What Moody Bible College Didn't Prepare Me For (vIDEO)

Welcome to the home of Episode 199 of the Misquoting Jesus Podcast with Bart Ehrman. Below, you can watch the entire episode, read its description, and see links to related resources.

links mentioned in this episode:

New Insights into the New Testament (NINT)

episode description

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Bart Ehrman reflects on his formative years at Moody Bible Institute, the fundamentalist Bible school he attended after becoming a born-again Christian at 15. He describes Moody’s intensely conservative curriculum, strict behavioral rules, mandatory evangelism, and ministry assignments. Yet despite the limitations of the education, Ehrman says Moody gave him an enduring passion for the Bible and helped launch his career as a New Testament scholar.

The episode explores the tension between gratitude and regret. Ehrman believes Moody deprived him of a broader liberal-arts education and taught him a fundamentally mistaken view of biblical inerrancy, but he also credits the school with giving him an unusually deep knowledge of Scripture and an insider’s understanding of evangelical arguments.

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He explains how studying Greek and the Bible at Wheaton and later Princeton exposed contradictions, historical problems, and other evidence that challenged his fundamentalist assumptions. He argues that changing one's mind in pursuit of truth can be painful but intellectually necessary.

The bonus Q&A tackles three major biblical questions: the unforgivable sin, the origins of Jesus' miracle stories, and whether John 1:1 means the Word was literally God or merely divine. Ehrman closes by arguing that Christianity does not depend upon an inerrant Bible: Christians existed and believed Jesus was divine long before the New Testament canon was established.