Maybe you've sat in church and heard a sermon about the importance of generosity. Your pastor reads a few verses from the New Testament, maybe Paul's letters or the Gospels, and challenges you to be a better, more generous person. That's a pretty familiar church experience, I think, for a lot of people. But what happens if you were to take a class on the New Testament at a university?

Is it a similar learning experience? What are you taught? And how does it change the way that you see the Bible?

Today, we're joined by New Testament Professor Hugo Mendez from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to explore all of these questions and more.

Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling 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. Now, Bart is still off gallivanting around the world,

as he does, but his absence is definitely our game. As we have Dr. Hugo Mendes here today,

Hugo, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Now, Hugo, for those who aren't familiar with him, is a renowned Bible scholar and co-author

with Bart of the New Testament, a historical understanding to the early Christian writings, one of the

most widely used New Testament textbooks in the U.S., so we are definitely in good hands here. Hugo, we're looking today

at differences and similarities between New Testament education in a church setting and in a

secular university setting. So to start up with the very basics, in churches, I think it's fair to say

that sermons often focus on moral lessons or faith inspiration,

while in a university setting the Bible is approached really quite differently.

Could you tell us how you think that approach differs to what people may be familiar with from a

religious setting?

Yeah, sure.

You know, I think the first thing that you kind of have to stay up front is that, first of all, there's such diversity in Christianity that it's even hard sometimes to kind of create general rules always for every single church that one can conceive of, right? There are traditions that might sit on different levels in terms of their ability to entertain critical conversations.

The universities also come in very different types, right?

...