230. Bart Ehrman — Did the Christmas Story Really Happen? The Birth of Jesus in History & Legend
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2021
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michael Shermer speaks with renowned biblical scholar and historian, Bart Ehrman, about: how we know Jesus existed and was crucified; how these questions are different epistemologically from those about Jesus’ resurrection and the claim that he died for our sins; how Christians deal with the trinity problem: How can God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit be one and the same and yet separate and different? (“God sacrificed himself…to himself…to save us from himself.” How is this possible?); How Christians answer these questions: Why did Jesus have to suffer and die? Why couldn’t God just forgive us for our sins?; Why was the virgin birth so important to early Christians? Why was the resurrection so important to early Christians? Anti-Semitism in the early Christian church (“the Jews killed Jesus” or “the Jews killed God”) and why it makes no theological sense (Jesus was Jewish, and if he had to die to save us from our sins, whoever killed Jesus should be thanked); why Jews and Muslims do not believe that Jesus was the messiah; how Jesus became God and how Christianity grew from a few dozen followers at the time of Jesus’s death to over two billion followers today; theodicy and the problem of evil: Why does an all powerful, all knowing, all good God allow people to suffer?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show |
| 0:18.3 | Welcome to the Michael Sherman show. My guest today is Bart Erman the great biblical |
| 0:26.8 | scholar and historian and conjunction with his seminar he's putting on a few days from now. The day we release this on November 27th, you have time to get the Early Bird |
| 0:31.4 | Special to sign up for his live seminar called |
| 0:35.0 | Did the Christian's story? Did the Christmas story really happen the |
| 0:39.6 | birth of Jesus in history and legend? It goes all day on December 5th from 9.30 in the morning |
| 0:44.8 | till 4 in the afternoon, eastern time. You can watch the whole thing online. Of course, I'll |
| 0:48.5 | be doing that as well. Bart will be covering what we can actually know about the birth of Jesus. |
| 0:54.0 | How can we decide whether he was born in Bethlehem? |
| 0:57.0 | Is it possible to reconcile the different gospel accounts? |
| 1:00.0 | Was the story of the Virgin birth a later fabrication? |
| 1:04.0 | What is the evidence for or against the many details such as the trip to Bethlehem, |
| 1:08.0 | the visit of the Wiseman, and the slaughter of the innocence? |
| 1:11.0 | How many of the most familiar parts of the stories |
| 1:14.0 | come from later legends and Mitch much more. |
| 1:17.0 | So in this conversation with Bart, |
| 1:19.0 | we just spent a few minutes on that |
| 1:20.0 | because I didn't want them to give away the whole seminar here |
| 1:22.0 | just on my |
| 1:23.1 | podcast so and I'm very much interested in in some of the larger questions like |
| 1:27.4 | how do we know Jesus actually existed that's good evidence for that okay what |
| 1:32.3 | about his crucifixion? What about that he |
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