Misquoting Jesus: How Christianity triumphed

(NPR via BDE, 3/20/18) Host Terry Gross interviews Professor of Religion Bart D. Ehrman on his book The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World.

Who Changed the Bible and Why

The bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why traces the history of Christianity devolving or evolving from a weird cannibal faith (with its strange communal ritual drinking of blood and eating of flesh) of a handful of peasants in rural Galilee to a dominant Western religion.

It did it in less than four centuries with the help of the Roman Empire [see the documentary Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus], Vatican, and Western war powers like the British Empire and Nazi Germany, exploring how it was nearly fated to become an obscure Jewish sect that instead molded Western culture, economics, and law.

• Bart Ehrman Foundation blog  discussion
• Transcript of this program from npr.org

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ABOUT: James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bart D. Ehrman came to UNC in 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers. He served as both the director of graduate studies and the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC. A graduate of Wheaton College, Illinois, Ehrman received a Master's of Divinity and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Gross holds a Master's degree in communications from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Copyright © Bart D. Ehrman and Fresh Air. All Rights Reserved.