Anyone familiar with the book of Revelation will tell you that it's one of the more violent, blood-soaked books of the New Testament, calling for the death and destruction of non-believers.

But what would the historical Jesus have thought of all this?

Would the man who instructed his followers to love their neighbours, to give up all their worldly possessions and follow him, be on board with the wholesale slaughter

of those who don't fit the mold. I've got New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman with me.

Hello, Megan. Yes, this will be an important topic. It's the book that ends the New Testament,

the climax, so to say. Absolutely. I am looking forward to finding out.

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. So I think a lot of people will know. We've spoken about it several times before.

You've written or wrote a while ago a popular book about Revelation called Armageddon, published in 2023. When did you first start thinking critically about

the book of Revelation and its place in the New Testament? I certainly thought about it

uncritically, for a long time before I started thinking about it critically. When I was at Moody

Bible Institute as a conservative evangelical, I took a semester-long course that was on, I guess it was maybe on both

Daniel and Revelation put together as predicting the end of time. And I was really into that end time

prediction business and used Revelation as a way of kind of showing what was going to happen at the

end, which we thought was going to be within, you know, 10 years or so at the time.

I guess I started critically thinking about it when I realized broadly that the New Testament was not what I had learned it was

and that it was a historical book that needs to be put into its historical context.

And I realized for the first time that revelation is not like a standalone-alone thing that it's the only book like it ever written that requires special rules of interpretation.

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