A remarkable quotation form an article by Biblical scholar Jacques Berlinerblau:

“Show of hands: Who here’s an atheist?” If a keynote speaker were to pose that unlikely query to an audience of 1,000 scholars gathered at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature my guess is only about a couple of dozen or so would publicly confess to infidelity.

Nonbelievers are few and far between in biblical scholarship. Not counting the theologians employed by seminaries who have yet to come out of the closet, the cohort is so small that we literally all know one another by name.

I knew Biblical scholarship was dominated by believers, but I wouldn’t have guessed that non-believers are so few that “we literally all know one another by name.” This is on top of the fact non-believing Biblical scholarship tend to be former believers who got into Biblical scholarship because of their faith and lost their faith because of their scholarly studies.

Robert M. Price and Bart Ehrman were originally fundamentalists, and Price had a long career as a liberal Christian and is still a seminary professor. Gerd Ludemann was a member of the Theological Faculty of a major German university until he lost his job for publicly rejecting Christianity. Michael Goulder was an Anglican priest for 30 years. And notably, Price, Ehrman, and Ludemann have doctorates in theology. Hector Avalos became an atheist while in high school, but he had apparently already done a lot of reading about apologetics by that time. The guy had been a child evangelist, which I guess gave him a head start thinking about that stuff.

Many Biblical scholars are nevertheless very left-wing in their theology, to the point where many conservatives will insist they’re not real Christians or real theists. But the fact that they still identify as believers explains why it’s so incredibly rare for Biblical scholars to say anything that would be truly embarrassing to Christianity. They never consider the possibility that Paul may have been a fraud. And it makes William Lane Craig’s sneers at people who disagree with him all the more ridiculous.