The Proto-Gospel of James, a kind of "Gospel Before the Gospels," was one of the most influential non-canonical writings throughout the Middle Ages. The narrative does not focus on the life of Jesus but on the supernatural birth, young life, betrothal, and pregnancy of his mother Mary. From this Gospel come many traditions that remain important in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions (Joseph was an old many; Mary was a perpetual virgin; Jesus' "brothers" were sons of Joseph from a previous marri...
Dec 19, 2023•41 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast Many people of faith think, and strongly believe, that without an almighty, sovereign being over this world life would (and can!) have no meaning: it's just a matter of chance and circumstance with no ultimate end, no goal, nor purpose, no meaning. Bart had that view for years, and feared that leaving the faith would lead to a purposeless, meaningless, chaotic, anarchic existence. As it turns out, that didn't happen. But why? In this episode we explore the possibilities of meaning in a world wit...
Dec 12, 2023•46 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Almost anyone who knows anything about Christianity knows that Jesus was born of a virgin. But was he? This miraculous event is found in only two passages of the entire New Testament (in Matthew and Luke). Did the other New Testament authors know about it? If so, why didn't they mention it? If not, how could they not? And where did the idea of a virgin birth even come from? If it is not a major concern for the twenty-five other books of the New Testament, why did it come to be so important in th...
Dec 05, 2023•49 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast For a religion that claims to view their god as the most powerful, supreme being in the universe, some Christians have an interesting habit of placing restrictions on what he can and can’t do. God can’t make a world without suffering, he has to inspire a collection of written texts (that have no mistakes in them), and he certainly can’t be sympathetic to anyone who practices other religion. But where do these limitations come from, and what purpose do they serve? In short: who says?...
Nov 28, 2023•37 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast For over five centuries (going back to Martin Luther!) many readers of the New Testament have maintained that the letter of James flat-out contradicts the teachings of Paul, that a person is made right with God only by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. James insists that a person is not justified by faith alone, but by doing good works; but Paul argues with equal passion that a person is justified by faith in Christ and not by doing works of the law. So... aren't these views at direc...
Nov 21, 2023•45 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is one of the most intriguing and peculiar non-canonical accounts of Jesus' life from outside the New Testament. The New Testament itself provides only one story about Jesus as a boy (as a twelve-year old, in Luke 2); this later account contains intriguing stories of the mischievous Son of God from ages 5-12. Is he an uncontrollable supernatural being who hasn't yet learned to control his power? Or a Savior already confronting the evils of the world? Or a prime examp...
Nov 14, 2023•44 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Nearly everyone today assumes that Jesus could read and write. But is that historically plausible? There is only one story in the New Testament where Jesus is shown to be able to read (Luke 4) and he is never said to be able to write (except in the story of the Woman Caught in Adultery that was added by scribes only later John 7-8). In this episode we consider the literacy rates of antiquity (very low!), and discuss who could learn to read and then write, how they were educated, and whether it i...
Nov 07, 2023•39 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast As far back as we have literary reports -- beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh, our earliest surviving narrative, written centuries before the oldest accounts of the Bible -- humans have feared death more than almost anything. Many people fear the process of dying; others fear facing eternal torment; yet others fear the void, the idea of non-existence. In this episode we talk about ancient reflections on death and about why some stalwart souls insisted that in fact there was nothing to fear....
Oct 31, 2023•43 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast We start learning about the Christian movement with the letters of Paul, around the year 60, about 30 years after Jesus' death. But what was happening during its very first year? The book of Acts, written decades after Paul, describes key events, but can we rely on its account as historical? If not, what can we infer from our various sources? What was actually happening in those years? Were thousands of people converting? Was the religion taking over the world? Was it declared illegal by the sta...
Oct 24, 2023•43 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast For our 52nd episode -- our one-year anniversary! -- we will be having a live Q&A with Bart. Questioners have submitted questions, some out of the many have been chosen, Megan will host the event, and questioners will ask their questions live, to hear Bart's responses! A special time of celebration as we (also) reflect on our Year One!
Oct 18, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast If Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, then why isn't mainstream, modern Christianity an apocalyptic religion? Was the move away from apocalypticism deliberate, and are modern doomsday preachers actually closer to preaching Jesus' message than other churches?...
Oct 10, 2023•44 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Most scholars write books and articles for other scholars, using jargon and presupposing knowledge available only to experts trained in their discipline. But some scholars write books designed for popular audiences about their fields of expertise. Can non-scholars write books like that? Should they try? Why do most scholars choose not to do so? Are there pitfalls in trying to communicate complex knowledge in simple terms? Is it possible to do so without "dumbing it down"? And why do so many acad...
Oct 03, 2023•45 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast The New Testament writings were produced decades after Jesus' death, but long before that people were passing along stories about Jesus and devising poems and creeds about their new-found faith. What do scholars know about these Christian traditions that were being passed along and preserved by word of mouth in the years before we had written texts. Scholars call them "oral traditions." How do we know such things existed, and can we be certain that they were passed along reliably before there we...
Sep 26, 2023•39 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most intriguing non-canonical Gospels to be discovered in modern times is the Gospel of Peter. Unlike the New Testament Gospels, which were written anonymously (only later to be given the titles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), this Gospel actually claims to be written by an apostle, Jesus' own right-hand man, Peter. The account we have is only fragmentary, an alternative version of Jesus' trial, death, and resurrection. And what an account it is, involving an actual record of Jesus em...
Sep 19, 2023•48 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Many Christians think that a non-Christian simply can't understand the New Testament fully, since they don't agree with it's major teachings. But could an argument be made for the opposite case, that those with a vested in interested in the New Testament as a book inspired by God cannot get beyond their theological assumptions to understand what the text is really saying? It seems like an odd question, but can committed Christians really study their own Scriptures honestly? In this episode we co...
Sep 12, 2023•43 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast The genius of Luke’s Gospel is frequently overlooked by those who simply breeze through it or assume it is saying the same thing as Matthew and Mark. In fact, it is strikingly different. What especially matters are not so much the contradictions one finds, but the larger picture. Luke has radically edited Mark’s account in places to create a new portrait of Jesus. In this episode we see how he did it and what the end result is. Among other things, when you look carefully at the details of Luke’s...
Sep 05, 2023•42 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast The Christian faith is rooted in the belief that Jesus died for the sins of the world and was then raised from the dead. But is this what Jesus himself preached during his public ministry? In the Gospels Jesus certainly predicts his coming death, on numerous occasions. But are those saying historical? How would scholars know? What is the evidence both ways? And if Jesus did not anticipate, let alone predict, his death, does that completely undermine the Christian faith?...
Aug 29, 2023•40 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Even though millions of people read the Bible, few know what experts who have devoted their lives to historical scholarship on it have to say or, even more important, why they say it. In this episode we talk about how scholarship on the New Testament has developed over the centuries, decades, and recent years, how critical scholarship actually works to make better *sense* of the NT and opens up important ways of interpreting the text, and whether and how this kind of academic approach to the NT ...
Aug 22, 2023•49 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Christianity started out with a handful of followers in 30 CE - Jesus' remaining disciples and a few female supporters. But within 300 years there were some 2-3 million Christians in the world, including the emperor of Rome. How did *that* happen? How did an offshoot of Judaism come to take over the world, to the extent that it eventually became the religion of the West for centuries, down to the modern age? The answers are not actually what most people would suspect, and in this episode we lay ...
Aug 15, 2023•45 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast The idea of the Trinity - that God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are different from each other and are all God, but there is only ONE God, is a central tenant of Christianity. But most Christians don't actually know what the doctrine really says, let alone where it came from (is it in the Bible?). In this episode we explain the factors that led to the formulation of the doctrine and see why it became so important to Christian thinking. But does it matter that the math doesn't wo...
Aug 08, 2023•41 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast The conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity is often pointed to as a turning point in the history of the religion - but would Christianity have continued on its upward trajectory without this conversion? Was Constantine’s conversion one of genuine religious conviction, or was it motivated by something else? Has his conversion been co-opted and over-emphasized by later Christian authors?...
Aug 01, 2023•51 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast The New Testament is often studied in isolation, separated from other ancient writings. How did this division come about, and what do we lose by looking at it as something different? Dr. Robyn Walsh talks about what can be gained from placing the New Testament back into the canon of Classical Literature....
Jul 25, 2023•48 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Many Jews and Christians today are uncomfortable with the views of slavery in the Bible; the practice is simply assumed, it is normally condoned, and it is never condemned. Even so, some Christian apologists argue that the Bible actively disapproves of slavery and was instrumental in opposing it in the modern era. But is that right? In this episode I interview one of the premier experts on the question, Dr. Josh Bowen, who has written two books on the matter; in our discussion he explains what t...
Jul 18, 2023•48 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Readers of the Bible are familiar with the stories of creation in Genesis 1-2, but far less familiar with similar tales from much earlier times in the world surrounding Israel. In this special edition of the podcast Bart interviews Joseph Lam, an expert on the languages, religions, and cultures of the Ancient Near East (and Bart's colleague at UNC), who has just produced a Wondrium Course on the Creation Stories in the Ancient World. Among other things they talk about the reasons for thinking Ge...
Jul 11, 2023•51 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Biblical scholars who approach the Bible from a historical perspective are often accused of working hard to deconvert the faithful. Is that true? Do undergraduates widely abandon their faith once they learn the historical realities behind it? Are professors and authors generally interested in urging their students and readers to abandon their religion? And is there any positive result for faith that can come from understanding historical scholarship? Is it crucial to faith to understand the Bibl...
Jul 04, 2023•41 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast By far the most mysterious, intriguing, and widely-interesting ancient "heresy" was Gnosticism. But what exactly is it and why does it matter? In this episode we consider the basic ideas that lay behind the Gnostic religions and explore just how radically different they are from the views that came to be regarded as orthodox. How could these religions be considered Christian if they didn't think Jesus' death mattered? How could they consider the God of the Old Testament to be a lower level and i...
Jun 27, 2023•51 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast Lots of informed readers know that scribes changed their texts of the New Testament -- but do the changes really matter for anything? In this episode we take the unusual approach of looking at textual changes in just one book of the New Testament, the Gospel of Luke, to see how slight (and not so slight) variations in the text can have an enormous impact on understanding the author's message -- involving such things as the virgin birth, the understanding of whether Jesus' death brought an atonem...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast Should the administrators of universities, their alumni, or their boards of trustees have any say in what teachers teach -- for example, in classes about religion? Should they be able to control the classroom in any way? What about the argument that university professors are brainwashing their students to follow their liberal agenda, while hiding behind “academic freedom”? Does the U.S. system of tenure allow professors to say whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that they can never be fire...
Jun 13, 2023•42 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast One of the central tenets of many denominations of modern Christianity is that Jesus is God. The Nicene Creed describes him as “of one being with the Father”...but just how old is this idea? If you asked Jesus’ disciples if he was a human or God, would they have affirmed his divinity, or accused you of blasphemy? And if Jesus was divine, then was he considered to be God made flesh, a human who was turned into a divinity, a "super-human" with some divine features…or what?...
Jun 06, 2023•51 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast Scholars have long argued that the Gospel of John -- named after Jesus' disciple John the Son of Zebedee -- was in fact written by someone else. Only later in Christian tradition was it ascribed to John. In that view, the author himself is not a "forger" -- that is, he did not claim to be a famous person knowing he was someone else. The book was *anonymous*: the author never names himself and so can't be blamed for later readers mistaking his identity. But in fact *is* there evidence that the au...
May 30, 2023•51 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast 
