Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

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... that the Bible is unchanging or perhaps inerrant. But can that claim hold up?
In this episode, Bart unpacks what manuscripts do and don't prove, and the challenges they raise for people who want to argue for an unchanging Bible.

The Book of Daniel is set in the sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian exile. It describes visions of empires rising and falling — and for a long stretch, the sequence tracks real history with remarkable precision. Kingdom after kingdom, exactly as it happened.
Then, at a certain point, it stops being right.
That break is one of the most important pieces of evidence. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to explain what Daniel gets right, where it goes wrong, and why the exact point of failure tells us when the book was really written. And Bart will talk about how this book and its ideas may have shaped Jesus' thinking.

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 you don't. They cover the theological choices its translators made, the late Greek manuscripts behind its New Testament, and a 1631 printing that told readers "thou shalt commit adultery." Bart also shares which modern translations he recommends instead.
In the listener Q&A: where the doctrine of original sin came from, whether early Christians evangelized door to door, and what Jesus meant about eunuchs in Matthew 19:12.

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 still carries its shape.
Bart unpacks what Tatian actually did to the Gospels, why the church found it so threatening, and what it means that an entire branch of Christianity once read a Bible we can no longer read.

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.