Gospel Thrillers! When Jesus Meets Robert Ludlum

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

Chris Huntley

Christianity, History, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 745 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many listeners have read a relatively new kind of thriller -- about a mysterious discovery of a long-lost Gospel and the protagonist's attempt to make it public, while being hounded in harrowing scenes by political or ecclesiastical forces of darkness (the Nazis! The Vatican!).

In this episodes Bart interviews the first scholar to discuss this genre, who in fact coined its name, in a book just now coming out, Andrew Jacobs, Senior Research Fellow at Harvard.

The backstory is fascinating and illuminating: these books started to appear during the Cold War, in the context of the increasingly serious questioning of authority, imperialism, and colonialism, and just when biblical scholars were themselves publicizing new finds that called into question the traditional truths of Christianity.

This context raises all kinds of questions. Why the sudden passion for Gospel conspiracy? And are academic scholars dealing with real-life discoveries themselves "objective" observers, or are they too caught up in the ideologies behind these novels?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.
0:06.8	The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar,
0:13.3	uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity.
0:20.8	I'm your host, Megan Lewis.
0:22.9	Let's begin.
0:24.9	I'd like to welcome you to this special edition of the Miss Quoting Jesus podcast.
0:30.6	You can see, Megan's not here today.
0:32.6	It's just going to be me and a guest, Andrew Jacobs, who is going to be talking about his new book, Gospel Thrillers,
0:41.2	conspiracy, fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible. Before we get on with Andrew, I want to remind you,
0:47.8	if you've heard already, or to tell you if you haven't, that this Saturday and Sunday, on February
0:53.8	3rd and 4th, I'm going to be doing a
0:56.9	course called The Genius of Matthew, what scholars say about the first gospel. This will be an
1:03.8	eight lecture course, and there will be two lengthy Q&A sessions with it. If you come to the
1:09.8	course, if you purchase a access to the course, you'll have
1:12.6	lifetime use of it to follow. The Gospel of Matthew is a really important book of the New Testament.
1:18.6	It's the most popular book of the New Testament, the most widely read book of the New Testament still today,
1:23.6	probably because of its great passages, especially Jesus' teachings, the Sermon on the Mount,
1:28.9	the Beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, the Golden Rule.
1:31.7	These things are in Matthew.
1:33.2	So it's a great and important book, but it's widely misunderstood.
1:37.3	And I think most people do not understand the real genius behind the book.
1:42.2	This course will be about the genius of Matthew, and I'll be
	...

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