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The Michael Shermer Show

334. The End of the World: Bart Ehrman on What the Bible Really Says About the End

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4921 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2023

⏱️ 102 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, interpret it as a metaphorical expression of hope for those suffering now, or only recognize its highlights from pop culture, what you think Revelation reveals…is almost certainly wrong. In Armageddon, acclaimed New Testament authority Bart D. Ehrman delves into the most misunderstood — and possibly the most dangerous — book of the Bible, exploring the horrifying social and political consequences of expecting an imminent apocalypse.

Shermer and Ehrman discuss: Ehrman’s religious journey • Who wrote the Bible and why? • how to read the Bible and the book of Revelation • Who wrote Revelation and why? • why Jesus spoke in parables • why worry about climate change if the world is going to end soon? • David Koresh and Waco • Reagan and end times politics • how Jesus became a capitalist and militarist • faith healers, televangelists, and other Christian con artists • Christian ethics and what Jesus really said about the poor and needy.

Bart D. Ehrman is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity and a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of six New York Times bestsellers, he has written or edited more than thirty books, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, Did Jesus Exist?, God’s Problem, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, and Heaven and Hell. Ehrman has also created nine popular audio and video courses for The Great Courses. His books have been translated into 27 languages, with over two million copies and courses sold. His new book is Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show.

0:17.0

Hello everyone, it's time for another episode of the Michael Schurmer Show. This one brought to you by Wundrium, the series of college level audio and video courses and documentaries produced

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thousands of lectures because every one of them comes with a dozen or two dozen or even

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sometimes three dozen lectures so here on my app pop-up is one called

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Democracy and its Alternatives. As you can see look you can see I've listened to

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almost all of these well all but one of those lectures okay so I I ground through and it's not a

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grind it's fun 24 lectures 20 minutes each is democracy built to last. Yes it is that's why it's been around for a long time

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the rise of the modern state states nations and nationalism that's subject of our latest issue

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skeptic.

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Why care about Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau, who gets to vote?

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Everybody today, adults anyway.

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Wasn't that way in the past, so democracy evolves. That's cool. Anyway, this goes on the dictator's playbook. That was a super interesting lecture.

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What do you have to do to be a dictator? All right? They give you the how-to on it. Is the European Union a success for failure? I would say a

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success, huge success, any kind of uniting of peoples where they have one currency and travel

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freely is always good I think.

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