Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling 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.

The New Testament is possibly one of the most influential books in the Western world.

Millions of people read it as a religious text, but only a few choose to study it as an academic pursuit.

Today, we're talking about New Testament scholarship as a field of research.

How did it start? How is it developed? And where does Bart think it's headed next? Before that, though, Bart, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well today. I had a dinner with some of my

blog members here in London last night, and that's always great. There are a lot of people on my blog, but the people come to these dinners, boy, they're really interesting. They were like really interesting background stories. And, you know, some of them are people of faith and some people are not people of faith. And, you know, a number of them are people who have left the faith. And so they're, but for a variety of reasons, they like the kind of thing I do on the blog.

It's great, you know, you'll get together with seven or eight people and we sit around and we talk about New Testament scholarship for three hours.

How often does that happen?

I don't even do that with my colleagues.

I don't think I've ever asked you before.

What do you actually do on the blog?

So I started this thing 12 years ago, and I post five times a week.

When I post, it's always on topics dealing with the New Testament, early Christianity,

historical Jesus, but like up to Constantine, the kind of things we deal with on the podcast,

but I post 12 or 1,500 words a day. And people make comments, and I reply to every question I get.

I've done this for 12 years. And so, you know, it's grown into a serious deal. I thought,

you know, when I started this thing in 2012, I thought maybe I'd raise, you know, $20,000 for charity or something because people have to pay a small membership fee to belong because it's really the point is it to raise money for charity. This last year we raised over half a million dollars. Wow. Yeah, I can't quit even if I want to. No, you really can't. That's amazing. Anyway, so it's some work for me, but I enjoyed doing it

because I enjoyed communicating to a broader audience and people really, you know, some people

are coordinating on to it. So, right, you taught Sumerian last night? Was that last night?

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