I’ll get off my soap box after this post, but one last observation(s) I can share of my past study of Ehrman, if interesting for your purposes. Forged was the first and perhaps worst book of his I read, and the pure number of false claims he makes therein was astounding. Not that I suggest he is intentionally lying… he either makes a claim based on something he heard or read, and uncritically repeated it without doing appropriate fact checking… or reports a general trend as an absolute claim without checking to see if there are any counter examples or further fact checking… fact checking that took me very little time with a simple concordance. It underscored to me we are dealing not with someone pursuing unvarnished truth, but one with an agenda that can’t be bothered to see if the actual facts support his theory.
I knew enough from my undergrad days to fact check his claims. Among the errors within one chapter alone of his book Forged, I found…
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He claimed as evidence against Pauline authorship of 1Tim/Titus that they mention the “overseers and deacons,” a late development he says “that’s not what you find in the historical Paul.” This is false. Philippians (an undisputed Pauline letter) is addressed to the “Overseers and deacons.”
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He makes the somewhat bizarre claim that authentic Paul believed that “only through the death and resurrection of Jesus can a person be saved,” and claims this is radically different than what is found in the Pastorals. He apparently missed the passage in 1Tim about being saved by the one mediator “who gave himself as a ransom for all men” or Titus about the “…Savior Jesus Christ who gave himself for us to redeem us…”
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He claims that in Paul’s authentic writings, faith “describes a relationship…trust 'in Christ,'” while in the Pastorals, it “is not about a relationship with Christ, faith now means the body of teaching that makes up the Christian religion. That is, 'the faith.'” This is demonstrably false on both counts. 1Cor, 2Cor, Gal, and Phl all use the phraseology “the faith”. In both 1Tim and 2 Tim we find discussions of having “faith in Christ Jesus.”
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he claims the real Paul was “‘blameless’ with respect to the 'righteousness of the law’”, but the forger of Ephesians claimed he (along with all mankind) was “carried away by the 'passions of our flesh.'” This is egregiously false. Ehrman seems to have missed Paul’s whole discussion in Romans about how “we were living in the flesh [and] our sinful passions were at work…”
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He claims that Paul’s language in 1Thes of “we who are alive” means without question that Paul himself “expects to be one of the ones who will still be alive when [the end times] happen.” This is erroneous. Ehrman might have noticed something from Paul’s use of language from reading the next chapter about “whether we are awake or asleep…”
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He claims “the verb ‘saved’ in Paul’s authentic letters is always used to refer to the future.” this is demonstrably false. He might have read Romans ("in this hope we were saved - past/aorist indicitive) or I Corinthians (“by which you are being saved” - present indicative)
It took me very little time with a concordance to fact check these claims of his. Why couldn’t he have bothered to have done the same before publishing these falsehoods?
So, to answer “why he is wrong?” It seems to this reader that he ends up being wrong so often because he is so blinded by his agenda that he doesn’t see a need to check his own claims for veracity.