Contested: Debating the New Testament’s Historical Reliability

by Bart D. Ehrman, William A. Dembski (Preface), Michael R. Licona

Debating the New Testament's Historical Reliability showcases Bart D. Ehrman and Michael R. Licona in a sustained, civil, and high-stakes exchange over the central historical question about the truth of can the New Testament be trusted as a reliable witness to Jesus, especially his bodily resurrection? Ehrman, one of the world’s best-known critics of traditional claims about the Gospels, argues that the New Testament contains serious historical problems and cannot establish the resurrection. Licona, a leading defender of Gospel reliability, answers with a historically grounded case for the credibility of the New Testament and the resurrection of Jesus. Framed by interviews, major statements, responses, and final replies, this volume gives both scholars room to make their strongest arguments and answer the other side directly. Clear, substantive, and unusually fair, it is essential reading for believers, skeptics, students, and anyone who wants the debate at its best and most focused.

Bart D. Ehrman was the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1988 to 2025 and served as department chair and director of graduate studies. Trained under Bruce M. Metzger at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he earned his M.Div. and Ph.D., Ehrman is among the most widely read historians of the New Testament and early Christianity. He is both an educator and a public intellectual. His scholarship began in textual criticism—the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament—and broadened to the historical Jesus, early Christian apocrypha, the Apostolic Fathers, ancient literary forgery, the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and early Christian views of the afterlife. His influential books include Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities, Forged, How Jesus Became God, Heaven and Hell, Journeys to Heaven and Hell, and What the Bible Really Says about the End.


Michael R. Licona is Professor of New Testament Studies at Houston Christian University, where he serves as program coordinator for the M.A. in Christian Leadership and Master of Divinity programs. He earned his Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from the University of Pretoria, with distinction, and has built his academic work around the historical investigation of Jesus, especially the resurrection, Gospel reliability, ancient biography, historiography, and Christian apologetics. Licona is best known for The Resurrection of A New Historiographical Approach, a monumental scholarly defense of the resurrection, and for Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? which compares Gospel composition with the literary practices of Plutarch. His more recent Jesus, Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently continues that project, arguing that Gospel differences often reflect normal conventions of ancient biography. Licona is also president of Risen Jesus, a ministry devoted to apologetics, teaching, and public debate.

278 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication November 6, 2026

About the author

Bart Denton Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.