Seeking to Understand History from People I Trust

Lately, I have been linking to many debunking videos. I like such videos for what I learned from them. But I am not just interested in watching videos that debunk pseudo-science and pseudo-history. I also enjoy learning about true history. Two of the sources I have enjoyed immensely in recent years are the online discussions by Bart Ehrman and Paul Freedman.

Bart Ehrman is a textual scholar and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His specialty is the New Testament. View Here.

Paul Freedman is a professor of history at Yale University who specializes in the Middle Ages. View here.

What I like about listening to Dr. Ehrman is that I learn a great deal about the history of the Bible, a field that attracts numerous silly conspiracy theories, but which has long interested me. To my great relief I learned that many of the teachings Christians accept today about their faith do not have their source in Jesus.

What I liked about Dr. Freedman is that I finally learned the facts about the early Middle Ages, a topic missing from most of our educations, and one that has intrigued me ever since I read Francis Brabazon's book Stay With God in which Brabazon writes, "The Dark Ages were the ages of light: the Renaissance was the twilight of our present black night of materialism," which began the process of my waking from old assumptions about history that many of us were taught.

It saddens me that at a time when people can freely listen in on courses once reserved for the Ivy League, most continue to be tantalized by old absurd tropes. One of those tropes is that historians are either part of a conspiracy to deceive humanity, or are too stupid to question what they read. I have found that real historical scholars question what they hear, admit when they are wrong, and honestly want to know and teach what is true.