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. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to misquoting Jesus. Today we are talking about

the problem of evil, which is a problem that Christians have been dealing with for a while.

If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent, then why does evil and suffering

exist? Surely an all-powerful benevolent deity would eliminate suffering and remove evil. Obviously,

that is not happening, given the presence of evil and suffering in the world. So what exactly

is going on there? Before we get into that, though?

Bartz, good morning.

How are you today?

Yeah, I'm doing fine.

It kind of seems weird saying that, given we're going to be talking about evil.

I got to say, almost every morning I wake up when I'm feeling pretty good about life and think about the world.

And I think, oh, my God, I don't know how I can possibly feel good about anything. It's a, what a mess we're all in. But yes, on the personal level, I'm doing great. I'm doing just fine. And, you know, I wish, wish everybody were. I hope you are. How are you doing? I am doing very well at the moment and I feel similarly, I

struggle to listen to the news some days and I feel very privileged that that's my struggle

rather than living through the things that I'm hearing about. But no, life is good here.

It is ticking along as it should be. Everyone is happy and healthy.

Life's a weird thing because even when life is just about

as good as you could hope for, people still get depressed and stressed and anxious and miserable.

And it's a weird phenomenon, but it's absolutely true. It's not that, you know, like if you get,

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