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, welcome back to misquoting Jesus. You might think that as an agnostic who

deconverted from born-again fundamentalism, but maybe doesn't see much value in his religious past,

but was his born-again experience the thing that sent him along this incredibly successful career path?

Did fundamentalism actually improve his life and make him an even better scholar than he would have otherwise been?

Before we get to that, though, but how are you doing?

How is the world of research treating you?

Oh, yeah, no, the world of research is going well. I've been in London, and for the last week,

I've actually, like, had nothing I had to do, which is so nice. And so I've been, like,

reading books and things, which is very glorious. And so since I'm on leave this coming semester,

I'm devoting myself a lot to doing this next book on the ethics

of Jesus. In my head, I'm calling it the origins of altruism. So for people who want to write in and say,

yeah, actually, evolutionary psychology has explained, so I know all that. So I'm going to be

talking about how altruistic behavior

entered into the Western conscience, because there was altruism, of course, throughout human

history. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here as a species. If we are all self-centered, we wouldn't

have survived. But my question is how ethical discourse and how ethical actions changed with the coming

of Christianity. And so I'm working on that now. And I'm going to be dealing with various issues

in that book. But one thing that I've gotten increasingly interested in is my recognition,

...