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.

Welcome back to this special two-part launch episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.

Bart and I are going to be continuing our conversation about his best-selling book,

Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why. This episode, we're looking

less at Bart's personal journey through faith in academia, and more at the actual scholarly

issues at play here. Namely, who changed the texts of the books of the New Testament, and why did

they do it? But before we get into that, Bart, hi, how are you doing? I'm doing well,

thanks. Not bad. I'm at my mountain house in Western North Carolina that I retreat to to write and think.

So I'm spending my days writing and thinking. How good can it get? And Megan, last time you announced

that you were in a seriologist who studies ancient things about it. Do you just like, tell us what languages do you have to do?

Yeah, for my graduate studies, I minored in biblical Hebrew, and my main language requirements were Sumerian and Acadian.

Sumerian and Acadian.

Yes.

Okay.

Can you maybe take a couple of minutes and explain to us why this is an important topic?

Yeah, well, it's important for a couple of reasons. For people of faith, it's obviously important to know what the Bible says.

And this entire study that scholars call textual criticism, which is trying to reconstruct what the original texts said, what the authors actually

wrote.

This whole discipline is designed in order to show what the authors wrote on the assumption

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