Jesus Before the Gospels

It’s Holy Week. As Christians prepare to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, recounting the New Testament stories of how he suffered and died, it’s worth remembering that his disciples could not read and write. They held what Christ did and said in memory, and shared those memories orally for decades before the gospels were written. In his latest book, controversial New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman applies new scientific understanding of how memory works to the gospels. Ehrman looks at anthropological evidence of how oral traditions change in each retelling, and legal and psychological assessments of whether eyewitness testimony is reliable.