Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

Five books, nearly a fifth of the New Testament, have the name John attached to them. Many Christians might think this is John the fisherman, the son of Zebedee, and that perhaps he was the "Disciple who Jesus loved." But the evidence is surprisingly murky. The Gospel never names its author. The letters are signed by someone calling himself only "the Elder." And the author of Revelation says he's John without once claiming to be an apostle. In fact, early Christian writers couldn't agree on who this John or the Johns were either. And they might have even invented a John or two along the way. 
Bart joins host Megan Lewis to work out how many people named John we're actually dealing with. Why more Johns may have been invented to solve the problem. Why the claim that the Beloved Disciple wrote the Gospel rests on an appendix somebody else appears to have added. And how can we even discover an author when that author may have held one of the most common Jewish names from the period.

In the summer of 70 CE, Roman legions broke into Jerusalem and burned the temple. The sacrifices that had organized Jewish worship for centuries stopped, and never started again. Everyone in the early Jesus movement lived through it or grew up in its shadow, and every Gospel in the New Testament was almost certainly written afterward. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to look at what the temple's fall did to a movement that was still a small Jewish sect: how the Gospel writers wrote about a world that no longer existed, why Judaism and Christianity both reorganized around texts once the sacrifices ended, and what it means that Christianity's founding documents were all written on the far side of a catastrophe.

As early christians wrestled with their beliefs and theologies surrounding Jesus, they both produced new texts and gospels, and edited existing ones to better fit with specific theological views. What were some of these early heretical beliefs? How did the Church Fathers fight against them? And can we see traces of that battle in the manuscripts of the New Testament? Today on Misquoting Jesus, we're talking about how the New Testament was shaped by theological fights between early Christian groups.

The Bible's world is crowded and unsystematic: ghosts, familiar spirits, demons that cause illness, and the dead who can be summoned. And at times, this world breaks through in ways modern readers don't always appreciate. When the disciples see Jesus walking on the water, their first thought is that he's a ghost. After the resurrection, Jesus has to reassure them he isn't one. King Saul has a medium call the prophet Samuel up from the dead, and it works.
So what happened to all those ghosts? Bart joins host Megan Lewis to explore the haunted world the Bible was written in, and how later Christians tidied it into a neater system of angels and demons, heaven and hell. Along the way: why demons were blamed for illness, why Jesus was accused of sorcery, and why believing in angels but not ghosts turns out to be a choice Christians made, not one the Bible made for them.

Most Christians grow up believing that everyone is born a sinner, that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, humanity inherited a broken nature and a guilt we can't escape. It's one of the most influential ideas in Western Christianity. But it isn't in Genesis, Jesus never taught it, and it didn't take its familiar form until four centuries after him.
Bart joins host Megan Lewis to trace where original sin actually came from: what the Garden of Eden story says and doesn't say, what Paul meant when he wrote that sin came into the world through one man, and how Augustine turned that line into a doctrine about every human being from the moment of conception. Along the way, why Eastern Orthodox Christians never fully accepted it, and what changes when you realize this belief has a history.