#125 — What Is Christianity?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks to Bart Ehrman about his experience of being a born-again Christian, his academic training in New Testament scholarship, his loss of faith, the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity, the status of miracles, the composition of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, the nature of heaven and hell, the book of Revelation, the End Times, self-contradictions in the Bible, the concept of a messiah, whether Jesus actually existed, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the conversion of Constantine, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
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0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.8	Today I am speaking with Bart Irman. Bart is the author of more than 30 books, including the
0:54.0	bestsellers, Miskwoting Jesus and how Jesus became God. He's a professor of religious studies at the
1:00.0	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a leading authority on the New Testament and the
1:05.9	history of early Christianity. He's been featured in time and the New Yorker and the Washington
1:11.7	Post and many other places. He's been on the daily show. He's been in many documentaries,
1:17.6	and his most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity, and this details the history of
1:24.8	how Christianity spread through the world. Bart, as you'll hear, is a former believer. He's now,
1:32.8	I think he calls himself a diagnostic at this point, though that didn't come up. But we had a great
1:38.6	conversation. This was really the full tour of what Christianity is as a belief system and how it
1:46.8	got that way. I wanted to come at it as though from Mars and consider the whole doctrine as though
1:55.4	I had never heard of it before. We did that and it was fascinating. We talked about his background
2:02.0	as a born-again Christian and then his loss of faith once he became a true scholar of the New
2:08.1	Testament. I asked him what the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity is. We talked
2:15.8	about the status of miracles. We spent some time talking about the centrality of the resurrection of
2:21.4	Jesus and the nature of heaven and hell. We talked about the end times and biblical prophecy
	...

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