Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar,

uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity.

I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.

Hello everyone and welcome back to misquoting Jesus. Today we are going to be talking about quite a personal topic, meaning in a world without God. People find meaning in the world in a myriad

of different ways, but for those who have been

raised in particular faith traditions, it can be hard to understand how people outside of those

traditions find meaning that is not necessarily rooted in the existence of a god. As someone who

converted from mainstream Protestantism to evangelicalism and then deconverted entirely, Bart has found meaning and purpose both with and without God.

So today we're going to take a more personal direction and ask him how he's done it before we get into the deeply personal topic.

Bart, how are you this week? Yeah, good. Okay, the weekly personal topic. All right. As I was saying last week, this is, you know, right when class is ending. So today's the last day of class. So the kind of the personal problem I have with this is, well, one problem is I'm 68 years old and I still live by, according to semesters. It's like, you know, that probably should have ended a long time ago. But my life is still organized around semesters. So the semester ends now. And so we get done with grading everything, kind of mid-December. And then all of a sudden, every year, same thing happens. I realize, whoa, I got a lot of Christmas presents to buy. How am I going to do that? As I said before, I love Christmas myself.

I enjoy Christmas and most things about it.

I really hate the commercialism.

I just hate all that.

I think it's completely distracting.

And I mean, I get it for economic reasons and I understand the importance of it.

But I don't like it. But then, you know, the burden of buying presents is like, okay, what am I? And I'm not good at it. That's the problem. You know, some people just have really a good knack of knowing what would be good for someone else, and I'm terrible. And whenever I like pick something, I think it would be nice and creative. It turns out to be either a complete dud or something they have 12 of already. It's that kind of thing.

How about you?

How are you as we're moving into the season?

I'm good.

I likewise, I'm not overly keen on the commercialization of Christmas.

And having many small children, it's quite difficult.

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