← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
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Megan Lewis
Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times bestselling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
- [01:03]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'd like to welcome you to the special edition of the Misquoting Jesus podcast. This week I'm not being interviewed by Megan, I'm interviewing Jodi Magnus, my colleague at UNC Chapel Hill, who is an archeologist of ancient Israel and is going to be doing a remote four lecture course for the these online courses that I've been doing. Now Jody's going to do one for us. It's going to be called Archeology in the Time of Jesus. And so it's going to be directly relevant both to what my online courses are all about, but also what this podcast is all about. So these lectures that Jody's giving, they're going to be recorded live on March 2nd and 3rd. There'll be lectures, 50 minutes, 60 minutes long, something like that, two a day on March 2nd and 3rd. And each day will end with a Q and A where people will be submitting questions. I'll be emceeing the event and I'll be choosing the questions. And Jodi, I'll try to pick the hardest ones for you. So I hope you all can come to it. You should at least check it out. Go to barterman.com timeofjesus and you can find out about the course and register for it there. I'd like to first tell you a few things about Jody and then she and I are going to talk about the sorts of things she does and why this kind of archaeological work is important for everyone, whether they are out digging or not. And then we'll talk about some of the things she's going to be doing in her course. Jodi and I have been colleagues for over 20 years now. She came to UNC in, I guess, 2003. She's the Kenan Distinguished professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism in my Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. This is a special endowed position within the university that was set up originally simply to bring in somebody who was both a internationally known scholar and a superb undergraduate teacher. And so Jodi fit the bill and she's still with us. Jodi did a BA in Archaeology and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her PhD in classical archaeology from University of Pennsylvania. She's written three books that have won awards that are closely related to what her topic is going to be during this lecture course. The first one them is On Masada From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth. As many of you know, this is one of Herod's places that he built outside of town in Jerusalem. That is where the rebels in the upright the first uprising in 67 to 73 against the Romans, where they hid out. And it's a very famous place. If you've ever visited ever visited Israel, you've probably been there. And Jody's an expert in the archaeology of the place. Second book is on the archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Qumran is the place where they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then her third award winning book is the archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. She has a book that's coming out this spring called Jerusalem through the Ages from the Beginnings to the Crusades. And so that's coming out with Oxford University Press. And the beginning part of that is going to be directly relevant to the course that she's doing for us. She's not an armchair archaeologist. Jody's out in the field and for a very long time, over 10 years, she was directing the excavation at Hukouk, which is in the Galilee region of Israel. And her findings were quite stunning and were regularly shown in National Geographic. She's one of the real experts of archeology in Israel in the time of Jesus. And so we're really pleased that she's going to be doing this course and we're pleased to have her here on the Miss Courting Jesus podcast. So, Jodi, welcome.
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Jodi Magnus
Thank you, Bart. Thanks for having me. It's nice to see you.
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Bart Ehrman
Nice to see you.
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I know
- [04:54]
that's the thing. We're colleagues and we kind of see each other when we have speaking engagements together or something. It's like we're right across the hall from each other. It's like yeah, we're both busy human beings. And the thing I really like best about Jody is that when I feel like I'm overwhelmed, I just think about Jody's schedule. I don't have so bad. In fact, you're out. You're out of town now as we speak, right off in California.
- [05:16]
Jodi Magnus
Yeah, I'm in Southern California. It's supposed to be sunny in Southern California in California.
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Bart Ehrman
I know that's what the song says, but, Jody, can you just give us a little bit of background just on you? We don't. We don't need much on this, but, I mean, you've been doing this archaeology stuff sounds like since college, is that fair to say?
- [05:32]
Jodi Magnus
Yeah, actually, yeah. So I wanted to be an archaeologist since I was 12 years old. And what happened when I was 12, I had a very good seventh grade teacher for history, and he introduced us to the ancient world. And I fell in love with ancient Greece and especially Athens. And at the same time, I was find fossils of shells at girl scout camp. And I had the usual childhood fascination with dinosaurs, which of course is not exactly archaeology. But anyway, it all came together and I decided at the age of 12 that I wanted to be an archaeologist. And that was it. And my interest was always in the classical world, in fact. And so that's what I ended up doing. I mean, I actually ended up specializing in the classical periods in the area of Syria, Palestine, the area of Israel.
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Bart Ehrman
This is a Hebrew university that you went, right? You weren't growing up there, right, in Jerusalem?
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Jodi Magnus
No, no, actually, I was far more mundane. I was born in Philadelphia and that teacher was in Philadelphia. And then when I was 12, we moved to Miami. And then when I was 15 years old, the summer I was 15, I went to Israel on a summer tour. And I fell in love with the country and decided I wanted to go back and finish high school there. And I spent my 11th grade year convincing my parents to let me do it. And they finally free lent it. It took about a half a year to convince them. So I went for my. My senior year of high school, I went to Israel. I actually arrived in Israel five weeks at the age of 16, five weeks before the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973. So I did my high school year at Stepoucher, which is in the middle of the Negev desert. It's where Ben Gurion is buried. And then I enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for my undergraduate degree. And as you said in your introduction, I majored in arch and history. Actually, what was called General history at the time at the Hebrew University, because at the time there was Jewish history and then there was everything else. And I was interested in ancient Greece, so that was everything else. So that was general history. The degree was a three year degree because I had already done the Israeli high school matriculation. So it was a three year BA in Archeology and History. It wasn't a liberal arts degree like we have in the U.S. after I finished my BA, I worked for three years as a guide at the Engedi Field School by the Dead Sea, which was absolutely amazing. And then came back to the United States in 1980 and a year later enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. While I was doing my PhD, I spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Then I was in Jerusalem for a while working on my dissertation. And after I finished my PhD, I had a 2 year old postdoc at Brown University. And then I got a position at Tufts University where I taught until I came to UNC. And by the way, it's 2002, not 2003.
- [08:21]
Bart Ehrman
No, I think I got that. So, Jodi, I think I got that off your cv. So, you know, so you're an archeologist, not a literary person. You're not a text person?
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Jodi Magnus
No, no, actually, no. Actually, it was. You probably recall this when I was hired at uncle. So, you know, you were. I was hired with tenure.
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Megan Lewis
Right.
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Jodi Magnus
I was already tenured at Tufts and my first semester at UNC, which was the fall of 2002, my position was not yet official because it had to be approved by the state legislature. So a quote, unquote, temporary position. And then it became a final, you know, an official position as of January 2003. But I've actually been at UNC since 2002.
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Bart Ehrman
Jodi's been my official colleague since 2003. Okay, so, Jody, let's get on to archeology itself, because, you know, I'm obviously, as you well know, not an archeologist. And I talk with a lot of people about the ancient world. And when I start talking to people about archeology, I tend to get like regular folk, not academics, but you know, just like, you know, next door neighbors and that kind of thing. I tend to get two different reactions from people when it comes to archeology. One is that some people have this very romantic idea about it, about how exciting and adventurous it is. And, you know, I think they're imagining you take your shovel someplace and you, you know, you start digging Crowns of kings and stuff. And they have this, you know, Indiana Jones kind of view. The other thing is that sometimes I'll go on. I'll go on trips, you know, I'll go on tours with. For things. And we'll go to archeological sites. And a lot of people have the opposite thing, where they just say, oh, man, just a pile of rocks. We have to see more. Any more piles of rocks. So it's these two extremes. My sense is that, like, archaeology isn't really like either one of those. Could you just tell us something about it?
- [10:12]
Jodi Magnus
Yeah, well, I mean, in a way, sort of it is and it isn't, right? So let me just clarify and say that archaeology is a science, and I'm going to explain what kind of science it is. But before that, I have to remind you about the interview process for my job at unc, because we had a very interesting conversation, because the position that I was hired in is not an archeology position. It's early Judaism, right? Which basically means Judaism in the time of Jesus. You guys did not advertise for an archaeologist. And so when I came to interview, I kept mentioning, you all realize that I'm an archaeologist, right?
- [10:49]
Bart Ehrman
I mean.
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Jodi Magnus
And you're all like, yeah, we know you're an archaeologist. And then I got into this big thing with Tom Tweed, who is in the department at the time, who kept insisting that I was an historian and I'd say, I'm an archaeologist. And he kept saying, no, you're an historian. And I'm like, no. And we went back and forth on this. And it wasn't until recently that I realized why he kept saying that. So of course, history is the study of the human past. So within that broad definition, of course, archeology is also the study of the human past. But from my perspective as an archaeologist, the difference is that historians learn about the human past by looking at written records, written documents and texts, whereas archaeologists learn about the human past by digging up human material culture. And material culture means anything that people manufactured and left behind, buildings, their tombs, their pottery, whatever it is that they manufactured and left behind, we dig that up, and that gives us information about the past. So, yes, I studied the past, but I don't emphasize. Of course, I do look at historical records. We should be inclusive and use as much information as we can. But my specialization is on human material culture. So archaeology is a science, but it's not an exact science. And it's not an exact science because in the exact sciences, the goal is to replicate the experiment and in archaeology, we cannot replicate the experiment because once you've dug those remains out of the ground, you've actually destroyed the evidence in the process of excavation, which is why archaeologists record everything that we do as completely as possible. And the goal then, at the end is to publish all of the data that we have, much of it, which is now forever gone, so that other people, other scholars, other people can come and put that all together and see what was there in order to learn about the past. And as an archeologist and as a scientist, what we do is to go into the field to excavate, to retrieve human material culture, not because we want to just find something. So in that sense, we're not like Indiana Jones, right? We don't just go. We're not treasure hunters. So real archaeologists, hint, hint, don't look for Noah's Ark, don't look for the Ark of the Covenant, don't look for whatever. That's not the goal. The goal is that we go into the field with one or more research questions, just like any scientist that we hope to answer through the process of excavation. Of course, we don't know what we're going to find. We always find stuff that we didn't expect to find. We always find stuff. You're always going to find something, right? But the hope is that you're going to find material that will help answer your research questions. And so, for example, the current excavation that I have, which we've been working at since 2011, I started that project with a couple of big research questions. One of them was, what was the fate of Jewish settlements in lower Eastern Galilee, the area, in fact, that was the heart of Jesus's Galilean ministry, not in the time of Jesus, but in the centuries after the time of Jesus, when Hukouk and other Jewish settlements in the area came under Christian rule. When the Roman Empire became a Christian empire, these settlements came under Christian rule. And the question is, did they suffer under Christian rule? Was it oppressive to the Jews, or did these settlements continue to survive and flourish in the coming centuries? Which was always my point of view. And at Hukuk, in fact, we have found good evidence that this settlement at least flourished through the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries A.D. i'll use B.C. and A.D. for our purposes here. So that's really what archaeology is about. Now, the piles of stone thing, it depends on the kind of site that you're looking at. So, you know, generally speaking, earlier periods, by which I mean, like Bronze Age, Iron Age, what you might call the Old Testament periods, Generally, even those periods when you have monumental architecture, the remains are not really all that understandable to somebody who's not a specialist. But the periods that I work in, the Roman period, for example, you get, you know, big temples, and you get colonnaded streets and theaters and bathhouses, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to be able to understand what it is that you're looking at. So it kind of depends on the nature of the site as far as the archaeological work itself goes. Yeah, it's hard physical labor, and not everybody likes it. I like to say that archeology is like New York City. You either love it or you hate it. So you go into the field and, you know, within the first couple of hours, a person will realize, yes, this is absolutely fantastic, or they'll like, oh, I can't stand this. It's hot and it's sweaty and dirty and all of that. Speaking of which, by the way, you. Bart, I have tried to get to come on my excavation without success. But, yeah, it is. It's hard. It's hard physical labor.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I mean, I get that part. I mean, I see pictures and so. But say something about the science of it, because my. My sense is that, you know, when. When archaeologists started out doing things, they basically were out to find stuff, and they were just digging stuff up and maybe sending it off to a museum someplace, you know, but, like, they weren't docum very well, and, you know, you just take out the pickaxe and go for it kind of thing. You all, like, use paintbrushes and stuff, right? What do you.
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Jodi Magnus
Oh, well, yeah, that. That sort of image of archaeologists down on our hands and knees with dental tools. It depends on the remains. I mean, there are cases where we'll do that, and certainly in, like, prehistoric excavations, for example, but in the periods that I work in, the remains are really big. And if you worked with dental tools and paint brushes, you'd never excavate anything. So a lot of our work is done with big tools. But if you come down on something like the mosaic floors that we excavate, of course you're going to be using delicate tools to do that. But to get back to your question, you're right at the beginnings of archaeology. So archaeology as a discipline has its roots in the time of the Renaissance, which is when people started wandering around. At first Italy, and then later it spread to Greece, and then later it spread to Egypt in the near east, where people were kind of wandering around and they would find pieces of. Mostly at the beginning Sculpture. Right. Statues and things like that, or paintings, wall paintings and things which were valued for their art value. Right. They were considered to be works of art. And they started to collect these for museums and private collections. And so that kind of archaeology, which is the oldest part of the discipline of archaeology, Old World archaeology or Mediterranean archaeology, or classical archaeology. Right. It actually did start out with that kind of art historical connoisseurship. And even until today, that has remained the case. I mean, you go into museum galleries, for example, and you'll see these ancient objects that are displayed as works of art. But over the course of time, archaeology has evolved as a discipline and it is now a science. And what archaeologists are primarily concerned with when we excavate is context. And the problem with a lot of those objects is that they don't have context because they were removed as objects of art without any concern with what was found around them. And, you know, what exactly was the level and can we date that level? And so on and so forth. So archaeology has proceeded, you know, well beyond that now. And it is a scientific discipline. And as a scientific discipline, it has a particular methodology.
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Bart Ehrman
Okay, good. This course you're going to be doing is about archeology in the time of Jesus and you know, dealing with what today, with the places Jesus was or things are kind of connected with Jesus. And I remember when I was in graduate school, maybe it's on the tail end of this biblical archeology thing, which is where people, archaeologists basically were going over to Israel to dig in order to prove the Bible. Right. The idea is you want to go to Jericho and prove that the walls really did come a tumbling down, or you go to Galilee and you find where Jesus preached in this synagogue and you're trying to prove the Bible. And my sense is that I know that's not what you're up to, but can you just say something about what that was all, and whether it was a good thing ultimately for archaeologists to be doing that kind of thing, but how things have changed since then.
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Jodi Magnus
Yes, and you're right. So that was the case for a long time. And to be fair, there are still people who kind of, that is their focus. That is, they're drawn to particular sites or particular periods because of their interest in, I don't know if the word validating the biblical account is true, but rather because of the biblical account will mention something and so they'll be drawn to that. And by the way, that was true even up until very recently. We think about Yiga Al Yadin, for example, the famous Israeli archaeologist. Well, why was he drawn to Masada? Right. It was because of Josephus's story of, you know, the mass suicide of the Jewish rebels at Masada. So, yes, there, there has been that impulse and, and I wouldn't say that it's even completely gone at this point. But even when that is the case now, the approach in terms of the excavation, publication, the way things are done, is scientific in the sense that, you know, everything is documented. The goal, of course, is to, to fully publish everything because without publication, we have effectively destroyed the past in the name of science. But yeah, so that is true. And even until now, there are excavations going on in Israel at major biblical tells. Right. These big artificial mounds that are piles of civilization one on top of the other. There has been that, but I think most credible archaeologists today wouldn't say, oh, I'm going out to excavate something in order to prove, you know, or validate what the, what the Bible says. Right.
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Bart Ehrman
No, I mean, I have zero trouble with people digging places where they think might be interesting and that, you know, actually are connected with other things we know. Absolutely. It's just that it does seem to be a different mentality of a scientist who wants to find what's there and, and not go in with prejudgments about what it's going to prove or not prove versus I mean, it sounds like with your Galilee thing, you had question and you, you know, you might have had an opinion, but, you know, you wanted to see what the evidence is. And that's what science.
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Jodi Magnus
That's right. And I'll also mention that another thing is archaeology is not objective. Science is not objective. By the way, people don't realize that they think science gives you objective answers. It doesn't. Just like everything else, it's a matter of interpretation. And that's why we archaeologists often disagree with each other, because we don't disagree about actually necessarily what was found. We disagree about the interpretation of the evidence. And so the other thing to remember, of course, is that the evidence that we have for the past, and we're talking thousands of years ago, is very incomplete. So a huge number of blanks that we're trying to fill in. And that's also where interpretation comes in. So that's why you get all of these big disagreements among archaeologists, going back, for example, to the biblical periods about the nature of the Kingdom of David and Solomon, for example. Right. So huge debates in the periods I work in debates about ancient synagogues, stuff like that.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I think there is a Populace at large does think of this as some kind of, like, objective approach and to the point where the problem is that material objects don't speak, they don't tell you what they're there.
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Jodi Magnus
That's right.
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Bart Ehrman
And there are some things that somebody will say is kind of a common sense solution to what you're finding, but there'll be all sorts of possible interpretations. I mean, a few years ago, I was dealing with issues of death and afterlife and was reading what we have, material remains from that period. And they'll uncover a graveside, a tomb or something, and there'll be a woman who's been buried there. And there would be like cooking utensils. And people say, oh, so she believes in the. They believe in the afterlife and they're giving her cooking utensils because she's going to be cooking a meal down there. Whenever they'd say that to me, I would remember when my dad died, in his casket, we put one of his favorite pipes. Yeah. He liked to smoke the pipe. It's not because we thought he's going to be smoking.
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Jodi Magnus
Right, that's right. Yeah. No, exactly right. That's the thing about archeology. Most of the time it doesn't tell you what people were thinking. Right. And to get another example relevant to, you know, your topic. So one of the things that the public tends to be fascinated with is the search for the Holy Grail. Right. And so people ask me, so, you know, do we, can we find the Holy Grail? Do we have it? And it's like, well, we can't. Because, I mean, so I say, well, maybe we have found the Holy Grail. I mean, maybe we have found. Maybe we don't know. Maybe we found a cup from that period, you know, in Galilee, let's say, or Jerusalem or wherever that Jesus drank out of.
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Bart Ehrman
Right?
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I know.
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Jodi Magnus
How would you know that Jesus drank out of that cup unless it had an authentic ancient inscription on it that's from the time of Jesus and said, this is the cup that Jesus drank out of. I mean, I mean, how would you even know that?
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Megan Lewis
Right. I mean.
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Bart Ehrman
No, I know. You find something from that time, like you find a crucifixion nail, for example, from. And you say, oh, you know, you know, this, this is Jesus crucifix. Like he's the only one who got crucified.
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Jodi Magnus
Well, there were thousands of people who were crucified.
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Bart Ehrman
Right.
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Jodi Magnus
Here's another one. Another one of my favorite examples is the search for Noah's Ark.
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Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah.
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Jodi Magnus
So, you know, there's always claims that, you know, somebody found Noah's ark. So I'm kind of like, there are so many problems compounded on that. So first, Right. So first of all, the people are looking in the area of Mount Ararat. Well, the Hebrew Bible actually doesn't say Mount Ararat. It says Hare Ararat, which means the mountains of Ararat. So it's not Mount Ararat today. It's something else. So there's that. Then there's like. Like, we don't even know if there was a Noah. And if there was a Noah, we have no idea when he lived. I mean, if there was a Noah. Right? Or even if there was a flood, Right? So we have no idea when that would have happened in time and space. And then let's say, okay, so somebody today goes to Mount Ararat and they found, like, a piece of wood, and they're like, oh, we found. You know, we found the ark. And then it's like, okay, well, how do you know it's part of an ark, first of all? And second, even if you can date that piece of wood, let's say you date it through radiocarbon dating or something, and you date it to, I don't know, whatever, 2,000 years ago, whatever. How would you know that's from the time of Noah? Because you don't know when Noah lived. Anyway. So there's like this whole, you know, the unfortunate thing is that these are the things that get done over and over again in these, you know, popular sort of TV documentary programs. And I'm often contacted by these, you know, by these various programs for consulting and advising. And sometimes I appear in them, depending on what they are, and they're always like, oh, we're going to do another program on, I don't know what it is, the Shroud of Turin or Noah's Ark or something like that, you know.
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Right.
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We want the Holy Grail. And I try and explain. No, but this is not right. There's a lot of really valuable information that archaeology gives us about the time of Jesus, but, you know, not that kind of stuff.
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Bart Ehrman
Not that. Yeah, so we don't want to spend a lot of time to kind of give away the game because you're going to be giving lectures on this and people should come to these because they're gonna. They're gonna be really interesting. But just we've got these four topics, and so you've got one Jesus in Galilee. And so I think a lot about Jesus up in Galilee. And because to have him there for
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most of the time I'm Bart Ehrman and I'm happy to announce a new online course done not by me, but by world renowned archaeologist Jody Magnus. This will be a significant course for anyone interested in the New Testament, the historical Jesus, ancient Israel, or antiquity in general. The course will be called Archaeology in the Time of How Recent Discoveries have Enlightened the Gospels. Jodi will be recording this course on March 2nd to 3rd. It'll consist of four lectures with a Q and A. Anyone who purchases a ticket is welcome to come to the live recording. Anyone who buys a ticket, whether they come to the recording or not, will be able to have the course for lifetime use. Jodie's one of the best known and most prolific archaeologists of Israel in the world. For many years she's been my colleague in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She she there is the Kenan Distinguished professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism. Jody's research interests focus on Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods. She's won multiple awards for her books. She has a book on Masada, a book on the archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scroll Trolls, and a book on the archaeology of the early Islamic settlement in Palestine. She has a new book coming out called Jerusalem through the Ages From Its Beginnings to the Crusades, coming out from Oxford University Press, due to appear this spring. Since 2011, Jodi has directed excavations at Houkou Coke in Israel's Galilee, and almost every year her findings have been written
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up by National Geographic.
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Jodi's obviously a real expert and she's a fantastic teacher. I'll now turn it over to her to let her tell you something about the course.
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Jodi Magnus
Thank you, Bart. I'm excited about giving this series of lectures on archaeology in the time of Jesus because what we're going to be doing is wandering around sites associated with Jesus and looking at the remains that we have to visualize what the world of Jesus looked like. We're going to visit Galilean towns and villages, including Nazareth and Capernaum and Sephorus. We're going to spend time in Jerusalem looking at the Temple, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and other sites. We're going to visit the site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and consider what information those scrolls contain that might relate to Jesus and his movement. And we will consider archaeological evidence for the deaths and burials of Jesus and his brother James and how that evidence might correspond or not with information from the Gospel accounts. So I'm very much Looking forward to the this and I hope to see all of you at the lectures.
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Megan Lewis
Okay, thanks, Jody.
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Bart Ehrman
This is. This is going to be a great course.
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Megan Lewis
Four lectures on really important material for anybody interested in the New Testament or the historical Jesus. Just to remind you, the course will be recorded by Jody on March 2nd and 3rd. She'll be giving the four lectures and there will be a Q and A at the end of each day. The price for the course will be $39.95 retail, but there will be an early bird pricing of 34.95 up through February 25th. If you purchase a ticket, you will have lifetime access to the course. You'll be sent the recording with additional materials, such as suggestions for further reading and questions to think about. If you're interested in looking at it or registering for it, you can sign up@barturman.com Time of Jesus I hope you can do it.
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Bart Ehrman
This is going to be a great
- [30:06]
Megan Lewis
course and I think you'll really enjoy it.
- [30:13]
Bart Ehrman
You know, without giving away the game here, what kinds of stuff can archeology tell us about that would be important for somebody interested in the days of Jesus?
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Megan Lewis
Right.
- [30:22]
Jodi Magnus
Well, I mean, big picture is, you know, what were Jewish towns and villages like in the time of Jesus? So this is again, what I often tell these TV programs that I consult with and people in general, that what archeology does give us is a lot of information about the world of Jesus. We can reconstruct with a great deal of accuracy that world. So what did the towns and villages look like? What kinds of houses did people live in? You know, what kind of dishes did they eat off of, what kind of food they ate? You know, we can reconstruct a lot of that with a great deal of accuracy. So in the case of the lecture, I'm going to be focusing on Nazareth, which is actually not a lot to say about Nazareth. But I do want to explain. One of the things that I want to explain is why we don't have a lot of information about Nazareth. So that's something I want to talk about. Sephorus, which of course is very close to Nazareth and has been the subject of a lot of speculation with regard to Jesus and his presence there or not. And then I'm going to talk quite a bit about synagogues in the time of Jesus, because, of course, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus preached in synagogues. So did Paul. And what did synagogues look like in that period? And I'm going to be focusing particularly on Capernaum. And here we have Archaeological remains that. Okay. And also on a synagogue more recently discovered at Magdala or Megiddal, which is the hometown of Mary Magdalene and just a little ways away, also from Capernaum.
- [31:47]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. And it's an old synagogue, right? They were dating.
- [31:50]
Jodi Magnus
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:50]
No, it's a synagogue from. It is a first century synagogue. So it's a really interesting discovery.
- [31:55]
Yeah.
- [31:56]
Bart Ehrman
So these things. I don't know if everybody listening to this, like, for me, all of the things you're saying are resonating in my head because I know what people say about all this stuff. For people who don't know, Sephorus was a. It was a major city close to Nazareth. And people have speculated that Jesus maybe worked there, went there, he learned Greek there, he went to the theater there.
- [32:16]
Jodi Magnus
Right? No, exactly. That's right.
- [32:18]
Bart Ehrman
So that's going to be really interesting. I have a specific question about Nazareth. I don't know if you want to get into this, but, you know, many people who don't like me are the mythicists who think that Jesus never exist. And they don't like me because they think I'm on their side. Until they find out, I think, yeah, there really was a Jesus. What are you crazy? But there's this argument that Nazareth never existed at all. And so when I point out that it's, you know, actually there are archeological studies and they've dug it up and stuff, the one question I get consistently, I don't think. I don't know if I've ever broached this with you, Jody, is they say, well, how do they know that when they dug up Nazareth, that they were digging up Nazareth? You know, were there strict lines? I said, well,
- [32:58]
Jodi Magnus
right. No, it's actually an interesting question. I mean, this is true not just of Nazareth, this is true also of other sites around the country. So it's a matter of continuity of names. So a lot of times, actually we don't have. I know what you're looking for. You're looking for an inscription, right, From Nazareth that says this is Nazareth, right. That mentions Nazareth. That's actually what you're looking for, right? Yeah, yeah. For, you know, most of the time, we actually don't even have that. And most of the time it's a of matter, a matter of the continuity of settlement that. That determines that. And. And Nazareth has been continuously settled as Nazareth with that name since at least with that name attached to it in historical sources that. Since at least the third, fourth centuries. Right. So we have early Christian sources from that period that refer to Nazareth and place it in that spot. And by the way, I will mention that there's actually a similar thing for Jerusalem. Jerusalem has been occupied continuously, of course, for nearly. Well, pretty much for 5,000 years. And we have ancient Egyptian sources from the Middle Bronze Age or Middle and Late Bronze Age that mention Jerusalem with different names. Actually, if you actually are looking for something in Jerusalem that says Jerusalem on it, you'd have to go much later in time. So there again, we know it's Jerusalem because it's been occupied as Jerusalem for a very long time. And we have outside documents that refer to a Jerusalem very early on, but it's the same problem in very many places. So it actually relies on sort of a continuity of settlement. And in the case of Nazareth, we do have archaeological remains. Admittedly, they're not plentiful. And this is one of the things I'm going to talk a little bit about in my lecture. But they go back to the time of Jesus. Right? They go back to the first century. And so it's for that reason that we can say that, you know, yes, this was Nazareth. It didn't change names between the 1st century and the 3rd, 4th centuries.
- [34:56]
Megan Lewis
Right.
- [34:57]
Jodi Magnus
When you begin to get those references in historical sources saying Nazareth is at this particular spot.
- [35:02]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, no, that's helpful. Your next lecture is. Almost everybody on the podcast will know about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some won't be familiar with the term Qumran, which is spelled with a Q, Qumran, but it's the location where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And among scholarship, there's been debate. I don't know if the debates are always on the margins or not, but certainly on the margins, debates about what this community was. Right. I mean, what we always teach our undergraduates is that this was like a community of. I don't know if people call them monastics or not, but they're kind of like these separationists who have left, who are off by themselves, maintaining their holiness and leading an ascetic lifestyle and such. But there are debates about, really, if that's what the settlement was, can archaeology help us with that kind of thing
- [35:48]
Jodi Magnus
or with, again, this is a matter of the interpretation. Right. And so how you interpret the archaeology. So you're right, there are many different opinions about. So, first of all, let's separate out the Dead Sea Scrolls and the site of Qumran, because that's where part of the debates come in. Right. So the scrolls were found in caves that ring the site of Qumran. And so One of the debates, which I believe actually is an illegitimate debate, is whether there is a connection between the scrolls and the site of Qumran. I think that we have unequivocal evidence, various types of evidence that demonstrate that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by the people who lived at Qumran. So I think that all of those debates and that's. They've gotten a lot of. A lot of attention. I think those debates and controversies are really, they don't have any merit at all. And then the set. But the second question which is what you're raising is who were those people who lived at the site of Qumran and deposited the scrolls in the caves? And I believe, and I think a majority of scholars accept this, that that community were Essenes, a Jewish sect called the Essenes. But I think what's, what's going to be interesting, and I don't really get to this till the end because first we have to sort of talk about what the scrolls are. Right. But what's interesting for your listeners and audience particularly is what connection the scrolls have, if anything, to Jesus and Jesus movement. Because in my. Pretty much everybody has at least heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but most people don't understand exactly what they are. And because of the circumstances of the initial discovery of the scrolls and publication of the scrolls, which was by pretty much Christian scholars from Western Europe and North America, their interest in fact was in what do the scrolls tell us about Jesus. Actually, the scrolls tell us nothing about Jesus directly for sure. But because of that, I think in the popular imagination, a lot of people think that the scrolls have something to do with Jesus.
- [37:48]
Megan Lewis
Right.
- [37:48]
Jodi Magnus
So that's why it's so important to explain what the scrolls are, what they can and cannot tell us. Right. What kind of information they give us.
- [37:55]
Bart Ehrman
No, it's really important. When I give talks about things, the two things that come up are, you know, they want to know about Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the other thing is they say, and the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Hebrew Bible was copied accurately over the least over the centuries, right?
- [38:09]
Jodi Magnus
Oh, yeah, okay. Well, that's certainly not true. But
- [38:15]
Bart Ehrman
you know, it's because of the Isaiah scroll mainly because, you know, it is pretty close to the Masoretic. Well, but others are not.
- [38:22]
Jodi Magnus
Well, that's. I mean, it's not even a matter of being copied accurately or not. It's one of the things, and I will be talking about this, is that the scrolls show us is that there were different variant texts of the Hebrew Bible. That circulated among the Jewish population in the time of Jesus. And so it's not a matter of. Matter of did they copy it accurately. It's a matter of which version eventually became the standard, authoritative version that we use until today.
- [38:46]
Bart Ehrman
Right, right.
- [38:47]
Jodi Magnus
Yeah.
- [38:47]
Bart Ehrman
No, well, people say that or talk about the Isaiah scroll, but when you point out the Jeremiah stuff, they say, well, they have no idea. This is like, that is not the same as what you. So, okay, so, yeah, okay, so this is. So is it sounding good so far? And so then you got a thing on Jesus in Jerusalem, and I would imagine the archeology of Jerusalem, it. I mean, is there a lot more that's happened in Jerusalem than up in Galilee?
- [39:10]
Jodi Magnus
Well, stuff happens in Jerusalem all the time. Not necessarily big things that, you know, are connected with Jesus, but I mean, overall. So as you mentioned in your introduction, I've got a book now coming out. It's actually coming out next month. So this is February. So March, end of March is coming out on Jerusalem. It's massive. It's just huge. And Jerusalem's like a moving target because it's there. There's constantly excavations going on there, constantly new discoveries, and that means new information. Sometimes we have to revise our existing understandings. So Jerusalem's a little bit hard in terms of writing the kind of book that I wrote because it's like, oh, my gosh, this is probably going to be outdated already within the next five to 10 years. But for the purposes of the lecture, you know, your lectures, because they're only like an hour long, it's like there's no way I could cover even, you know, a teeny bit of Jesus in Jerusalem. So I'm trying to focus on the kinds of sites that are, are, you know, kind of the highlight, so to speak, of Jesus's final days in Jerusalem and sites that are connected with that. Right, that's. That's sort of the goal of the lecture and especially focusing on the area of the Temple, the Temple Mount and some of the buildings, you know, around there. Right. That's kind of what I'll be focusing on.
- [40:22]
Bart Ehrman
It's going to be great because a lot of people seem to have the idea maybe from watching movies or something, that the temple was like, kind of like, you know, the size of our office building in Chapel Hill. It's like this building or something, because Jesus cleanses it. You know, I can't be that big. Right. And, you know, not having been a tour guide myself in Israel and not being like person with it the way you are One time I took a tour of UNC people to Jerusalem and we had this local tour guide, and he takes us to this, to an upper room. And he says, so this. This is the upper room? And somebody says, you mean this is the room where Jesus had his last. Oh, no, we don't know. It's just, you know, that was an upper room and this is an upper room.
- [41:02]
Jodi Magnus
Oh, dear. Next time you do that. That asked me to recommend a tour guide.
- [41:07]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, my God, really?
- [41:09]
Jodi Magnus
But that certainly is not. I actually do discuss that in my book. That's on Mount Zion, which is south of the. Just like south of the old city today. And the cenacle. Right. And that. That structure actually is much later now. There are earlier remains on the ground floor level. But anyway, so.
- [41:25]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, okay, well, people. People are looking in the ground, see if they can find the Grail in there. It's like.
- [41:31]
Jodi Magnus
No, no, no, it is, it is. It is true that it's revered now as. But.
- [41:35]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, but the Jerusalem stuff's going to be really interesting because the temple is such a major feature of everything before the destruction and Judaism and Jesus and man. If you don't understand what's going on with the temple, you're not going to understand what's happening with the death of Jesus. But then you'll ask lectures about the death and burial of Jesus and James. Right.
- [41:57]
Jodi Magnus
Jesus is brother James. And by the way, just to preface, I am not concerned with whether James was the full brother of Jesus, the half brother of Jesus, unrelated. It doesn't matter for my purposes, we'll just say the brother of Jesus. And of course, this is one of the topics, one of the rare topics where Bart and I kind of disagree about the.
- [42:20]
Bart Ehrman
We need to preface this that Jody and I both like to argue and we're both convinced that over the last 20 years that neither one of it. We both think we've not ever won an argument.
- [42:30]
Jodi Magnus
Well, yeah, actually, what I told Jim. Well, I tell Bart, because Bart. Bart always wins arguments because you, you know, you're. You're a professional debater. Right? I just don't give up. But you're a professional debater, so you. Yeah, no, I do not give up. But, but I always tell Bart that, you know, just because he won the debate doesn't mean that he's right. So.
- [42:52]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Well, I'm just happy to win.
- [42:54]
Jodi Magnus
So.
- [42:54]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. All right, let's go ahead. Tell them our difference about. About all this. So we do have a difference.
- [42:59]
Jodi Magnus
Well, that. That kind of will be in the Well, I don't talk about you in the lecture, but, but I do. You know, I, I actually do think that the Gospel accounts, and especially the synoptic accounts of, of Jesus's burial, describing Jesus's burial by Joseph of Arimathea are largely consistent with what we know from archaeology about how wealthy Jews like Joseph buried their dead, you know, interred their dead in the time of Jesus. And I also think that the episode itself where Joseph goes to take the body of Jesus and put it in his family's to that is something that can be understood or is explicable in light of a couple of different biblical Jewish laws. And so I will be talking about the archaeological evidence, but also about, you know, how the Gospel accounts might be understood in light of what we see in the archaeological evidence. Now just to clarify, because this again has been something that's come up between me and Bart, which is. Let me clarify. I am not claiming that this means that the Gospel accounts are historical. That doesn't mean that this episode actually ever occurred. Occurred. It doesn't prove that. What it does indicate, however, is that whatever the sources were for that account, they were familiar. Wherever that information is coming from, they were familiar with how wealthy Jews like Joseph disposed of their dead in the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. Right, so that's the point of clarification. And then the James stuff comes in with the kind of famous so called James Ossuary, which got a lot of publicity. And then sort of my take on whether the James ossuary is, is authentic or not. Right, so that's a lot of people
- [44:39]
Bart Ehrman
won't know what an ossuary, an ossuary is.
- [44:41]
Jodi Magnus
So in the time of Jesus in Jerusalem, wealthy Jews disposed of their dead, buried their members of their families in rock cut tombs, tombs that were cut into the bedrock slopes around the city, outside the city and during the time of Herod. And then afterwards it becomes common to collect the bones of the deceased after the flesh had disintegrated and deposit them in little stone boxes or containers that are called ossuaries. And so in 2002, an ossuary came to light in a private collection. Wasn't from an archaeological, I mean it's an authentic ancient ossuary. But it didn't come from an archaeological excavation. It was illegally looted and had been acquired on the antiquities market. But it's incised with a name that says James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus in Aramaic. And the implication is that this stone box contained the remains of James the Just, the brother of Jesus. And so we got a lot of publicity. You can Google it online, the James ossuary. A lot of claims about it. And so I will be also talking about that ossuary in the lecture.
- [45:46]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, this is going to be great. We need to end here. But I do wanted to give you a chance just to say a little bit about the book. You've said a few things. The Jerusalem book coming out, because people are probably going to want to buy it and. And they should know about it a little bit.
- [45:57]
Jodi Magnus
I hope so.
- [45:58]
Jerry Insurance Assistant
Great.
- [45:58]
Jodi Magnus
I love the book, by the way. I love all my books. You know, books are like kids, right? You love them, spend a lot of time with them. But this book in particular, I really like. I spent a huge amount of time on it. It was really not easy to write because Jerusalem is an infinite topic. There's no end. And so, you know, what do you put in? What do you not. It actually came out with a lot more than I had originally envisioned it. But because there's just so much, much. And it's really important to me to explain to people the complexity of the history and archaeology of Jerusalem, but try and explain it in a way that, you know, even people who are not specialists won't understand. So the book is actually organized by chapters chronologically from the beginning to the Crusades. The first chapter is kind of like a general introduction with, you know, explaining the topography and climate of Jerusalem, explaining how we date things that we dig up or date, you know, the sites. So the historical, the biblical, the archaeological, you know, all of the kind of methodology in a kind of a very succinct way. The second chapter is on, which actually is, I guess, chapter one or whatever is on the explorer. So documenting sort of how Jerusalem's been explored from basically the 19th century, mainly a little bit earlier, and then right up until, let's say, the 20th century. So very various major explorers. And then it starts with the chronological. So it starts with the very, very beginning. And it's organized so that it's like the first chapter is Canaanite Jerusalem, which is, you know, pre Israelite. Then you get Israelite Jerusalem, then you get Judahite Jerusalem. And so it goes on like that right up until the Crusades. And in order to try and sort of focus it, each chapter focuses on a point in Jerusalem's history that's either at or right before a crucial transition point. So, for example, the chapter that would Jesus focuses on Jerusalem just before the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in the year 70. Right. So it's kind of like that. And then within each chapter, it starts with kind of a historical background, and then we turn to the archaeology and look at the major archaeological sites. And in many cases also we look at things like some of the pottery types that are characteristic without going into, like, real detail, but kind of if there's something distinctive, other kinds of material culture that might be important. Important or distinctive of the city in various periods. And then right up to the Crusades, the last chapters on the Crusades. I actually wanted to end the book right before the Crusades. I wanted to. The chapter before the Crusades is Early Islamic Jerusalem, which focuses on the year 800 because of Charlemagne, because Charlemagne had very close connections to Jerusalem. So it's kind of interesting. But I wanted to end the book there, and the publisher insisted that I include the Crusades because they included. They wanted to include Crusades in the title because they said that would attract readers. So I had to. I had to add. Right. So I had to add a chapter on the Crusade. So it goes up to the Crusades. It's a fun book. It's already gotten a couple of advanced, very nice, advanced reviews, and I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
- [49:05]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Well, it sounds great because it's such a wide range chronologically, and it's. So it's reaching out for people with all sorts of interests, and so. Yeah, good. Okay. Well, Jodi, this has been great, and I'm glad I've convinced you about everything, and you've. You've certainly likewise me, so. All right, well, Jody, it's. This is great because the kinds of stuff that you're doing really is illuminating for. For those who are listening to this kind of podcast, and most people aren't familiar with the archaeological side, and so it's really, really quite helpful. So thank you for being on board. Okay.
- [49:38]
Jodi Magnus
Thank you, Barbara.
- [49:42]
Megan Lewis
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.