← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:00]
Shopify Advertiser
You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet, like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial today@shopify.com Winner.
- [00:30]
Megan Lewis
Love him or hate him. If you're listening to this podcast, then you're probably familiar with some of the ideas that Dr. Bart Ehrman holds. But how familiar are you with the ideas he used to hold when he was an evangelical Christian? Today we're talking about five Christian ideas that Barth used to hold. Some you'll know and some you might not. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is Scholars Spotlight, where Bart will tell us about a biblical scholar that he thinks we should know. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus podcast with Dr. Bart Ehrman. Bart, for listeners who may not know your story terribly well, could you walk us through your faith journey from evangelical beginnings to where you are now?
- [01:09]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, do it quickly because I think a lot of people have heard it and I don't want to bore everybody. But you know, I was raised, I was raising Episcopalian, so I wasn't evangelical until I was 15. I had a born again experience and in high school and became a committed evangelical. And then the person who had led me to Christ, as they said, and I think probably still say when convert people had gone to Moody Bible Institute and convinced me that rather than doing something secular like being on the debate team at Kansas University, I should go to Moody Bible Institute. And I wanted to be a serious Christian. And I thought this is how you be a serious Christian. You go to Moody Bible Institute. So I did. And I was a fundamentalist for several years. And then as I studied the Bible more, I, I moved away from fundamentalist kind of Christianity to more kind of mainstream Christianity. I went to a Presbyterian seminary, not because I was Presbyterian, but because the, the expert in Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in the world happened to teach there. So I went there to study with him, a man named Bruce Metzger, a very, very fine and just one of the great scholars of the 20th century while there, not because so much of Bruce Metzger, but because of other things I was doing studying the Bible in Greek and learning Hebrew and studying the Old Testament in Hebrew and thinking about theology. And I shifted away and became more of a mainline Christian with fairly more liberal views. And that went on for a number of years until I actually moved to Chapel Hill. I was still active in the church. I returned to the Episcopal Church and was teaching adult education and. But about 30 years ago, because of things unrelated to my views of the Bible, but trying to deal. Wrestle with the realities of the world, the realities of pain and suffering in this world that is supposed to be run by God, I came to the conclusion I just didn't believe it anymore. So about 30 years ago, I left the faith. So I've, you know, I'm still obviously hugely interested in the Bible and the historical Jesus and the, you know, the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and early Christianity, all of that. But I'm not no longer a believer. So there, there are, There are views that I used to hold very firmly that I absolutely do not hold anymore.
- [03:36]
Megan Lewis
And that is the topic of today's conversation, those firmly held views that are no longer yours. And you actually very helpfully sent me a list ahead of time, so I know what I'm supposed to be asking you. So the first one that you sent was that the Bible had no errors. How. How error free are we talking? Like, there's no grammatical, no spelling errors, no errors in, like, historical events.
- [04:02]
Shopify Advertiser
What.
- [04:02]
Megan Lewis
What does that actually mean?
- [04:04]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
So I should I preface this by telling everyone that when you saw this list of five, you said, I never thought any of those things.
- [04:12]
Megan Lewis
And then you called me a pagan.
- [04:14]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, okay. Which is. All right, fair enough. Yeah. And. But. But you were raised in a church as well, right?
- [04:20]
Megan Lewis
Yes.
- [04:21]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, but in the Anglican tradition, which is. Which is. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, which is the American version of that. So I, I get that. So. Right. One of the core beliefs at Moody Bible Institute, as in other fundamentalists and other even conservative evangelical places, is that the Bible is inerrant. And people can interpret that in different ways. And people did interpret it in different ways, even at Moody. But I think at Moody, most people thought that there aren't any mistakes of any kind. No, they're not. They're not talking about spelling errors because we, we actually don't have. We knew they didn't have. We don't have the original manuscripts of the New Testament, so we don't know how they spelled words. We knew that scribes had changed the text in places. And so we weren't saying. We weren't saying that, like, you know, the King James Bible has no mistakes in it or that the Greek text that people paste their translations on had no mistakes in it. We, we had a term for this. We said that the New Testament was inerrant and the Old Testament in the autographs, which we meant. Autograph means the, the original writing itself. So whoever wrote Matthew, when he wrote Matthew, what he wrote did not have mistakes in it. He might have had spelling errors, but he didn't have, he made no mistakes about what Jesus said or did in detail. He had no contradictions within himself or against any other book. Everything he said was absolutely true. And not just Matthew, but all 27 books of the New Testament, all 39 books of the Old Testament. And that within those 66 books there are no contradictions. There are things that might seem like a contradiction. There might be things that we don't understand. We can't figure out why they aren't contradicted. But we were committed. There are no mistakes of any kind, including geography, science, you know, biology, evolution, all of that. Whatever the Bible says is the truth.
- [06:24]
Megan Lewis
But just the autographs.
- [06:26]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Just the autographs that we don't have. Yeah, because, you know, I've had, I, I. There are people who still say that the reason I left the faith is because I realized that our manuscripts have differences in them. I've got a, I've got a friend who wrote a book saying that. Like I'm saying that on the first page. And he couldn't have just asked me. He's like, are you kidding me? I' knew this when I was a fundamentalist. I knew that the woman taken an adultery wasn't originally in the New Testament. Of course I knew all that. And so, yeah, so that, yeah, but so it's accepting, you know, what mistakes that crept in later by human error. The Bible itself was inerrant.
- [07:03]
Megan Lewis
So just to keep on the woman taken in adultery for a moment, if that's something that was introduced later, how did you, as an evangelical, understand which, which bits of the Bible, which bits of the New Testament were in fact original and which bits had been added? And were the bits that were added in still important somehow? Or did you mostly disregard those?
- [07:28]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, I. So this is what got me into scholarship, this very question. This is why I became a scholar. Because since I thought that the originals were inspired by God and that the words themselves came from God, I didn't think that God dictated them, but I think he, I thought he made sure that they were right. He made sure there were no mistakes in them, then it meant I had to find the original words. And that's a field of scholarship, you know, which, which fundamentalists can do just as well as crazy atheists, you know, trying to figure out what the original words were. And so there are, there are a set of criteria that scholars use, have used for a long time that look pretty reliable when taken as a group to establish what the originals were. Even though now I know there are lots of places we don't know, but the criteria are pretty effective and in most of the places.
- [08:18]
Megan Lewis
Interesting. I think the first time I came up against this assertion that the Bible was free of errors because it was inspired and therefore can't be wrong. I was in college and I was talking to a friend and he was telling me, with the conviction that you can only muster as a white dude, certain that God agrees with you and only you, that homosexuality was in fact a sin and that we knew it was a sin because of the Bible. And I kept saying to him, but the Bible was written by, by people and people make mistakes and we are all fallible. And he kept just saying, yes, but it was inspired by God and it was like banging my head against a brick wall.
- [08:58]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's no arguing against it on one level. If somebody thinks that it doesn't matter, you can show a flat out contradiction. I mean, it is just a contradiction. And you know, when I was like that, I would just say, well, no, we can reconcile that. And I would reconcile it and I agreed with this person. If the Bible says something, boom, that's true.
- [09:18]
Megan Lewis
So can you give us an example of one of these reconciliations before we move on to your next idea?
- [09:27]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, if the Gospel of John says that Jesus died the day before the Passover meal was eaten, and the Gospel of Mark says that Jesus died on the day after the Passover meal was eaten, it's because one of them is using the Roman calendar and the other is using the Jewish calendar. They're using different calendars. That's why it looks like a contradiction. But no, it's just one's. They're just following different calendars. Okay. And that kind of thing seems completely plausible if you don't know, if you don't know enough, and you know, we didn't know enough.
- [10:03]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. There's some fascinating mental gymnastics that goes on with some of these reconciliations, which is very interesting to hear. Okay. The second idea that you used to hold as an evangelical Christian, the Old Testament prophecies clearly points to Jesus. So what, what is. Can you give us an example maybe of one of these prophecies that Absolutely, most definitely 100 are talking about Jesus?
- [10:30]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, today, if if any Christian reads Isaiah, chapter 53, which is one of the four passages in the. This part of Isaiah that talks about the suffering servant of the Lord, there is no Christian on the planet who can read that passage and not think Jesus. And so it says. So it's talking about somebody who suffers, that God has him suffer for the sake of others. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities by His. The chastisement for our peace was upon him. By his wounds we were healed. And it talks about him being led to the slaughter as a lamb that was silent. And. And it has all of these things. And you just read this man that's talking about Jesus crucifixion. And the reason Christians think that is because that. That became the Christian teaching about this passage in the Old Testament, you know, in the early, in the second century. And so it just is the natural way to read the passage or earlier in Isaiah, A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Well, that's Jesus. He got born of a virgin. So there are passages like that, that, that just when a Christian reads them, they just, boom, it's Chris, It's Jesus. And. And they have real trouble understanding why Jews don't get it. You know, it's clear as day, it's Jesus. What are you blind? Can't you read? Are you like, are you stupid or something? Why. I don't get it. Why don't they understand? Yeah.
- [12:03]
Megan Lewis
So now that you're not holding those views anymore, how do you understand those or what do you understand those prophecies to be about what is like the biblical, scholarly understanding of them?
- [12:15]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So there are a couple things to say about it. What one is, this is a. This is a favorite argument of Christian apologists. I got asked this very question three nights ago at an event I was doing by. By a college student who just wanted to know, what do you do with the fact that you have all of these prophecies, dozens of these prophecies that got fulfilled by Jesus. He got born in Bethlehem. He, you know, he died between two robbers. He. He was raised from the dead. You just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And he had, you know, Old Testament passages in his head. And so a couple things to say about. One is that the. When you actually read these passages in their context, so you don't just like, lift them out. Like, you just don't lift a verse out and say, wow, that sure sounds like Jesus. You actually read the entire chapter and you read the entire book and you read the author and you read, like, the context, and you try to understand where this was written historically and culturally. Once you do that, these prophecies just kind of disappear because they're clearly not talking about that. The book of Isaiah, when he's talking about this one, that is suffering, the suffering servant, which I think maybe we talked about this recently on a podcast, that there are four passages about this figure, the suffering servant, in the second part of Isaiah. And in two of those four passages, it identifies signifies who it's talking about. It explicitly says, this is Israel, the suffering servant. The exiles who have gone off to Babylon have suffered for the sins of the people. And so now it's enough God's accepting that atonement, and now they'll be restored to the land. And so you can go passage by passage and show, show that, that it, that it says something. Something other than that. The other thing to bear in mind, though that's a little bit harder for people to get their mind around sometimes, is that when the Gospel writers were writing their accounts, they knew these passages and they believed Jesus was the Messiah. So they knew that Jesus fulfilled scripture, and they wrote their accounts in a way that reflects the fulfillment of Scripture. So it's not that they're giving, like, you know, objective reports as if they, like, were taking notes at the time of Jesus did this or did that. It's that they are writing their accounts to show that he fulfilled Scripture. So of course you have these similarities. That's how they were written, to show the similarities.
- [14:38]
Megan Lewis
When you were an evangelical, were you aware that the context around these passages quite easily showed that they weren't talking about Jesus? Or were they taken in isolation so frequently that it just wasn't even on your radar?
- [14:54]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Most of the time they were just taken in isolation. When they were, when they were taken in context. For example, Hosea, chapter 11, which says, out of Egypt, I, I, I have called my son. That's quoted in the Gospel of Matthew to explain why Jesus and Joseph and Mary fled down to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. And then they came back to fulfill the scripture that says, out of Egypt have I called my son? The Hosea passage is clearly talking about the people of Israel escaping their slavery in Egypt under Moses. And so what we would say in that case is that, yes, it has a double fulfillment. The Exodus event was foreshadowing what God was planning to do with the Messiah, so that it isn't that it has to be one or the other. It's both things. And if I were still like an evangelical, that's probably how I'd want to interpret these things. Even though some of them don't work as neatly as that. Like this virgin, the virgin giving birthday. It just doesn't work as we've talked about before. But other ones you can talk about a double fulfillment.
- [15:59]
Megan Lewis
Can you talk about. Or can you view the, the suffering servant sections as a double fulfillment?
- [16:06]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
You could do. Yeah. If I was, if I was a Christian who believed that the Old Testament's predicting the New, I would say that. But when you read Isaiah, it's quite clear he has no, he's not talking about a future Messiah. That's the major point. And when people read Isaiah 53, they read the Messiah into it. The word Messiah never occurs there or any of these suffering servant passages. The only one that Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah calls the Messiah, explicitly calls a messiah who's going to do God's will is the Persian king Cyrus. He calls him God's Messiah who's going to do God's will. So he's a pagan, by the way. That's an interesting passage too. But. So Isaiah doesn't talk about a future suffering Messiah at all. If you think he is, you have to import it in there because it's not there.
- [16:54]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. We're going to have a brief announcement, then we'll be back with the three other ideas that Bart used to hold. I want to just get a few updates from you, Bart. First, your new book, Love Thy Stranger has been out for about a month. How did the launch go?
- [17:10]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, it was very busy. I did seven interviews yesterday. So that's going well. And I'm getting a lot, lot of positive feedback from people I wouldn't expect. I got a, I got an email from a Christian, evangelical Christian apologist today saying they really liked the book. And I'm getting notes from people who are definitely not evangelical Christian apologists like the book. So it's a. So I think it, it is going well and I'm really, I'm really quite pleased with it.
- [17:43]
Megan Lewis
And people can sign up to take the free companion course@lovethestranger.com and also learn more about the book. I also wanted to ask about the blog. So I read that you just celebrated your 14 year anniversary. Congratulations. And did a fun meetup called Hypothetically speaking. So could you tell us what that was about and update us on any other blog news?
- [18:07]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, so we, we've had 14 years now at the blog and we've raised three and a half million dollars. And, well, all the money, every, every penny of that went to charities dealing with hunger and homelessness and disaster relief and such. And so I haven't, I haven't gotten a dime out of it. Nobody, nobody else has gotten a dime out of the. People have to pay again this monthly fee. And they can pay, they can pay a monthly fee. And they. It's. It's not a lot. It's. It's like kind of crazily cheap. It's like, you know, $2 a month for the lowest level, and you get five posts a week, you know, every week going back 14 years and access to the archives. It's kind of a good deal. It's a good deal. And so I hope people can look at it and possibly join. The event was a lot of fun. We just had people who were like, donors who. And we had hypothetical questions that we would all raise. So not like academic questions, but like, what if kinds of questions that they'd ask me and I'd say my opinion, they'd give their opinions. It was really fun. And I think it's actually available to people who are on the BL if they want to, they want to listen to it.
- [19:13]
Megan Lewis
And if that does sound interesting to you and you want to be able to read five posts a week from Bart and other fantastic people, you can go to ehrmanblog.org, not.com, ehrmanblog.org and find out more information there. And finally, before we return to our conversation, I have a very exciting announcement relating to our support of charity water. For those who don't know about this amazing charity, the problem that they're solving is that 703 million people around the world lack access to clean water, forcing them to spend many hours each day collecting unsafe water that harms their health and limits their opportunities. So we support charity water by donating $1 from every course sold and 50 cents from every biblical studies renewal to help fund water projects. Last year, we hit our first giving threshold of $10,000, which was donated in September. And we recently found out that this will be used to fund a project for in need in Tanzania that's probably coming this year or early 2027. I'm very proud to announce that we have just hit another $10,000 threshold and that got sent in earlier this month. And I know that this is a very important commitment to all of us here. So on behalf of Chris, Bart and myself and the whole Paths in Biblical Studies team, thank you so much. For trusting us with your course and Biblical Studies Academy purchases we use. We really couldn't do this without your help. And if you want to learn more about our support for Charity Water or to make a donation, you can visit bartiman.com forward/charity water. So thank you all. Ah, that's $20,000 in the last 12 months. Maybe slightly over 12 months.
- [20:57]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
I think less than 12.
- [20:59]
Megan Lewis
Yeah.
- [20:59]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Oh, oh, yeah. No, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 12. Yeah, right, yeah.
- [21:03]
Megan Lewis
Fantastic stuff.
- [21:04]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Good. It's good, it's good.
- [21:05]
Megan Lewis
Okay, we are going to continue with our conversation on five biblical Christian ideas that Bart used to hold and doesn't anymore. And next up is, well, the perennial. Perennial 1. Anyone who does not believe in Jesus will be eternally punished.
- [21:23]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, right. So, no, absolutely. Yeah. Well, look, if there's one way of salvation, then there aren't more ways. There's one way, and it's believing. When I was an evangelical Christian, the idea is there's one way that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through him. John, chapter 14, verse 6. And so there's no other way. And so this caused problems for us. Sometimes emotional problems, sometimes intellectual problems. What about people who've never heard about Jesus? What about people who were born before Jesus? What about, like, you mean God's going to torment them in hell forever? Because. But they've never even heard of him. And some. Some of my friends were quite insistent. Yes. I mean, it's too bad, but, you know, it's the way it works. That's. That's the rule. And others tried to figure out ways around it, but it's kind of hard to find a way around it if you have these kinds of beliefs. And so we, we did believe that. And for us, that was an incentive to evangelize and to convert friends and family and even people we didn't know, because if we didn't convert them, they were going to pay an eternal price.
- [22:37]
Megan Lewis
Did you have any ways that you tried to work around this, or was it just a very uncomfortable, unfortunate truth? And the way to try and fix it was evangelicalism?
- [22:51]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I think I probably went to different phases. I think early on I just thought it was true. You know, I was 17 or something. 18, I didn't know, but I just thought, yeah, it's got to be true. There it is. It's true. Oh, that's not good. I better. Better convert my family and friends. And so I did my best to do that. I think as time went on I just thought, I don't know. I. And I, My answer was, you know, I just don't know. I just don't know.
- [23:16]
Megan Lewis
And did you. Was your view that people had to believe in Jesus in a specific way? Did they have to be in a specific denomination or was just, just any Christianity enough?
- [23:27]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
My view is that anybody who accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior would, would be in and that there was a range, but we didn't think like Catholics were, were going to be in because they didn't believe the right thing. And, you know, especially not like, not Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or, you know, Seventh Day. Forget it. No, so it was people who had this kind of personal commitment to Christ and they could be wrong about a lot of theology, but they couldn't be. Couldn't be wrong about that. And so. Yeah, so right. That was. And so. But it could be very emotionally wrenching realizing, you know, you know, that's the way it was.
- [24:06]
Megan Lewis
That's. I'm very glad that I was not raised with that belief because that is something that my husband did have. And he still struggles. He's been an atheist for years. He still struggles with the trauma almost of what if I'm wrong and what if I'm dooming my entire family? And yeah, it's, it's really, it's a lot.
- [24:31]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
No, it could be wrenching after you, after you leave the faith. And I, it was one of the big concerns I had when I left the faith. You know, what, what if I was right all along? I ended up thinking that, you know, if I'm really being honest about it and I'm being, I'm really pursuing what just, I honestly think is the truth, that God's not going to be punished me for just doing my best to figure it out, even if it's true, that you've got to believe in Christ. And I've given. He's not going to punish me for getting it wrong. And that, you know, even if he's a just God, he's also a loving God. And for me, that helped. And I'm, you know, I'm more of a rationalist, I think, than most people. I can actually reason myself out of things. And I, I finally got to a point. I just said, you're like, I don't believe that. I don't. I don't. I just, I do not believe that there is a loving God who is going to torture people for 2 trillion years for something, for things they did wrong for 20, you know, or that they didn't, they never heard about Jesus. And so they're going to be 2 trillion tortured for 2 trillion years. And that's not even the beginning. Eternal. I just don't believe that. Come on, where'd you come up with that? So I don't, I don't believe that. Yeah.
- [25:42]
Megan Lewis
Kind of similar in the like, apocalyptic mindset, I guess, is this idea that the New Testament predicts that Jesus will return in our own generation. I had never come across this particular. I mean, obviously it's, it's something that is said and there's, I can't remember which particular creed. Like we, we look again for his, his coming, but I never had the sense that it was imminent. So then moving to the States and finding out that actually, oh no, he's coming, like this year was a bit culture shock, I think is probably the best way to describe it. So what, what were your thoughts on Jesus second coming?
- [26:30]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah, we were convinced he's coming before 1988. Good. From. Yeah. How Lindsay had written this book Late Great Planet earth in the 70s. And he showed on biblical grounds why it had to be before the end of the 1980s. And we, we thought that his interpretations were correct. And so this is our, our belief. And so I had friends who had, who believed that the Rapture was going to happen. Then we talked about the Rapture in a recent episode and that I had friends who had a bumper sticker that said, in case of rapture, this car will be abandoned. Then after I left the faith, I had people showed me a bumper sticker that said, in case of rapture, I want your car.
- [27:21]
Megan Lewis
Nice.
- [27:25]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so we, we did believe that. And you know, oddly, this belief started in, in England. It was a, it started, we mentioned before this, it started in the early 19th century in England. It came over to America and then came. Yes. As everything in America went on steroids. And it became a big deal in America. But now, even in England, the, the growth in the Christian church tends to be in evangelical circles, the evangelical form of the Episcopal Church. And there's still, there are a lot of people there who are now also thinking, yeah, it's going to be soon. And you know, they're kind of. The reason is because Jesus says it's going to be soon. Okay, so it's going to be soon. Yeah, that was, he did say that a long time ago, but yeah, solid logic.
- [28:09]
Megan Lewis
He says it's going to be soon.
- [28:11]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yes. But the argument is always that the prophecies are being fulfilled now. And so there Are predictions about this, predictions about that, and oh my God, that's just like the headlines of the news. And but they've been saying that all along, every generation has had people saying, see, the prophecies are being fulfilled.
- [28:33]
Megan Lewis
As an evangelical, when 1988 came and went and there was no rapture and Jesus didn't come back, did the goalposts simply shift to further in the future? They just got the date wrong. For you personally, I mean, I know we've spoken about this in a more general sense before, but was that the view that you had?
- [28:53]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, so in 1988, I was no longer an evangelical and I actually, I actually thought that this view was just not just completely wrong, but is really a little bit strange that people keep saying it's going to happen sometime next year, you know, like year after year after year. And when I moved to chapel hill in 1988, there was a book that was in wide circulation. There are 2 million copies available, circulating largely in the south. That was called 88 Reasons why the Rapture Will Occur in 1988. And this person had this, this author had 88 biblical and philosophical and what he called common sense reasons why the rapture was going to occur during Rosh Hashanah in late September of 1988. And I had a student in my, my New Testament class that semester whose parents literally sold the farm. And there were, there were lots of people kind of expecting this. When it didn't happen, of course, what happened is what happens every time. Then the author decided, oh, he made a slight miscalculation, and in his case, he had forgotten there was no year zero. Right. It goes from one BCE to one CE or one BC to one ad. It doesn't go, you know, there's no year zero. And since he had forgotten that he was off a year, so it's going to be 1989. So he wrote a second book about him. And after a while, these people just have to give up or they die. It's one of those two things, and that's what always happens.
- [30:27]
Megan Lewis
I feel like if you're going to be predicting the end of the world and there's any kind of mathematical calculations involved, you should probably get someone else to check your work.
- [30:38]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, his case was kind of interesting because this guy was a guy named Edward Weissen, and he had been a NASA rocket engineer. So he wasn't like a dumb guy. And he, but he, he, he was predicting it's going to happen during the week of Rosh Hashanah in September of 1988. And he had a lot of fundamentalists say, look, you know, Jesus says, no one knows the day or the hour when the end will come. You shouldn't be making a specific prediction like this. And he said, no, it's completely right. I don't know the day or the hour. I just know the week and just know the week.
- [31:08]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, perfect.
- [31:11]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
And he meant it.
- [31:14]
Megan Lewis
Well, he's not wrong.
- [31:17]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Okay.
- [31:19]
Megan Lewis
All right. So the final idea that you held as a Christian and no longer do is that Paul and Jesus had the same view of salvation. And I can safely say that this is not at all one that I had even paid vague attention to until you and I started recording and I was doing all of this reading and research. So what. What does that mean? And why is that not necessarily true?
- [31:45]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, it's, you know, I think it's a common belief among. This isn't just an evangelical belief. I'd say that Christians, broadly, throughout history, have. Have thought that Paul and Jesus, you know, on the same page about salvation. I mean, they're, you know, Paul is Jesus apostle, and he's taking the gospel message out into the world, and he's converting people. And of course, he has the same message of Jesus. I mean, of course. And so that's the default position that Christians have always had. And it's a view that I had. Well, even after I was an evangelical, I thought, well, they're basically on the same page. And it wasn't until I started digging really deeply into the question about Paul's view and Jesus view that I started realizing, no, actually, they're not the same. And I used to give my students an exercise to try and get them to realize part of the problem, which is there's this passage in the Gospels where this rich man comes up to Jesus and he says, asks Jesus, what must I do to be saved? Or what must I do to, you know, have eternal life? Or worded differently in the different Gospels. And Jesus says, keep the commandments. And the guy says, well, which ones? You know, because there are lots of commandments in the Old Testament, Jesus starts listing some of the ten commandments, you know, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal. And so that's it. You want eternal life, Keep the commandments. And so the conversation goes on from there. But he doesn't reverse that view. That is what you got to do. And I asked my students, okay, so Jesus. Jesus died, you know, sometime after that. And suppose 20 years later, the same man comes up to the apostle Paul and he says to him, what must I do to have eternal life? Or what must I do to be saved? Does Paul say, keep the commandments, keep the Jewish law? No, he doesn't say that.
- [33:42]
Megan Lewis
He does not.
- [33:43]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
He spends all this time saying that will not bring salvation. Galatians, Romans, I mean, it's consistent. Paul does not think that will bring eternal life. And so go, well, it's different. And so, you know, some of my brighter students will say, well, Jesus was, you know, Jesus time before he died and was raised from the dead. So he couldn't say, believe my death and resurrection. And so he gave, you know, the Jewish view. And the response to that is, well, if Jesus was right that a person could be saved by keeping the commandments, why did he have to die at all? You could just keep the commandments. That's what he said. And so, so, and so I think, you know, I think that that's a very, very, very big difference. And since then, I've realized other things, including a point that make rather emphatically in this new book, Love Thy Stranger, where I try to show that Jesus teachings were that if you recognized you were a sinner and you regretted it and you, you felt bad about it, you'd broken what God wanted you to do, if you turned back to God and asked his forgiveness, he would forgive you. You, like a parent would forgive a child. He just forgives you. There's no payment, there's no penalty, there's no punishment. He forgives you. Paul does not think that. Paul does not think that God forgives sins. He doesn't talk about people repenting so God will forgive them. He says that the only way for God to deal with the problem of your sin is for there to be an atonement. Somebody has to pay the price. Either you're going to pay the price by being punished, or Christ pays the price for you. And so if you don't want to pay the price, you have to accept the death and resurrection of Jesus. That's how you get salvation. Not by God forgiving you, but by somebody paying a penalty. That's not the same. In fact, it's. If Paul's right, then Jesus is wrong. And if Jesus is right, Paul was wrong. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
- [35:45]
Megan Lewis
And I was just going to say these are substantial differences. Do you think that maybe the reason people don't see them as differences is because they don't place them side by side and they do what they do with the messianic prophecies and just kind of lift them out and treat them as standalone statements.
- [36:04]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
I've laid this out to very fine biblical scholar, New Testament scholars before, where I have to go into a little bit further explanation than I did just now. But when I kind of lay it out, the difference I've had had seasoned biblical scholars tell me, whoa, I hadn't thought of that. It is so much a part of our thinking that, you know, that we don't, you know, we just don't realize these are actually different things. And what reason people don't notice it? One reason is because I'm not talking about which words get used to explain salvation. It's not that I'm using, it's not that I'm saying forgiveness is one word, atonement is a different word. And those words are at odds. I'm saying those concepts are at odds, the ideas are at odds. And you can use different words for them. Is the problem because in the New Testament it says in places so, you know, you know, Jesus died so God will forgive your sins. Well, if he died and God relents on your sins, it's not because he's forgiving them in the way I'm talking about, it's that he accepts the atonement. Accepting atonement isn't the same thing as forgiving in the sense I'm talking about. So the sense is different. But people don't realize it because they read these words and they don't think about them.
- [37:24]
Megan Lewis
I don't have any more follow up questions. Is there anything that you want to say before we move on to our bonus segment for the day?
- [37:30]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
The only thing I'll say is that when you said these, this is the last of the five things. Yeah, those are the five things I gave. There are actually a lot of things. We'll do this again sometime down the road.
- [37:43]
Megan Lewis
Five other things that Bart used to believe.
- [37:46]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Exactly right. Yeah. No, but this has been good because it is, it is. It's always helpful for me to think about what I used to think and what I think now. And in part because, you know, I think people are so firmly entrenched in what they think that they're just, they just don't want to even bother to think about it. And I think it's good, good to think about some of your most cherished beliefs. To ask is, do you really think that and is that is a really good reason to think that or is it just because that's what you learned when you were 13, you know, or is it, or is it, you know, but you know So I really believe in questioning not just my faith, but everything about, you know, my, my, my thought world, whether it's philosophy, whether it's science, whatever, and just challenge things because I think it, it makes for a richer life to be able to think about thing and to, to come to other conclusions sometimes.
- [38:37]
Megan Lewis
Bart, thank you so much. That is all for today's interview. We're going to move on to this week's bonus segment, which is, as I said at the top of the episode, Scholar Spotlight. So, but which biblical scholar are you highlighting for us today?
- [38:53]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, I thought I'd do something a little bit unusual this time. We have this, you know, we have this course for the paths of Biblical Studies that the members of the Biblical Studies Academy can get for free, but other people just, you know, get the course by John Collins that's called Judaism Before Jesus. And I will be recommending some of John's books later on in other podcasts because he's, he's one of the real experts on this. But I thought it'd be interesting to recommend another scholar who deals with this time period that I've, I always found extremely helpful. His name is Shia Cohen. So S H A Y E Cohen, C O H E N who is one of these other really brilliant scholars of, of Second Temple Judaism, early Judaism. He wrote a book that I've always found extremely useful for people who want to know about Judaism before, during, and after the days of Jesus. And it's a book that lay people I think can grab a hold of. It's called from the Maccabees to the Mishnah. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. So the Maccabees, the Maccabean revolt about 160 years before Jesus would have been born, and the Mishnah, the later codification of Jewish laws by rabbis about 150 years after Jesus Day. And the time that time period where he just explains what was going on in Judaism in ways that are understandable and that are enlightening because I think people have misconceptions about Judaism in the period. John Collins is correcting a lot of those. Shaikhon's book goes on beyond Jesus up to the time of the early rabbis. So I would recommend, so I think that he's a really fine scholar and someone that people ought to look at.
- [40:39]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so very much. Now, before we finish for the week, Bart, could you remind us what we spoke about today?
- [40:45]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about five views that I used to have when I was a committed evangelical Christian that now I no longer have. And I was trying to explain, you know, why I don't, don't hold to these views anymore. And one of the points for me of this kind of thing is what I was saying at the end is that I think that there are a lot of scholars who never change their mind about anything and somehow they think that's a good thing. Like it shows they were right all along. And it might show that, but I'm not so sure it does. Somebody never changes their mind about something, I don't know. And so I, I think it's a good thing to think about what we, we hold near and dear to us and also just things that we think are right and just consider are they really right and to look at the evidence one way or the other. So, so that, that's kind of the point of, of these five things.
- [41:31]
Megan Lewis
Audience, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. Ms. Quoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [41:51]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, we're going to something very, very different, something that you're the expert in. So, so, so we're going to have you talking a lot more than me, probably. But you know, the very interesting thing about religion and culture and history, religious history before we get the Bible. And so I think, I think we're calling it, we're going to call it before Adam and Eve. It's kind of tongue in cheek, but what's going on in the world of religion before that leading up to the Bible.
- [42:22]
Megan Lewis
Make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday. So please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.