Hello, everyone, and welcome back to misquoting Jesus. Today, we are talking about the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

Now, these two texts are widely understood to be a two-volume set written by a single author.

Given that we've spoken before on misquoting Jesus about just how difficult it is to identify an author of an ancient text,

why are scholars so sure that these two

are written by a single author? Who was that author, if we know? And why on earth would they write

two books when they could have just written the one? Stay tuned for all of that and so much more

on today's misquoting Jesus. 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. Good morning, Bart. How are you doing today? Yep, doing A-OK today.

Things are all right. How about you? Yep, also very good. Also very good. Looking forward to

hearing about the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles, if you're ready to tell us about them.

We'll see. I think so. I've been thinking about them for about 50 years, so I think I'm probably ready to talk about them.

It's probably a good time to start the talking part of the process. Do you remember when you first learned about this relationship between the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles?

I certainly remember when I didn't know about the relationship.

It was sort of shocked from my system because when I was 15, I had a born-again experience

and became an evangelical Christian and I decided, well, okay, I better read the Bible

because I'm a Bible-believing Christian now, so let's see what's in it. And so I started trying to read the King James. And that was too complicated. I couldn't understand these words. And it wasn't just the these and thousands. It's like the grammar. I just, oh, man, this is hard. I didn't think the Bible would be hard. So someone suggested I pick up a volume of translation. It's called Good News for Modern Man, back when we didn't

realize that. That was a problem. Generically and everything. So anyway, I picked it up, and it was more

kind of paraphrastic, more kind of a looser translation. And I could understand. So I read the Gospel of

Matthew. I said, oh, this is great. You know, the

birth, the life, the birth, the life, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. Oh, this is interesting. I read Marcus. Oh, huh. Yeah, that's like the other one. It's like the life and death and read Luke. That's good. Boy, it's more of the same. John, okay, yeah, this, I thought the entire Bible was that way. I had no idea. I had been raised in the church. I was raised in the Episcopal church and was an altar boy. It was active in the church. But I knew nothing about what was actually in the Bible. And I just thought, I didn't know there were 27 books, but I knew there were a lot of them. And I thought they were all like books about Jesus. I get to the book of Acts. Wait a second.

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