Question:

I just heard the Interview From NPR "Fresh Air from WHYY with Terri Gross" Thoughts? If you have a chance.  http://www.bartdehrman.com/multimedia.htm

Answer:

I have read a couple of books by Ehrman.  He is a very biased, angry person.  At the same time he is actually an excellent scholar–one of the best around.  You can assume that he checks his sources very carefully and nearly all the information he provides is in fact good info.  You will learn quite a bit, some of which is useful, from Ehrman.  However, he is radically committed to the idea that there is no such thing as the supernatural and that certainly the Bible is not inspired by God.  He is not unbiased in the way he presents his information to say the least!!!  (but then again, neither am I!).  I would suggest you carefully separate the information that Ehrman imparts from the spin he puts on that information.  He is not serving God.  In fact, his underlying motive is not to provide truth, but to undermine faith in the scriptures.  He is quite sneaky in the way he puts spin on the information, making it rather hard to separate his scholarly discoveries from his highly biased interpretation.  In this interview he always assumes that if there is a difference between the gospels, it is because the information is inaccurate or is created in order to express the bias of the author.  In fact, God did use the "bias" of the authors to tell different aspects of the gospel story, but Ehrman’s implication that the stories contradict or that they are fictionalized, or that God’s hand is not behind the finished product is simply not true.

 John Oakes