7/18/2026 – From Dr. Bart Ehrman’s blog post here. The five posts linked below by Bart’s good friends are very interesting, as the two scholars articulate how they balance faith, the church, and the academy. As Dr. Jeff Siker said he lives with “one foot in the church and one in the academy”. They are good friends while not sharing Bart’s faith views.
I [Bart] think one problem is that people today equate Christian faith with believing the Bible is inerrant. That is a modern view that simply seems like “common sense,” but it only seems that way because fundamentalist views of Christianity have convinced not only fundamentalists but most everyone else that if the Bible has any mistakes, Christianity can’t be true. But that’s simply not right. It’s completely possible to believe that Christ died for your sins without the Bible being completely accurate about everything.
We’ve had some blog posts on this, written by Christian scholars who know pretty much what I [Bart] do about the Bible. Judy and Jeff Siker, two of my friends (married) who are ordained Presbyterian ministers and are also New Testament scholars (one a colleague of mine in my PhD program at Princeton and the other my PhD student at UNC) and know full (and have long taught) historical-critical scholarship on the Bible and are still active in ministry; both wrote posts about how that works for them. Here’s a list!
Is It Possible To Continue Believing? Guest Post by New Testament Scholar Judy Siker
How I View the Bible as Both a Critical Scholar and a Christian: Guest Post by Judy Siker
Jeff Siker — Why I Am Still a Christian (and a NT Scholar)
Jeff Siker Part 2: Why I am a Christian (and yet a New Testament scholar)
Doing Critical Scholarship as a Committed Christian: Anniversary Guest Post by Jeffrey Siker
Jeff’s response to a comment – I think it’s so difficult to get back behind the Gospels to the Historical Jesus, that I don’t have a great deal of confidence in being able to say that Jesus identified himself as the Danielic Son of Man. It strikes me as more likely that in retrospect the author of Mark (along with other early Christians) searched their scriptures for echoes that would make sense of Jesus’ life/death/res. I’ve long thought that Mark combined the notion of a present earthly prophetic Son of Man from Ezekiel with a future heavenly apocalyptic Son of Man from Daniel, and rolled them together with the suffering servant motif from Isaiah to generate his suffering Son of Man in Mk 8/9/10. Mark’s Christology does a good job of subordinating coercive power to the transformative power of a God who embraces human suffering in the person of Jesus. I find that Christology very persuasive. I think Jesus likely knew he was going to die a violent death, but I don’t think he saw it as an atonement for human sin. Jesus didn’t die for our sin so much as he died because of human sinfulness.
