When I've heard Ehrman describe his current beliefs, he's described himself as an Agnostic. But it would not matter if he now says that he is a Atheist. The point is that for almost all of his near 40 years teaching religious studies, he was a committed Christian believer. And all of his education and his entire career has been devoted entirely to studies in religious belief. That's about as far as anyone can get from having an impartial educational objective background. And that's also true for virtually all of the many tens of thousands of Biblical studies teachers around the world (but mainly in the USA), the vast majority of whom are still Christian believers.
One of the very few exceptions who lost his faith entirely shortly after becoming employed in his first few years as a Biblical Studies lecturer, is Hector Avalos. Although even in his case, as he himself says, he was previously from his young teenage years a highly devout street evangelist who stood on street corners preaching the faith and trying to convert anyone end everyone that he met. In other words he was very committed indeed to his Christian faith in God, Jesus and the Bible. But he lost his faith during the time he was studying the bible more intensively and researching the actual evidence prior to qualifying academically and being employed in his first role as a Biblical studies teacher in the USA.
You can find various public lectures and debates with Hector Avalos on YouTube, where he makes clear that the evidence for Jesus is extremely weak to put it mildly. Whether he actually believes Jesus was most likely mythical, I don't know. But the point is that he admits that a study of the claimed evidence changed his mind quite drastically about how reliable any of it actually is.
In one of those YouTube lectures he also explained that in meetings of the most prestigious groups of Biblical Studies professors in the USA, he was surprised to find that the meetings actually began with everyone sitting around with their eyes closed and their hands clasped together praying! And the point he was making is that, that is not normal behaviour in any other branch of university academia.
Point is (in case you are missing it) – this is by no means an impartial group of people. And as committed Christian believers, the vast majority are about as far from being impartial as it's possible to be.
And on the letters of Paul, once again – it might be a different matter if none of the letters had been discovered to be almost certainly fakes (or at any rate agreed to be fakes by all Biblical Scholars and afaik by all educated senior members of the Christian church). In that case, if there were no agreed fakes, then there might be no particular reason to doubt that the letters were indeed originally written by the named author “Paul” … But that is not the case! We do not have all 13 letters with no fakes! We have instead 13 letters about half of which are universally agreed to be fakes …
… as soon as you have a situation like that, then it calls into very serious doubt the authenticity of all the letters.
But even more than that, as I have explained at least twice now – it means that there is absolutely no way to claim that 6 or 7 of the letters were genuinely written by Paul. Or even to claim that those 6 or 7 were probably from Paul himself. Because we cannot tell whether those 6 or 7 (the “authentic letters”) are more likely to be genuine than any of the other 6 or 7! There is simply no way of having any idea at all which (if any) were the ones truly written by Paul. Ask yourself "Q - what is the evidence showing those 6 or 7 were from Paul whilst the others were not from Paul"? And if you think you do have the evidence to show which ones were most probably by Paul, then do tell us what that evidence is??
And in threads about the historicity or otherwise of Jesus, that means the content of those Pauline letters cannot be used to say anything reliable at all about what anyone might have known about Jesus.
