Welcome to Miss Quoting 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, Bart. How are you today?

Well, I'm doing better.

I've had a rough last few weeks.

And so thank you for filling in with James Tabor, my friend,

and expert on the New Testament early Christianity and

all around interesting fellow. I appreciate that. Oh, it was a lot of fun. Oh, good, good, good, good,

okay. So, yeah, it's been a bit of a roller coaster and, you know, that's kind of how life goes sometimes.

But we're back in the swing here. How are you doing?

Yeah, good. Actually, my multitude of children are all finally healthy. My voice is mostly back.

So that's always helpful when you spend most your time recording podcasts. A little bit of a

problem if my voice goes. So part of this is I'd like to hear more about you. I was in England, as you know, for a couple of weeks for other things and for a family thing. And I met some people there who listened to the podcast and they're all interested in like you. But they were saying me, how does somebody get interested in a seriology?

I think earlier we talked about what it was, but like, how does, you know, it's not a sort of thing.

You think, you know, you're not learning about it in like grade school or something.

So how do you... And that's honestly a personal...

There's my soapbox, really.

We should learn more about Mesopotamia far earlier.

And the US actually does it better because my

two eldest children have actually had some information about Mesopotamia from their grade school

...