Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Memories of My Past, My First Girlfriend and Jesus by Bart Ehrman Some of you have probably had this same experience.
[00:00:11] Now that I'm 70, I'm thinking about my past a lot more than, well, in the past.
[00:00:17] And the other day I was thinking about my life in high school. Soon after I become a born again Christian, an incredibly ignorant born again Christian. And one incident quickly came to mind.
[00:00:28] Before I became a gung ho Christian, my first serious girlfriend was Linda, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school.
[00:00:36] She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent and Jewish.
[00:00:41] I'm not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her.
[00:00:45] Now I don't recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back, I suppose it's not particularly surprising.
[00:00:52] She and her family certainly weren't observant Jews, and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular.
[00:00:59] I don't know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind of doubt it. In any event, at that point in my life, religion wasn't really my main concern when it came to a girlfriend.
[00:01:10] We were a hot item for months. And then at the end of my sophomore year, disaster struck. Her mum got a new job in another town, which is only about 20 miles away, but it seemed like light years.
[00:01:23] I got along great with her mum, but she, the mum was quite firm that with the move it would make better sense for us not still to be going together as we used to say in those days.
[00:01:33] So that was that.
[00:01:35] We kept in touch over the course of high school though, and then the big thing that happened to me next was that the next fall I started going to a Youth for Christ club called Campus Life that met once a week at someone's house.
[00:01:48] It was always a social event with a devotional talk at the end, and pretty soon I was getting mesmerised by the religious aspects of the meeting.
[00:01:56] I learned that even if you thought you were a Christian but had never asked Jesus into your heart, then you weren't really.
[00:02:03] It didn't matter if you went to church every week. I did. Or if you were active in the church. I was. I was an altar boy. Or if you prayed to God every week. I did. Or if you confessed your sins. I did. Or whatever. You had to have a personal relationship with Jesus by asking him into your heart or you would not be saved. And that was a very bad thing indeed. Hell fire, Brimstone. Serious stuff.
[00:02:29] So to make a very long story very short, I met with the leader of the group a mid-20s or a very old man who, as we used to say, led me to Christ and I became born again.
[00:02:41] And if ever there was an ignorant born again Christian As a 16 year old, I was the one. I knew nothing about this form of Christianity. I'd been raised Episcopalian. I knew about the Book of Common Prayer, but nothing about the Bible. I'd never read it, didn't know a thing about theology, not even the rudiments, except that if you ask Jesus into your heart, that was the ticket to salvation. And I was all for that.
[00:03:05] And that you better get all your family and friends to do the same or they're going to roast in hell with all the pagans.
[00:03:11] So soon after that, I was talking on the phone to Linda, the old girlfriend, and I was trying to convert her, the Jew. And she didn't understand what it was all about any more than I did, really.
[00:03:22] And finally she asked, if I have God in my life, why do I need Jesus?
[00:03:27] I was absolutely flummoxed. I had no answer. I didn't know.
[00:03:32] And so the best I could, I said, well, I'm not sure, but if we have him, we might as well take him.
[00:03:39] I was clearly not a good bet for a career in theology, but actually, experiences like that made me think that I'd better figure it all out. So within two years, I was at Moody Bible Institute, memorizing entire books of the Bible and reading voraciously, everything I could get my hands on about the Christian faith.
[00:03:57] It wasn't long before, before I had all the answers, just about absolutely all of them. It was too late for poor Linda, I guess, or now that I think about it, probably was actually much better for her.
