Introduction and Guest Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Sa. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is April 6, 2018, a very auspicious day in the world of Mormonism, and we are so very excited to have with us our current guest, Dr. Bart Ehrman.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] I am going to just take a leap and say that most of Mormonism, and even I would say most of progressive and post Mormonism are unaware of the works of Dr. Bart Ehrman. We only have an hour with Dr. Ehrman. We're so excited to have him here. So I'm going to get right to the introduction. Dr. Ehrman has written or edited 30 books, including five New York Times bestsellers.

John Dehlin [00:01:17] And he is the James A. Gray Distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. His work has been featured in Time magazine, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and other print media, and he's been on all the major TV and radio shows.

John Dehlin [00:01:37] I have entitled this presentation the Story of Jesus, the New Testament Christianity, and Dr. Bart Ehrman. And let me explain to you why I am going to shift my screen to a little brief PowerPoint presentation that I did. And the reason that I'm doing that is because I want to just show you.

John Dehlin [00:02:03] Show you the different books that Dr. Ehrman is responsible for. So we begin with, and these are just a few of the books that Dr. Ehrman has authored. The first book we're going to talk about today is Did Jesus Exist? The historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth. So we're going to start if Mormonism is based on Christianity and Christianity is based on Christ, we're going to start with the question, did Jesus exist? The second question we're going to ask is, how did Jesus become God?

John Dehlin [00:02:37] And that sort of talks about the progression of Jesus from a historical figure to a deity. The third book that we're going to be addressing Briefly today is Dr. Ehrman's book called Forged, which is writing in the name of why the Bible's authors are not who we think they are. And that is going to lead us into the discussion about how the Bible got created, who didn't write the Bible, who did write the Bible, and how the Bible kind of got put together.

John Dehlin [00:03:07] The next book we're gonna be briefly talking about is Jesus Interrupted Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible. And this is a very important book because it just talks to us briefly. We'll be covering it briefly, but it talks to us about, you know, how The Bible has inconsistencies that can only sort of be understood once you understood the history of the Bible and how it was put together.

John Dehlin [00:03:30] The fifth book that we'll briefly be covering is Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why. We'll be talking briefly about how the Bible has changed over time. And then the main reason that we're here is to celebrate this brand new book that's come out called the Triumph of How Forbidden Religions Swept the World. So we'll be briefly talking about this incredible book, and we want to encourage you all to buy all six books. And that's why we're trying to do so much. And we're so gracious. We're so grateful for this hour. Again, the book is the tripe of Christianity. And then we're going to end by talking about Bart's own story, because Bart himself has had a journey from being raised as a Christian to what he is now. And so, without any further ado, Dr. Bart Ehrman, I just want to welcome you today to Mormon Stories podcast.

Bart Ehrman [00:04:29] Yeah, thanks for having me.

Did Jesus Really Exist? Historical Evidence

John Dehlin [00:04:32] All right, Bart. So to begin, I think we want to start with just this idea. Many people are wondering, did Jesus really exist? Many sort of progressive and post Mormons who end up losing the faith or leaving the faith end up unraveling and questioning everything, including the existence of God. And then, of course, the existence of Jesus. Read and followed enough of your work to know that you're actually viewed a tiny bit as controversial in the sense that you stand firmly behind the camp of believing that Jesus did exist. So let's spend five or ten minutes talking about your views on how you've reached that conclusion.

Bart Ehrman [00:05:18] Yeah, well, I would say it's not actually very controversial. There are, as you probably know, there are thousands of biblical scholars in North America and in Western Europe. And I know, I know of one who doesn't think Jesus existed. So there may be three or four others who have doubts, and the thousands or tens of thousands of others don't have any doubts at all. So it's only controversial because there is a group of people on the Internet who are. It's very small group, but it's a very loud group. They call themselves mythicists and they think Jesus was not a historical figure at all, but that he was a myth that was completely created by the, by the earliest Christians when they were starting their religion.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] Okay. And so it's not controversial. It's pretty established. What, what are the foundations or the pillars of, of the, you know, of the understanding that Jesus did exist.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:19] Well, you know, for anybody in the ancient world, of course, you need to have sources of information. And for 99.9 of people from the ancient world, we have no evidence at all that they existed. Not a shred of evidence. But with Jesus, I mean, we have numerous accounts of his life that were written independently of one another.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:43] The Gospels themselves are decades after the fact. But the Gospels are based on earlier written testimony. We have one author in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who actually knew Jesus, brother. And he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us about this. And so there's nothing to suggest that Paul has any reason to think he's making up Jesus. I mean, he actually, he knows people connected with him. So in my book, Did Jesus Exist? I marshal all of the evidence, and so it would obviously take a couple hours to lay it all out. But it's because Jesus is so well documented that there's just very little discussion. I mean, there's virtually no discussion among scholars about whether he existed or not.

John Dehlin [00:07:31] Okay, so thank you for that opening piece. The next thing that we want to turn to is how this person Jesus eventually becomes viewed as a divine being. So can you talk a bit about Jesus life, what we know about him, and then how that. What I'm guessing you would say would be a somewhat ordinary life or maybe an extraordinary life. How we get from Jesus the preacher from Galilee, the Jewish preacher from Galilee, as you say, to the Son of God.

Bart Ehrman [00:08:06] Yeah, this is a lot more controversial. I mean, how did it happen? And what I argue is that even though we're pretty sure Jesus actually existed, the big question is, what was he like and what did he teach and what did he do and what happened to him? And there are some things that are pretty much beyond doubt. There's no. There's really no doubt that he was a Jewish preacher from Galilee who got on the wrong side of the law and was crucified by the Romans. That much is clear, and virtually everybody agrees about that. The question is, what was he actually saying and doing during his life?

Bart Ehrman [00:08:46] What I argue in my book, How Jesus Became God, and in several of my other books is that Jesus is best understood as a kind of Jewish apocalyptic prophet who was predicting that the end of the world was coming soon, that history was going to be brought to a crashing halt, that God was soon going to intervene to destroy the forces of evil that are controlling this world and making life miserable for people.

Bart Ehrman [00:09:13] God will destroy these forces of evil and set up a good kingdom on earth and so Jesus was preaching about the coming kingdom of God. In that context, I have to deal with, well, what did Jesus say about himself?

Bart Ehrman [00:09:28] And I argue fairly strenuously that one thing Jesus absolutely did not say about himself was that he was God. That these claims of Jesus, that he's a divine being start appearing only late in, in the first century. That our earliest sources about Jesus, Matthew, Mark and Luke have nothing about him claiming himself to be a divine being, but that these are only, these are later claims put on his lips by his followers.

John Dehlin [00:09:58] Okay. And so that goes to the Bible and how it got created. Because Mormons are sort of a little bit split on the Bible. On the one hand, we're taught that the Bible is sort of inferior to the Book of Mormon, that the Book of Mormon is the most correct book on the face of the earth, which also testifies of Jesus. And then we're taught that the Bible kind of got messed up over the years from various ways. And so even though it's got the word of Jesus or Christ in, can't be relied upon fully. So on the one hand we're sort of taught to subjugate the Bible a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:10:34] On the other hand, we just sort of believe it all. And so we, we assume that Matthew was written by Matthew, Mark by Mark, Luke by Luke, John by John, that they were all written during the time that Jesus existed, that Mark's getting out his journal and writing about what happened, and that those books are all merged. And then we don't even really think about inconsistencies between the two Gospels. Instead we sort of just assume that it's all true. And if there are different accounts or different things said, that somehow they just all fit into a mosaic to fulfill the full story. So can you help us understand how we get from Jesus dying to a book called the Bible?

Bart Ehrman [00:11:17] Right. So part of this is fairly non controversial among scholars. The view that scholars have had for a very long time is that Jesus died sometime around the year 30 of the common era and that the Gospels start appearing about 40 years later.

Bart Ehrman [00:11:35] The Gospel of Mark is almost certainly our first gospel and it's usually dated to around the year 70 of the common era. Matthew and Luke maybe 10 or 15 years after that. John may be 10 years after that. So John may be being written in the 90s of the common era.

Bart Ehrman [00:11:49] And so what this means is that the Gospels are being written by people who are writing four, five, six decades after the events they narrate. The Gospels themselves are written in Greek and they were originally composed in Greek so that their authors are Greek speaking Christians living 40, 50, 60 years later. Jesus himself would have spoken Aramaic and he lived in Palestine. None of these authors lived in Palestine. And so then the big question is where did they get their stories from?

Bart Ehrman [00:12:19] They don't claim to be eyewitnesses. There's nothing about these books to make you think they were eyewitnesses. They're later Christians. And the normal view is that they've heard their stories from storytellers. Christians have been circulating by word of mouth stories about Jesus life for decade after decade until the gospel writers wrote them down.

John Dehlin [00:12:39] So basically Jesus dies, he has some followers, they sort of sit around, you know, what would be analogous to a campfire, telling stories about when they remember Jesus and when they knew Jesus and what happened to Jesus. A few decades go by and then someone thinks to write something down.

Bart Ehrman [00:12:58] Yeah, that's right. And you know, one of the questions is why? Why didn't somebody write it down right away? And the reason is, that's usually thought is that the earliest followers of Jesus agreed with him that the end of the age was coming soon. So there was no reason to write anything down because for posterity there wasn't going to be a posterity. But not only that, but the vast majority of people in the ancient world were illiterate in Palestine in the first century Roman. First century Roman Palestine. The most convincing study has argued that somewhere around 3% of the population could read and write, which means 97% of the population could not.

Bart Ehrman [00:13:40] And the 3% would have been the upper crust elite who were living in cities, who had the, who came from wealthy families. The followers of Jesus were lower class people from poor peasant stock and almost certainly couldn't write. So it's not until you get 30 or 40 years into the religion that you start getting people who even could compose a gospel. And they're basing their gospel stories on accounts that they heard. As you said, people are telling other people about what happened in the life of Jesus. And so it's being circulated by word of mouth for years and then decades before the gospel writers put them down.

John Dehlin [00:14:17] And I don't mean to have to make this too explicit, but obviously the most reliable historical account is something that is written down sort of immediately when it happens. And isn't there a rule of history about the farther away from the event that the account is written, the less reliable it is?

Bart Ehrman [00:14:36] Well, yeah, I mean, it sort of naturally follows because, you know, if what you really want as a historian, I mean, if you, if you really want to know about somebody who lived, say in the 20s in Judea, in the first century. What you would like are about 10 people who knew him at the time, writing down what they heard him say and do, heard him say and saw him do within a few weeks. But you don't get that kind of information for most of the ancient world. You certainly don't get that for Jesus. Instead, you get accounts written by later people who've heard stories that have been in circulation for decades.

Bart Ehrman [00:15:10] And we all know what happens to oral tradition when it gets circulated. Things get changed. People make up things, they invent things, they exaggerate things. And so the question is, is that the kind of thing the Gospels are or not?

Bart Ehrman [00:15:23] It's not necessarily the case that they're inaccurate. One has to investigate to see whether they're inaccurate. But you have to understand that these are not written by four eyewitnesses who are recording the events a year later.

John Dehlin [00:15:36] Right. Now, you may have already touched on this lightly, but you know Matthew, Mark, Luke And John, they're four of the 12 apostles. Is that true?

Bart Ehrman [00:15:45] No, not quite. So the way it works is that the traditional ascriptions to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew and John are two of the 12. Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple. In the traditional ascription of these Gospels, Mark is understood not to be one of the 12, but to be a companion of Peter. And Luke is understood to be a companion of Paul, who himself was not a companion, who was not one of the 12. And so you have two, but you have two disciples and then two companions of the apostles.

John Dehlin [00:16:16] Great. Thank you for clearing that up. Of the four Gospel writers, do we know anything about their lives to know whether they would have been literate or not?

Bart Ehrman [00:16:25] You mean of the actual Mark or do you mean the author of Mark?

John Dehlin [00:16:28] Yeah, of the actual Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Bart Ehrman [00:16:31] Yeah, the actual Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Well, we know that John was almost certainly illiterate. He was a fisherman in rural Galilee. And in the Book of Acts, chapter 4, verse 13, we're actually told that he was illiterate. And so he certainly didn't write the Gospel of John. I think we don't know anything about who Luke was.

Bart Ehrman [00:16:53] It's often said that he was a doctor who was a companion of Paul, but there's no evidence to suggest that he was the historical Luke. We don't know anything about the historical Luke other than his name shows up a couple of times. Mark is another person who was a lower class Galilean. Lower class peasant from, from Galilee. So he wouldn't have been able to write. Matthew is said to be a tax collector. And some people say, well, a tax collector would have to be able to be literate because of his duties. But tax, most tax collectors were simply the guy who knocked on your door demanding money.

Bart Ehrman [00:17:26] So there's no reason he would be literate either. So the answer is, even with the traditional descriptions, there's no evidence to say, suggest any of these four could read and write. And there's also really not very good evidence that those four are the ones who wrote these Gospels.

How the Gospels Were Written and Transmitted

John Dehlin [00:17:40] Okay, so let's get to that. So we've got these accounts that are being told across decades. Is it sort of like, hey, let's sit around a campfire and talk about what Mark said about Jesus? Okay, now let's sit around a campfire and say about what Matthew said about Jesus. If the actual historical figures didn't write down their experiences, number one, how did their experiences get attributed to them? And then who ends up writing their accounts if it's not them? And how does that happen?

Bart Ehrman [00:18:10] Yeah, so I don't think it worked that way. I don't think that people are saying, let's remember what Matthew's version of this story is. No, they're telling stories about Jesus for a wide range of reasons. For example, you're trying to convert somebody, you're talking to a neighbor and your neighbor has some other religion. You're trying to convert them to become a follower of Jesus. And so you have to tell them stories about what Jesus said and did and what happened at his crucifixion. You're not quoting, you know, Matthew. I mean, the Gospel of Matthew doesn't exist. And you probably never even heard of somebody named Matthew.

Bart Ehrman [00:18:42] You're just telling stories, a story about Jesus did this miracle or he did that miracle, or this is how he got crucified. And so you tell these stories and these stories are circulating. Eventually some people write down the stories, but they write down the stories anonymously. So the Gospel of Matthew is completely anonymous. There's nothing about anybody connected with Matthew in the Gospel of Matthew having written this thing. What happens then is it's only about a hundred years old after Matthew was written, that anybody said, oh yes, that was written by Matthew. So that the ascription to Matthew is being attributed to Matthew decades later, about a century later.

John Dehlin [00:19:25] Okay, so the gospels, whatever ends up getting written down gets written down, not attributed to anyone. And then afterwards a name gets stuck to the account.

Bart Ehrman [00:19:36] Yeah, long afterwards so not. Not like the next year, not by somebody who actually knew the author, but by somebody living 100 years later in some other country says, oh, yeah, by the way, this was written by Matthew.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] Now why would someone do that? That seems just fundamentally dishonest to, like, say, well, we've got this oral account that turns into a written account. Now 100 years later, let's stick someone's name to it. That seems.

Bart Ehrman [00:19:55] Well, my. My guess is that they're not trying to be dishonest. My. My guess is they're just trying to figure it out and they think, oh, it's probably Matthew. And then somebody says, maybe it's Matthew. And the next guy says, yeah, you know, hey, I heard it was Matthew. And then. Then pretty soon it becomes Matthew. And so it's not that anybody is necessarily being dishonest. These kinds of things happen all the time. I mean, rumors happen all the time that people say so and so said such and such, and they didn't really say such and such. But it's not that somebody's being dishonest. It's just how rumors start.

John Dehlin [00:20:25] Okay, so let's talk about text, briefly talk about textual criticism and how it has become a tool used to better understand the Bible and particularly the historicity of the Gospels and highlighting some of the challenges about the historicity of the Gospels.

Bart Ehrman [00:20:48] Well, so the question of the historicity of the Gospels is.

John Dehlin [00:20:52] Or the accuracy. Even the accuracy?

Bart Ehrman [00:20:53] Yeah, well, the accuracy. I mean, the first thing that scholars started noting when they started studying the Bibles with a critical eye was that the different accounts are sometimes at odds with each other. Matthew and Mark will tell the same story, but there'll be an inconsistency that you can't straighten out.

John Dehlin [00:21:13] Important ones or just kind of tangential, meaningless ones?

Bart Ehrman [00:21:17] Some of both tell us some of

John Dehlin [00:21:20] the more important ones so we don't just get these dismissed as like, you know, articles. The versus an or a, you know.

Bart Ehrman [00:21:27] Yeah, well, there are lots of big ones. I mean, one big one refers to something we were talking about earlier. Did Jesus call himself God in the Gospel of John? That's all Jesus talks about is how he came from heaven as a divine being to bring salvation to earth and that he is equal with God, the Father. I and the Father are one. Before Abraham was. I am. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. So these divine claims for himself that Jesus makes in the Gospel of John are completely missing from Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Bart Ehrman [00:22:05] Matthew, Mark and Luke are always seen as being earlier than John. And they're based on earlier written sources. And so none of those three and none of their earlier sources had Jesus say any such thing. It just makes you wonder if Jesus really was going around calling himself God in his public ministry, that would obviously be the most important thing that he was saying. I mean, what could be more important than that, that he's calling himself God.

Bart Ehrman [00:22:31] How is it possible that these earlier authors simply didn't mention that part? It didn't occur to them this might be important to know that he called himself God. And so that would be something that's rather important. What was Jesus view of himself?

John Dehlin [00:22:48] And aren't there other places where he actually denies being.

Bart Ehrman [00:22:52] Well, yeah, no. Jesus never comes out and says, I am not God, because why would he? I mean, I've never said that about myself either. Why would you even think about it? It's so. It's not even a topic of conversation in the other gospels, and it's the only topic of conversation in the Gospel of John, our last gospel. And that. That makes it suspicious.

John Dehlin [00:23:13] Okay, Any. Any other, you know, major inconsistencies or

Bart Ehrman [00:23:18] problems that you might not just about everything. I mean, what I tell my students to do is to simply take. Take a story of, for example, the resurrection story and read that in. In all four gospels and compare the accounts and see if there are any differences that can't be reconciled. And the fact is, there are differences all over the place.

Bart Ehrman [00:23:39] So they all agree Jesus was put in a tomb, and the third day the tomb was found to be empty. But who went to the tomb? Which women? What were their names? How many of them were there? What did they see there? What were they told there? Did they do what they were told there? Did the disciples go and meet Jesus in Galilee or did they stay in Jerusalem? I mean, boom, story after story, everything's different.

Bart Ehrman [00:23:59] And so, you know, so what happened? Well, you've got four accounts that can't agree on what happened. So what do you normally do when you've got four accounts that can't agree? Well, then you've got to figure out. You either have to figure out what happened, or you have to say, well, there's no way of knowing.

John Dehlin [00:24:14] Okay, so you're saying that different people show up at the tomb depending on which gospel you're reading?

Bart Ehrman [00:24:21] Yeah, that's one of the many, many differences.

John Dehlin [00:24:24] Okay. I noticed when I was growing up, two things. One was that the sign above Jesus head on the cross said something different, literally, in each of the four gospels. How do they get that wrong?

Bart Ehrman [00:24:37] Well, because nobody was there taking notes. There are these traditions floating around, and they all have something to do with him being a king of the Jews, but they are different. But, you know, it's just. It's another thing. You can take all the crucifixion narratives and simply line them up and compare them with each other and see whether they're consistent. And the reality is, they're not consistent. They're not consistent on even what day he was dying on or what time of day. I mean, the whole thing is different.

John Dehlin [00:25:07] I also got stuck on this idea that Judas dies in two different ways in the New Testament. Is that true?

Bart Ehrman [00:25:12] That is true. In the Gospel of Matthew, he hangs himself, which is what everybody thinks, is that he hanged himself. That's only in Matthew. Mark, Luke, and John don't say anything about it. But there is an account of his death in the Book of Acts, and he doesn't hang himself. He kind of bloats up and falls forward and his guts gush out. He falls headfirst to the ground and his guts gush out. So it's not a hanging. It's some other thing going on, completely different. So if anybody wants to compare two accounts, I encourage them to do that. Compare the death of Judas in Matthew with the death of Judas in Acts, chapter one and try and figure that one out.

John Dehlin [00:25:49] I was a Mormon defending my religion back in the 80s, and I had a lot of Southern Baptists. And the explanation I got was that he was hung, but then the rope broke. He fell onto a rock and his bowels gushed up.

Bart Ehrman [00:26:03] Why did he fall head first?

John Dehlin [00:26:06] Well, when the rope snapped, it flipped him.

Bart Ehrman [00:26:09] Yeah, I don't think it works that way. You ever cut down a body from who's been hanging from a rope? Cut it down and see which part goes down.

John Dehlin [00:26:18] Okay. All right. So problems with contradictions in the Bible. Now, what if somebody says to you, well, Barth, what the sign said above the crucifixion or who actually showed up doesn't challenge whether he actually resurrected. He still atoned for our sins. He still resurrected. If some of the details are wrong, that's the problem of men, not God.

Bart Ehrman [00:26:42] Yeah, well, that's fine. That's what they want to believe. That's fine. I mean, that's what I used to believe. And so I'm not arguing that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I'm not arguing that he's not the Son of God at this point. We're just arguing, you know, is the Bible. Is it consistent and is it accurate. And I think on both scores the answer is no. It's not consistent, it's not accurate. You can still be a Christian and think that most of my scholarly friends are Christian and they know all this, but they're not fundamentalists. The problem that I have isn't with people who are Christian or Mormon or anything else. It's fundamentalists. I think they can be a problem.

John Dehlin [00:27:20] Okay, we'll probably end talking about fundamentalism, but it's good that we are giving a nod to that. Let's talk about your next book, misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why. So let's talk. Is there anything more that should be said about changes to the Bible over time once the Gospels and then, of course, the Epistles get sort of identified?

Textual Changes, Contradictions, and the Biblical Canon

Bart Ehrman [00:27:46] Yeah. This is the first book that I wrote that actually that anybody read. And it came out about 13 or 14 years ago. And it deals with a completely different thing from what we're talking about. The issue in that book is you have somebody writing the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then you have Paul writing his letters. You have these other books of the New Testament. But the question in this book is, how did we actually get those books?

Bart Ehrman [00:28:15] We don't have Matthew's Gospel. We don't have the original thing he wrote. What we have are copies that were made of that original thing he wrote. And as it turns out, we don't actually have the first copies. We don't have. And we don't have copies of the copies, and we don't have copies of the copies of the copies. We have copies that are from. So the first time we get a complete copy of the Gospel of Matthew from beginning to end with manuscript, the whole thing is 300 years later.

John Dehlin [00:28:43] Oh, my gosh.

Bart Ehrman [00:28:44] So people have been copying this book for hundreds of years before we have a complete copy. We don't start getting lots of copies for many hundreds of years. So we have lots of copies now, but they're from the Middle Ages. And the question I deal with in this book is if copies are copying this thing and they're changing it the whole time, as they obviously are, because you have these manuscripts that are all different from each other, and usually in just very small ways, but sometimes in significant ways.

Bart Ehrman [00:29:10] If you don't have the originals or the original copy, how do you know what he wrote? And so that is the task that scholars have taken on themselves. And it's not just the New Testament. It's every book from the ancient world has exactly the same problem in the Hebrew Bible. But also, I mean, it doesn't matter. Plato or Aristotle or Euripides, name your author. You have this problem. And people don't realize that it's a problem. And for most people, it doesn't matter whether you know the original words of Plato. Those are public. I mean, they don't really. But if it turns out you don't have the original words of the Gospel of John, that matters to people. And so that's why it's an important issue that I deal with in my book, misquoting Jesus.

John Dehlin [00:29:49] So again, you dedicated an entire book to this. Tell us why. You know, would that just be, oh, a word got left out of this one copy, or a word got slightly changed a little bit or got misspelled? Can significant changes happen over time to these documents or manuscripts?

Bart Ehrman [00:30:09] What I argue, what I show in the book, is that the different. We have about. We have over 5,600 manuscripts of the Bible, of the New Testament, various kinds. There are hundreds of thousands of differences among these manuscripts.

Bart Ehrman [00:30:24] There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. But the vast majority of them are completely unimportant, insignificant, immaterial. They don't matter for anything. A lot of them just show that scribes couldn't spell any better than students can today. They just like misspelled words. Every misspelled words are different. But there are some big differences. There are significant. I'll just give you just one example.

Bart Ehrman [00:30:50] The famous story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, where she's supposed to be stoned to death because she's been caught committing adultery. They ask Jesus, what are we supposed to do? And he says, let the woman without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. And they all leave because they're embarrassed by their own sins until nobody's left. And he looks up and he sees the woman, says, is there no one here left to condemn you? No, Lord, no one. Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. This is this beautiful story. It's in the Gospel of John, chapter seven and eight.

Bart Ehrman [00:31:23] And in fact, it was not original to the Gospel of John. It was added by later scribes. So it's arguably the most famous story of Jesus. And it wasn't originally in the New Testament.

John Dehlin [00:31:34] It's probably worth talking about also how, you know, the Bible, you know, wasn't sort of the manuscripts that became, you know, the King James version of the Bible or whatever, you know, weren't put together by the finger of God. Wasn't there basically a committee that basically said, well, heck, we've got all these manuscripts. You know, how do we decide what to include and what not to include? And who is it making that decision?

Bart Ehrman [00:31:59] Yeah, no, it's a great question. And it's one I actually deal with in another book you didn't mention called Lost Christianities.

John Dehlin [00:32:05] Seven books. We're gonna promote seven books of yours.

Bart Ehrman [00:32:10] So a lot of people had the misconception that it was at the Council of Nicaea, the Emperor Constantine decided which books would be in the Bible, the Council of Nicaea, which is completely wrong. What happened was you started. You got lots of gospels in early Christianity. So we know Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But there's also the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Truth. There are all these other gospels floating around. There's other. These other books that claim to be written by Paul and these books claiming to be about to be by Peter. And you have all these books floating around.

Bart Ehrman [00:32:40] And at some point, Christians said, look, which ones are authoritative? And they had to choose which ones they thought were authoritative. And they had various criteria that they used to decide, well, is this one going to be authoritative for us or not? I mean, is it like something written last week, or does it go back to the time of the apostles? And is it connected with an apostle? Or is it just some nobody who's writing a book? And does it toe the line theologically? So these are the kinds of questions people were asking. The debates went on for many, many years. It's not until the end of the fourth Christian century, about 300 years after the books were written, that anybody said, these 27.

Bart Ehrman [00:33:22] These are the 27 books that should be our scriptures. And even when that person said that, it didn't settle the issue. The debates continued for a long time. And so the canon of the New Testament, the collection of these 27 books, isn't something that dropped from the sky one day. It's a result of a long, long period of historical discussion and argument.

John Dehlin [00:33:43] If you were to sort of have a scale of, like, credibility or legitimacy, even if this is possible, are there more credible manuscripts that were left out and are there less credible manuscripts that were kept in.

Bart Ehrman [00:33:55] I don't think any. Just in terms of the Gospels. So just talking about, like, the life and teachings and activities of Jesus, the four Gospels are our earliest. The four in the New Testament. They're the earliest ones we have, and they are more than the other gospels. To have historical information in Them. The other gospels are even more obviously legendary, and they're certainly quite late. So that. So they're not going to help us to know what happened in the life of Jesus. Where they're helpful is to understand what Christians were saying about Jesus in later times.

How Christianity Became the Religion of Rome

John Dehlin [00:34:28] Okay. All right, so now it's time to promote this amazing book. Bart D. Ehrman, the Triumph of Christianity. How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. So how in the heck do we go from this Jewish preacher from Galilee, dying people sort of telling these tales, and the tales growing to the oral traditions getting passed down to them finally getting written down to this becoming sort of a dominant world religion? How does that happen?

Bart Ehrman [00:35:03] Yeah, that's the question of the book. I mean, in the New Testament, after Jesus death, he's got 11 men disciples and a handful of women who come to believe that he's been raised from the dead. And so we're talking maybe 20 people. These 20 people are lower class, illiterate day laborers, peasants from a rural part of a remote section of the empire. And within, within about 300 years, there are 3 million of them. And by the end of the 4th century, there are 30 million of them in an empire of 60 million. So half of the empire has converted to Christianity, and by the end of the 4th century, it's the official religion of Rome. And so my book is, how does it happen? How do you get from 20 to 30 million? Yeah, so, right, that's a.

John Dehlin [00:35:54] So we're gonna summarize the book in like five minutes. But no, talk just a little bit about how that happens.

Bart Ehrman [00:36:00] Well, so one thing I argue is, I think the first thing is you have to understand who is becoming a Christian, who is becoming a follower of Jesus and starting to worship the God of Jesus. What I argue is that even though Jesus and his own followers were Jewish, the mission to Jews didn't actually go very well.

Bart Ehrman [00:36:24] Most Jews rejected the claims that Jesus could be the Messiah of God. Jesus was just the opposite of what Jews would thought Messiah would be. The Messiah was supposed to be a figure of grandeur and power who destroyed the enemies of God and set up God's kingdom, ruling the kingdom of God from Jerusalem. Is that what Jesus was? Well, no, actually he was a criminal who was crucified for crimes against the state. I mean, he was publicly humiliated and tortured to death. That's the. That's Jesus. And so he's just the opposite of what Jews thought a messiah would be. And so it's not surprising that most Jews said, no, we don't.

Bart Ehrman [00:37:04] You know he's not our Messiah. What I argue in the book is that when the apostle Paul became a follower of Jesus, he had been, he was Jewish. And he also rejected Jesus for those reasons. But he had a vision of Jesus. He saw Jesus. A couple years after Jesus had died, he had some kind of vision of Jesus and again convinced him Jesus was alive again. But Paul came to realize that the death of Jesus is what really matters. The death and resurrection of Jesus are what matters. And he realized that being Jewish doesn't matter, which meant that the message of Jesus could go to the non Jew, and the non Jew doesn't have to become Jewish.

Bart Ehrman [00:37:45] So if you're a man, you don't have to be circumcised, you don't have to keep kosher, you have to. Don't have to follow the Sabbath rules. And so it opened up the possibility of the message being taken to Gentiles. And so the big question in my book is what is it the Gentiles believed before and what was the religion like before? That would, that would open up the possibility for Christians to convince them that they should give up their old beliefs and start worshiping the God of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [00:38:12] What I point out in the book is that gentiles were all pagans. The word pagan doesn't have any negative connotations in this context. It's just the word that historians use to refer to people who in the ancient world were polytheists. They worshiped many gods. And so we're talking 93% of the empire here. So you have about 5 to 7% are Jews. Everybody else is a pagan.

Bart Ehrman [00:38:35] People worship lots of gods. Everybody worships lots of gods. Gods of every function, gods of every place. They're the state gods, the local gods, the family gods, your personal gods. You worship all these gods and you worship these gods because the gods can provide you with things you can't provide for yourself.

Bart Ehrman [00:38:55] We can't make sure that it rains, but the gods can provide rain. The gods can make sure that the crops grow. They can make sure the livestock multiply. They can make sure that the gods can heal you if you get sick. I mean, there are things gods can do we can't do.

John Dehlin [00:39:08] That sounds like a good deal. Lots of gods to do lots of cool things.

Bart Ehrman [00:39:11] Well, every, every function has a God. So you've got, you have a God of crops, you have a God of weather, you have God of war, you've got a God of love, you've got, you've got gods for everything.

Bart Ehrman [00:39:22] Pagans had been following These traditional religions, hundreds, thousands of religions in the Roman Empire, in your locality, people have been following these religions for centuries. I mean, millennia these religions have been around. Christians came along and said that their God was more powerful than any of the pagan gods and in fact, than all the pagan gods put together.

Bart Ehrman [00:39:46] And so what Christians had to do was to convince pagans that their God could provide benefits better than the pagan gods. And the thing about Christianity, there were two things about Christianity that I argue made the difference. One is, unlike these other religions, Christians were monotheistic. Like the Jews. They maintained there's only one God.

Bart Ehrman [00:40:08] Unlike the Jews, they were, they were evangelistic about it. They, Christians wanted to convert people. Jews didn't care. I mean, Jews basically wanted to be left alone to be Jews. They didn't care if you were a Jew. They just wanted to be a Jew. Christians wanted to convert people to their monotheism. And the thing that made them especially interesting in the story is that Christians were exclusivistic, which means they said we're right. And since we're right, you are wrong.

Bart Ehrman [00:40:38] This was the only religion in the empire making that kind of exclusivistic claim. The other religions, whether you're worshiping Zeus or Apollo or Athena or Aphrodite or just your local God, your personal God, your family gods, none of them thought, since I'm worshiping these gods, you have to worship those gods too. Everybody was open to worshiping whichever God you wanted to worship, except the Christians.

Bart Ehrman [00:41:00] So what happens is when Christians, one by one convert somebody to believe that, oh, you know, I do want to worship the Christian God, he's more powerful. That's the one I'm going to. I'm going to give up my other gods.

Bart Ehrman [00:41:13] The Christians are taking people away from the pagan religions and no other religion is doing that. So that as Christianity grows, the pagan religions all shrink and this is the only religion doing it. So that the growth of Christianity, even if it happens just at kind of a slow pace, it's causing the destruction of the other religions. And you do that for three or four hundred years and you become the religion of the empire.

John Dehlin [00:41:44] Yeah. And those exclusive truth claims then sort of become the secret sauce for Christianity's success, is that along with the evangelicalism and the exclusive truth claims, that's kind of the secret sauce.

Bart Ehrman [00:41:58] Yeah, it's a secret sauce. It's got two major ingredients and it is very palatable. So the thing is, the other thing I argue is that you don't need to have like these major evangelistic Rallies, you know, like Billy Graham campaigns or something, where thousands of people are converting at one time, you might think you need that because if you go from 20 people to 30 million people, you've got to have massive conversions, right?

Bart Ehrman [00:42:24] But what I show in the book is you don't need that at all if you had a steady rate of growth. Now, of course you didn't have. There was not a steady rate of growth. It's not that it grew 3% year every year for 300 years. It was very much up and down and up and down. But if you kind of calculate it out over the period, to get from 20 people in the year 30 to 30 million people in the year 400, you really do need a growth rate of about 3% a year. So that means that if you've got 100 of you who are Christian this year, the hundred of you need to convert just three other people this year.

Bart Ehrman [00:43:03] And the thing is, in the ancient world, if you convert the head of a household, the paterfamilias, the man who's in charge of the household, and suppose you have a man, he's got a wife and two kids, you convert him. Well, he makes sure his other three convert because you have to follow the religion of the paterfamilias. So by converting one man a year, the hundred of you convert one man a year, you got four converts.

Bart Ehrman [00:43:29] And so you do that year after year after year. And gradually what happens is at the same rate of growth, it starts out you're not getting very many converts because there aren't very many of you. So you're.3% a year isn't very many. But. But once you start getting 10,000, 100,000amillion, it's an exponential curve.

Bart Ehrman [00:43:49] And then you start getting masses come in at the same rate of growth, not at a different rate of growth, but at the same rate of growth.

John Dehlin [00:43:55] Okay, so now we're going to fast forward. You know, Christianity starts to grow. Catholicism happens. Then the Protestant Reformation happens. Then at some point in the 20th century, Bart Ehrman is born and raised. Tell us, Bart, a bit about how you were raised and what your beliefs look like and then how they changed.

Bart Ehrman [00:44:18] Yeah, so I was actually raised as a Christian. I was raised in the. I was raised in the Episcopal Church as a. We were a fairly religious family, but we weren't kind of crazy religious. But when I was in high school, I had a born again experience, and I moved into a very conservative evangelical form of Christianity as a 15 year old. And basically I became a Fundamentalist. I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and did the three year diploma there. And then I went to Wheaton College, which was the alma mater of Billy Graham and did my, finished my bachelor's degree there.

Bart Ehrman [00:45:03] I was was a conservative evangelical Christian who thought that the Bible had no mistakes of any kind whatsoever and was the basis for all faith and practice. When I was in college, we had a foreign language requirement and I decided I wanted to take Ancient Greek because I wanted to read the New Testament in Greek.

Bart Ehrman [00:45:22] And so I did. And it turned out I was pretty good at Greek. And so I thought, you know, I want to go on and do a PhD studying Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The world expert on that field, in that field was a man named Bruce Metzger who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. So I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] Were you warned, don't go there, you'll lose your faith?

Bart Ehrman [00:45:43] Yes, I absolutely was. There aren't any Christians there. This Princeton Theological Seminary, of course, is a Presbyterian seminary training Presbyterian ministers. But the circles I came from said those people aren't really Christians. So I go to Princeton Theological Seminary and while I'm there studying more Greek and I learn Hebrew, I'm reading the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew and I learned German so I can read scholarship on what biblical scholars have said about these things. I start, you know, I take a lot of classes on biblical studies and theology and such. And I start realizing that in fact the Bible is a very human book.

Bart Ehrman [00:46:23] There are discrepancies. I mean, they just are. If you read two passages, especially if you read them in Greek and you compare them, you find discrepancies. Then once I admitted there could be, I started finding all sorts of things, bigger discrepancies, contradictions, historical mistakes, just all sorts of problems. And I came to a view that the Bible is not the inerrant revelation from God. I remained a Christian for a long time, but I became a more of a mainline denominational Christian.

John Dehlin [00:46:53] Real quick, Bart or Dr. Ehrman, are there, you know, Christian apologetics that would try and sort of any criticism of the truthfulness of the Bible? There would be a group of fundamentalist Christians providing apologetics to explain the problems that you were finding and if so, give us one or two examples.

Bart Ehrman [00:47:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, well, no, I mean, this is. There certainly were. I was trained in Christian apologetics as a fundamentalist. And so I, I learned all the arguments and I used to use all the arguments to try and convince people that you know, I argued, you know, you can prove that Jesus was raised from the dead. You can prove the Bible is inerrant. And so if there anything that looks like a contradiction, you just figure out a way to explain it away. And these people still exist. I often have public debates with. Recently last month, I had a public debate with a scholar named Michael Ocona. I've had several debates with him on whether you can prove the resurrection or not. And this was a debate on whether you could prove that the Gospels are reliable or not. And so, yeah, they certainly exist and are quite vocal.

John Dehlin [00:47:57] Were you. So would you have been an apologist for a while before you.

Bart Ehrman [00:48:01] Okay, I tried. I mean, you know, I wasn't, you know, on the radio or anything, but I definitely went around trying to prove the truthfulness of the Christian message.

Ehrman's Personal Crisis of Faith

John Dehlin [00:48:11] So did you experience what we call in Mormonism a. A crisis of faith, a dark night of the soul where you have to struggle with your identity, your morality, your reason for living once this sort of fundamentalist worldview falls apart.

Bart Ehrman [00:48:28] Yeah, it started a process for me where I began questioning. I mean, if the Bible's not going to be my source of all authority, what authority do I have? I mean, what provides my moral compass and what guides my beliefs and why should I think what I think? And it started all that. What ended up getting me and leading me to kind of the darkness of the soul wasn't related to any of the scholarship. It was actually wrestling with the problem of suffering in the world, with the question of how there can be a all powerful and good God who's in control and sovereign over this world, given the enormous amount of suffering that's going on all day, every day throughout the world with, you know, starvation, famine, drought, tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, I mean, war, I mean, just all of the massive suffering.

Bart Ehrman [00:49:22] Is God, is there a God really in control? And so I read about it. You know, I read massively about it and thought about it and wrestled with it. I finally got to a point probably about 20, 25 years ago where I just said, you know, I don't believe it anymore. I just don't think there's a God who answers prayer. I don't think there's a God who's in control. I think that in fact, this world can't be explained on those grounds. And so at that point I became an agnostic. And that's what I still am. I'm an agnostic atheist.

John Dehlin [00:49:50] Bart, you should have asked a Mormon, because a Mormon would tell you, number one, God's ways are mysterious. And number two, we have suffering in this world as a challenge, as sort of a mortal probation to give us opportunities to grow and to thrive.

Bart Ehrman [00:50:07] Yeah, well, Mormons didn't invent these ideas. Both of those views were around long before there were any Mormons on the earth.

John Dehlin [00:50:14] So yes, what's wrong with that response that God gives us challenges as a test?

Bart Ehrman [00:50:20] Well, I think that would be fine if challenges were things like, you know, maybe I didn't get that job that I wanted and wow, I've got this hangnail and you know, the kinds of things that I experience as problems.

Bart Ehrman [00:50:35] My issue is that every seven seconds in this world a child starves to death. I don't see this as a challenge. I don't think God is allowing children to starve to death so that he can provide me with a challenge. You know, in other words, it's not like, oh, that makes me so much a better person now that I know that since you and I have been talking there have been hundreds of people starving to death.

Bart Ehrman [00:50:58] You know, I think that that's actually very self centered to say it that way, that this is a challenge for me somehow. Because what about the person starving to death? Does God not care for them? Does God? Yeah, it's fine to say God's ways are mysterious, but what makes you think God has anything to do with it at all? I mean, if God's in charge, is he in charge or not?

John Dehlin [00:51:18] Mormon's top theologian right now is named Terrell Givens and he wrote a book called the God who Weeps. And I think one of the main premises of the book is that God is weeping about that dying child, but that maybe it's mankind. God allows us to screw up our world and our lives and maybe that's those starving children are. Because we're not doing our job. It's not God's job, it's our job.

Bart Ehrman [00:51:40] Children have been starving for millions of years and, well, millions, hundreds of thousands of years. And until about 70 years ago, there was nothing humans could do about it. And so it's absolutely true that we should be doing more. And I firmly committed to that. But it doesn't explain why there's massive starvation. It's not because of human activity. It's because of climate conditions and all sorts of things that humans have no control over. And so this view that God is weeping with the child, is it? Actually I don't know this theologian, but it came to him out of other traditions that have said that especially post Holocaust theologians have been arguing things like this. And I appreciate the argument, but I simply don't find it at all satisfying.

Relevance of New Testament Scholarship for Mormons

John Dehlin [00:52:32] Okay, now we're going to end with sort of a domain that isn't really your expertise, but it's probably the most important question for my, for most in my audience. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk for about a minute and then I'm gonna ask you to help, help us, kind of teach us whatever you can about this situation. So Mormons are taught that a long time ago, 600 years before Christ, a Jewish family left Israel, traveled across the land, built a boat, sailed to what we now know as the Americas and started a civilization. They wrote down as records what happened to them for about a thousand years on golden plates, brass plates, and eventually there was a group that was wicked and so that group was turned dark skinned.

John Dehlin [00:53:24] And then the darkies sort of fought with the light skinned people. And by the end of the book of Mormon, 600 years after Christ's death, with Christ actually visiting America, by the way, as part of the chief narrative of the Book of Mormon, Christ, after he's resurrected, comes to the Native Americans, visits them. Six hundred years after that, the darkies kill off the whites. But before they do, these plates are buried in a hill. And then later, Joseph Smith comes, unburies the plates and translates into English what he claims is the Book of Mormon. So we're just taught that the Christ lived, the Bible's true, Christ was resurrected, and the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ, more accurate than even the Bible.

John Dehlin [00:54:08] And the challenge is that people stake their entire lives on this narrative. They're taught this narrative from the time they're a baby or they convert to the church with the same type of emotional experiences you had in your conversion. And so they believe what they're told, and then they're giving 10% of their income, two years of a mission, service, and deciding education, career, family, all on the premise that this Book of Mormon is an ancient record sort of written by God. Now there are going to be a lot of Mormons that just are happy and they don't care whether this is true or not because they just want to live it.

John Dehlin [00:54:46] That's not who I'm asking you to speak to. I'm asking you to speak to the people who want to know what is true so that they can make informed decisions with their lives based on evidence and reality. Is there anything you could say to speak to that story that I just told you?

Bart Ehrman [00:55:06] Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's really interesting. That people who are born into a particular religious tradition and grow up in that tradition find that the claims of that religion are just kind of commonsensical and that they, you know, you don't really need any evidence for them. It's just. It's what makes sense to you and outsiders of that religion, whatever. Religious. So I'm not just on Mormonism here, but any. But outsiders to any religious tradition look at that religious tradition and think, wow, those are bizarre claims.

Bart Ehrman [00:55:40] And the insiders don't feel that way. And so the question is, if you're an insider in any religious tradition and you really want to know the truth of it, what do you. What do you do? And I think what you have to do is you have. You have to do what you're suggesting, which is you look at evidence.

Bart Ehrman [00:55:57] So I am not an expert on the Book of Mormon, and so I can't really speak to it definitively. I do know when I was a fundamentalist Christian, I read through the Book of Mormon carefully and carefully noted all the contradictions and the historical errors that I could find so that next time missionaries came to my door, I would have something to talk to them about. But I can't do that for anybody else. I think people need to do with the Book of Mormon what scholars have been doing with the New Testament since the 19th century. I think within Mormonism, there needs to develop a critical discourse where people actually seriously take the Book of Mormon as a historical document and see whether it stands up to historical scrutiny.

Bart Ehrman [00:56:42] Not people who are just trying to defend the faith, but people who are generally interested in knowing. Are there contradictions here? Are there mistakes here? Are there hysterical errors? Does it match up with what we know from science, from what we know from anthropology?

Bart Ehrman [00:56:55] You know, does it. Does it work or not? And then people need to make a measured decision. And, you know, I think everybody has to make the decision themselves. But I think it's much better to make the decision based on evidence rather than based on simply what you were told when you were a child.

John Dehlin [00:57:14] One listener is objecting to my use of the term darkies. I just want to be very clear. I would never, ever use that term. I was quoting past general authorities who have used that term because I was trying to represent the narrative that has been taught to people for generations. Bart, one last question about this. And Mormons also struggle with this thing called the Book of Abraham. There was a mummy scroll that was uncovered. Joseph Smith claimed to have translated it into English, said that it was the writings of Abraham, modern Egyptologists, have interpreted the same scroll and found it to not even contain the word Abraham.

John Dehlin [00:57:49] Going back to the book Mormon, if someone were to give you that narrative that I gave you, based on your understanding of science and history and archaeology and race and whatever, what would your quick response be to the core historical narrative of the book, Book of Mormon, for your assessment?

Bart Ehrman [00:58:06] My personal view is that there's nothing, nothing true about it at all.

John Dehlin [00:58:12] Anything else you would say?

Bart Ehrman [00:58:14] No, I mean, just, I think it's completely made up. I mean, you know, I mean, I, I'm not restricting myself to Mormonism. I think that's true. But if you ask me, historically, did it really happen? No, it didn't happen, in my opinion. But, you know, I think that about a lot of narratives in the Bible too. So it's not, you know, I'm not picking up Mormons here. I think, you know, the story of, I think the stories of Abraham, the actual historical figure of Abraham, I think they're not historical either. But I certainly don't think that the stories in the Book of Mormon are historical. No,

John Dehlin [00:58:44] last, maybe the last question. Bart, we'll get you out on this. Today, there are a lot of Mormons saying, okay, well, the Book of Mormon isn't historical, the Book of Abraham isn't historical, but Mormonism is just a great way to live your life.

John Dehlin [00:58:58] And so they're moving away, and even the church is moving away from fundamentalism. And the question is, and you get this with Sam Harris and others in the past, some have a real critique of progressive religion folk that somehow they enable the fundamentalists that they prop up, that they in some ways allow fundamentalism to exist by giving their money and their reputation to an organization that's fundamentally fundamentalist. So do you have any final thoughts around this idea of it doesn't matter if the Book of Mormon is true, doesn't matter if the Book of Abraham is true, doesn't matter if the Bible really happened. These are all myths and fables and stories and go ahead and give your tithing and your reputation and your time and your service and your money to a church and raise your kids in it because it's a good way of life.

Bart Ehrman [00:59:51] Well, I certainly have less objection to that than to fundamentalism. And I really, I don't think, think that it's fair to lump all religion under the category of fundamentalism. I think a lot of. I'm far more familiar with the Protestant and the Catholic traditions. And in those traditions, you have very, very important streams that are socially oriented. They have good they have interest in social justice and in helping the poor, and they support causes that I very much believe in. And I don't have any problem at all with people who are, who are highly religious, who are thoughtful about it. My goal in life as a scholar who writes about these things has never been to turn somebody away from their religion, whether they're Mormon or Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Baptist or anything else.

Bart Ehrman [01:00:44] It's not to turn them away from the religion. It's to help them be more thoughtful about whatever the religion is and to reflect on the truth claims of the religion, but also to reflect on what value their religious commitments are providing for their social lives and for their lives in community. And so if they're doing good things for their community and they're helping the poor and the oppressed, then I'm for them. And so I don't share the feeling that we should get rid of religion altogether.

John Dehlin [01:01:14] All right. Well, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are going to appreciate that. Bart, I'm going to go through your books one last time, if you don't mind. Is that okay?

Bart Ehrman [01:01:21] That's great. Go through them.

Book Recommendations and Closing Thoughts

John Dehlin [01:01:22] All right. And you're going to have to remind us of the title of the seventh book. So we've got Dr. Bart Ehrman, did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. We have How Jesus Became God, the Exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee. We have forged Writing in the Name of God why the Bible's authors are not who we think they are. We have Jesus Interrupted, revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible and why we don't know about them. We have Misquoting Jesus, the Story behind who Changed the Bible and why, a very important book. And then we have the most important book that brought us here today, the Triumph of Christianity, How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. And this is a fascinating, gripping read. I love this book. You all need to go buy it immediately. And Bart, what's the seventh book?

Bart Ehrman [01:02:21] The other one that I mentioned was called Lost the Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.

John Dehlin [01:02:28] All right. Well, Dr. Bart Ehrman, your work has been so important to so many people, to many liberal and posters, Mormons, to Christians and non Christians all over the world. And on behalf of a bunch of people trying to figure out what's true and to base their lives on the truth and on evidence, we can't thank you enough for your sacrifice, for your lifelong scholarship and sacrifice, for helping us see the world more clearly and for helping us base our lives more on reality than on something that falls short of that.

Bart Ehrman [01:03:06] Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's been a real pleasure.

John Dehlin [01:03:09] All right, everyone, Dr. Bart Ehrman, really quickly, please go to the website bartderman, that's e h r m a n bartdurman.com or he also has an amazing blog. I heard on a podcast you write like a thousand words a day or something like that.

Bart Ehrman [01:03:29] Yep, I do. Five days, five or six days a week. And I've been doing it for six years, haven't missed a week yet. And people, people should look into my blog and think about joining up.

John Dehlin [01:03:40] It's airmanblog.org, ehrmanblog.org I will make sure and have our producers include those links along with Amazon links to all your books in the show notes.

Bart Ehrman [01:03:55] That's great, listeners.

John Dehlin [01:03:56] Thanks for joining us today. Thanks to everyone who makes this possible. Bart Ehrman, we are so grateful for you. Again, thanks to everyone who donates to the Open Stories foundation and Mormon Stories Podcast to make this possible. Please continue that support and we will bring you more amazing thinkers and writers and humans just like Bart d. Ehrman. Thanks, Dr. Ehrman, and thanks to everyone again for joining us today. Take care. See you soon.

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