How an ‘Agnostic Atheist’ Got Students to Scrutinize Their Faith

When Chris Huntley was thinking of how Bart Ehrman should bid farewell to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, there was only one place to look.

Eighteen years prior, Randy Pausch took the podium at a Carnegie Mellon University auditorium aware he was about to die. Ten malignant tumors eating at his liver meant he had only a few months left. But he was joyful throughout his hour-long address, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” reminiscing about what he learned playing high school football and his zero-gravity experience aboard a NASA shuttle. The intent was for this to be his “last lecture”—one final, comprehensive lesson he hoped to impart before his death 10 months later.

The video of Pausch’s “last lecture” has amassed 22 million views on YouTube in the nearly two decades since. 

Huntley kept that video in mind from the moment he started as chief marketing officer for Ehrman’s online course platform nearly five years ago. If anyone deserved a “last lecture,” Huntley believed, it was Ehrman: a New Testament scholar known worldwide for his enthusiastic speaking style and his ability to make granular details of the Bible—and their meanings—salient to broad audiences.

When Ehrman decided to retire from university teaching at the end of 2025, Huntley booked a 400-seat auditorium at UNC-CH for an event that December. He commissioned mugs and shirts emblazoned with classic Ehrman sayings and asked two of Ehrman’s most respected colleagues, Hugo Mendez and Mark Goodacre, to deliver opening remarks, almost like a living eulogy. Attendees traveled from as far as Mexico and Argentina for the event, which Huntley kept free to maximize accessibility.

Ehrman took the lectern to rapturous applause. Then, donning the same wire-framed spectacles and mischievous grin he has for decades, he began his sweeping last lecture: “The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies.”

Ehrman’s not on his deathbed. Far from it. His 35th book was released in March, with more on the way. He uploads a new podcast episode every week, runs a YouTube channel with more than 200,000 subscribers, muses regularly on his blog, and continues to work with Huntley on digital courses for Paths in Biblical Studies, a business Ehrman started on the side while teaching at UNC-CH.  

As he wrote in his October 2025 post announcing his retirement from teaching after 37 years in Chapel Hill, “I just turned 70, so I’m thinkin’ I’m about halfway there.”

Ehrman, a former Evangelical Christian, has been open about his atheism. But for the most part, he told The Assembly, for him faith and Biblical criticism have existed in different worlds. He made a career studying and speaking about incongruities in the Gospels, but his intent was never to sabotage his listeners’ religious conviction. It was to get people to become interested in examining their beliefs with a keen eye and be honest with themselves about their imperfections.

In the process, he got tens of thousands of students in Chapel Hill—and hundreds of thousands worldwide—to think more seriously about what it means to believe.

“I feel like a lot of very religious people—and maybe just the ones I’ve been exposed to—are characterized by certainty, and I’ve just always been very uncertain about everything,” said 2023 graduate Charlsie Doan, who took numerous classes with Ehrman. “Being aware of your certainty is really important so that you can make informed decisions about faith. And I think that’s something that Bart does a really great job at.”

Bridging the Gaps

From the time he graduated high school to the time he moved to Rutgers University as an adjunct professor in 1984, Ehrman never stepped foot in a secular classroom, let alone taught in one. He grew up a conservative Evangelical in Kansas and developed his knack for presentation “teaching the book of First Thessalonians to 15-year-olds” while working at a church in college, he said. Ehrman built the critical approach he takes to the Bible over more than a decade of theological study, including seven years in seminary. 

He still called himself a Christian when he landed in Chapel Hill in 1988, but he quickly discovered that many among the student body found his teaching disconcerting. Most of his students had never engaged in textual criticism, which ascertains the original wording of a document. And even if Ehrman’s critiques of the Bible weren’t aimed toward deconversion—or causing people to lose faith—they could sound like they were, a tension that came to a head in his first semester.

His class that fall centered on the historical Jesus: How Christianity’s most important figure was depicted across historical documents and how various texts portrayed him differently. It just so happened that Martin Scorsese’s incendiary film The Last Temptation of Christ, exploring Jesus’ struggle with lust, fear and depression, had been released that summer, spawning street protests and death threats from Christian conservatives who believed its premise was blasphemous and anti-Bible.

Ehrman saw an opportunity. The political hubbub caused by the film offered a perfect chance to ask students to confront the real-world implications of their studies by watching the movie and writing an evaluation of it. But to his surprise, he said five or six students outright refused, even when told they would fail if they didn’t complete the assignment. 

While he could ask his students to examine material academically, he said, he couldn’t “force somebody to do something that violates their religious principles.” He carried that lesson into the rest of his career. 

Although textual criticism is a notoriously complex and at times tedious discipline, Ehrman centered his approach on accessibility and intrigue. It was as much his job to inspire curiosity for his field as it was to instruct it.

“What I’ve always tried to do as professor is two major things: to make everything interesting and to make difficult things clear,” Ehrman said. “That’s not a talent that a lot of people have.”

“If you read a book from most Bible scholars, you’d be asleep halfway through Page 2,” said Huntley, the marketing officer. “But he’s very gifted at making things that are potentially technical or cumbersome easy to digest and understandable for the common layperson.” 

Ehrman pivoted to 30-person seminars in the last few years of his career to better engage with students. Before then, his largest undergraduate lectures included as many as 400 students, stocked with a litany of faith backgrounds and reasons for taking his class.

Some students, Ehrman said, joined to test their faith, to convince him that his takeaways were misguided, or to help others they felt were misled by his teaching. A few campus ministries set up prayer groups to help devout Christians process Ehrman’s lessons. One of them, Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru), even established a whole “Ehrman Project” in 2011 dedicated to debunking his claims. 

Ehrman relished this intellectual diversity. As far as he was concerned, more people, including himself, were engaging with a fascinating subject on a deeper intellectual level. Where those conversations led mattered less to Ehrman than that they happened. 

“This isn’t a religious college. It’s a public college, a public university,” said Mendez, Ehrman’s colleague in the Department of Religious Studies. “And yet, Bart had incredible ways of making religion something that students in engineering, mathematics, science also felt was part of their curriculum, part of their experience, something they wanted to take, something they were proud to take. That’s a big deal.”

An Agnostic Approach

Ehrman wouldn’t tell his students what he believed for much of his career in Chapel Hill. Rumors circulated on campus that he was a “closet Evangelical,” he said, or a Jewish rabbi, even a “flat-out pagan.” 

He calls himself an “agnostic atheist” because of the discrepancies throughout the Bible and because he can’t come to terms with the level of suffering in the world. He’s outlined his beliefs extensively online, but he didn’t think he had a right to tell others to abandon their faith. So Ehrman never discussed it in his lectures and rarely did so with colleagues, with the exception of an optional, ungraded class at the end of the semester where he’d outline his faith journey to those interested.

“I have no interest in deconverting you from your beliefs, or converting you to something else, or for you to believe what I believe,” Ehrman said. “But I do want you to think about whatever you believe. Whether you’re an Evangelical, a Fundamentalist, a Jew, or an atheist, whatever you are, you need to think about these issues because these are big issues.”

No matter their faith, anyone doing “serious scholarship,” Ehrman said, accepts that the Bible is not entirely consistent with itself. Effective textual criticism requires some level of agnosticism. Students should approach texts for what they are and draw conclusions based on the evidence in front of them, not what their instructor thinks about it. 

“He was not trying to persuade you away from what background you might come from, or what particular priors or commitments [you had] religiously or politically,” said Jason Staples, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University who spent nine years studying under Ehrman at UNC-CH. “The one thing that really mattered to him is he expected the same kind of intellectual flexibility and honesty from his students that he modeled.”

Ehrman’s teaching caused some to question their faith, but it also helped many understand theirs better. Both takeaways were fine by him.

Staples said his time studying with Ehrman in many ways fortified and enriched his conviction. He attends an Anglican church with his family and remains steadfast that “there is truth in Christianity,” even if he doesn’t believe any Christian denomination “has the whole thing together.” 

Huntley calls himself an “avatar” for Ehrman’s religious audience: a lifelong Christian and raised Fundamentalist whose appreciation for his faith expanded after learning more about the Bible’s history. Mendez, who took over Ehrman’s “Introduction to the New Testament” undergraduate class, remains a practicing Catholic.

Doan, the 2023 graduate, first took Ehrman’s class to better understand the cultural effects of Abrahamic faiths on the Middle East. But hearing him speak so frankly about religion helped her become more open about her faith journey and acknowledge the “intellectual pitfalls” that come with the “agnostic theism” she’s settled on. She said her conversations with classmates at George Washington University Law School, where she’s in her second year, are richer as a result.

First-year student Abby Mocharnuk came to UNC-CH eager to take Ehrman’s classes after engaging with his blog in high school. And while her beliefs didn’t change much after Ehrman’s class, she said, she came to understand her atheism better and observed a similar level of reflection among even her most devout classmates.

On the last day of class, Ehrman asked Mocharnuk and her peers to describe how they viewed suffering. One student, a practicing Christian and one of the most vocal throughout the fall, told Ehrman that she viewed it as part of a “tapestry”—a necessary thread in a larger course of life that inspires growth through struggle. 

Mocharnuk didn’t agree with her classmate’s assessment. But having watched her challenge her beliefs and the Bible out loud all semester, as Ehrman asked, she respected it. She believed Ehrman did, too.

“The thing I’ve learned most from my students is just how human everybody is, and everybody who’s thinking about these things is really doing their best to figure them out,” Ehrman said. “Even if they have a different view, it’s just wrong to try and make them think something else or to insist that they’re idiots.”

Significant Discovery

Perhaps the greatest paradox of Ehrman is that, for all his critiques and disdain for Fundamentalism, his work is not antireligious. 

Ehrman has never heard of somebody deconverting during the course of a semester. The closest he gets are occasional emails from former students—some who once prayed for his soul and maligned his teaching—telling him they now appreciate the uncomfortable conversations he compelled them to have.

“That’s probably the real testament,” said Goodacre, who teaches Biblical studies at Duke University and has known Ehrman for three decades. “Far from being a destroyer of people’s faith, he’s actually been someone that’s helped people to explore their faith and get fresh angles on it.”

In many ways, this was both the purpose of his last lecture and the most significant discovery in the history of Biblical studies.

Ehrman argued that the Bible is not a single book, as many might presume, but a series of books bound together, many written by different authors at different times holding different perspectives. Religious and secular scholars broadly agree on this. God created humans after plants and animals in Genesis 1, but Adam before plants and animals in Genesis 2. Joseph and Mary’s hometown is Bethlehem according to Matthew’s gospel and Nazareth according to Luke’s. Mark says Jesus died the morning after the Passover meal; John says Jesus died the day before. 

But rather than compelling someone to attempt to prove one account superior, make differences coexist, or write off the Bible altogether, Ehrman said, these contradictions offer a chance to explore its inescapable human touches. For example: John’s theological point that Jesus is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” by aligning his death with the ancient Jewish tradition of slaughtering lambs the day before Passover.

“The point is not the contradiction,” Ehrman said at his last lecture, “but the meaning.”

Ehrman asked students to approach the “big issues” in their lives with intellectual honesty, to value questioning their beliefs and challenging their previously unchallenged worldviews.

“For the broader public, we need this kind of scholarship,” he added. “We need it for the Bible because the Bible is so important, but we need it because it’s the kind of thing we need to be doing with our brains: using them to think.”

When Ehrman finished that line—the last of his career in Chapel Hill—he peeled open his sport coat and stuffed his notes inside. He waved at the crowd, thunderous in applause, in bashful thanks before staring back down at the lectern. He took a gulp, then looked back up, smiled, pointed to his heart, and made an X with his hands, as if to say “enough.”

Ehrman might have just retired from teaching, but he had places to be. A meet-up for his blog beckoned the next morning. And, like his students, he had plenty of thinking still to do.