Love him or hate him. If you're listening to this podcast, then you're probably familiar with some of the ideas that Dr. Bart Ehrman holds.

But how familiar are you with the ideas he used to hold when he was an evangelical Christian?

Today we're talking about five Christian ideas that Bart used to hold. Some you'll know and some you might not.

We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is Scholar's Spotlight, where Bart will tell us about a biblical scholar that he thinks we should know.

Welcome to misquoting Jesus, a podcast with Dr. Bart Ehrman.

Bart, for listeners who may not know your story terribly well, could you walk us through your faith journey from evangelical beginnings

to where you are now? Well, do it quickly because I think a lot of people have heard it,

and I don't want to bore everybody. But I was raising Episcopalian, so I wasn't evangelical

until I was 15. I had a born-again experience in high school and became a committed evangelical.

And the person who had led me to Christ, as they said, and I think probably still say,

when convert people, had gone to Moody Bible Institute and convinced me that rather than doing

something secular, like being on the debate

team at Kansas University, I should go to Moody Bible Institute. And I wanted to be a serious

Christian, and I thought, this is how you be a serious Christian. You go to Moody Bible Institute,

so I did. And I was a fundamentalist for several years. And then as I studied the Bible more,

I moved away from fundamentalist kind of Christianity to more kind of mainstream Christianity. I went

to a Presbyterian seminary, not because I was Presbyterian, but because the expert in Greek

manuscripts of the New Testament in the

world happened to teach there. So I went there to study with him, a man named Bruce Metzger,

a very fine and just one of the great scholars of the 20th century. While there, not because

so much of Bruce Metzger, but because of other things I was doing, studying the Bible in Greek,

and learning Hebrew and studying the Old Testament in Hebrew, and thinking about theology.

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