Danny Jones Podcast
#303 - Ancient Religion Expert on Secret Gospel Coverup & Jesus True Origins | Bart Ehrman
15 May 2025
Watch BONUS episodes on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including six New York Times bestsellers. SPONSORS https://drinkag1.com/dannyjones - Get a FREE bottle of AG D3K2, AG1 welcome kit + 5 travel packs. https://americanfinancing.net/jones - Use the link or call 888-995-2440 today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://www.bartehrman.com https://ehrmanblog.org Bart's YouTube channel: @bartdehrman FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Ancient languages 11:35 - Septuagint Greek vs Hebrew 22:34 - Did Jesus really exist? 27:00 - Thomas Payne's Age of Reason 31:37 - Early Christian drug influence 37:13 - 'Christ' as a drug term 42:18 - Euripides Phaedra 'christ' drug term 44:52 - Drinking death poisons 54:28 - Christos drug term in Euripides 57:53 - Jesus arrested in park references 01:00:43 - Ancient virgin birth & c-section 01:08:33 - Greater questions of Mary 01:16:47 - John Marco Allegro 01:25:02 - Ancient dictionary unreliability 01:30:06 - The Secret Gospel of Mark 01:39:08 - Biblical scholar bias 01:42:54 - Satan & The book of Job 01:48:45 - Ancient Mug containing psychedelic drugs 01:55:42 - Younger dryas hypothesis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
What's up, Dr. Ehrman? Thanks for coming, man. Okay, thanks for having me. Pleasure to meet you. Nice meeting you. What's your background?
My background? How long do you have? At least three hours. Yeah, okay. Well, right. So I'm a scholar of the New Testament, early Christianity. I have a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Testament studies. My background, I got into biblical studies because I was a Christian as a teenager, a born-again evangelical Christian.
And I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college after high school and then went off to an evangelical liberal arts college. And I got really interested in studying Greek. Greek is an ancient language and decided to do graduate work analyzing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
And so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where the world's expert in the analysis of Greek manuscripts worked. And I spent years there working on that and did a master's degree and a PhD. Ended up teaching at Rutgers University for a few years, and I've been at North Carolina Chapel Hill now for, well, since 1988. Oh, wow.
Teaching both undergraduate students and PhD students in early Christianity, New Testament, those kinds of things. Wow.
And you mentioned that when you were younger, you had a belief and you were a practicing Christian. That's right. And what happened to you? What was your evolution through your belief in Christianity?
Well, I was raised in the church. I was raised in the Episcopal Church. But then when I was a teenager, late teenager, mid-teenager, I had a born-again experience and became a very conservative evangelical. And a lot of my faith at that point was built on the idea that the Bible has no mistakes in it, completely inerrant.
That was the view taught at the Moody Bible Institute I went to and also at Wheaton College where I finished my undergraduate degree. That view started shifting when I went into graduate school. As I started, I learned Hebrew, and so I was reading the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew.
And I learned French and German, so I could read what modern scholars are saying in these countries and learned other ancient languages. And the more I studied, the more I realized, in fact, the Bible does have mistakes in it. There are contradictions, there are discrepancies, there are geographical errors, there are problems with the Bible.
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