Visions of supernatural beings or places are relatively common in the bible and early Christian writings - from wheels within wheels, to visions of the risen Jesus, to trips to the afterlife, writers record a whole array of fascinating experiences. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to talk about one of the less flamboyant, but nonetheless intriguing visions - Paul’s trip to the “third heaven”. We’ll get into the role of visions in ancient communities, what exactly a “third heaven” is, and why Paul chose to write about it.

The Sermon on the Mount is probably one of the best-known speeches of Jesus, and if you’ve spent any time in a church service, then the odds are that you’ve heard at least part of it. It contains the beatitudes - “blessed are the meek” - the Lord’s Prayer, and a whole host of teachings that are held sacred by Christians the world over. But… did the writer of Matthew fabricate the whole thing? Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to talk about this amazing sermon, whether anything like it exists elsewhere in the New Testament, and whether Jesus is likely to have uttered a word of it.

Today’s title may seem a little bit odd - how many Jesuses are in the NT? I’m sure there are going to be several comments on YouTube from people who didn’t stay to watch the episode because the answer is clearly “one”. For those who want to see where we go with this, Dr. Bart Ehrman is going to be answering my questions on the different ways early Christians and writers of the NT viewed and understood Jesus, and whether all of those views and perspectives can be embodied in a single figure.

If you have a passing familiarity with the Christian Bible, then you probably know that it’s split into two parts - the Old and New Testaments. The New Testament is the part with all the stuff about Jesus, while the Old Testament is drawn largely from Jewish religious scriptures. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman is joining me to talk about why early Christians insisted on keeping the Old Testament… despite not being Jewish.

In the modern Western world, monotheism is the rule, rather than the exception. Not so in the ancient past, where many cultures worshipped whole pantheons of gods, each one responsible for specific areas of the mortal experience. How does the one god of Israel compare to this myriad of deities, and can an understanding of how ancient mediterranean cultures thought about and interacted with the divine help us to understand the god presented to us in the Bible?

If you’ve ever done any research on the Bible - and if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have - you might have noticed that most biblical scholars agree with each other on a lot of basic points. These include the dating of texts and whether specific events recorded in the Bible are historical, among other things. Why is that, and is it some kind of conspiracy? Today, Dr. Chris Frilingos joins me to talk about the academic consensus, the gospel stories of Jesus’ early life, and how early Christians made meaning from them.

Seeing or hearing a Bible verse being pulled out of a hat to support someone’s argument is a common experience for many people. Homosexuality is wrong because the Bible says so. Satan is the bad guy because the Bible says so. Women should wear modest clothing because the Bible says so. But does the Bible say so? My guest today, Dr. Dan McClellan, is no stranger to engaging in biblical debates, and is here to talk about how and why the Bible is used in this way, and whether such arguments are ever valid or useful.

Demons and ghosts have specific, sometimes ambiguous, places in the modern imagination - demons tempt people to wickedness, but their incredible power can be harnessed by someone brave (or stupid) enough to bargain with them. Ghosts envy the living and can haunt and harm you, but can also be the comforting presence of a long-dead loved one. What role, though, did demons and ghosts take in early Christianity, and are those roles linked at all to our modern understandings of them? When you get right down to it, just who is Satan, and is God's adversary really a fallen angel? Dr. Travis Proctor joins me today to talk about all of this, and so much more!