“The more sensationalistic he becomes, the more his books sell”

If you’ve had a friend who’s been confused after reading a Bart Erhman book purported to be the latest and definitive scholarship on the unreliability of the Bible, James Emery White does a good job explaining the unreliability of Erhman as a scholar:

Bart Ehrman is the professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who has created a cottage industry of books attempting to tear-down the Christian faith, and belief in the Bible in particular. He's discovered that the more sensationalistic he becomes, the more his books sell. As a result, he long ago abandoned even trying to balance his rather sizable biases with the enormous weight of scholarship that is so heavily arrayed against his claims.

Here's his formula:

1.  Pick out an obsolete perspective or, at best, a minority report on some matter supposedly related to the Bible's integrity.

2.  Ignore the overwhelming weight of mainstream scholarship against said view. And for goodness sake, don't include it in the book.

3.  Present "findings" as hitherto unknown, and in the most salacious manner possible.  It helps to throw in that it will surely undermine two-thousand years of faith and history.

4.  Screw peer reviews (it wouldn't pass anyway). Go straight to the tabloids, and laugh all the way to the bank.

White highlights two examples of how shallow Ehrman's contentions tend to run. Read the whole thing.