Bart Ehrman's "Jesus, Interrupted": New York Times Bestseller

I recently came across a book that does an excellent job of explaining the enormous gap in knowledge that exists between Bible scholars and the rest of the population, which is Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). This is one of Ehrman's four New York Times bestsellers, which explains why he is one of the most well-known Bible scholars among the general public.

In this book Ehrman recounts his personal journey as a conservative evangelical Christian who went to Princeton Theological Seminary to earn a doctorate, and was determined to hang on to his belief that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But at Princeton he was exposed to the critical-historical methods of research into the writings that make up the Bible for the first time, and this experience would forever change his entire view of what the Bible actually is.

He explains in detail how and why he changed his views on the Bible. In short, when one is exposed to higher education in this field, you discover things you've never heard before, and the evidence is simply overwhelming. It also just makes far more sense than the simplistic approach to the Bible taught in fundamentalist churches. I can identify with Ehrman because I had the same experience 16 years ago when I first started doing this kind of research.