Why Did Paul Hate Jesus and His Followers?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Release Date: 02/06/2024
Were Early Christians Known to Be Moral Reprobates?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Many modern Christians think Christians are inherently more moral than non-believers. Non-Christians, as a rule, don't think so. What about in the ancient world? Why is it that the most widely attested view among ancient pagans was the opposite, that Christians were dangerously immoral reprobates? Why weren't they seen as stalwart proponents of family values?
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Did Jesus Have to Suffer? Trying to Make Sense of a Troubling View
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Did Jesus himself think or talk about his imminent sufferings—did he predict his own brutal end, or have those parts been creatively interpreted by later authors to fit a theological agenda? This episode offers a chance to uncover the layers of historical, religious, and philosophical complexities surrounding these ancient texts.
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Is the "Good Book" Really So Good?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
In this episode Bart interviews Jill Hicks-Keeton about her sure-to-be controversial book, recently released: The Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves. We are all familiar with the disturbing parts of the Bible, with it's divinely sanctioned violence from the destruction of Jericho in the Old Testament to the destruction of the world in the New, from the passages that justify slavery to the patriarchal views of ancient Israel and the writings in the name of Paul. How have evangelicals tried to salvage these disturbing passages in order to make them not just...
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Was Jesus Buried on the Day of His Crucifixion
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
All the Gospels agree that on the day Jesus was crucified, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body and took it from the cross to bury in a tomb. What almost no one realizes is that this would have been unprecedented, so far as we know, in the Roman world, where part of the humiliation of crucifixion was for the corpse to be left on the cross to decompose and be ravaged by scavenging birds for days before being disposed of. Did the Romans make an exception for Jesus? Is that plausible? Or is the story of his burial by Joseph a later legend? This is obviously an issue of enormous...
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What Did Judas Betray?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
The Gospels agree that Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus, even if they don't agree on why he did it. But is their view about *what* he did plausible? That he told the authorities where they could find Jesus without any crowds around? There are, in fact, reasons for thinking that Judas did something far more sinister, that he revealed a key teaching of Jesus gave to his closest followers but he did not proclaim in public. Did Judas reveal a secret teaching that led to Jesus' crucifixion?
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The Disturbing Views of God and Suffering in the Book of Job
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Many people have a rough idea about the story of Job, the incredibly wealthy and righteous man whom God allows "the Satan" (who is not the Devil, btw) to deprive of all he has (including killing his ten children) and plague with horrible pain, in order to see if he will stay righteous. Most readers don't realize, however, that the vast majority of the book comes from a different author who has a completely different view of why people suffer. In this episode we talk about what both authors have to say and discuss honestly and forthrightly whether either view of suffering is at all...
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Do We Have a Soul?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Most people think that everyone has a soul that is resident in the body. The vast majority of Christians believe the soul lives on after the body dies. But ironically the vast majority of people -- even devoted readers of the Bible -- have never noticed what the biblical writers actually say about it. In this episode we look at views of the soul found in the Hebrew Bible, the teachings of Jesus, and the rest of the New Testament. Is it the standard Christian view? Do the biblical writers think the soul can live on without the body? If not, what would salvation and eternal life be? Tune in to...
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Did Slaves Give Us the New Testament?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
This week Bart will be interviewing New Testament scholar and public intellectual Candida Moss, on her new book, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. In the book, Dr. Moss (Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham) maintains that parts of the Bible may have been written by slaves (Mark, possibly); or co-authored by them (enslaved secretaries of Paul?); or copied by them (in our surviving manuscripts). No one has broached the topic of "How We Got the Bible" from this perspective before, and the episode provides a lively...
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Newly Discovered PROOF: Jesus Was an Illusionist
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
In an absolutely shocking turn of events, Bart has learned of a first-century Gospel that will overturn everything scholars think they know about Jesus, showing that he was a charlatan exposed by the Roman government for duping the Jewish crowds by sophisticated works of magic. The Gospel, set to be published this week by the NY Times, details how Jesus deliberately faked his famous miracles in an effort to seek fame and fortune. How did he go from magician-for-hire to Son of God, and was the crucifixion a tragic illusion gone wrong? Join us this week on Misquoting Jesus to find out more.
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Was Peter a Rock or Shifting Sand? Jesus' Closest Disciple in History and Legend.
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Jesus' closest disciple was Simon, whom henicknamed "Peter" -- that is "The Rock." But in the Gospels and the writings of Paul, Peter is fickle, clumsy, and unreliable, less like a rock than shifting sand. After the New Testament we have numerous writings both about and allegedly by him. In looking over all these records, what can we say about the one on whom Jesus allegedly "built his church"? Is it possible to separate out the history from the legend? The fact from the fiction? And why didn't the Gospel writers do a bit more to improve his reputation?
info_outlineNext to Jesus, Paul is the most important figure in the history of Christianity, but as is well known, before he was a zealous apostle he was an equally zealous antagonist. What was that all about?
Why would a Jew in the Roman world outside Israel even care if a small group of Jews were claiming that Jesus was the messiah who brought salvation? Wouldn't he just write them off as another bunch of crazies? What about their claims did he find so offensive that he had to take them on? And when he took them on, what did he actually do? Was he murdering them? Sending them off to prison? On what authority? Can the NT be right that he was authorized by Jewish authorities? Was he just beating up people he didn't like?
These are important questions because the answers can help explain the transformation of Christianity into a world religion. In this episode, we try to figure it all out!