My very special guest today is Professor Bart Ehrman. Bart will need no introduction for most people, but in case you aren’t aware: he is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of over 30 books on early Christianity and New Testament studies, including the best sellers Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible. Those and other books have made him the bête noire of Christian fundamentalists. But his book Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth also made him deeply unpopular – predictably – with Jesus Mythicists, since he holds that fringe theory in very low regard.

So today, thanks to generous donations from people I’ll thank by name at the end of this interview, I have the great pleasure of discussing Jesus Mythicism with Dr Ehrman. We cover a lot of ground in just one hour and I’m sure some of what he says is going to set the cat among certain pigeons. So please enjoy my conversation with Professor Bart Ehrman.

My guest today is Dr Dan McClellan. Dan is the presenter of the Data over Dogma podcast and a public educator who has won the Society of Biblical Literature's 2023 Richards Award for Public Scholarship for his YouTube and TikTok videos on the academic study of the Bible. He is also the author of The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues (2025). Dan holds a Masters in Jewish Studies from Oxford and did his doctorate in Hebrew Bible Studies under Francesca Stavrakopoulou at Exeter University. Dan spends a lot of his time correcting erroneous and simplistic ideas about the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians, held by Christian fundamentalists and Biblical literalists. But I’ve found many of my fellow atheists have similarly poor understanding of these texts and their cultural contexts. So I invited Dan to discuss what current critical scholarship can tell us about this subject and asked him about some common claims about the Hebrew biblical texts made by atheists. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dan McClellan.

My guest today is Dr Thomas C. Schmidt of Fairfield University. Tom has just published an interesting new book through Oxford University Press: Josephus and Jesus – New Evidence for the One Called Christ. In it he makes a detailed case for the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum; the much disputed passage about Jesus in Book 18 of Flavius Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. Not only does he argue that Josephus wrote about Jesus as this point in his book, but he also argues that the passage we have is substantially what Josephus wrote. This is a distinctive position among scholars, who usually argue that it has at least be significantly changed and added to, with a minority arguing for it being a wholesale interpolation. So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tom Schmidt about his provocative new book.

You can download Tom’s book here: https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/