Ross Douthat (4:44)

And how much of the change is about strangers versus about, let's say, enemies? Or is this sort of an overlapping category? Right. Because obviously one of the starkest things that Jesus says in terms of the kind of moral radicalism you're describing is love thy enemy. And one of the most famous parables that relates to this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Where. Well, why don't you. What is the parable of the Good Samaritan actually? Why don't you describe in your own words?

Bart Ehrman (5:13)

Well, it is a good illustration of the issue because the parable is that there's a Jewish man, he's going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and on the route, he gets attacked by a group of thugs who beat him up and steal what he has. And he. And they leave him naked beside the road. And later a priest from the temple is going on the same road and sees him and walks on the other side and bypasses him, doesn't do anything. And then a Levite who is one of the assistants in the temple comes down, sees him, bypasses him. But then a Samaritan comes along. So the backdrop of the story is that the Samaritans were understood to be the enemies of the Jews. The Samaritan comes by and he sees this man, and he goes over and he helps him. So that happens. And then Jesus asks the person he's talking to, which one of these was the neighbor? Well, it was the Samaritan. So the idea is that if you're going to love your neighbor, it doesn't just mean somebody who's within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. If somebody's in need, that's your neighbor. And that's what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage, but within Israel, it's love your fellow Israelite as yourself. And Jesus is now universalizing it. And so part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the west, including the invention of public hospitals, orphanages, old people's private charities, dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor. All of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.

Ross Douthat (6:58)

So this is a work of, I guess you could call it sort of cultural and intellectual history. But I think it's pretty obvious that you also want to make a point that's relevant to our moral and political debates right now. Is that fair?

Bart Ehrman (7:13)

It is.

Ross Douthat (7:14)

So what do you want readers, Christian or otherwise, to take away from this argument that connects to, let's say, America in the age of Donald Trump?

Bart Ehrman (7:22)

Well, so I don't get overtly political. I have very strong political views, many of which do not agree with yours.

Ross Douthat (7:31)

I am a studiously neutral interviewer, professor, but please continue.

Bart Ehrman (7:37)

I'm just saying I tend to be on the liberal side of the trajectory of the spectrum, but it doesn't really matter, because in the book, I'm not arguing for a particular political position or social agenda, position or not. What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you. The other. You're not supposed to, you know, bomb them back to the, you know, Stone Age. And you're not supposed to make them suffer because you don't like them or you don't want them among you. You're supposed to take care of them. So, again, we haven't brought this up yet, but, I mean, I'm not myself a Christian, so I'm not arguing this.

Ross Douthat (8:24)

We're going to get to that. Yes.

Bart Ehrman (8:25)

I'm just saying I'm not making an apology for Christianity here, but I am saying this was Jesus teachings, this was his teaching. And even though I'm not a Christian, I subscribe to that idea. But what bothers me is there's so many Christians in our world claim to be Christian, claim to be followers of Jesus, and don't follow his most basic teaching about this.

Ross Douthat (8:43)

So I do want to talk about your own beliefs and your intellectual work and how those fit together. And I think they will lead us back in the end to the argument in the book. 1. I'll just put one kind of moral, philosophical question to you, I guess, on behalf maybe of at least some of the people you're criticizing. One of the notable things about the 21st century world is that globalization and digital life have sort of combined to create this sense of sort of global immediacy at all times, right? Where, you know, you go on social media, you turn on the tv, and sort of events in incredibly distant lands are brought immediately to the fore. Right. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan cares for the Jew with whom he is confronted, like, physically, Right. The person is right there. He is physically the Samaritan's neighbor. Even if politically, morally, and so on, they're separate. Isn't it a hard question how that generalizes to a world where in theory, you have some kind of relationship to 8 billion people?

Bart Ehrman (9:51)

Yes. No. You can't simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. I mean, if any government tried to institute as their governmental policy the Sermon on the Mount, you know, they'd last about two days, period. I mean, so you. I'm not saying that it's this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I'm not saying that it's going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example, but the Bible is quite clear that just even in the Old Testament, love your neighbor as yourself meant your fellow Israelite. Or it explicitly states anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite. So does that have any effect or not? I mean, if you're not a Christian. Oh, it wouldn't have any effect. If you are a Christian, you at least ought to, like, think about it.

Ross Douthat (10:45)

All right, let's talk more about your own relationship to Christianity. And I feel like Often when I read a book or an essay by someone who says, I'm not a Christian, but as a historian or as a cultural critic, I'm here to emphasize Christianity's importance for the culture that we all live in, that person often is sort of tiptoeing toward Christian belief. That sometimes is sort of an intellectual way station where first you say Christianity is important and then you say, ah, well, maybe, maybe it might be true. In your case, you've already taken a journey out of Christian belief. Tell me about that journey. Tell me about your own religious background before you became a professor of New Testament history.

Bart Ehrman (11:30)

Yeah, well, it continued on after that too, but yeah. So I was born in a Christian household and I grew up in Kansas, so fairly conservative area. And I was raised Episcopalian, was an active church person as a kid, altar boy. When I was 15 in high school, I had a born again experience, became a committed evangelical Christian.

Ross Douthat (11:55)

What was that like? How did you have a born again experience?

Bart Ehrman (11:58)

I started attending a youth group, Campus Life, Youth for Christ Club. And the fellow who ran that was probably in his mid-20s. And he was a very gung ho evangelical Christian who believed that if you don't commit your life personally to Christ as your Lord and Savior, you're not really a Christian. So it didn't matter that I went to the Episcopal Church every week and that I served as an altar boy, that I confessed my sins and I said the prayers and I sang the

Ross Douthat (12:24)

hymns to the contrary, that, you know, you could have been a whitened sepulcher. Right.

Bart Ehrman (12:29)

That's exactly right. That's exactly how he would have thought. That's how he thought of it. And until I asked Jesus into my heart, you know, as he put it, I wasn't really a Christian. And, you know, I wanted to be a Christian and so I did that. I committed my life personally to Christ as my Lord and Savior and became very gung ho about my religious faith.

Ross Douthat (12:51)

Did you. Did sorry, did you feel that as a personal transformation?

Bart Ehrman (12:55)

Yes, very much so. It was a kind of an elevated spiritual experience where you felt kind of a burst of joy and a sense that something had changed now. And so when they call it a born again experience, many people actually have that sensation. Other people don't, but I happen to this fellow had gone to Moody Bible Institute for his college and he was very big on learning about the Bible. I knew nothing about the Bible as an Episcopalian. They'd read it and then preach on it, but he's like, I didn't know anything. And So I got.

Ross Douthat (13:29)

Really, as Catholics, we always think that's the safest approach. Sorry, that's a joke for Protestant and Catholic listeners. Go on. Sorry.

Bart Ehrman (13:39)

No, when I taught at Rutgers, most of my students were Catholic and it was a big sea change when I moved to the South. Yeah. So anyway, I decided to be a committed Christian, go to Moody Bible Institute, and I really did become a Bible nerd there. I mean, it was day and night studying Bible and theology for three years.

Ross Douthat (13:57)

And Moody you would describe as fundamentalist in some way. Right. Which effectively means. Well, there's a lot of stuff associated with it, but fundamentally it means that the Bible is inerrant in a really strong understanding of the term. Any contradiction should be reconcilable.

Bart Ehrman (14:14)

That's right, yeah. Contradiction is not just internal contradictions within itself between books, say, but with science or six day creation, Adam and Eve, which is like the flood, all historically happened and everything about the Gospels literally happened. And so yeah, it was fundamentalist in that sense and I bought into it, you know, and so when I left there, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham's alma mater, which for me was a step towards liberalism. And I started moving away from the kind of strict fundamentalist thing. I didn't. I'm not going. You don't want to hear the whole story. But I decided I wanted to do a PhD studying Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and the world expert on that was a guy named Bruce Metzger, taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. So I applied there and I went there and I studied with him. I did both a master's degree and a PhD there and became an expert in ancient Greek manuscripts. And over time I moved away from this evangelical belief, especially this hardcore inerrantist thing. And by the time I was through there, I was a fairly mainline Protestant Christian. When I graduated, I was a pastor of a Baptist church for a year, Princeton Baptist Church at American Baptist Church, and preached on the radio every week.

Ross Douthat (15:33)

You are the second former American Baptist pastor that we have had had on this show. Ryan Burge, the great religion data analyst. Anyway, just a striking fact. So you were a pastor. So as a mainline Protestant Christian, your relationship to the New Testament was basically to say the fundamentalists overstate how error and contradiction free these documents are. But there's still good reason to think that Jesus is the Son of God, raised from the dead on the third day and so on. Well, or, or had you drifted, had you drifted a bit from that too?

Bart Ehrman (16:09)

I, I still would have affirmed that. But as time went On I, I started realizing that I wasn't, I didn't really believe all of the, the kind of straight up doctrines. It turns out there are a lot of mainline Protestant ministers still today who, who wouldn't, who don't think Jesus was literally born of a virgin or even that he's necessarily physically raised from the dead. Right. And I kind of moved in, I moved in that direction, but until about 30 years ago, I was still a committed Christian.

Ross Douthat (16:36)

And then why did you cease to be a committed Christian?

Bart Ehrman (16:39)

It wasn't related to my scholarship or my understanding of the Bible or the understanding of the historical development of Christianity. It wasn't related to that. It was because of the problem of suffering. Why is there so much suffering in the world? I taught at Rutgers for a few years and when I was there I was asked to teach a class called the Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible in one way or another is trying to wrestle with the problem of especially why the people of God suffer. And I had realized by this time that there's not an answer in the Bible. There are lots of different answers and some of these answers are in conflict with each other. And so I taught this class and I thought, afterwards I thought, man, I need to think more about this. Actually, when I got done this class, I should write a book about that. I was like 30, 32 years old. Wait a second, what are you talking about? You're 32. You got the answer to suffering.

Ross Douthat (17:41)

I mean, look, as a newspaper columnist, the rule is that there's no obstacle to trying to solve the problem of evil in 800 words. So why should there be an obstacle to a 32 year old writing on it? But, so this was a pivot point where you decided, did you decide that God could not exist or did you decide that the Christian God was unlikely to exist like a God who has particular attributes related to goodness as we understand it?

Bart Ehrman (18:08)

I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world. And I'm not a radical atheist who insists there is no God, but I don't think there is. I don't think there's any kind of supernatural power that's overseeing the world, that is active in people's lives, that actually answers prayer. I don't believe a God like that

Ross Douthat (18:32)

exists because such a God to exist would have to be bad, wicked, or

Bart Ehrman (18:40)

no, I don't think that that kind of God would have to be anything. And so it's not that I have some kind of criterion for what that God must be. It's that I think it's unlikely that there's a God who's active in the world. Because in my view, if there was a God who was all powerful to. I'm granting an all. If there was an all powerful God, if there was an all powerful God who was loving, then there wouldn't be people who starve to death every minute, which is what happens. So I just came to think, I think it's not true. I don't believe there is some kind of divine power that is overseeing this world.

Ross Douthat (19:20)

I think that a more conservative Christian listening to that narrative might say that you see a separation between how your view of the Bible and the New Testament changed and how your view of God changed. But the conservative Christian might say, well, it seems like there's more of a progression here where you start out as a firm believer in a literal resurrection and then you become a believer in sort of Jesus having been maybe spiritually present to the disciples. And then from there the possibility of an all powerful, all good God sort of slips away. But there is sort of a movement there where how you think about the New Testament does shape how you think about the likelihood that there's a God who cares. Right. It's not completely separate.

Bart Ehrman (20:08)

I think it's separate because I believed in God for a long time after I. So the views I teach, the kind of scholarship I do now, is exactly the scholarship I did when I was a Christian. So I can see how people would think that it's kind of a domino effect. And when I was in evangelical, we talked about the slippery slope that leads to perdition. You give up one thing, man, it's all over. And so I get that. But I have my closest friend, my two closest friends are Presbyterian ministers who are active in the church. And they basically think what I think

Ross Douthat (20:41)

about the Bible right now. I'm not saying it's inevitable, the progression, but I'm just saying, like, if you held it as more of an. If you held it as an established fact that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and so on, you would necessarily have to give a little bit more credence to. To the possibility of a God who intervenes in the world. Right.

Bart Ehrman (21:03)

If I believe Jesus was raised from the dead, necessarily, I would believe in God. Yes.

Ross Douthat (21:07)

Yes. Okay, well, that's because there's no other

Bart Ehrman (21:08)

way for it to be.

Ross Douthat (21:10)

But I'm just saying there is some progression there. Where kind of your Presbyterian minister friends, right, who would say, well, Jesus had powerful moral teaching, was crucified, and was present to the disciples in some way after the resurrection. That's a weaker claim on God's behalf, Right. Than the claim that Jesus was walking around and eating fish and so on. So once you've moved to the weaker claim, there is a general weakening. That's all I'm suggesting. But you would say you still, I mean, just being here talking about the book you've just written, you're still drawing moral value from the New Testament, even as an agnostic?

Bart Ehrman (21:45)

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Ross Douthat (21:48)

All right. I want to get a little bit deeper into the historical debate about Jesus and about the New Testament. And in doing some prep for this episode, I noticed that at one point once you had a seven hour debate with a more conservative scholar of scripture. And I asked my producers if we could have seven hours for this and they said yes. So buckle. I don't know what plans you've made for the rest of the day, Bart, but you're here. No, we have slightly less time than that. So we're gonna try and do. We're gonna try and skim the surface of what is, and I think just an incredibly fascinating debate, regardless of where you come down or what conclusions you draw from it. To start out, imagine that the listener or viewer has very little contact with the debate or even with Christianity itself. Right. What is the historical raw material that the New Testament gives us in terms of understanding the life of Jesus in the early church?

Bart Ehrman (22:50)

So we have four gospels in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus life. Outside of those four accounts, there's very little information about the historical Jesus even within the New Testament. The New Testament has 27 books, and most of it doesn't say very much at all about what his life was like between the time he was born and the time he died. Paul has more writings than anyone else and doesn't say anything about his miracles or any confrontations or, you know, he doesn't tell us about his life, I mean, for good reasons. But what that means is we basically have four accounts in the New Testament about his words and deeds. We have accounts from outside the New Testament, lots of them, other gospels, for example, but generally they're seen to be not historically reliable, even by people who wish they were. So basically, if we want to know about Jesus life, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Ross Douthat (23:44)

And what is the. Just very quickly, what is the scholarly consensus on the relationship of the four gospels that we have, or what is your own view or both?

Bart Ehrman (23:53)

Well, my view is the common view. The first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, have very many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence, and often, word for word, the same. And that has long been thought by scholars to indicate that somebody's copying somebody. So almost everybody agrees that Mark was the first gospel written. It's our shortest gospel, and it appears to have been used by both Matthew and Luke, so that Matthew and Luke have most of the stories in Mark, often the same sequence, same words, word for word. So Mark is first. Matthew and Luke used Mark and had material of their own that they added to it. Sometimes Matthew and Luke have similar material, sometimes they have different material. Those three are then called the Synoptic Gospels, which means you can see them together because you can put them in columns next to each other and actually

Ross Douthat (24:40)

read each version of the same story, right?

Bart Ehrman (24:43)

Yeah. And it's interesting to see how they differ at that point. But John has very little of the material in Matthew, Mark and Luke up to the time where Jesus is arrested. So the Passion narrative, the account of his death, has similar stories in John. But John records mainly his own miracles, his own encounters of Jesus, his own teachings of Jesus that are different from Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Ross Douthat (25:05)

And Jesus talks longer in John. Right? That's it.

Bart Ehrman (25:10)

Very much. So when you get to John, entire chapters are Jesus talking. At one point, he starts talking in chapter 13 at his last meal, and he talks through chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16. Then he launches into prayer, chapter 17. That's all Jesus, virtually all Jesus talking. So. That's right. That is different.

Ross Douthat (25:28)

Yeah. And then in addition, you've already mentioned Paul's letters, but there's a large number of letters. And there are the Acts of the Apostles, which seems to be written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke.

Bart Ehrman (25:42)

That's right.

Ross Douthat (25:43)

And both of those, in different ways, are sort of windows into the early church. And it's fair to say, since the 19th century, maybe the late 18th century, there's just been endless attempts to sort of drill down skeptically into the claims that these books make and how closely they are actually connected to the early church. You have debates about who wrote the gospels when they were written. You already mentioned lost gospels, books that were supposedly suppressed, debates about whether Jesus really claimed to be divine, on and on and on. I think it's notable to me as a reader of your Work that as a agnostic and skeptic of sort of the full historicity of the New Testament, you do think some kinds of skepticism go too far. So one of the books you've written is about people who think that Jesus didn't exist, right. That he's a mythological figure. Why should we think that Jesus existed?

Bart Ehrman (26:40)

Well, let me say that I don't. I mean, historians by their very nature are skeptical because they're dealing with sources that they have to evaluate. And so this isn't just, this isn't a thing about Jesus per se, it's about how history works, that you've got to evaluate your sources. I don't, you know, I've never gone into my scholarship trying to like disprove things. It's just you try to figure out what happened in the past. And there are people today who call themselves mythicists who think that Jesus did not even exist. And I don't object to that because it's too skeptical. I object to it because it's not historical. And so I'm just interested in knowing historically what really happened. And when it comes to the historical Jesus, the evidence is just so overwhelming. I don't think you can really have a bona fide question about whether the man existed. The question is what did he say and do? And that's where you start getting into trouble. But the reason, there are lots of reasons for thinking Jesus really existed. I mean, for one, just one very basic thing. The apostle Paul mentioned he was writing letters in the 50s and the 60s. Jesus probably died around the year 30. Paul in his letters talks about his meetings with James, the brother of Jesus. So what I put it sarcastically is if Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know that. Right? But Paul's conferred with James and so things like that. And so, yeah, Jesus, I think he certainly existed. That doesn't tell you what he said and did though.

Ross Douthat (28:07)

But it's fair to say it's even by the standards of secular history. Right. He's an unusually well attested figure in terms of how many people are writing about him.

Bart Ehrman (28:18)

Yeah. And this is something I think that people kind of overlook because I often say, and it's absolutely true, that Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek and Roman source of the first century except for outside of Jews and Christians, not mentioned at all. And people say, oh, well then he probably didn't exist. Well, how many people are mentioned? I mean, Philo is like the most famous Jew from the period. I mean, how many people talk about him?

Ross Douthat (28:43)

No one, you know, so the Romans and Greeks generally thought they had better things to do.

Bart Ehrman (28:49)

Better things to do.

Ross Douthat (28:50)

But also. Right again, even extremely well attested figures, you're dealing with sources that come later and you know, where you're sort of putting things together. If you're talking about even like the life of Julius Caesar. Right.

Bart Ehrman (29:04)

Well, that's it. I mean, you'll have Roman emperors and things talked about, but who else is talked about in a world like the Roman empire had about 60 million people. How many of those 60 million people in Jesus day do we actually have a record of? Very, very few. So the fact you don't have a record isn't weird, it's what you'd expect.

Ross Douthat (29:24)

Right, so then another point, the idea that basically there were just tons of gospels that have just as good a claim to be connected to Jesus as the ones in the New Testament that were then suppressed for political and theological reasons later. And you know, this gets sort of the full treatment in the Da Vinci Code and sort of popular culture like that you've written. Obviously there are lots of rival gospels. Why should we give at least a certain degree of priority to the ones that we have in the New Testament versus the others?

Bart Ehrman (29:59)

Well, it's not on a priori grounds. I mean, it's not because they're in the Bible. It's that. So I actually did an addition of these other gospels.

Ross Douthat (30:08)

I believe that I own it.

Bart Ehrman (30:09)

Yeah. And I'm really interested in these things. But everybody who is interested in historical Jesus from a historical point of view has to take every potential source seriously and examine it in detail and consider, does this provide historical information or not? On the grounds of the kind of historical criteria that historians use to figure out, you know, what did Abraham Lincoln really say or do? What did Julius Caesar? You use the same criteria. And when you apply these, these criteria to these other gospels, there's almost none, there are virtually none of them that you can consider as historically reliable. Possibly the Gospel of Thomas, which has 114 sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945, about half of which are like you get in Matthew, Mark and Luke. The other half are not. Possibly some of those sayings in there could go back to Jesus. Apart from that, virtually none of these gospels is going to give you historical information.

Ross Douthat (31:03)

So the New Testament, the books we have, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Acts of the apostles, all of this maybe takes us as close to Jesus life as we're likely to get pending some novel discovery in a cave or in the, you know, the ruins of Pompeii or something else. Pompeii. The timing might be wrong, but you don't think that's close enough for them to be truly credible as historical narratives. Why?

Bart Ehrman (31:30)

Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don't think that you can simply read the Gospels and think, oh, that's what Jesus really said and did. So there are a lot of reasons for that.

Ross Douthat (31:46)

Give me three. Three reasons.

Bart Ehrman (31:50)

They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event where they both can't be right because they are contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn't live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They're living decades later and are recording accounts that they've heard. So that's two things. The, the authors living much later and the contradiction. The third thing is these authors got their stories from somewhere. If we don't know where the authors lived, we don't know who the authors were. They, the, the gospels circulated anonymously before names attached to them, so we don't know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but we don't.

Ross Douthat (32:34)

I'm just going to go on.

Bart Ehrman (32:36)

We can get back to that because that's about.

Ross Douthat (32:38)

There's some debate, but.

Bart Ehrman (32:40)

Oh yeah, there's debates about everything. Welcome to history. So these authors do not claim to be eyewitnesses. They do not narrate things in the first person. They describe Jesus and his disciples in the third person. As I said, they're writing in a different language, living decades later. The question is, where did they get their stories? The one thing we can say about Christianity in this period, from the time Jesus died to the time, say the end of the Gospel of John, say that's a 60 year period, is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Mediterranean. It started out as a small group in Jerusalem and by the time the end of the first century, we know of Christian groups who are scattered throughout Judea, Galilee, Syria, over to what we today think of as Turkey, Asia Minor, over to Greece, in Rome, possibly North Africa, possibly Spain. So in those 70 years, Christianity has spread. There's no social media, there's no newspapers. Most people, the vast majority of people are illiterate, cannot read. It almost certainly spread by people telling stories about Jesus. So somebody in Jerusalem tells a story to somebody else in Jerusalem and then somebody from Antioch comes, he tells them the story. This goes on for 30, 40, 50 years before they are written down. So what happens to the Stories, they change. And the evidence that they change is we have different accounts of the same story that are different.

Ross Douthat (34:12)

Where does the fact that the Gospels contain stories of miracles, including, most notably, the Resurrection, also plenty of secondary miracles, healings, and so on? Where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism? Is it itself just an automatic reason for skepticism that you should discount historical narratives that claim that someone walked on water?

Bart Ehrman (34:41)

No, I think saying historical skepticism is a tautology. History is skeptical. So it's not. It's not that you're doing historical skepticism, you're doing history.

Ross Douthat (34:53)

But, I mean, I agree 100%. But suppose you present to me two stories, right, that follow the same trajectory you've described. They're written down later, they pass through some kind of oral history, they're written in a new language, they're the same story, except one of them has a miracle in it and one of them doesn't. Does the skeptical historian, tautological, again, say the miracle is an extra reason to think that one of these stories has been garbled compared to the other?

Bart Ehrman (35:24)

I think what the historian does is they look at the miracle story and they judge whether it probably happened or not, because that's what you do with history generally, right? And so what's the probability of Jesus walking on the water? Like, how do you establish that as a historically.

Ross Douthat (35:40)

That's a very good question. How do you establish that historically?

Bart Ehrman (35:43)

You cannot.

Ross Douthat (35:44)

Okay?

Bart Ehrman (35:45)

Because all historians can do it. Doesn't matter who you're studying in history. You could be studying Charlemagne, whoever you're studying, studying BAAL Shem Tov, who is the founder of Hasidic Judaism, who has eyewitness accounts of his miracles, fantastic miracles, just within the last, you know, and we're not talking about thousands of years now. And so historian looks at the accounts of BAAL Shem Tov doing things like sticking his finger up against a tree and making it come on fire to burn, you know, to warm themselves up and. Or whatever. And you have all of these accounts and you ask what's. How do we account for the story? Well, how do you establish things happening in the past? I mean, what. What kind of criteria do you use as a historian to figure out whether something likely happened or not? And you have a set of criteria. You know, for example, do you have independent witnesses? Is it something that's plausible? Is it something that ever happened ever in the history of the universe before? So suppose you've got a story and you're not sure, did somebody make this up or did it actually happen? Like Jesus walking on the water. Did it actually happen or did somebody make it up? Now, has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn't happen? Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Has anybody ever actually walked on water? Yeah. Well, no, not in recorded history, in other words, so what is the likelihood? I'm not. So I'm not saying that it's impossible. I'm not saying it's impossible that Jesus walked on the water. I'm saying that if it did happen, there's no way for us to establish it historically, because other explanations are always far more likely.

Ross Douthat (37:22)

But does that mean then, that you are essentially taking a kind of a view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened, just because you'll always default to, by definition, miracles or things that don't normally happen. Right. Like if. To take. To take a different example, the Yale historian Carlos Eyre wrote a book recently called they Flew. That's a book about accounts of levitating saints in the 16th and 17th century. And Ayer basically makes the case. And this is, of course, debatable, like all such things, but he makes the case that the level of historical attestation for these events is at the level or above the level that you would normally need to say. These things happen like independent witnesses, lots of different writers writing about it, people who have reasons to be skeptical, saying it happened, all of these things. Right. But then you're still left with the fact that. Do people normally fly? No. Do people normally levitate? No. So I'm just curious. Is there any level of historical attestation where you would say, okay, this makes this miracle more likely to have happened, or are we just defaulting to the idea that miracles are impossible and so the historian can never assert that one possibly happened?

Bart Ehrman (38:44)

I would say you have to consider every possible account and consider who the witnesses are and evaluate whether it's more probable that that happened or that witnesses got it wrong or somebody made it up, up at every point. So you don't make a categorical decision. This could not have happened. Part of the problem with history is that history is actually not explaining just what happened. History is explaining what we can establish probably happened. And so the past is not history, the past is the past. Our only access to it is through historical inquiry. So let me give you a separate. Like a different example, just to kind of explain for people who aren't quite following this. It is impossible for you to take your coffee, your black coffee, and to pour Half and half into it and to stir it and to stir it enough that the half and half comes out of it. I mean it's basically, it's the second law of thermodynamics. It can't happen. At least it never has happened. So suppose somebody from 1950 says that they saw somebody in 1920 do this. And suppose you got five people who say, yeah, 30 years ago we saw this person stir the coffee, stir the milk in the coffee and he stirred it right out of it. What's the likelihood that those five people would be right? I would say the likelihood is virtually zero. Is it likely somebody could have made it up? That somebody could have seen something that they thought was that, that they thought it was a magician, that it was somebody with sleight of hand. Do those things ever happen? Yeah, that happens all the time.

Ross Douthat (40:24)

Right.

Bart Ehrman (40:25)

Does anybody do this thing? No, it never happens. So which is more probable?

Ross Douthat (40:29)

Do you think that there's a risk in New Testament historical scholarship of taking the fact that the Gospels include miracles and using that as a reason to become overly skeptical of them?

Bart Ehrman (40:49)

Yes, I think that is a risk. But I would say that it's not that people who are critical of the, the vast majority of critical scholars of the New Testament are actually Christian believers. So I'm an odd duck. I mean, I'm an agnostic, I'm an atheist and I'm a New Testament scholar. And that is weird. So it's not that everybody's approaching this thing, trying to destroy the miracles or anything like that. Most people doing this are actually church going Christians.

Ross Douthat (41:18)

Right. Let me just give you one example of sort of how, how this problem might manifest itself. And you can tell me why you think I'm wrong. Right. So you mentioned earlier that you yourself would probably date the Gospels to the later part of the first century. Right. So the 80s.

Bart Ehrman (41:41)

Usually it's thought the typical view is that Mark was written in the first around 70, Matthew, Luke around 80, 85, John around 1995.

Ross Douthat (41:49)

Right. And this makes a difference to the question of their credibility for the reasons that you've already laid out. The longer stories are circulating in oral tradition.

Bart Ehrman (41:59)

Right.

Ross Douthat (41:59)

The more errors, confabulations, all of these things creep into them. Right. So the gospels, look, they're still important historical sources, but they look less historically credible if you plant them in 85 versus 60.

Bart Ehrman (42:13)

I wouldn't say necessarily. I mean, somebody could write a book on Thomas Jefferson today and be more accurate than an account that was written a year after his death. Death. And so it's not necessarily that the length of time is, is the issue. The other thing about oral tradition, of course, is that stories change overnight. I mean, you know, you, you, I'm sure you've had things told about you the next day that just aren't true. Right. I mean, I, I know I have never, Never. Okay, okay, well, I'll start tomorrow then. I'll say something.

Ross Douthat (42:41)

Well, no, that's, I, I, I want to get at that, at that question in a minute, but just on, on this question. Right. So there are many reasons that scholars have for offering that kind of later dating. Right. But one of the reasons that shows up pretty consistently in the literature is the fact that at various moments in the Gospels, Jesus has discourses where he seems to predict something like the destruction of the Jewish temple, which happens in 70 AD at the hands of Roman armies. Right. And just to take as the example, the Gospel of Luke.

Bart Ehrman (43:14)

Right.

Ross Douthat (43:14)

So the Gospel of Luke then connects to the book of Acts, the story of the Acts of the Apostles. They're written seemingly by the same author.

Bart Ehrman (43:21)

That's right.

Ross Douthat (43:23)

The Acts of the Apostles is, you know, it starts out with the early church, it ends up following the career of St. Paul and it ends pretty abruptly in the early 60s with Paul a prisoner in Rome. And that's just sort of where the book ends.

Bart Ehrman (43:41)

Yeah.

Ross Douthat (43:42)

Soon after that, a lot of incredibly crazy stuff happens. Right. You have the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, you have Nero's first persecution of the Christians and then you have the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple. Right. So it's a very action packed decade. It has always seemed to me that the most straightforward reading of Acts ending, where it does without any detail of those subsequent events is just that the writer wasn't aware of those subsequent events and was writing, was ending his story roughly where he was. It's the early 60s. Paul is still alive. This is the end of the story because this is when he's writing it. And that one of the key reasons that scholars reject that sort of intuitive conclusion is that they don't want to give Jesus credit for a prophecy. They don't want to say, oh, wow, like, you know, and which is. So do you, yeah, go ahead, tell me why you think that's a mistake in reading.

Bart Ehrman (44:46)

Yeah, no, I understand that argument. Yeah, I understand it. Wow. I absolutely don't think that's why scholars came up with that. But. Okay, okay, okay.

Ross Douthat (44:53)

Okay, good.

Bart Ehrman (44:54)

Yeah, of course, that's what I thought for many years. That's the best way to explain it. There are reasons for thinking the Gospels were written later than that. And so then it's a legitimate argument then. Well then why does the book of Acts end while Paul's in prison in rome in the 60s? So two things about that. One, I agree that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, so I don't date them because of that.

Ross Douthat (45:20)

Number two, Jesus predicted it because it was just in keeping with Old Testament prophecy. Right. You're saying, just to be clear, you don't think Jesus literally knew the destruction was going to happen.

Bart Ehrman (45:32)

I don't think he had supernatural knowledge, no. There were other Jews at the time who were predicting the destruction of Jerusalem. So thinking it's kind of like Peter, people today might predict something that's going to happen about the war in Iran and they'll come up with some prediction

Ross Douthat (45:47)

and somebody will be right.

Bart Ehrman (45:48)

Somebody will be right. So you can read the handwriting on the wall kind of thing. There are good reasons for thinking why the author of Luke Acts would have wanted and Acts before Paul was finally put on trial and executed. The whole point of the book of Acts is so for those who don't know, the book of Acts, as you said, begins after Jesus resurrection and then he ascends into heaven and then the of Pentecost happens and Christianity starts spreading throughout the world. So it covers about a 30 year period of the early spread of Christianity. One of the major theses of Acts, one of its themes is that this is a movement that cannot be stopped. Paul in particular, cannot be stopped. Paul goes into a town and he gets persecuted and they beat him and he just goes to the next town and starts another church and they try to stop him there. There can't stop him. At one point they stone him, gets up, goes to the next town. There's nothing you can do because the Spirit is behind this whole thing.

Ross Douthat (46:48)

That's right. It's like podcasting.

Bart Ehrman (46:50)

Yeah.

Ross Douthat (46:50)

Unstoppable.

Bart Ehrman (46:51)

Unstoppable and very interesting. So the deal is if the Paul's execution had been narrated, he would have been stopped. Luke is trying to show that this is an unstoppable movement, so he's not going to narrate the execution. Okay.

Ross Douthat (47:10)

I promised my producers we wouldn't do the seven hour debate. So I'm resisting. I am resisting the urge to argue incredibly deeply. Just two questions. First one, I've read your work and so I know that you think it's possible or likely that Jesus made these predictions.

Bart Ehrman (47:27)

Yeah.

Ross Douthat (47:28)

Aren't there a lot of scholars who think that Jesus's predictions are a reason to date the Gospels later. Isn't that. Again, I agree it's not the only reason, but it is a significant reason given.

Bart Ehrman (47:42)

It would be. The deal is with that is that it's not quite that simple. It's that some of these predictions, especially in Luke, seem to show a detailed knowledge of what's going to happen when it happens. It's just not that the temple's going to be destroyed. It's that Roman troops are going to surround the city, that the Gentiles are going to trample. It goes into detail that looks like it's projecting backwards something that they know about.

Ross Douthat (48:08)

But some of those details are also wrong. Right, like there's claims about what season it happens in. Right? Like pray that it doesn't happen in.

Bart Ehrman (48:16)

Well, yeah, no, but the prediction that people say is wrong is when in Mark 13, Jesus says not one stone will be left upon another. And people today can go to the Western Wall, there are stones still. But the problem is that Mark wasn't from Jerusalem. And when people talk about the destruction of Jerusalem, even today, they talk about it's completely destroyed and it wasn't. So the fact that Mark has it wrong doesn't mean that he was living before the event.

Ross Douthat (48:44)

Okay, but so you're saying that there are more specific reasons to think that the prophecies are written. So if you just. First of all, it's fine for you to say, okay, Luke's theme is that Paul can't be stopped. So he doesn't want to end with Paul being stopped. But if Luke is writing decades and decades later, everyone knows that Paul was stopped. Everyone knows that Paul was martyred. Right? Nobody seems telling a story and it seems that. But he's telling a story to an audience that is aware of events. Right? So if you're telling a story, just let me. You're telling a story about Martin Luther King, right? And you write the story and you end the story somewhere just short of his assassination. And it's not a history just of Martin Luther King. It's a history of the whole civil rights movement. And it leaves out like a whole sort of back half of these events. That would be an odd narrative choice given that everybody knows, everyone involved in the civil rights movement, everyone involved in American history ever since knows that the signal thing about the end of Martin Luther King's career was that he was assassinated. And by the way, there were riots. There's a whole transformation of American politics associated with.

Bart Ehrman (49:56)

With it.

Ross Douthat (49:56)

It just seems like a big one. It's a big challenge to Write about that without letting that creep into your text.

Bart Ehrman (50:02)

That's right.

Ross Douthat (50:03)

2. Why, if your theme is that Paul could not be stopped and you're a Christian who believes in the resurrection, why wouldn't you end with Paul's martyrdom and say like other Christian martyrs, of which there are many, he continues to influence and shape the church to this day and give sort of further examples. Wouldn't that be be just the much more rhetorically natural style?

Bart Ehrman (50:25)

Well, it may have been, but you can't tell an author what he needs to write. And the Martin Luther King thing, it's an interesting analogy, but I don't think it quite works because that's really kind of the point is the assassination for Paul, according to Luke, that's not the point at all. For one thing, we don't have a lot of records of people being martyred at the time. We actually don't know a lot about Paul's death. The earliest reference we have to Paul experiencing martyrdom is around the year 95 by a book called First Clement. And so we don't have records, we don't know what this author even knew actually.

Ross Douthat (50:59)

But if he's writing later, by the time he's writing Nero's persecution has happened, you have had substantial Christian martyrdoms of some kind. Martyrdom would be part of the story that Christians have to tell. Just seems odd to leave it out.

Bart Ehrman (51:17)

Well, it seems odd if you. But you know, we have lots of historical writings from the ancient world and they don't end where you think they might, where you would end them. And so it's common to tell a life, to tell a biography that has a section of a person's life. So I understand it might seem weird, but I think it seems weirder if you already assume that Luke was writing before 70, then it'd be seem weird to you to think that somebody would think otherwise. I get that, but the question is, what is the actual evidence? It's not where he stops. You can't, you can't.

Ross Douthat (51:52)

That is, that is evidence. It's not the decisive evidence maybe, but it is evidence. Right?

Bart Ehrman (51:57)

So yeah, no, that's right. You look at every piece of evidence and you weigh the probabilities.

Ross Douthat (52:24)

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Ross Douthat (52:55)

I'm Robin and I am excited to open my Crossplay app. I'm challenging John, my colleague at the New York Times. Robin played the word grunge, which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier. I am going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points. I might just take another two letter word here with whoa gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mathing. I like to play it more from a strategic point of view and see where I can block the other player from scoring high. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to to beat friends and co workers. And also you get to learn new words. Crossplay, the first two player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today. I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure. All right, let's go back to the very first point you made. For reasons to treat the Gospels skeptically, which is about contradictions between them. Just give me a couple examples, just so listeners have them, of places where the Gospels contradict themselves or contradict each other in ways that cast doubt on their historical viability or validity. Not viability. Sorry.

Bart Ehrman (54:12)

Well, yeah, so, you know, I've written kind of a long book on this. Jesus Interrupted is this book where I deal with a lot of these. I mean, but they're all levels. I mean, it's interesting because they're at all levels. I'm just kind of on a basic level. In Mark's gospel, usually thought to be the first gospel, Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. And he says, when you go, don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any money, but do take a staff, okay? You got to take a staff because you're going to be walking. So Matthew is exactly the same episode, word for word, the same in places. And in Matthew, he says to the disciples, okay, so don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any extra money, and don't take a staff. So like, wait a second. This is so like. So this is kind of like an obvious thing where it's either like, okay, he either said, take a staff or don't take a staff, but he probably didn't say so. Things like that, you get, you know, those are little things, but sometimes you get fairly big things. Like, what day did Jesus die? All the gospels locate his death around the time of the Passover feast. Mark explicitly has Jesus himself eat the Passover feast with his disciples. And he takes the symbolic foods of the Passover feasts, the bread and the wine. And he instills new significance in them. Says, this is my body that's broken, this is my blood that's given for many. And so they've had a Passover meal. He's arrested afterwards and he spends the night in jail. He's crucified the next morning at 9 o' clock in the morning. Mark specifically dates all of these things. John, our last gospel, also gives specific dates for when things happen. Jesus does have a last meal, but it's not said to be a Passover meal. He talks with his disciples for five chapters, as I said, and then afterwards he's arrested, put on jail, and Pilate condemns him to death and he's crucified afternoon on the day. They're preparing the Passover meal a day earlier. Specifically dated in both cases, John 19:14. So, yeah, so you have that kind. So those are kind of detailed things that make you think, you know, somebody's changing something for some reason of their own. Own. And that's absolutely, I think what's happening. People are changing things for reasons of their own. But there are lots of other things that are simply. I mean, they're just like very big issues involved with, like, what did Jesus actually preach? Why did Jesus do miracles? Why, you know, like big issues between the Gospels. But for most people, like, like me when I was an evangelical, it took a little thing that I just couldn't reconcile anymore to make me realize these are not inerrant. And once you realize that it opens. It actually improves your interpretation of these Gospels. It makes it possible to understand each Gospel for what they're trying to say rather than trying to make them all say the same thing.

Ross Douthat (57:06)

Yeah, I guess so. To me, as someone, I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, I'm a Catholic. And Catholics believe in some version of inerrancy of Scripture. But being Catholic, there's like 17 different theological schools about what that means. To me, though, it often seems like, like at least some of the kinds of things you're describing. While they would undermine faith, if you feel obliged to believe that the Gospels can never get a name wrong or a date wrong or anything like that, or else you have to throw them out. If you're evaluating the likelihood that these are texts that actually come from eyewitnesses. Come from eyewitnesses. Through mediation, someone is writing down eyewitness accounts. Fine. Right. But come from eyewitnesses, they're actually what you would expect. Right. Like this is. So I, you know, I've written, I guess, two memoir ish books, and one of them was about my undergraduate experience, God help me, and one of them was about having Lyme disease. And in both cases, just the nature of memoir writing means sort of at phase one, you misremember certain things, you get certain things wrong, you're a writer, so you sort of telescope narratives. Sometimes things are compressed and so on. Right. All of that happens. And yet I still think of them as truthful testimonies about what happened to me that some future historian could reasonably rely upon. Then, in the case of the Lyme disease book, my wife wrote a book about the science of sort of the maternal transformation in which she discussed some of her own experiences as a mother and included details about being the wife of someone struggling with Lyme disease. And, you know, when I read her account, there were obviously, there were things that she interpreted differently. So two people married, living in the same house, raising kids together. Right. Differences enter in from the beginning, but that happening in the Gospels seems like in a certain way, evidence of their basic historical reliability. Just in the sense that, like, if I handed you as a historian, right. Four documents written by different authors, and they all agreed on every particular. Right. They all hit the same point and their theology was clear. They all had exactly the same theology. Wouldn't you be more skeptical of those documents than you would be of.

Bart Ehrman (59:37)

Yes. Right.

Ross Douthat (59:40)

Okay, then my work here is done, I guess.

Bart Ehrman (59:43)

No, it's not. Because, I mean, would that we had memoir, we don't have memoirs. These people don't claim to be eyewitnesses. They don't claim to. These are not eyewitness reports. I mean, if Peter had written a gospel, that'd be great. Unfortunately, Peter was illiterate, and so he. I mean, even in the New Testament, by the way, Peter is called illiterate. Acts 4, 13. He was Agromatos, didn't know his letters. So we don't have anything from these apostles. What we have are stories in a different language in different parts of the world from people who weren't there who are telling us what they've heard. And so that's not the same as you writing a memoir.

Ross Douthat (60:25)

So it's not the same as me writing a memoir. At the same time, though, and this is where I guess we just sort of disagree. I think Mark is pretty clearly Peter talking to somebody. Why?

Bart Ehrman (60:39)

Why? Why?

Ross Douthat (60:40)

Because it appears as Peter's story, right?

Bart Ehrman (60:44)

No, it doesn't.

Ross Douthat (60:45)

No, it doesn't. Peter is a dominant character in it relative to the other Gospels. Peter's. There's all these little grace notes in Aramaic where Peter. It's somebody remembering exactly, sort of the word Jesus speaks and so on, Right. You don't think that's.

Bart Ehrman (61:00)

If you're raised thinking this is Peter's gospel, then it might sound like that. If you have no assumption about that at all, it would never occur to you that this is Peter's version of the story.

Ross Douthat (61:09)

No, no. And you don't think. And I'm not gonna.

Bart Ehrman (61:12)

I just think that there's no. Since the Gospels don't claim to be by eyewitnesses, that to say that they're eyewitness testimonies. On what grounds? Why would you think that? You don't think that? I mean, when you read other ancient histories, I mean, you know, and when you read ancient historians like Thucydides, he tells you that he doesn't know what these speeches were, what the speeches were. Like, how would he know? He wasn't there. He made them up. He tells us he made them. That's what historians do. He says they make it up. You know who the care person is. And you think, well, what would he likely have said in this case? Well, then you come up with something, right?

Ross Douthat (61:49)

But in the case just in the Synoptic Gospels, right across the different sources that Mark, Matthew, I mean, that Matthew and Luke are using, since we know they're probably using Mark. Setting aside other debates there, Jesus doesn't come across as a character that Thucydides made up. He comes across as someone who's being described by people who listen to him talk. You don't think so?

Bart Ehrman (62:13)

So we have the Sermon on the Mount. It's found only in Matthew chapters 5, 6 and 7. It's three chapters long. Matthew's usually dated to around the year

Ross Douthat (62:21)

80 to 85, unless Luke was written earlier, in which case Matthew's earlier. But sure, yeah.

Bart Ehrman (62:29)

So I asked my students whether they heard the last inaugural address. You know, say some. I did this some months after the last inaugural address. They said, yes, I heard it. I said, okay, write it down for me. How could they possibly write it down? How could somebody 50 years after Jesus gave this address know what he said? And if Jesus did give the Sermon on the Mount, why isn't it in any of the other gospels? Like, they just didn't think that part was important. You see what I'm saying? These are stories about Jesus that have been circulating that different authors have put together in different ways. And the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke sound so similar is because Matthew and Luke used Mark. They have the same source.

Ross Douthat (63:14)

I will just say the claim about why people would remember the words of Jesus and why they're different from listening to Donald Trump give an endless, you know, an endless inaugural address, right. Is that these stories were told to people who were explicitly his followers, who believed him to be potentially the Messiah, who were often living in community with one another, and who then experienced a radically transformative event that caused them to have stronger reasons from the beginning to share and circulate and remember these stories. And therefore, they're more like. More like maybe somebody writing a story about their own family 20 or 30 years later or sharing stories about their own family than they are like me sharing a story about what I remember the first inaugural address to be.

Bart Ehrman (64:04)

So the fact that these were followers of Jesus is probably not the reason for thinking they're more historically accurate, because the followers of Jesus have their own reasons for portraying Jesus in ways that they understand him. People tell stories all the time about people that are important to them, and the stories. Stories change. So the question is, what do we know about oral tradition? What do we know about how people passed on stories both today and in antiquity? And there's actually a whole field of research on this, and it's not favorable to the idea that people remembered things verbatim since for.

Ross Douthat (64:38)

But they don't have to remember things verbatim to have general accuracy. That's different from someone making up a speech. Right. To your own example. Right. If someone. Someone. If one community remembers that Jesus said, do take a staff, and one community remembers that he said, don't take a staff. Right. You still could have a pretty good sense that Jesus said some version of that dialogue.

Bart Ehrman (65:01)

No, you don't know that Jesus said it. You have to analyze it. What are the grounds for thinking he said it? Just like what are the grounds for thinking that George Washington said something or other? How do you go about establishing it? It isn't just because it's found in several sources, especially if these sources used each other. If you've got three biographies of George Washington that all say he said the same thing, and These biographers all used each other. Then that's not, you know, you got one source. You don't have three sources.

Ross Douthat (65:27)

One of the people you've debated in your many debates is a scholar and writer named Peter Williams, who wrote a book called Can We Trust the Gospels? Right.

Bart Ehrman (65:38)

Have you seen my debate with him?

Ross Douthat (65:39)

Yes. Yes.

Bart Ehrman (65:40)

So I encourage people who want to know about his views about things and my views to watch that debate.

Ross Douthat (65:45)

I encourage that as well. Gives you the extra two hours that this conversation is missing. Right. But this will be my last question on this point. Williams makes the argument that if you look at details in the Gospels that are not about sort of things Jesus said but are about place names, geography. Right. How often does a given name appear versus what was actually common in the 30s or the 20s, right. In Palestine? They do remarkably well. It looks like the people who are describing, writing and talking about these things actually knew the geography of the Holy Land quite well. Actually knew sort of the nomenclature of people in this region quite well. Right. And I watched your debate and you said basically something to the effect of just because somebody, Nobody gets it right, that New York City has five streets going this way and that the typical name in the Bronx is Vinnie. Right. It doesn't mean that they're going to be right about what happened on a particular day and a particular. An actual event. Right. Which is a fair point. At the same time, in the back and forth we've just been having, you've been emphasizing the idea that Gospels are written decades later. They're written. Written in another language. They're written maybe written down all over the Roman Empire. Right. Not just in the Near East. And that because of this, when you're talking about things Jesus said, there's just too many cycles, too much distance and so on. Why didn't those cycles and those distance make Williams's argument obsolete? Why don't people just get the names wrong after 60 years? Why don't they start introducing massive errors of geography, too? Why are all the errors that you imagine to be there about things Jesus said, as opposed to like where is Jericho in relationship to Jerusalem? Shouldn't there be more errors of fact just through this cycle process you're describing?

Bart Ehrman (67:49)

Well, there are errors of fact that Peter doesn't talk about in the Gospels. I mean, they're just geographical errors. So, you know, there are those things. The fact that somebody tells a story about a certain place and gets the place names. Right. Right. Doesn't mean that the story's right.

Ross Douthat (68:05)

No, absolutely.

Bart Ehrman (68:07)

But if you have it's irrelevant to the question about whether the stories about Jesus are things that happen.

Ross Douthat (68:12)

But it can't be irrelevant in the sense that if the gospels got place names badly wrong and introduced a lot of random, weird names in place of what were actually the names that were normal in 25 A.D. you as a historian would say, well, that's a reason to think it's not true.

Bart Ehrman (68:28)

That's right.

Ross Douthat (68:29)

So the fact that they get things right has to be a reason for giving them some credit.

Bart Ehrman (68:33)

It doesn't work that way. Way.

Ross Douthat (68:34)

Why not?

Bart Ehrman (68:34)

Okay, doesn't work that way because of this. If you know the location of places, that doesn't mean that you know what happened in those locations. You're asking about what is what's described. Jesus having said and done accurate. If you say, well, it must be accurate because he knows where Jericho is in relationship to Jerusalem.

Ross Douthat (68:54)

I'm not saying that it must be accurate. I'm saying that you are saying that the process of oral tradition necessarily introduces a large set of errors in terms of memory of statements.

Bart Ehrman (69:09)

I'm not saying it necessarily does.

Ross Douthat (69:10)

Necessarily does. But it.

Bart Ehrman (69:12)

It does. But it doesn't. But look, if there were errors all over the place about geography, that would call the stories into question. If there are not errors of geography, then it's neutral. Are the stories historical or not?

Ross Douthat (69:27)

No, but it's evidence. It's not neutral because it strongly implies that the origins of these stories, that certain key elements of these stories were transmitted successfully across the process you've described. That's all I'm saying.

Bart Ehrman (69:43)

Yes, exactly.

Ross Douthat (69:43)

Like the place where the geography of the near east, allowing for some errors, was transmitted fairly successfully across.

Bart Ehrman (69:52)

It's actually not all that great, if you want to know the truth. But, I mean, there are geographical errors. But look, if I tell a story about somebody murdered right in front of the Empire State Building, the fact I know where the Empire State Building is doesn't mean the person was murdered there.

Ross Douthat (70:31)

In theory. I knew that. This kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals. And I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan. Murder me. What the hell was Alan thinking? From Serial Productions and the New York Times. I'm EM Gessen, and this is the idiot. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's. I. I will return us to our original theme and. And bring. And bring us to a close. Like Luke. Luke ending. When There was so much more to be said.

Bart Ehrman (71:18)

There you go.

Ross Douthat (71:20)

Just as a historian then, we've sort of walked around this a few times. But just directly, what do you make of the resurrection stories? What do you think happened for Easter Week?

Bart Ehrman (71:30)

Yeah, I think the followers of Jesus definitely thought that before he died. I think they thought that he must be the Messiah or that he possibly was the Messiah. There are different views about what the Messiah would be be at the time within Judaism. But whatever the view was, every view of the Messiah thought that he would be a powerful figure who would overthrow the enemies of God and set up a kingdom of some way. That was their expectation. Rather than that happening, though, Jesus was arrested and he was put on trial and was crucified publicly, humiliated and tortured to death. I think it's absolutely the case that, that some of his disciples afterwards thought that he had been raised from the dead. My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterwards. I don't know how many people had the visions. I don't know whether there were groups, whether a few individuals eventually convinced the others. And people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. They started proclaiming that they convinced people of it and that's the beginning of Christianity. Now if you're a Christian, that's perfectly fine because you can just say, well, yes, he did appear to people. If you're not a Christian, it's also perfectly fine. You can say they thought they had visions of Jesus. You don't have to have an explanation. It could be a mistaken identity. It could be a dream. It could be there are all sorts. People have visions of Jesus.

Ross Douthat (72:56)

Probably not a mistaken identity. Right. I mean, that seems that you see Jesus cousin who looks like him and you think he's a liar.

Bart Ehrman (73:05)

A couple years ago I was giving a lecture in Michigan and there's a guy on the third row who I thought was my dad.

Ross Douthat (73:11)

Right.

Bart Ehrman (73:12)

My dad had died 15 years before that. So I just. It's just like, oh my God. That just looks so.

Ross Douthat (73:19)

You're so. But so. But so then. Sorry. So mistaken identity. You mean one person has this experience? It's not that everybody thinks there's a guy walking around.

Bart Ehrman (73:28)

No, I don't think Jesus appeared to set 500 people one time. I think it's pretty clear Paul believes he saw Jesus. We don't know how he would have identified Jesus. He didn't know Jesus during his lifetime. But he saw something he said was Jesus. I think Peter claimed to have a vision of Jesus. I think Mary Magdalene probably Did do you think that?

Ross Douthat (73:46)

Because as a reader, like the scene where Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus seems kind of like it comes from an eyewitness account.

Bart Ehrman (73:54)

No.

Ross Douthat (73:54)

No. Okay. I can't sell you on that at all.

Bart Ehrman (73:58)

No. Well, how would you verify that it's not.

Ross Douthat (74:00)

So why do you think Mary Magdalene had a vision of Jesus if you don't?

Bart Ehrman (74:04)

As a historian, you look at independent sources that claim something, and it's independently attested that Peter did and that Mary did. And so I think that that's completely plausible. There's also.

Ross Douthat (74:14)

But you're never struck by these passages just sort of as a human being encountering another human being's narrative and think to yourself that something like that happened.

Bart Ehrman (74:24)

Well, I'm struck by the passages. They're extremely powerful passages, but that doesn't mean they happen happened. And so I think that one of the interesting things about the resurrection, two things that people haven't noticed, my first point is that the empty tomb in the New Testament never brings about faith. It always brings doubt. And so it was never taken as the evidence.

Ross Douthat (74:47)

And I will say, if I encountered the empty tomb, it would not have turned me into. No, no. It's a source of. Which is, again, part of what is. Strikes me as quite realistic about the narratives that people don't respond to the empty tomb by saying, ah, now we will proclaim Christ risen. Right.

Bart Ehrman (75:06)

Yeah, well, okay, fair enough. But that's the other interesting thing, is that all the resurrection narratives are filled with doubt. In the Book of Acts, one of the strangest verses in the New Testament is Acts 1:3, where it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples, proving to them with many proofs that he was alive. And you think, how many proofs does he need? Why does it take 40 days? But that is the interesting thing, is that in all of these accounts, you have these doubt traditions. What are those doubt traditions about?

Ross Douthat (75:37)

Aren't they about the fact that as you yourself said earlier, people do not normally rise from the dead? And so the normal human reaction is the doubting Thomas reaction to say, let me tell you, watch him. Right?

Bart Ehrman (75:50)

It would be. But if you're sitting here in front of me, I'm not doubting you're sitting here in front of me.

Ross Douthat (75:55)

Well, if your father, your late father was sitting here in front of you, you would doubt that he was sitting there in front of you.

Bart Ehrman (76:00)

The point is that he wasn't.

Ross Douthat (76:01)

Right.

Bart Ehrman (76:02)

I thought he was right. Right. So if he had spent 40 days with me, he wouldn't have to be doing tricks to Prove to me he was alive. And so my point is, I feel

Ross Douthat (76:11)

like if my father is still alive, I feel like if my father died an awful death of crucifixion and then he started appearing to me, it would take a long time before I was ready to believe that he was really there.

Bart Ehrman (76:22)

You might think that, but in fact, there are a lot of psychological studies of visions, especially of recently deceased loved ones. And virtually everybody who has it is sure it happened.

Ross Douthat (76:33)

Right. But the claim that the early Christians make is precisely that this isn't just a vision of a departed loved one. This is a world altering event that is going to inspire them to missionary work and martyrdom, which most people who have a vision, a dream or whatever about their departed loved one don't have. Right. I mean, that's. It just seems like your account of this as, you know, something that happens all the time. Somebody dies and, you know, and people have visions and they sort of decide that the vision was real. Just seems quite different from a situation where you have more radical claims and a lot of doubt about these radical claims all mixed together in a way that suddenly sets a new religion in motion.

Bart Ehrman (77:18)

No, I can explain. I mean, because we didn't get to that part, but. So I know you're. We're almost at our seven hours here, but let me just say that my point of saying that they thought Jesus was the Messiah before he died is the critical point. Because when he got crucified, it showed he was not the Messiah. He was not the one who's going to destroy the enemies. But then they had these visions and they came to think he was alive again. So they thought, oh, we misunderstood. We thought he was going to destroy the Romans. God must have wanted him to die. The fact that God wanted him to die has shown in the fact that God raised him from the dead. He's raised from the dead. His death is the way of salvation. Then Jesus must have had to die. God must have wanted him to die because he was the chosen one. How do we know he's the chosen one? He got raised from the dead. Well, if God had his chosen one killed, why sacrifice for sins? That's the beginning of Christianity. As soon as these people started realizing, oh my God, he's raised from the dead, they thought that his death was a sacrifice that starts Christianity.

Ross Douthat (78:19)

So why is there the doubt, tradition? Why is there all this material about the need for physical proof? And like, why isn't the collective. I'm saying, why isn't the collective vision enough? Why do the Gospels lean so hard. One, on this mystery. The tomb is empty, we can't explain it. Two, on certain of describing these encounters with Jesus that are like, hard to figure out. You know, you're seeing him on the road to Emmaus, he's eating fish, he's here, he's there. Like, why doesn't the vision stuff sort of clean things up? Especially again, given that in your account these are all being written later and

Bart Ehrman (78:55)

smoothed out, because by that time, when they're being written later, we have records of Christians who think that Jesus wasn't physically raised from the dead, but was spiritually raised from the dead. The dead. And Paul's saying, no, no, no, it's a physical resurrection. These accounts in Luke and John where Jesus is eating fish and, you know, touching my wounds and things is meant to show that it actually was a physical resurrection. So these authors are trying to show that this is not just like some kind of spirit of Jesus going up to heaven or something. This is actually a physical resurrection which fits into the Jewish apocalyptic view.

Ross Douthat (79:26)

But why are they including all of the doubt?

Bart Ehrman (79:28)

They include the doubt because it's historical. There were apostles who doubt, doubted it.

Ross Douthat (79:33)

Right, but you're trying to sell an argument decades and decades after the fact.

Bart Ehrman (79:38)

You want to prove that Jesus really was raised.

Ross Douthat (79:40)

Right. But why are the stories so strange? Why are they not sort of straightforward? You know, Jesus was raised and then he taught us these things and that's it. Why do you have, you know, you've got all the empty tomb stories, you've got people not recognizing him and then recognizing him. Right. You've got, he's passing through walls one moment, he's eating three fish the next. Right. Doesn't that seem to reflect a fundamental initial strangeness in how people are experiencing it rather than something that is constructed for propaganda purposes decades later?

Bart Ehrman (80:13)

Propaganda? Wait, wait, you put words on my lips.

Ross Douthat (80:16)

You're saying that they had to emphasize the physical reality to win an argument with the spiritual eyed, the people who said it was spiritual. And I'm saying that it just seems like it's all a weird mixture from the start.

Bart Ehrman (80:28)

It is a weird mixture from the start. Look, if. If you see somebody that was publicly executed and then you see them alive, it's going to be a weird experience. But my point about the proof, the eating the fish and things, is that these people are telling the stories about Jesus resurrection to people who don't believe. And they're saying, yes, you don't believe. It doesn't make sense. But I'm telling You we saw him eat fish afterwards, so you know there was an empty tomb. These are proofs to convince those who are doubting. So you put doubt into the story to show that the doubts were resolved within the story.

Ross Douthat (81:03)

Let's end by just going back, going back to your book. Right? And we started this conversation a long time ago talking about the moral transformation that Jesus made and the idea that you were supposed to love your enemies, love people who persecuted you, love the stranger far away, who has nothing in common with you. All of these sort of transformative ideas. Right? You like those ideas, right?

Bart Ehrman (81:31)

Yes, I do.

Ross Douthat (81:34)

If the Gospels ended with the crucifixion and Jesus's death, right. You would have a story where someone came along and preached that it was important to love your enemies and important to care for the stranger and so on. And that person was crucified and died a horrible death, and that was the end of the story. And he talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the last being first, and look where he ended up. Right. Isn't that the power of the argument for Jesus ethics kind of inherently bound up in the idea that he won?

Bart Ehrman (82:19)

Well, Christianity would not have become a thing if Jesus had died and there was no story of his resurrection. It just would have been. He would have been another prophet who preached something and then got killed for it and boom, that was it. So there wouldn't be Christianity. But the power of the Christian message from the very beginning was the message that Paul has, which is that it seems a little bit ridiculous. Ridiculous that God's chosen one is crucified. And it seems a little bit ridiculous that the way to access ultimate divine power is by being a slave. But it's Jesus message. You have to serve others rather than dominate message. It's so contrary to what's in our DNA and what's in every other culture. But because they thought it got raised from the dead, they thought it proved it. You have to be willing to die for others if you want to have life, if you want to have treasures in heaven, you have to sell everything you have Now. Now, completely contrary to what people would think. But it's because of the resurrection. Yes, absolutely. It's the belief in the Resurrection that ends up making this the powerful message that transformed the West.

Ross Douthat (83:21)

And isn't it also just to your own personal reasons for being an agnostic or a non believer? Right. Part of the power is also that it's not a logical answer, but it's at least a poetic answer to the problem of evil. Right. The Question of why God allows suffering is not resolved by God himself suffering, but it is at least, least addressed.

Bart Ehrman (83:44)

It's a powerful message that God. I mean, when I was still a liberal Christian, when I was a liberal Christian, I thought that the point of the Gospel message was really that, that God had entered into the world and suffered with us. And that's a very powerful message. I mean, it's not one that I agree with anymore, but I, I can recognize it is a really powerful message and that it's so contrary to the way of the world that it, that has special poignancy to it.

Ross Douthat (84:11)

And here you are, so many years later, a sterling example of academic historical skepticism, and you're writing a book trying to persuade people that Jesus message has something to it. Is it possible that you're still in some sense a follower of Jesus of Nazareth?

Bart Ehrman (84:31)

I sometimes call myself a Christian atheist because I don't believe in Christ, God. I absolutely don't believe in God or any supernatural powers. But I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can. But although, you know, I'm not a very good follower of Jesus, I haven't sold everything and given to the poor. But I, but I, I think that that message is one that, that I want to embrace.

Ross Douthat (84:58)

Okay. Bart Ehrman, thank you for joining me. Thank you and Happy Easter in advance.

Bart Ehrman (85:03)

Happy Easter.

Ross Douthat (85:29)

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