Bart Ehrman and Michael Shermer: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

Oh morning Bart boy how are ya I'm good yeah nice to see ya yes I can see ya can you see me good good yes you sound good we are recording we're off and rolling you're at home I presume at your home office looks like lots of good Bible books back there hey congratulations on the new book it looks great doing well I see on Amazon you got a high ranking and beautiful review in the New York Times a little orange dot does not come with the purchased ones that's a review copy have a forbidden religion swept the world I I should note that I didn't actually read it this way I read it this way wow so your reader is good and I should note also I'm a big fan of teaching company courses oh yeah I've taken a few of yours let me just for our listeners remind them you've done this is teach one to dot-com or the great courses you've done the history of the Bible the making of the New Testament Canon the New Testament from Jesus to Constantine historical Jesus after the New Testament the rightio the Apostolic fathers the greatest controversies in early Christian history how Jesus became God and the lost Christianity's and I've taken a couple of those if people are not familiar with the teaching company these are typically 30-minute lectures and you can just hammer through them even it like 1.5 or 1.25 speed and get through in like 20 minutes a lecture on a drive it's a great way to do a commute oh yeah because most most lectures the speed at which they lecture for teaching company courses is a little slow if you're just driving you can absorb quite a bit more at a higher speed so I usually listen to 1.5 and yeah and then the other thing that most people don't know about is that Amazon audible you know they're under the same corporate umbrella now and so if you are along with the teaching company has a deal with both of them so if you are a member of audible.com where you buy audiobooks you buy a membership for the year it's like two hundred and twenty-four dollars and you get twenty four books or twenty five books so it's less than ten dollars a book but what most people don't know is you can buy an entire teaching company course for one credit one book credit which is less than ten bucks so instead of paying two hundred and twenty-five dollars for a course or even discounted at fifty dollars for a course you can get it for nine ninety-five for an entire course ah yeah and it's still illegal I mean you just all you do is you just go into audible.com and type in the name of the course like one of your courses and you can buy it for the cost of a book so I'm not trying to cut into your profits or anything because I don't get paid but I just think it's a great it's a great way to spend time I mean podcasts and the kind of thing we're doing here you know people will consume mostly audio we're recording in our video in case anybody wants to watch it but but most most people listen to these kinds of things while they're driving back you mean you know doing chores working out that sort of thing I find it you know a really useful tool to to absorb a lot of information so but before we get into the weeds of your of your argument in the new book again just to remind everybody it's the triumph of Christianity how forbidden religion swept the world I've been watching the Paramount Studios series Waco a six-part series on how the Branch Davidians and that whole disaster with with the federal government and started think of an analogy that to get us started here it would be like the couple dozen people in in mark Mount Carmel and in Waco Texas all of a sudden you know within a couple centuries they have two billion followers how this just sounds insane yeah because you know anybody who's a leader of a sect or cult like that has got to have he's got to be out there a little bit you know in terms of the acceptance of most people so it's an interesting problem that you're tackling and I had no idea there was so much literature on this you know how how our religion grows just extra-biblical but before we get into that just give our listeners who are not familiar with you I mean most atheists know your work and they love the story about how you went to Wheaton Bible College and we're gonna be a preacher and then you went to Princeton Theological and found out how the sausages are made and frankly I I've often said this I don't know how anybody could take one of your Teaching Company courses or read one of your books and still be a believer afterwards I mean maybe it's the confirmation bias and they only listen to what they want to hear but - tell us a little bit about your journey of how you went from evangelical believer to religious scholar in you're an atheist or agnostic or whatever you are now yeah so obviously it's yeah it's a 62 year story but the short of it is I was raised to Christian my parents went to the pistil Church in Lawrence Kansas where I grew up and I was fairly religious kid but when I was about 15 I became even more religious I had a born-again experience and became a conservative evangelical Christian and when I graduated from high school I went off to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago this is a fundamentalist Bible College was there did my diploma degree there and yeah well but that went from there - we yeah so so moody was Moody was kind of like fundamentals boot camp for three years and Wheaton was a conservative evangelical liberal arts college and I took Greek of Wheaton and because I wanted to read the New Testament in the original Greek and because I was a firm believer that the Bible had no mistakes of any kind whatsoever in it I wanted to read what the original woods were and so I took Greek to do that and it turned out I was pretty good in Greek and decided I wanted to do a PhD studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament the world expert on that was a man named Bruce Metzger who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and so I went off to Princeton seminary to study Greek manuscripts with him and there's in the course of my studies there at Princeton Simon that I started engaging with more critical scholarship on the Bible where I started realizing that my earlier fundamentalism had problems with it as I started finding that in fact there aren't discrepancies in the Bible and contradictions and historical mistakes and geographical errors and all sorts of problems and so eventually over a period of some years I left my of angelical faith and I remained the liberal Christian for a long time I think you know when you say that my teaching courses would make anybody and agnostic I think that you know if that kind of information doesn't make people agnostic a lot of liberal Christians don't have much of a problem with with with my views of the Bible because they're the views that are taught in the rule the illogical seminaries right these people are you know they're not bible-thumping Christians they're people who have a more modern understanding of the world and their place in it but so I became a liberal Christian and I was that for a number of years the reason I'm becoming an agnostic and then and then atheist is unrelated to to my biblical scholarship it's because I finally got to a point where I just couldn't explain the problem of suffering in the world pain and misery if there's supposed to a god who's in charge in charge and I ended up probably about 20 years ago then leaving the faith altogether the problem of evil was the biggest crux for you but yeah but in terms of faith at all yeah yeah earlier than that because yeah I think so too I've never heard a good explanation I've listened to people like William Lane Craig and you know marched through their arguments for why evil is you can you can square that circle with an all-powerful God I just does doesn't make any sense to me and I I don't think it ever could be resolved that way but we should note parenthetically the purpose of your work is not to D convert people at all you're just you're a professional storyand installer yeah you just want to know the truth about the past to the extent that we can understand it that's right so you know a lot of conservative Christians get upset with my work and they think that I'm out to destroy their faith and that it just isn't true I mean I my my goal I'm it's like your goal is to make people more intelligent about what they think and to you know if they're going to be believers they could be informed believers instead of ignorant believers I think having some knowledge is a good thing oh yes you know I think we're about the same age I'm 63 and and you know I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu the first first four-year graduating class that's a Church of Christ school it was very very conservative at the time we we were not allowed but no dancing was allowed on campus you weren't allowed in the girls dorms and vice versa and President Ford spoke at the University and it was I was totally into it at the time yeah but then when I and I really hadn't thought much about the the problem of even that sort of thing I took courses in the Old Testament New Testament we're required to take to Bible classes and go to Chapel once a week I don't think they have to do that anymore and and then I took a course in the writings of CS Lewis so I read everything Lewis wrote and you know beautiful writer and I can see the power of it but then when I went to a secular University after that for graduate school and experimental psych it wasn't that they were a bunch of atheists there and they were bashing religion in this this was in the 70s no one even talked about it was like a non-event it was like who cares the culture we have now where it's you know there's militant atheism and militant theism in this polarizing war this war between science and religion this really didn't exist then and I remember getting there thinking no one really cares about any of this stuff and and life goes on they're happy and living fulfilled lives without religion hmm yeah and then so when I counted your work in the 90s I I know a lot of atheist loved it because of its implications but then then when atheism became more polarizing thing in the 2000s after 9/11 and all that dawkins God Delusion in the New Atheists and all that I noticed that some there were some attacks on you for like defending the possibility that someone named Jesus actually existed because this branch of atheists that you know he didn't even exist the whole thing is a myth and if you defend his existence here somehow in the wrong camp yeah yeah yeah no it's you know for years I've been attacked about conservative evangelicals which I kind of expected but then so I wrote this book on did Jesus exist or I showed why almost certainly existed and I've never experienced the vitriol like this before the atheists are far more aggressive yeah that's unfortunate across the board I think because I've been on the receiving end of attacks for other reasons by my own people the much worse much worse treatment than any I've gotten from from Christians or Holocaust deniers or climate deniers or anti-vaxxers any people have debunked they're usually polite to me and when I when I debate Christians you know they couldn't be more polite and I've been in churches where you know they come up to me and thank me and pray from you know the whole thing yeah you know a lot of these atheists you know they're bad news and you know they're some of the representatives clearly so but even a lot of yeah yeah but personality obviously yeah I also think that social movements tend to go through these purging stages like like like feminists are going through that a little bit now with the me to movement you know there's kind of polarizing and branching off and purging of people that are not true feminists or you're the wrong kind of feminists I noticed that with socialists even when I was at Pepperdine I ran objectivism was a big thing everybody read Atlas Shrugged at Pepperdine me it was all anybody talked about right and then then there was like a purging of her own movement I saw after that like who was bob who is the pure Objectivist you know who was a true free market capitalist you know and and if you saw the wrong movies or you listen to the wrong music you're out yeah yeah I think social movements go through these purges or some reason yeah well it is interesting to look at the kind of the the the the atheist movement that way because it's exactly the same thing you're right I mean you're you're not atheist enough if you you know on historical grounds if you think Jesus existed you're not really really one of us you're down on the margins just just on a side note just give us a couple minutes on what are the best arguments for Jesus existence or not well so yeah so I kind of Marshall the the arguments in this book and there there are a couple of things I mean for one thing we have we have a number of sources behind our Gospels so you know we have Matthew Mark Luke and John in the New Testament but these are all based on earlier sources and these sources can be reconstructed to summon staffs and so if you if you're trying to establish the existence of a person from the past what you want our independent sources that I'll talk about this person and when it comes to historical Jesus they're just tons of independent sources he's not reliant on each other it's not that they're getting the stories from each other they're independently attesting age this without even questioning and so that's part of it and one of it one of the things is that one of these sources the Apostle Paul actually knew Jesus brother James tells us about his brother Jayden and he knew Jesus closest disciple Peter personally knew him so it's not the Paul actually knew Jesus but I mean he didn't know his brother and so you know if if Jesus didn't exist you thinking brother would know about it so one of my columns at Scientific American I wrote on called what is truths I you know I said well so historically we can treat history as a science and we could say certain things actually about the past like Jesus existed or that he was resurrected because you know the Romans I mean I'm sorry crucified I mean Romans crucified people right and left it would not be surprising that he got classified but then to say he was either resurrected or even more of an article of faith that can't be proven he died for my sins there's certain statements that that we as scientists can't get act yeah and you know the resurrection well you could conceivably make an argument which people like William Lane Craig do oh but but to say something like he died for my sins that would just I don't know what you'd call it just appeared just religious doctrine or something that yeah yeah well right and you know when you're when you're acting trying to do history which which the attrition politics claim they're trying to do history but the reality is that the only way you can do history responsibly is on the basis of shared presuppositions in other words historians don't make claims that other historians won't accept simply because of the presuppositions involved for example if somebody wants to claim that the reason the Allies won the Second World War no historian would say that it was because God intervened and made sure and just as nobody would say well is because Martians came down and created the Nazis and because I mean somebody might think that but you can't make that as a historical argument because the stories don't share the kind of assumptions of the arguments based on right so you can't say that Jesus was raised from the dead as a historical statement because it presupposes all sorts of theological beliefs that I share the historical community right right now you make that point early on in the triumph of Christianity that you're not making a statement on its success being because of God or not because of God or you know that's sort of irrelevant it reminds me a little bit back in the 90s when I need dr. Laura Laura Schlessinger she had her popular radio show and she's to make the argument that you know one of the arguments for God's existence is the Jews like how is that they're still going after all those persecutions that you know there has to be the Old Testament God the God of Abraham has to be the one to God because look the Jews are still surviving it's like yeah but boy when did he put him through I mean come on but the sense of it let's start in on you know how you go from 20 Christians if that so Jesus is crucified and in 3080 30 and so there's about 20 Christians they wouldn't even call themselves that yet right at that moment or what would they call themselves when he's still alive just power up Jesus yeah yeah they're Jews who are following so they they're Jews who think that Jesus is the Messiah who's you know been raised from the dead so they don't have a name for themselves Yeah right yeah when does that come in when do people start calling whatever the Greek version of that is yeah it's the same things Cristiano it so they it sucked in the New Testament the term Christian appears in the book of first Peter in the book of Acts we're told that they that they started being called Christians in the city of Antioch and so we don't know we actually don't know when but a good guess has become time in the late 30s or early 40s or the Common Era right you have that chart in here I'm trying to find the increase in numbers in 30 see 20 Christians and thirty years later in 60 you have a thousand to fifteen hundred Christians and by 100 C seven thousand to ten thousand by 150 30,000 to 40,000 and so on up to to the four hundred see where you get 25 to 35 million and I love the point you make about you know to the average reader doesn't know statistics or growth curves things like that it seems miraculous but really like compound interest in a in a retirement account you don't you always have to put a couple percent in every year and have a grow a few percent every year and after you know a couple decades you got plenty of money yeah so it doesn't require a miraculous well we'll leave out the true miracle supernatural Mary but but nothing like a Billy Graham big tent every weekend converting thousands at a time everybody just assumes I mean so I mean I think just about everybody agrees that there's got to be about plenty when you start and it's not on a certain degree that by around the Year 400 they're probably about half of the Roman Empire would and the Empire's usually guess that about 60 million people so about 30 million people city you get from 20 people to 30 million people in you know in under 400 years and people just actually assume you've got to have thousands of people converting in one shop but you're you're absolutely right one once you actually if you have a standing rate of growth and what I would I pried and map out is what that growth rate will pay average probably this round it's around three or four percent a year yeah you know if your money throw in three to four percent a year for hundred years it'll be filthy rich our compound interest yeah it's the same thing that these these kinds of growth groups so there's really only two ways to grow a religion either conversion or fecundity and so you have a well but Kennedy not just having more babies but they they follow the father or the mother family and so you kind of address both of those and and and again you don't need big tent revival conversions were three or although you do make the biblical reference of 3,000 and use converted in one shop and that's probably mid right back you know fifty days after Jesus resurrection the you know three thousand people convert a few days later another five thousand yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah I know when you know when I did it I was 17 I went to the Glendale Presbyterian Church with my friend and his family and and you know it's sort of a calling up it wasn't a lot of pressures just like if you're feeling it you know you want to accept Jesus you know come on up and you know a few of us went up and it wasn't a lot but you can see if you if it's that way every weekend every week and yeah and then you go home and and and you tell your spouse about it and then they go and then your kids kind of go with you and then they have kids so the fecundity part you know you just have more babies and the babies and people tend to follow the religion of their parents for the last part right no that's right so that's that's one of the points that I make book is that the it doesn't require a massive missionary effort you know it's not that Christians have some kind of mission board and they're sending people how to convert others and it's not happening like that as far as we can tell there's almost no evidence of that well there is evidence of is a lot of things happening by word of mouth and one person knows another person who knows another person which is how you know it's actually how what happens more often in the in the modern world I mean you know people the Mormons are there with famous for their for their missionaries the missionaries have almost no effect right it's it's when you're living next door to a Mormon and you're not like the lifestyle you have you think highly and then you think about going to their church so then you convert it's more that kind of thing right yeah so and let's go back to what was there before of course there was a small sect of Jews but almost everybody else we're pagan whatever that means and I think you pointed out they wouldn't have even said I'm pagan no no yeah the pagan is now an outsider turned or heard of these people and it's usually thought that the Jews made out maybe five to seven percent of the Roman Empire so we're talking 95 93 to 95 percent of everyone else is something else and but the something else is just one thing it's like if hundreds of thousands even of different kinds of traditional religions that are practiced in different different localities throughout the Roman Empire one of the tricks is trying to figure out what these various hundreds and thousands of religions have in common and so I have a chapter that I try to explain what makes these religions alot in some very broad ways for one thing they're all polytheistic they they work as many gods and sometimes there's overlap they worked with many of the same gods and then they worship these gods mainly through coltd acts by acts of making offerings such as animal sacrifices and they say prayers and so each of these religions has the different they might have different gods and they might have different kinds of sacrifice and competitive offerings and different rituals and practices and things but but but they're broadly they're broadly similar in these ways so it's hard to put our selves in the minds of somebody who lived thousands of years ago but you know if if they're there looking out the window and seeing the wind and the lightning the storm the rain I mean are they really thinking there's an intentional agent in there that is acting in the world and affects my lives and i have to appease them or appeal to them yeah it appears that most people did take that I mean the the upper class philosophers who were they sometimes were doubtful about it but it appears that the vast majority people really did think that the gods were too long to drop the rain they're the ones who multiplied the livestock they're the ones who make sure the crops grew they're the ones who provided help if you get sick there you know the the dogs are doing things for humans that humans can't do for themselves and these religions are meant to facilitate that so that you give something to the dog you give them an offering of some kind of sacrifice or you just offer them some flowers and you crave them and that's all I ask and then they give you what you need so a Christian missionary or someone like Paul or whoever just telling their friends next-door neighbors about this religion in which this guy died for our sins he was resurrected he turned the water into wine he cured the blind could see the Deaf could hear and so on it's not so crazy because they're already thinking this out of stuff happens yeah it's a big big difference from the modern world where you know a lot of educated people just kind of roll their eyes or even mention miracles happening because I mean we just Annie how the universe works but in the ancient world it's often that the Christians came along and started claiming they had miracles there was oh wow okay you have a miracle it's no different from a God coming down and healing you cancers means God working in the world and so the Christians are actually making common cause with pagans in claiming that their God does miracles what the Christians need to do is to convince a few people every now and then that the Christian God is is powerful right and like what's the term heat Hema theism you know so this is where there's multiple gods but you believe in only one of them right well you worship only one of them right and so you know the differentiation is that a monotheists as there is only one God and he know this he no thief says there are a lot of God but there's one that's the greatest and that's the larger the worship and that's what was in in the cultural milieu at the time of this rapid growth right yeah that's right oh so it isn't that Christians burst on the scene and said there's only one God and everybody said I've never heard of that before a lot of people have heard the idea that there's one superior God so there were a lot of female peers and there were Jews or hema theists I mean even in the Old Testament the originally Israelite religion racino theistic rather than monotheistic so they didn't in the Ten Commandments for example one of the commandment is you shall have no other gods before they right would spread throughout the culture so people had heard Christians play off of that and I think the reason people some people became here this is because they would be worshiping one God in particular and they would appraise this god you're you're the greatest you know you are you're the most powerful you're the most wise and after a while this God is like the most everything so why bother with something else and so the idea that they're gonna be one God is to be worshiped made a lot of sense the big difference of the Christians is they said that when you worship this side of ours this Christian God you can't worship any of the others at all I you just got ruler exclusionary they're exclusionary yeah now that did they go so far to say they don't eat these other guys don't even exist or you just shouldn't worship them at all there are different views among Christians some Christians said look they don't even exist there are no you've got these idols these these statues of the gods they're just made out of wood and stone there's nothing there there's no reality there they're just wouldn't stone there are other Christians have said no in fact the gods God can work them actually aren't super human beings but they're demons they're they're evil demons who are leading you astray and so if you worship the true God you can't worship these demons anymore so what were the central tenets that the early Christians were presenting that made their religion stand apart and we're possibly more appealing to Romans and others well it's interesting that the main appeal is actually this point at which they're they're hitting hitting pagans on their own turf which is that the gods are all-powerful the dominant power pole can give us the things we can't have so when you when you when the Christians convinced another of Hagin say that their God can do these these powers these great things because they're exclusive this it's they're saying there's only one God who does this and so when Christians convince somebody's worship it's not they're taking them away from paganism and it's all based on this idea that their God is doing miracles this is it's kind of surprising thing because you know I mean I'm an historian I don't believe in miracles but it looks like the reason people are confirming is because they think the Christian God is really powerful which means he can do things we can't do which means he's doing nerville's and so that I begin with the resurrection of Jesus they started saying you know he raised a person from the dead I mean how many gods do that and and so the resurrection of Jesus becomes a separate part of their population I mean it's certainly the case today modern Christians that that is the central dogma of all Christianity he right he rose the dead without without the resurrection you might as well be a Jew well that's right and Christians have proclaim the resurrection not very long we don't know how long in the New Testament it's three days later on the day it was raised and I don't know I don't know how much later it was I doubt if it is three days but it maybe was three days but they they came some of his followers came to believe he got raised from the dead that changed everything because Jesus wasn't planning on starting a new religion he had no designs of sorry new religion he was a Jew or a Jew he was a Jewish teacher and taught the Jewish law through the security follows I mean Jewish he he thought the ender Islanders and his father's on the other eye understanding of things but you know if they had not thought he'd gotten raised from the dead they simply would have been a sect within Judaism or where they would adhere to the teachings of this one teacher of Jesus as opposed to some other teacher like Hillel or kumar's another rabbi but the resurrection is completely changed everything because once they became convinced he was raised from the dead they had to figure out why didn't die right because if he's raised from the dead that shows that God has has really favored him but God got really famous and one z1z tortured to death publicly that what God does to the people he favors so the death itself had to had to be explained and the reasoning happened very early on that their death itself must have had something to do with salvation the main Testament prophecies no actually early on they don't I don't think they thought about testing prophecies to begin with I think what happens is they came to think that if God raised Jesus he must've wanted Jesus to die if you die too much then some kind of sacrifice like the perfect sacrifice not like these animals were slaughtered in the temple all the time but like this is like the perfect sacrifice and once they father that that's when they started looking the Scriptures to try and find out are there other are there any passages in the scripture that are predicting and that God's chosen ones going to die and bonding passages that that no other to every thought have anything to do with the Messiah but the Christian said oh no these are referring to the Messiah and so that that's how you start needing debates between Jews and Christians over the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures and what about grafting on to the died for my sins me personally I you know original sin I cannot be atone for this only Jesus can atone for my original sin yeah well the modern you know the problem is we're happy to kind of piece together all this longing through just allusion to it but but Paul Paul himself Paul our earliest honor and the earliest critic in our office so he's right into the first ones we have and you can you get a sense for how the syncing work and Paul may be that this is how it worked more bothering Paul was especially concerned about the fact that Jesus had died by being nailed to a cross and that's simple motive death was really trying to perform before he became a Christian because the Old Testament says in the book of Deuteronomy that anyone who hangs on a tree is cursed and so that means God's curse does anyone who hangs on a tree and a cross is a dead tree and Jesus hanged on a tree Jesus and Jesus was cursed by God and some Paul originally the reason he persecuted the Christians is because they were worshipping somebody cursed by God as if he was in the sight of God and this isn't making sense at all but then when Paul himself came to think that Jesus had been raised from the dead he had to figure out well then why didn't he get cursed by God and he concluded that since Jesus was the one who was blessed by God he couldn't have been he could have been cursed for anything that he had done wrong and then then he started thinking in terms of how sacrifices work and innocent animal is killed for the sake of someone else right not because of anything the animals done it's not a bad sheep and food killer it's a substitution started thinking in terms of a substitutionary death of Jesus and that's how that's how you get to Jesus died for our sin where the cross itself becomes such an important almost telematics symbol you know it's interesting that the the the portrayal in the cross doesn't doesn't exist in the first three centuries we don't have Christians don't don't use the cross as a sign like in in no early Christian art in the first three centuries is the cross ever portrayed you know but the Christians we're not going around where process rather - because everybody thought the crosses is horrible horrible shameful things like celebrating the electric chair or something I think it's the Steve Pinker makes a line in better angels of our nature to introduce that chapter on torture this would be like Jews wearing a little shower head yeah what is it really symbolizing no well what ends up happening is when when the Empire becomes Christian in the fourth century then the cross becomes more of a symbol and because people are celebrating the cross of Christ is the way of salvation and so the kind of awful associations then tend to disappear that point right what about the fish symbol with the little Greek letters Jesus Christ son of God Savior that Christians where is what how old is that yeah so that's that's probably older we don't know exactly when it started but some people may not know you know when people are driving around the car with a fish on the back with Wyatt Wyatt fish and it's because what you say that if you spell out the words Jesus Christ son of God Savior and you isn't it's a anagram so you take the first letter of each of those words and increase the the letters that result are there five letters in the subtler fish right the idea though that the Christians are hanging are hiding out in the catacombs and identifying themselves of the silence so I like your discussion on what would appeal to a pagan from a Christian and I forget whose theory was the help help CAIR theory of apollon in a way because you know there were so many things that could kill you in the ancient world than anybody that offers something for you know healing the sick and that kind of thing would appeal well that's right there there's a Roman historian named Ramsey McMullen who said who points out that all of these pagan religious whatever God they're worshipping the one thing the song can do really well is heal because this is the thing people worried about because you know in the Roman world if you have a tooth abscess it will almost always kill you there's no way to control the infection and you know when we're dying in childbirth and children infants dying in this is a period in Roman Empire apparently every childbearing woman had to have six babies six babies in order to keep the population constant mortality so so the healing business he's been some person who saw you referred to is named Rami sorry he's a sociologist of religion right he's not a you know it's not an expert in antiquity he's not a scholar of early Christianity but he wrote this book called the rise of Christianity that tried to explain why Christianity succeeded and one of his arguments wasn't critics had superior health care I don't buy it but it is clever and what he argues is that during these early centuries there were there were a couple of epidemics of the Roman Empire some rather severe epidemics there there is one during the reign of Marcus Aurelius at the in the second half of the second century that wiped out between a fourth and a third of the entire population of Rome of the Empire and it actually killed Marcus Aurelius and so there's massive epidemic of course there's no way to find it and what what Romney start argues is that the early Christians nursed their sick more than the pagans in because Christians have this ethic of love and pagans give it now I mean this is what the Christian sources all say you know if you you really need to take with a grain of salt and he doesn't take them with a grain of salt he just says well the Christians there are more loving pagans than they probably were but what if point out is that studies have shown that in that four deadly diseases simple nursing improves survival rates even in the absence of medicine Wow and so what what SARP argues is the Christians were nursing their sick in times of epidemic so they were more likely to survive even without medicine than those pagans who just let the let their die it's kind of an interesting argument and you know it's intriguing the problem is apartment is trusting our sources that these pagans were just letting their loved ones died without tending to them apart from that problem is the issue that actually our Christian sources themselves talk about the Christian food sources that talk about these epidemics lament the fact that since the Christians are nursing the sick more than the pagans are Christians are getting infected more so I don't think it actually improved survival over the proof survival rate so much what about community support like today Manning the soup kitchens helping the poor you know tending to the sick that kind of thing that that aren't part of your family but just in the community yeah so this is an argument that's a little bit more plausible that a lot of people collapse onto is that the Christian communities we're providing things that were attractive to outsiders the idea is that in pagan religions there's there enough community to really in pagan religions you it's not that in a pagan religion you're not going to be together once a week to to share your burdens and to pray for each other and worship together and to study together and to you're not you know together as brothers and sisters who are taking care of each other there's none of that in the pagan religions Christians come along they have all of that they're brothers support each other actually but also morally and everywhere and so wouldn't that be attractive to outsiders so they're coming to be said about that one is that Christian communities were actually closed they weren't open and available to everybody so it wasn't like today where if you want to see what the Baptist Church is like you just go to the church on the corner on Sunday morning and check it out you couldn't go into the worship services the Christians unless you were already Chris there and so the outsiders don't actually know what's going on what is happening in these communities we do know what the outsider thought was going on in these communities and it turns out it's not positive at all right it's interesting that the common the common line about these Christian communities was that they they involve weekly weekly episodes of nocturnal orgies where people are committing incest and they're carrying babies and eating their this is what's going on yeah well yeah you run around you find it in the number of different sources and the reason it seems to be then everybody knew that the Christian took harmless and the brother or sister they were meeting when it was dark because long before they hadn't worker in today so they meet in the dark their brothers and sisters they greet one another with a kiss and so you know they're kissing is some kind of incest things going on and they eat the flesh and they drink the blood of the Son of God babies yeah so so these are the rumors and so it makes sense that Outsiders would be attracted to the commune life of the Christians but but it looks like that didn't it just looks like that maze didn't happen and and the other you know the thing to say about is we have a number of authors to talk about why they themselves converted to Christianity or why other people converted and they never mention the community thing right so it's employment for those those who have sociologically minded it seems like yeah that ought to be yeah but yeah yeah you have a chapter on the persecution of Christians you all social groups in a way in a perverse sort of way like to be persecuted in the sense that it makes that elevates third we must be really on to something that they ate us and that that kind of fuels them from the inside like I've got to really stick together because they don't want us to grow yeah yeah well that's right I mean you can actually see this an ironic way in America today you know I I have a lot of students who you know I teach in the Bible Belt in North Carolina and a lot of my students come from conservative Christian homes and some of my students feel like they're being persecuted because they're Christian in America but you have this persecution mentality because well you know it doesn't provide it provides cohesion that make you think that you're on the side of the truth and the people are against you and so there are sociological reasons for that and that was certainly driving the early Christians with the difference being that occasionally they were persecuted they the the thing that people have a misconception about is that it's widely I think widely in the population thought that the early Christians were declared illegal that it was against the law to be a Christian and if you're copying a Christian you'd be thrown to the Lions and in fact it doesn't appear to have been that way at all there were painful persecutions of Christians here or there throughout the empire but they were very sporadic you don't have any kind of imperial attempt to to legalize and to snap out Christianity until the for an early fourth century and for the first three centuries of Christianity in most places most of the time is perfectly fine to be a Christian there was no problem with that there do you think there might be an occasional uprising but basically it was fine so on the kind of highlights version of history we usually get you have the conversion of Saul to Paul and then Constantine boom so and you have a long section on Constantine I mean clearly something happened but there's a couple of versions of what and it played some role but maybe not that not the major role that grew Christianity well when I started in on the project I I have the view that I think a lot of people have which is that the reason Christianity succeeded was because of the conversion of Constantine so Constantine is the emperor in the early fourth century and he grew up a pagan he's raised Fagin and he then had this conversion Easter he becomes a Christian and when I started this project I thought well that that was the turning point after Constantine millions of people convert and so it's because of Constantine conversion and at the time I doubted whether it was a genuine conversion I mean maybe he was just like thought that maybe Christianity could help him and it's political in his political life and so those are my thoughts going into this I completely changed my mind about all that yeah yeah I when I tried to show this goes back to what we were saying earlier I try to show that given the rate of growth that Christianity was experiencing at the rate of growth it was going Christianity was going to take over the Empire with or without Constantine right and if Constantine hadn't converted that probably one of the successors would have would have would have done because just growing at this steady rate that they're going by the time you get enough people these numbers just start just the whole movement starts outlining and so I don't think that Constantine is the reason I'm trying to explain all that in the book but the other thing is I really think that it was generally convergence Constantine became a very avid Christian and we actually have we have some of his writings that he some of his writings including this sermon that he who delivered to a group of church leaders and you know he he might be talking through his hat but I it sure looks like he is really a committed Christian at this point yeah in terms of like he accepted Jesus as his Savior and excludes excluding all other pagan religions well you know and the way he did it I would say no I would see the reason most people did it which is what we referred to earlier that the Christian God was more powerful than the pagan gods so in the accounts we have we have three accounts about what about Constantine's vision Posten has some kind of vision of sometimes wrong being that made him at first probably he no theists and then turned him into the monotheists worshipping the Christian God these three versions are all told by the contemporaries and all three are full of people who knew him and so it's very interesting to prepare entraps these three accounts because there are differences among them but it's a little bit harder to figure out what exactly happened but it appears clear that what was behind it all was that Constantine was in a he was in preparation for a battle he was there was a civil war going on and he was involved in the civil war and he came to thank for fairly empirical reasons that the polytheist solution to divine power wasn't working very well because everybody else who's a polytheist who's engaged in this war was losing and so he maybe maybe maybe there's one God who is powerful enough to and and he ended up converting to believe in the Christian God and as it turned out then he wins the battle and he thinks well okay this is effective and so he expenses in Colorado thinking that there's one God is more powerful than all the others and he rejects the other gods and in fact there's only one be worshipped and it's the dog Jesus and he changes the law or to what extent Roman citizens can go ahead and worship the Christian God without penalty that's right so some people have the misconception that Constantine made Christianity the state religion which is softer on all the time you hear that all the time it's absolutely not true the Christianity did not become the state religion until the end of the fourth century during the reign of Theodosius the first so it was 50 years after after toxin teen cop what Constantine did those what you were saying is that he made it he made it legal to be a critic you made it elicit religion this persecution that I mentioned earlier that started in the fourth century the early fourth century was undertaken by Constantine predecessor an emperor named Diocletian Diocletian required Christians to sacrifice to pagan gods and when they didn't they were punished so this is the first time any his empire why attempt to snap out Christianity and Constantine converted toward the end of that persecution Diocletian was taken out of the equation that the Civil War ended Constantine took over power and he and his cone Emperor issued a an edict of Tolerance which was a statement then everybody could be whatever religion they wanted to be they could be they could be Christian the Jew they could be they could be any traditional religion of the Empire and every religion was perfectly acceptable and so this was this happened in the year 313 and called the Edict of Milan and it basically allowed the religious freedom of every time so then growth can happen maybe slightly more rapidly because no penalties at least legal penalties for it so this is the this is an irony that involves this exponential curve we've been talking about Christianity have to slow its growth at this point you would think new it increases its rate of growth it actually had to slow because it if Christianity continued to grow at the rate that it was growing when Constantine converted if it continued to grow up that rate in 50 years there would have been a hundred and seventy million Christians in the Empire but the Empire had only 60 million habitants so the rate had this low the reason it slowed was because the more people who converted there were fewer people to convert right right and so yeah so so the rate actually slowed but they started coming forget whose law that inclines why I think it is any any growth curve that can't go on forever won't ya you know I'm seeing about that so I mean there's two billion Christians today seven and half billion people so you know maybe twenty seven twenty eight percent I mean it's impressive but it's not like the majority well yes that's right you know cuz I when I when you go around talking when I go around talking to two groups about know why Christianity succeeded I always have people who tell them it is because God did it right I wondered I mean if God did it why why has he done it there's a lot most of the people are not and in any case I didn't have time to check the growth curves of Islam but you know starting in those eight century you know now we're at a billion people and you know the geographical location is probably smaller than all of Western civilization my guess is their growth curves are about the same from say 700 say eight century to 15th century something like that well I don't know it's a great question I don't know the growth rate of Islam the the most interesting comparative analysis is actually with the Mormon Church see the this fellow Romney struck I was mentioned earlier who had the the health care plan idea he he crunched the number that means a sociologist so he knows how to crunch population growth and he he crunched the numbers and his argument which I had to tweak a little bit of my book for a variety of reasons but but his argument was that Christianity grew to growth rate of 40% of decade until the early fourth century and the thing about that forty percent rate if you saw if you start with a thousand Christians in the year forty thousand Christians in the year forty and then go to three go to six million in the year 300 it is a forty percent growth rate every ten days so so when he points out though is that the Mormon Church has grown 43 percent of decades compounded till today right which i think means yes or playings law that any curve that can't go on forever that's right so you have Joseph Smith in one 1820s and now it's millions certainly more than Scientology I mean Scientology was always kind of on the next next on the list of cults that become mainstream religions if they survive the death of the founder yeah which you know Miscavige David Miscavige took over after ron Hubbard moved on to the a great writing desk in the sky apparently he's still channelling about more novels anyway but you know III don't know if they will survive like Mormons I'll be more on some kind of time more mainstream I mean most except for the fundamentalist Mormons that live right there on the border of Utah and Colorado and some of those tiny little towns most Mormons are is about as mainstream nice regular folks that you'll ever meet poverty needs those did just parenthetically on your travels and and in communication with Christians do they really think Trump is a Christian or are they just up on the lever for the Republican Party no it's unbelievable they well yes I many of them think that he is a Christian they concede that he's not a very good one Christian both what they really think is that they are that he's God's instrument and that that God is using this fallen person to bring about the the Christian social order and so really it's you know you know it's all about it's all about abortion it's about these social issues and it just for me as a scholar of Christianity I find it just incredibly frustrating that that this entire social agenda has nothing to do with love Jesus himself talked about right I need Jesus to pick up a Republican well just leave the Gospels what is Jesus concerned about is he concerned about you know gun control and abortion and so what he's concerned about are the poor the hungry homeless the leave nothing to do with the poor yeah so when when did that that's really probably mid 20th century when that all kicks in maybe second half of the 20th century when we first deanna t morphs into this this conservative Republican doctrines yeah it's it's I think it's with the moral majority 1980s right yeah but they're still our branches of Christianity that that do I mean most cat most of the Catholic Church is more focused on that sort of thing although they they obsess about abortion but at least they're against capital punishment that's right liberal Christian Protestant denominations still very much seen themselves as trying to model the concerns of the historical Jesus but it's it's part of the frustration is those are the denominations that are losing members and as these conservative evangelical and Pentacostal churches that have these other agendas that are the ones they're taking off of the world right now to my atheist friends never really been to church or certainly never been to admit one of these megachurches I tell them you got to go to understand about these killers I mean it's it's like a rock concert why I mean it's full immersion you know the music and and the standing up and sitting down and holding hands and singing and free parking I mean yeah in Southern California that's big you know and yeah in the community you know they're not there to hear a lecture on the you know cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the first cause and you know all that like William Lane Craig stuff you know he's an expert at marching down Azhari people don't care about that the regular person is not there for that you know so counter those arguments with better arguments against the you know five proofs of God all that is a waste of time yeah yeah yeah well that's no that's right and that's that's really where you know in the modern world where that community thing really kicks in because that's that's what's getting people into these churches is this kind of what happens when they're all together just makes the biggest difference and that sense of persecution again you know those Democrats those liberals the left you know they're all a bunch of atheists it's like wait a minute no most of them are Christians no democratic communists yeah yeah and when did that happen I mean you know Al Gore said he was a Christian Obama you know worship we went to church every weekend and pretty much all my atheist friends say he's secretly an atheist like I don't think so I think Obama now we shall heed what he says yeah yeah yeah well I mean you know Hillary gonzalo I mean never action goes to church yeah it C is far more Christian than he was I'm sure yeah yeah so it must be an interesting as the time we live in the last couple decades that you've been working to compare today to you know the early origins of the church I'm curious about the the whole business of what they thought then or at least the scholars compared to now on how Jesus could be both Son of God and God and a spirit you know 3 and 1 1 and 3 and all that business of the other the problem of identity you know that how did they square that circle well so this is um this was a topic that I dealt with in my book how Jesus became God and what I argue in that book is that you know I for me it goes without saying although most most people are guess it doesn't Jesus didn't think he was God I mean Jesus was he was a he was a Jewish teacher who thought he had the right interpretation of the law I thought that I mean he thought the God give him the right interpretation of the law but I mean he was even even a rabbi a Jewish teacher it was because he was raised from the dead that his followers started saying that he's more than a human that he was divine and the logic was that there there was an ancient logic which said that if somebody if the human being is taken up into the divine realm they are made a divine being this is a view that's found in ancient Greek sources ancient Roman sources ancient Jewish sources we have we have these legends of people I mean the founder of Rome Romulus at the end of his logic was taken up to heaven and he became to God chorus and he was worshipped by Romans as the Roman god because the reason became a god cos he's living with the gods now you get this in you get it in Greek circles as well I'm getting Jewish circles even in Jewish circles this is surprising to people that there Moses is said to be taken up in heaven and who have become a divine being in some Jewish tax so the Christian saw the Jesus was raised from the dead and they it's not the thing taught that his body was resuscitated you know or that just that you know he was good average came back to life event even near-death experience or something like I said he was actually made into an immortal being and it was taken enough to live with God and for whomever that happens that person becomes a God and so the early Christians I think very soon started thinking about Jesus as a divine being and it wasn't it took a while for them to realize they had a problem on their hands because if you're I'll see a human being I mean what's it mean is it Betty isn't that he became God that's not the earliest Christians thought they thought it became God then the questions well when did he become God was it added resurrection or or I mean he's good only spirit also wasn't involved during his life well maybe became God at his baptism when the God says you are my son today I have begotten you so it says baptism he became God then other Christians starting well he must've been a God for his entire life right so oh he wasn't his mother was a virgin God don't want her daughter pregnant and literally the son of God because God made his mind and then people start me woman he mustn't God from before his birth so what he just did before so they stopped pushing it back right since I'm pushing back into eternity and Jesus existed before but then he became more human then you get the problem how is he both human and divine at the same time right yeah those are the basic law for centuries yes oh okay so it's an evolve as an evolving process I like your discussion of the the appeal of the afterlife you know to what extent Christians offer an afterlife compared to pagans that does seem to be an ATAR element that gets added on because the pagans didn't believe it if I recall ancient Jews didn't didn't believe you're going to a place you just don't know we're just nothing well yeah it's hard to know I mean for both of them so this is actually a really interesting because this is the project I'm working on now for my next book yeah well I'm calling it the invention of the afterlife okay don't call it this because I already took that title that's my new book and I'm more focused on all the recent scientific attempts to up mine upload the mind and all this but that got me into this problem of you know what actually gets resurrected either Jesus or you if you're if you're there in heaven physically yeah well I'm 63 am i 30 like 35 but you know because opposed idli Jesus you know Jesus with 30 when he was crucified right so you're 30 when you're in heaven yeah what you know what if you you know what if you got injured I mean you take your injury with you what if you may be born with a birth defect I mean you have to live forever what if you were blond you have to be black and so yeah Christians had to work all that out so you in my book Julia Sweeney's monologue from her monologue letting go of God where she talks about the Mormon boys coming to her door in Hollywood and given her the pitch you know and they give her the whole whole pitch about how Jesus came to America and the whole thing she said I just wanted to tell him don't start with this story okay even the Scientologists know don't start with the story about the plane at all that's the yeah right a personality test anyway but she has a funny thing where they're telling or the pitch about the afterlife you know the blind shall see in the dev cell here and you'll be made whole again and she says well I had uterine cancer so I don't have a uterus do I get my uterus back they're like ah you can Majan these 18 year old boys yeah I don't want it back she says what if you had a nose job and you liked it my own nose you know okay so it's not your body it's your soul whatever that is it's the pattern and yeah but okay but wait a minute so what is that you know that it's all your memories okay but my memories now at 63 are different than they were decades ago of my childhood say the memories are always changing so what is it that gets transported to this other place yeah yeah you know I mean the traditional Christian view today is that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell and so but when you press people on what that entails I mean if your soul if your body's not up there how do you recognize your grandmother right so right so yeah yeah yeah so well I mean this is the problem like like Ray Kurzweil these guys they mind uploaders you know we're gonna copy all your your connect a copy all your memories and put them in the cloud which is kind of like heaven okay so all right but which memory all of my memories the memories are always changing and the memories of all what about all the people I interacted with are they there too and and that gets reenacted you know basically you end up with an argument in which you have a virtual reality which the entire history of the cosmos and all the cosmos is there well yeah you know essentially you'd be like this is what we have now except we're living in the matrix or something like that you know you know and so the Christians have the same problem that the mind uploaders have you know what exactly is happening here and the moment you start thinking deeply about it's like this is really messed up yeah yeah so well working on your soul goes to heaven or hell because it's as you're saying it's not in the Old Testament and in fact you Jesus preach and so why is the why isn't the sand Christian explanation then yeah weren't worded where did it come from so what did Jesus mean when he said though those of you standing here today will see me again or whatever the words were yeah yeah this is exactly what he says is some he saw his disciples and he said to them some of you standing here will not taste death before they seen anything this kind of power right and so what I think what I've long thought is that Jesus is not talking about what's going to happen to you when you die he's talking about God bringing his kingdom here on earth to destroy everything that's opposed to God and everything that's causing all the problems on her he's gonna bring in a good utopian Kingdom right that's gonna happen before you disciples die right here on earth yeah no that's what I actually put speculate the end of my chapter on that this is what he meant by the kingdom of God is within you that we have to create a better a better society here now yeah yeah yeah yeah well it's later that this whole idea because you know the utopia is out there it's up there it's in the next life not here well that's right and I you know I think you know my guess is that what what happens is people really think that this world is an awful place to live at the end of the day and they want a different world and so they want the perfection that's going to come in the afterlife and so but it is I mean I do argue that's one of the things that made Christianity attractive to pagans the a lot of pagans didn't believe any kind of afterlife they just thought he died and that was the end of the story so that they're you know today sometimes you go to a cemetery you see tombstone this says r.i.p rest in peace and in the Roman world they had a they had a different set of abbreviations it was seven letters it said the letters were n F F NS and C and what they said for was I was not I was I am not I care not yes yes yes I think that was that was in this book - you mentioned that yeah I thought that was great because that I think I forget who I think was one of the Stoics paquius maybe who said that you can't experience death I mean by definition to experience something you have to be alive so it's not possible to conceive of death because to conceive of anything you have to be living yeah so Christians Christians did with interesting thing they they created a need that pagans didn't know they had and then this then they solved the need right huh and so they Crispin's didn't know that there's gonna be hell afterwards Christians had to convince them that there wasn't a via hell and that if they didn't believe in the Christian God they were going to go to that he'll be tormented forever and so you know they're they're they're basically the only religion teaching this and they don't have to convince a lot of people but they're convinced in a few people at a time and it becomes an effective bad working tool well I get the appeal for sure I mean atheists are always put on the spot what would you say to somebody who's dying you know are you just gonna tell them tough luck bud that's it well no you don't say that but yeah yeah but if you can offer something else like well like I'm reminded one of my favorite movies Ricky Gervais sees movie the invention of line have you seen that yeah Wow oh it's great yeah he lives in this world where no one ever lies it's they always tell the truth which has its set of hilarious things but then along the way the accidentally discovers he can lie he goes to the bank to make a withdrawal and basically the teller just asked him how much money do you have in there he he he he gives the wrong number and she just gives him all this extra money doesn't actually have it he what's that going oh my god then of course it's hilarity ensues or he's telling women you know the world is gonna end unless you and I have sex right now he's just like okay Dan there's a ton of this this sad moment where his mother's dying and in the hospital or whatever and she asked him well what happens it is like that pause like okay here it is everybody gets a mansion and it's a big beautiful mansion and all the food you want and people waiting on you and she's like oh that's just great then she dies happy and then anyway the rest of the movie is the word gets out that this is what he this is the truth and that he's the Moses or whatever yes yeah he's in this hospital he orders a couple boxes of pizza and he uses the pizza boxes to make some notes to himself and he walks out like the 10 commandments he's holding up these pizza pies and there's thousands of people out there like so what what happens then after you die what else happens and he starts making stuff up yeah he's like Moses anyway so it's quite funny I mean for sure if I could say it I guess I would but I don't believe it so you know this is always a strong you know humanists have all kinds of things for you know secular weddings like your funerals the kinds of stuff you can say but certainly at the time when when the pagan religions weren't offering anything and then you go you know you're gonna die and and we have this extra thing you get to go to this place yeah and then when does it become like a cosmic courthouse like in all you know moral wrongs will be righted and the equivalent of Hitler would not have gotten away with it yeah yeah well I think it starts off as that I mean I think I think when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God coming you know again he doesn't believe that he's not talking about your soul burn to heaven or hell he's talking about a kingdom here on her but I think this is all part of a larger theodicy you know that to explain why there can be blinded there could be so much pain and suffering especially for the people of God I mean the the people who are supposed to have God's side are the ones are getting into the neck getting it in the neck more than the others and so how's that fair and so well God has to make it right and so he's going to make it right by by destroying everything that as opposed to him and everything that causes the misery and pain and then making a utopian kingdom here on earth and because he's making rival it was wrong he's got to raise people from the dead in order to reward them if they suffered unjustly and if they were they were Schmucks he's gonna raise them from the dead to make them suffer yeah I know the future direction was tied up in this whole The Odyssey idea and it's only later than that gets transformed into the idea not that there be a perfect kingdom here on earth but that there is a perfect kingdom up in heaven and when you got you're gonna go there if you're doing yeah well no yeah if you believe in Jesus right otherwise yeah well that kind of gets us back to where we started with the problem of evil is being an insoluble one for Christians we think but their solution is well you just don't believe in the cosmic courthouse where it's all settled so I can see why that now is such an appealing element that didn't really matter to the two ancient peoples as much as it does today yeah you know what I when I first started thinking about the whole problem was when I was teaching Rutgers back in the mid 80s I was asked to teach a course on that was called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions well I well I didn't this course is look I have the students read different parts of the Bible that had completely different understandings of why their summer and so you know they hadn't read know the the prophets of the Old Testament and the Book of Proverbs in the book of Ecclesiastes little bit of job and they had repeated of Jesus in the book of Revelation and then only and there are all these different explanations and it was interesting because almost none of these explanations have anything to do what people say today are people today if you say why is there suffering all the tickets of free will hurt each other which you know Mary you know okay fair enough but you know you don't have you don't have the Bible say it's the perennial problem and it's and it's no wonder that religions some religions to see because they have more people finding the satisfying solution to this right well I'll be looking forward to reading that book that sounds good when will that be do you think probably to publish the crazy book every two years and so I I'm working on it now I'm gonna write it this year but they won't come out for another two years and had he decide what what what you're gonna write about next is it just what what you run into that tickles your fancy or is there a certain direction of your you know narrative arc for your life and you you're heading in that direction well I I normally have about five books in my head that I write I sketch them out a little bit and what I end up doing is figure out which one do I think is the most interesting to the most people or could be made the most interesting than most people and so like with the cry for Christianity that's the kind of book where you have to explain why it's interesting before people realize oh my god that god that's yeah that matters you know is everything you do sound thicker whereas it's next book on the invention of the afterlife you know where do people get what happened to see you when you die that's something everybody's interested yes yeah it's a kind of thing and so yeah I usually just pick whatever things to be the most interesting thing back it sounds good well congratulations on the triumph of Christianity here it is again for our listeners how a forbidden religion swept the world Bart Ehrman thank you so much no it's great I will let you know when we post this and you can post today your social media okay all right thanks mark

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 76,376

Rating: 4.7207737 out of 5

Keywords: Science Salon, Agnostic, Atheist, Bart Ehrman, Christianity, Michael Shermer, Historical Jesus

Id: 9H4Lt9-IIak

Length: 79min 9sec (4749 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/HmanTheChicken]

I personally disagree with Ehrman and Shermer on their conclusions, but this was definitely interesting.

[u/OtherWisdom]

Thanks for posting this. It's a very good contribution to this sub.

[u/OtherWisdom]

I just noticed that one of the discussion points was the fish symbol that we see people adorning their vehicles with, for example. There's a discussion about this here and, in case you missed the reference, an article about it here.

[u/devokar]

Schermer goes on a bit much in the introduction.