Oh, Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor and I'm joined today by perhaps the world's most famous New Testament scholar Dr Bart Ehrman.

Dr. Ehrman, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure to sit down with you.

When thinking about what to spend this time talking about,

I was a bit struck by the breadth of your work and a little

bit paralyzed in terms of choosing a conversation topic, but I think that the

majority of my listeners will know you in the context of your critical scholarship and

some of your debates that you've had with Christians about the nature of the New Testament

and the nature of Jesus.

So I wanted to begin by asking in your view, the figure of Jesus, the most important

figure in Christianity and if Christianity is true, the most important figure in history,

what can we know about Jesus of Nazareth?

Right, okay, so right, this is the sound bite, right?

What can we know?

So this has been arguably the major problem, one of the major problems of the

study of Christianity, not just the New Testament, ever.

I mean, the first, one of the first people who tried to start studying the New Testament from a critical point of view.

In other words, not simply accepting it as a inspired word of God that is infallible,

but started examining it from a critical perspective was Hermann Samuel Ramirez in his

book got published in the 1770s but it had to do with who was Jesus really and he ended up arguing that Jesus was a political

insurgent who wanted to overthrow the Roman Empire but this and this this view is you know reappeared over time.

...