Was Daniel Jesus' Favorite Book?

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1. 

   E208 · 13 Oct 2026 · 43 minNew

   Where Did Original Sin Come From?

   Most Christians grow up believing that everyone is born a sinner, that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, humanity inherited a broken nature and a guilt we can't escape. It's one of the most influential ideas in Western Christianity. But it isn't in Genesis, Jesus never taught it, and it didn't take its familiar form until four centuries after him. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to trace where original sin actually came from: what the Garden of Eden story says and doesn't say, what Paul meant when he wrote that sin came into the world through one man, and how Augustine turned that line into a…

2. 

   E207 · 6 Oct 2026 · 57 min

   How Apologists Use (and Misuse) Manuscripts

   Do manuscripts prove the Bible never changed? Some Christian apologists have argued that the Great Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) is proof of an unchanging Bible, that it's "Word for Word" identical to the later Masoretic Text. Some have argued that P52 – a small fragment of John's gospel – shows that eyewitnesses quickly wrote down gospels. In a debate with Bart a decade back, Daniel Wallace even referenced a first century Gospel of Mark, that turned out to be a stolen manuscript that was eventually dated much later. For some modern Christians and apologists, manuscripts are "proof" of something...…

3. 

   E250 · 22 Sep 2026 · 45 min

   The KJV is a Literary Masterpiece, and a Disaster Study Bible

   The King James Bible is arguably the most influential book in the English language, and Bart thinks it's a literary masterpiece. He also thinks it's one of the worst Bibles you can study from. In this episode of Misquoting Jesus, Bart and host Megan Lewis trace where the KJV came from, starting with William Tyndale, whose translation it largely reuses and who was burned at the stake for making it. They look at why its unicorns and cockatrices trip up modern readers, and why the words you think you understand, like "conversation," "strange," and "admiration," are more misleading than the ones…

4. 

   E204 · 15 Sep 2026 · 38 min

   Fixing Gospel Contradictions: 2nd Century to Now

   Around 170 CE, a Syrian Christian named Tatian noticed what a lot of readers have noticed since: the four Gospels don't always agree. So he fixed it. Tatian wove all four into a single, seamless account of Jesus' life. And for roughly two hundred years, in the Syriac-speaking churches of the East, that harmony was the Gospel. Then the church came for it. Bishops collected copies and destroyed them. Tatian was condemned as a heretic. Today not a single copy survives in its original language — we know the text only through a commentary, some translations, and a sixth-century Latin Bible that…

5. 

   E203 · 8 Sep 2026 · 44 min

   Why Are There Four Gospels?

   Most Christians are used to reading four Gospels. But why are there four? Why not one? Or twelve? The early Church thinker Irenaeus fought hard to keep Christians reading all four gospels, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion. In this episode, Bart unpacks how a four gospel new testament came to be, and what could have been the alternative.

6. 

   E202 · 1 Sep 2026 · 40 min

   Was Paul an Eyewitness of Jesus' Resurrection?

   In a recent response to Wes Huff, Bart said the only eyewitness we know of who's converting people is Paul. A lot of people pointed out that Paul never met Jesus. Fair. But Paul is also the only person in the New Testament who tells us, in his own words, that he saw Jesus alive after his death. Everyone else reaches us secondhand. Bart unpacks what Paul actually claims to have seen, why Paul is the only person who claims to see a resurrected Jesus, and why the earliest firsthand evidence for the resurrection suggests visions.

7. 

   E201 · 25 Aug 2026 · 42 min

   How Bart Learned to Live Without God

   For many religious people who deconvert, losing their faith leaves a giant hole in their lives. They can lose their community, their purpose in life, and their understanding of how the world works. What does life look like on the other side of deconversion, once the dust has settled? Today we're talking about how Bart lives without God. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is listener's questions, where I'll be asking Bart - among other things - whether he uses early Christian art as a source for his research.