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 doctrine about every human being from the moment of conception. Along the way, why Eastern Orthodox Christians never fully accepted it, and what changes when you realize this belief has a history.

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.