← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Are There Authentic Sayings of Jesus from Outside the New Testament?
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- [00:00]
A
Drama, romance, competition, chaos. Welcome to reality TV with Hulu on Disney featuring the hottest reality TV Every day turn on larger than life docusoaps like season four of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the hit new series Love Thy Nadir featuring superstar model Brooks Nader and her sisters. Obsess over the seasons of iconic dating shows like Love Island UK and Farmer Wants a Wife. Get hooked on irresistible food competitions like MasterChef. Dive into hit game shows like Celebrity Family Feud and revel in show stopping fashion competitions including the one and only Project Runway. It's the very best of reality tv. Every single day, all in one place. Every tear, every triumph, every jaw dropping twist. This is where reality lives. This, this is where Hulu gets real. Stream now on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply. Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Early Christian writings from outside the New Testament contain some pretty unexpected material. A giant walking talking cross and Jesus childhood pastime of bringing clay birds to life are both examples that we have discussed before. But do these additional documents also contain authentic sayings of Jesus that are overlooked by Christians because they're not contained within the New Testament? Join us today as we delve into this subject. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about whether early Christian writings from outside of the New Testament contain any authentic sayings of Jesus. Bart also has some listeners questions to answer. But before all of that, Bart, how are you doing today?
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, I'm. I'm doing pretty well today. I this, this past weekend I finally got my manuscript sent off to my publisher. This book I've been writing seems like forever but on how the teachings of Jesus transformed the moral conscience of the West. You know, how, how our thinking about morality and what it means to be a good person and what to do good things changed with the teachings of Jesus. And so it's, it's been a book I've thought about for a long time and took me longer to write than normal and it is such a huge relief to be have it off my plate. Now I just need to wait for the editor to rip into it and then I'll be back in my stress and anxiety. But for now I'm feeling pretty good.
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A
Perfect. Perfect.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah. So how are you doing?
- [02:53]
A
Yes, very well, thank you. I am the opposite side of things to you. I am not writing a book. I am editing a book. Josh has started to write an introduction to biblical Hebrew grammar. And I don't know how he does it. He's written all three books in the last three months. And so now I have to sit down and edit them all, which is good, because, honestly, I need a refresher on Hebrew. It's been quite a while since I.
- [03:21]
B
When I taught Hebrew, there was only two decent texts, and one of them, the one we used when I was teaching, I was teaching assistant at Princeton Seminary, was one that spent about half the semester spent about half the semester laying out the rules for how to. How to formulate the Hebrew words. And the second half was showing how the rules never apply. Hebrews. Quite amazing. Ancient Hebrew is really quite amazing that way. You have to figure out what the word actually is based on, like, a few. He's got like eight letters and only two of them matter. So I was like, oh, my God. And so, yeah, so, okay, good on him. I hope it goes well.
- [04:01]
A
Yes, it's. He's a very good. He's been doing Hebrew for decades, so he knows it, I would say, pretty well at this point. And he's good at taking concepts and explaining them to people who don't have a background in. In ancient studies. So, yeah, I think. I think it'll be good. Anyway, sorry. Derailed the conversation there. Enough about biblical Hebrew. Back to Jesus. So to begin with, what exactly do we mean when we're talking about authentic sayings of Jesus?
- [04:33]
B
Well, I think. I think when historians use that, they mean sayings that he really said. You know, just like. Like just about everybody. People are always reported as saying things they didn't really say. And so that happens with Jesus. We have. We have gospels in the New Testament, and there are good reasons thinking that in the Gospels, there are sayings that he really said, but there are sayings that he almost certainly did not say. And there are criteria that scholars use to figure out which is which. Which would be the. You know, it's the same criteria used for any historical figure. We've got records of what they're. What they said. You just look and figure out which ones are more likely to have been said and which one's not.
- [05:12]
A
Okay, so if we're thinking about the material in the Gospels, are all of the sayings recorded there considered to be authentic?
- [05:20]
B
No, no, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, you know, when you, you know, Jesus says things in the Gospels that almost certainly he would not have said. And especially there are things in the Gospel of John, for example, especially where it's kind of, it's a little bit easier to demonstrate it with the Gospel of John, but it can be shown also with the other Gospels. And so we won't be getting into that too much here. But we, I don't know, we maybe have done an episode, we certainly will do an episode on how you establish, you know, the gospel sayings, which ones go back to J, ones don't. And how do you know? And there are, of course, debates, you know, scholars debate this kind of thing all the time. It's one of the things that happens within New Testament studies if you have scholars on a wide range of spectrum of the spectrum about who think that almost everything is authentic. And some people, yeah, not much of it. And I'm kind of in between. So. Yeah, so I think certainly not, not everything in the Gospels are things that he said.
- [06:15]
A
How about outside of the Gospels, are there books in the New Testament that aren't gospel writings that don't do still contain authentic sayings?
- [06:23]
B
Well, authentic sayings, I don't know. I mean, it's a little bit hard to say. There are other sayings of Jesus that I guess people would be familiar with that are not actually in the Gospels or maybe they won't, won't be familiar with these. But one of the key examples is in the Book of Acts where Paul reports that Jesus had said that it is better to give than to receive. And everybody, I think a lot of people just think that's something Jesus said and he may have said it, but it's not in any of the Gospels. It's reported by, by Paul later. And so that would be, that would be an example of something that he may well have said. It makes sense. It's kind of, it's, it's in line with other things he says. But we don't have it recorded in the Gospels.
- [07:09]
A
So how then does the non canonical. Do the non canonical texts add to this picture? Are there sayings within those Gospels and other early Christian writings that academics think may be authentic sayings of Jesus?
- [07:25]
B
Well, there's certainly a lot of sayings of Jesus from outside the New Testament that we've really come to know about mainly in modern times. We knew about a number of them because they were quoted by one author or another or they'd show up in one place or another. But it's really only, you know, since the late 19th into the 20th centuries that we. That we started discovering entire gospels that have sayings of Jesus. And the most famous is one we've covered on the podcast before, the Gospel of Thomas, which has 114 sayings of Jesus. About half of those are very similar to ones that you get in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, but the other half are ones that you don't find there. And so those would be all things not in the Gospels. And then you have a Gospel of Philip where Jesus says all sorts of things that nobody thinks he really said because they're quite distinct, they're different. They're Gnostic sayings that clearly come from the second century. They're not the sort of things Jesus would have taught. And anybody can read it themselves. Just look up the Gospel of Philip and they'll see. It won't take a page before you realize, man, I don't think Jesus said that. But we have a Gospel of Mary, we have a Gospel of Judas. All of these have sayings in which Jesus says things. And so the task of the scholars to treat these gospels seriously as potential sources for did Jesus say this or not? And they use the same criteria for these gospels that they make for the ones that are in the New Testament. The reality is that when you do that kind of study, when you engage in that kind of analysis and use kind of the historical criteria one needs to use, it's pretty clear that there's very little outside the New Testament that we can confidently attribute to Jesus. There may be a few things, and even in the Gospel of Thomas, there are debates about with that one in particular because it's early. It's probably in the early second century, so it's not long after our canonical Gospels. Some scholars think there are authentic materials in there too, but it's a debate.
- [09:29]
A
Okay, so if most of these sayings are probably not authentic material, then why are they important? Why would people want to study them?
- [09:38]
B
Well, for one thing, you want to study them to see if they are authentic. But I think most historians think that the history of Christianity is more than the historical Jesus, that understanding how Christianity developed is a very important enterprise. Christianity is the largest religion in the world today with over 2 billion people who follow it. And it didn't. It didn't come straight from Jesus till now. There have been over 2000 years of development. To understand our world and our culture, and to understand Christianity, you have to see how it developed. And one way to do that is to see how Jesus words are recorded. Because if somebody records Jesus saying something, actually whether he said it or not, but you know, especially if he didn't say it, but they said he said it, then they're probably using that for some reason and it's probably supporting some view that they have a theological view or a view about how to behave or a view how to engage in worship in church. So they're quoting Jesus to authorize that. And so by analyzing the sayings, you can understand what's going on in Christianity at the time. So you date when the document is, you figure out what the sayings are, where they're moving, and they show you a lot about Christianity. And one of the things it shows is just how different various Christian groups were and what their theological and practical views were.
- [11:09]
A
When did you start to become interested in non canonical gospels as a source for sayings of Jesus?
- [11:15]
B
Well, you know, absolutely it was not when I was a conservative evangelical Christian where I was only interested in the New Testament Gospels, but when I went to graduate school, I started hearing about these other things and it took me a while to get interested. You know, I heard about like a Gospel of Thomas, you know, and I heard about these things. But I really was a New Testament guy for a long time. But then when I started reading some of these things, I thought, whoa, this is really interesting. And then I started reading more and more and I, it probably wasn't until, I don't know, I may have been a PhD student already before I heard of this entire. There's an entire group of sayings that, that scholars have grouped together. They aren't, they didn't come down to us as a group, but sayings of Jesus that are not in any of the gospels and are not, you know, so they're not in the gospels and they're called agrafa agrapha. So an agraphon literally means something that is not written. So it's a misnomer. It's not a good name for it because these sayings are written, because if they weren't written, we wouldn't know about them. But there are these sayings that are outside our canonical gospels. And so you could include the saying from the book of Acts I said I gave earlier or saying from Thomas or Philip or things. But usually when scholars talk about them, they're isolated sayings that occur in one place or another that we don't have otherwise. And so there's this whole field of study where you study these agrapha to try and figure them out.
- [12:45]
A
Fantastic. So we've talked about the canonical gospels, the non canonical gospels. What other material is there for looking at these additional sayings of Jesus. Are there any other recordings of them?
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, well, that's why we have them. So it's like, but where are they? And so if you eliminate gospels, you know, Gospels which were just telling you about what Jesus said and did, you have, have. You do have some places that record things. And so there are several sources of information that we have for this kind of thing. And I think. I think what I'd like to do is just tell you what kind of sources, then give you an example. If, if, if that's okay. Yeah, please. I assume it is, since it's our podcast. We can do what we want. Right? So. So in addition to things like acts, chapter 20, that it's more blessed to give than to receive, which is an agraphon in the sense that it's not written in one of the Gospels, sometimes you do get sayings in Paul. You know, Paul will quote Jesus sayings a couple of times anyway, but you also get them sometimes. You get these sayings in manuscripts of the New Testament where a scribe will add a saying that was not originally in the book that he's copying, but it seems to him like, you know, this is something worth. Worth pointing out, that Jesus said this. And so I'll just tell you my favorite one. It's. There's a. There's an early manuscript, one of our earliest manuscripts, called Codex Bize. It's designated as Codex D. It's kind of a wild manuscript in ways, but it's really very interesting and. Interesting and much studied at one point in, In Luke chapter 6, this manuscript adds a saying of Jesus that is not in Luke. Otherwise. And the saying is that is this. We're told that on. On. On a certain day, Jesus saw a man working on the Sabbath and he said to him, so this is the saying, oh, man, if you know what you're doing, you're blessed. But if you do not know, you're cursed and a transgressor of the law. Wow. So if you know what you're doing working on Sabbath, that's okay, that's fine, you're blessed. But if you don't and you're working, man, you're cursed. Very. You could do a lot of interpretation on that. I have a graduate student actually wrote an entire article trying to explain what that meant. So. So that's another thing you can get. You get. So we do get manuscripts of the New Testament that add sayings. The most famous would be the woman taken in adultery, where Jesus says things like, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. That's added by a scribe wasn't originally in John. And so it's that kind of thing. The other kind of thing we have are quotations by church fathers of sayings of Jesus that we don't have anywhere else. And I'll tell you my favorite one, because it's one of the earliest. Apparently. It's a saying attributed to Jesus by a church father named Papias, who we've mentioned before. He was writing probably, I don't know, somewhere between 120 and 140 of the common era. And he said that he got his information from people who had known the disciples who had hung out with Jesus. And so it's kind of this line of transmission. But he quotes one saying of Jesus that I think is absolutely terrific about what's going to happen in the future kingdom. The days are coming. This is Jesus saying this. Allegedly, the days are coming when vines, grapevines will come forth, each with 10,000 boughs. And on a single bough will be 10,000 branches. And indeed, on a single branch there will be 10,000 shoots. And on every shoot there will be 10,000 clusters. And in every cluster there will be 10,000 grapes. This is in the kingdom of God. And on every grape, when pressed, will yield 25 measures of wine. That's how great it's going to be in the kingdom. You think you're having a good time now? I had somebody actually do the math for me. With these ten thousands, it's a lot of wine that's coming out of these vines. And so allegedly, Jesus said that that's one of the glories of the kingdom. And so scholars look at that. And I've always quoted that as something obviously Jesus didn't say. And I've had several scholars, early Christianity scholars, including a fellow who wrote a book on Papias who said, I don't know why you say Jesus didn't say that. I think maybe he did say it. Wow. Okay, party gone.
- [17:02]
A
Excellent. Thank you. We are going to take a brief break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about exactly what these sayings are. I'm going to be asking Bart what his personal favorite saying is, so stay tuned.
- [17:17]
B
I'm Bart Ehrman, and I'm happy to announce a new course that I'll be offering called the Other Doubting Thomases. Did all of Jesus disciples believe in the Resurrection? I'll be giving the course on Sunday, April 6, from 2 to 4:30pm It'll be a two lecture course with a live Q and A. I've often heard from readers of my blog or listeners to my podcast that all of Jesus earthly disciples were martyred because they didn't believe in his resurrection. In response, I usually point out that we don't actually know how most of them died or for what reason. We simply don't have historical records. But that in itself raises an even more intriguing question. Do we actually know that all of the 12 came to believe in the resurrection? Certainly some New Testament passages say they did. But other passages that are hardly ever noticed, let alone taken seriously, are mysteriously ambiguous about the matter. For a long while now, I've wondered if these consistent doubt traditions reflect a historical reality that in the early decades of the church, some followers of Jesus in say, Galilee or Jerusalem knew that some of Jesus original destination disciples really did doubt he was raised from the dead, that these doubts never were resolved, that some of the disciples never were fully convinced, and that they, possibly a few of them never did come to believe. I don't recall anyone addressing the issue before in this course. I'll be looking at all the evidence to see if we can answer it. I hope you can join me again. The course will be held on Sunday, April 6th from 2 to 4:30pm if you're interested in registering, check it out@barturman.com Easter 2025 course.
- [19:20]
A
Welcome back everybody. Before the break, Bart was talking about where we can find these sayings of Jesus outside of the New Testament. Now we're going to get right back into our conversation. So, but before we get to the sayings themselves, when did scholars first start to get interested in this kind of material?
- [19:40]
B
You know, scholars started getting interested in knowing what Jesus really said and what he really said and did back at the, the end of the 18th century. So it's, it's a kind of, it's an enlightenment, post enlightenment movement to try and, to understand. The Gospels have contradictions. They're written later, decades later, by people who weren't there, writing in different language, living in different parts of the world. And so, you know, they contradict each other. And so how do you know what, what Jesus really said? And so they started looking for sources, they looked for manuscripts of the New Testament to see which ones, you know, seem to be the most accurate. But then they started noticing you having these other gospels and things. And I suppose in the 19th century, toward the second half of the 19th century, when some scholars got very interested in this question, what about these other sayings that are Quoted here or there. The other place. Is it possible that they are authentic? And there started being books written about this, especially in the early 20th century. There's several, several books written about it. And so I'd say it's on the periphery of New Testament scholarship. I'd say a lot of New Testament scholars have never even looked at this kind of thing. Maybe don't even know. They must know it kind of exists. But there are specialists who are really quite interested in it.
- [20:55]
A
So how do scholars go about trying to identify if one of these sayings is authentic or goes back to the historical Jesus? And do they get treated differently to sayings that are housed within the New Testament?
- [21:09]
B
Well, as to whether they're treated differently, it depends which scholar you're talking about. I would say that most conservative Christian scholars, whether they're Protestant evangelicals or Roman Catholic or Orthodox, they don't, as a rule. They, they just kind of rule these out automatically. They don't think about them much because, you know, just they're not in the New Testament. And it's probably. And they're reasons for thinking we don't need to worry about these. And so they don't. I'd say most conservative scholars are like that. But, you know, critical scholars who are just interested in historical Jesus and don't have a theological reason one way or the other, just are interested in it. They use every source they have. You know, I often, I often have somebody write me, have you ever thought about using this, this other source, you know, for understanding Jesus? And the answer is yes, of course. We look at every, every single source that there is and, and evaluate its, its credibility and evaluate every single saying. You know, it's a very painstaking thing. You go saying by saying to figure out, could Jesus have said this? The criteria scholars do for that are the same criteria they use to figure out if Caesar Augustus really said something. You look to see if the saying allegedly by Caesar Augustus or allegedly by Jesus is anachronistic, whether it presupposes something happening that hadn't happened yet in their lifetime, for example, or whether it's something that actually makes sense in their own historical context. And so we know a good deal about the context of Caesar Augustus, and we know a good deal about the context of Jesus. It's a very different context. But if you've got, you know, if you've got a person teaching in Galilee in the, in the twenties of the common of the first century, there are things that, that you would. You. You really would not be said by Somebody in that context, so far as we can tell, and, you know, we have pretty good information about. So you look for that. You also look to see. So you, and you look, see, is there saying, like, is this saying, like, similar to things that you're really sure he said? For other, you know, you've established some things you're pretty sure he said, is this thing similar to that or is it contradict to it? And would that affect things? But you also want to see, is this the kind of thing that somebody would make up and put on the person's lips? Like, if you had like an enemy of Caesar Augustus reporting him saying something that was really negative, you know, if it was the enemy who's reporting this and he's the only one reporting this, what do you think? You know, or. Or if a real, like a real sycophantic kind of, you know, person trying to, to kiss his sandals says something positive, makes him say something amazingly, you know, can you. And that's the only record you have, but can you trust that said it. And the same thing with Jesus. If you've got, if you got sayings of Jesus that are written by people who are adoring him, like gospel writers, and it really puts him in a bad light, or it is like it contradicts other things that he said, or it isn't the sort of thing he would have said, but on the other hand, is something that this writer would definitely want him to have said. Like, if you've got a. If you find a document next week that says, you know, that Jesus teaching the doctrine of the Trinity as it came out of the fourth century, you know, or Jesus teaching people how they have to say their Hail Marys, you know, if you come up with something like that, you're. Yeah, I don't think so. But it makes sense that this author would say that because it backs up his point. If you've got things that are contrary to what the person would want to say, though, like, in other words, you've got an author who reports Jesus saying something, and this author believes something about Jesus, you know, and it actually, the thing that he's writing sounds contrary to what he himself, the author himself believes. Well, he probably didn't make that one up because it's contrary to what he believes. And so those are the kinds of criteria you use for anybody in the past, including Jesus. Use them with the gospels of the New Testament. You use them for every other source that reports one of his sayings.
- [24:57]
A
Thank you. Now, when scholars are looking at these sayings and trying to determine their authenticity. Has there been much academic disagreements about how useful these are for trying to work out what Jesus actually said?
- [25:10]
B
The criteria or these sayings?
- [25:11]
A
No, sorry, the sayings.
- [25:13]
B
The sayings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are some debates, I would say over the last, I don't know, 70 years, most of the debates have focused on things like the Gospel of Thomas. Could there be things in here that he actually said? Because Thomas, as I said, is a fairly early gospel, many scholars have thought that it was not dependent on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, especially for the sayings that aren't in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It got it from somewhere else. But there are things that some scholars say make sense for Jesus to have said, and so there will always be debates about that. With that said, almost everybody agrees that if you really want to know what Jesus taught, the best place to turn are our earliest sources, which would be Matthew, Mark and Luke especially. So everybody agrees on that. But the question is really more about what's going on on the margins.
- [26:03]
A
So what do you think? Do you think any of these things could or are likely to go back to the historical Jesus?
- [26:09]
B
I think it's unlikely. I think that there might be some, I mean, the one I mentioned about Paul in Acts 20, that that would make sense, something Jesus would have said that didn't get into one of the Gospels. It may be that some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas actually do go back to Jesus. It may be some of these other reported things did go back, things in manuscripts, you know, like let the one without sin be the first to cast a stone. You know, it's, you know, I don't think it's impossible Jesus said that. I think it's very hard to demonstrate, but it wouldn't, you know, I don't think there, there are strong arguments against it other than the fact it's not recorded until, you know, well over a century after Jesus died. And so what's the likelihood that this person knows it but nobody else did? And so, so you have to weigh those things. So I think it's possible, but I, I tend to think that probably almost all of these things are not things he actually said.
- [27:05]
A
Thank you. Now, my final question for our conversation today. What are some of your favorite sayings of Jesus from the, the non canonical material?
- [27:14]
B
Yeah, so I've got, you know, I've got, I've got a lot of them. I thought it might be useful just to kind of give a sample of them so people can see. Please, please you know what they are. And so there are. I mentioned that one of the best sources for these agrapha, for these things are called not written sayings, which actually are written, but the agrapha are sayings that are in later church writers. And so there's. There's one, there's one church writing that I rather like. It's in the Apostolic Fathers. The Apostolic Fathers is a collection of 10 or 11, depending how you count church writers from after the New Testament period who embraced the points of view that ended up becoming the dominant views within Christianity. And there's a book that's called Second Clement. We have two books that are called Clement first and Second Clement that were thought by some, by some Christians to be part of Scripture up into the 4th century. We have a. One of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament is a manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus that is from about the year 500. I'm sorry, about the year 400. That is one of our oldest mansions that has these two books within its New Testament judgment. So Second Clement. These were not actually written by the guy named Clement who is one of the early, allegedly one of the early popes. But there are several quotations of Jesus that I find, I find rather interesting. I mean, for example, it says when the Lord himself was asked by someone when his kingdom would come, he said, when the two are one and the outside, like the inside, and the male with the female is neither male nor female. When you do these things, he said, the kingdom of my Father will come. Whoa, that's interesting. It's also a saying found in some of the Gnostic materials. It actually doesn't sound like something Jesus would have said, but maybe he did say, that'd be interesting where there'll be complete unity when you get to the kingdom. No more male, female, not, not two things, but one thing. And you know, so maybe, maybe, but you have to look at it, look at it and see. Or there's a, There's a saying in, that's quoted by the church father origin in the early third century that I think is very ripe for interpretation. This church father's origin. The greatest theologian of the first three centuries of Christianity who quotes a saying of Jesus that says, be skillful money changers. Wow. Okay. You think about Jesus driving out the money changers from the temple, but what, what would he mean by be skillful money changers? And Origen seems to think he knew that Jesus said this. And Origen was a scholar who actually done a lot of research on things. And so I don't know, but I'll tell you my favorite one. So my favorite one is back to Second Clement. And in part, it's my favorite because there's some reasons for thinking that maybe this was originally in the book called the Gospel of Peter. We have the Gospel Peter in a fragment, but there are reasons, kind of complicated reasons, for thinking that this thing may have gone back to this Gospel of Peter, which some people thought was scripture. So this, I think it's very clever and interesting. The Lord said, you will be like sheep in the midst of wolves. Okay, sounds like Jesus. But Peter replied to him, what if the wolves rip apart the sheep? Jesus said to Peter, after they're dead, the sheep should fear the wolves no more. So too, you don't fear those who kill you, then can do nothing more to you but fear the one who, after you die, has the power to cast your body and soul into the hell of fire. So I, I love this thing because, you know, Jesus says, well, you know, you'll be like sheep among the wolves. And Peter said, yeah, well, the wolves rip us apart.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah, but then you're dead and nothing else bad can happen to you.
- [31:21]
B
So really don't worry about that. Don't worry about life or. Not true.
- [31:26]
A
Technically true.
- [31:27]
B
It's a good, good point. So anyway, yeah, so you get, you get, you get very interesting ones and, you know, things that are kind of interesting on their own terms. But, you know, theoretically. Could Jesus have said something like that? I think so. He could have said that. Is there a way to demonstrate it? Not really, but I think something like that is certainly within the realm of possibility.
- [31:53]
A
Thank you very much for sharing all of those. Now, for audience members who are interested in this and want to learn more, what resources that are available for them.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, well, there, there are not a lot of books written about these things. There are several, but they're all in German. And so that's not going to help most of our readers very much. And they're kind of old, but, you know, I've got a collection of these that my, my colleague Zakoplacia at unc, he's a. He's a expert in ancient languages and early Christianity as well. And we, we put together this book called the Other Gospels. That is a collection of all the gospels from the first 600 years or so of Christianity that were originally written in either Greek, Latin or Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language. And we translated all of these, and we have a section in here on the Agrapha, which lists the sayings of Jesus not found in in the other gospels. And so that would be a place to go with a little introduction and explanation of them.
- [32:55]
A
Excellent. Thank you so much. We are going to now go over to our news and updates and find out what's been happening in bart's world.
- [33:05]
B
Welcome to our upcoming highlights and events segment where we catch up on bart's courses, community updates and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.
- [33:22]
A
So, but I wanted to ask you, and we've spoken briefly about this a month or so ago, you've been writing a new series on your blog. And for people who are not familiar, the blog is entirely charity driven. There's a small membership fee and all of the money raised for the blog goes directly to charity. Now you've got this new series going, which takes Bible chapters, well, chapters of the New Testament and then explains them in a nutshell. What does that mean and how is it going?
- [33:49]
B
Yeah, it's going well, but it's hard for me. So what I'm doing, I'm going book by book. And so I did, I'm doing them canonically. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and each one I begin by I summarizing, Summarize Matthew in 50 words. I do that. 50 words, exactly 50 words. And then I spend about 1200 words unpacking the themes and emphases of Matthew. Then I have a second post that talks about who actually wrote this, what we know about the author, when was he writing, why was he writing. Then another post on how they can know where you can go for further reading on these things. And so I'm sort of going through, and I'm up to Paul. I decided I was the next thing was Romans. I was going to do Romans, which is his first letter. But then I thought, you know, I really need to do a nutshell thing on the, the Pauline letters as a whole. And so here's a, you know, here's a post on what you can summarize about the Pauline letters. The goal, the point of this whole thing is so that somebody can read this and understand. Like, you know, how do I, you know, how do I know basically something, you know, the very basics of something. And so how do I put it in a nutshell? And so that's, that's what it is. And I, it's going, it's going well. It's going well.
- [34:55]
A
How, how difficult is it to summarize an entire book of the New Testament in 50 words? Because that doesn't sound like an easy thing to be doing.
- [35:03]
B
It is not easy. I tell my People who are. Watch who, you know, who are on the blog. Try it. You know, if you read. Have you read Matthew at all? You know, have read it through, summarize it, you know, Romans, and it's not easy. But I tell you, the hardest thing for me was I recently had to do the Pauline letters. And so I was going to do the seven undisputed Pauline letters. How do you do that in 50 words? Yeah, you could do it. Obviously you do it a million ways, but I mean, how do you do it? So it actually tells you something. That's a good boy. That was. I. I've never done any of this before. And so it's been fun and people are really enjoying it. They're. They're writing just like, you know, just helpful. It's just helpful to have something like this. Like it's something succinct. And so that's the goal of it. Yeah, it's going well.
- [35:46]
A
Excellent. Thank you. And now, if people are interested, the blog can be found@ermenblog.org you can go there. There's usually a couple of posts available for free, so you can take a look and see if it suits you. And then there's more information about the costs and that kind of thing. And I've not asked you this before, Bart, and I don't know if you have the information in your brain. What kinds of charities does the money go to?
- [36:10]
B
Oh, boy, do I have it in my brain. I'm thinking about this all the time. It mainly goes to. We have. We have five distinct charities we contribute to. Two are local to me, and three are not completely low or more international, but they, I guess three are. Three are local to me. So they're basically dealing with hunger and homelessness principally, but also literacy and disaster relief. So hunger, homelessness, disaster relief are the main things. And there are things like Doctors Without Borders and Care. My local. The local food bank. I've got a local thing in Durham that deals with hunger and homelessness that is fantastic. It's called the Urban Ministries of Durham. And it, it doesn't just kind of put a band aid on the problem. It works to resolve homelessness and get people into employment and find them housing. Fantastic. So. So those are the things. And I will say, this past week we passed the $3 million mark for this. We've raised. In the history of the charity, we've raised over $3 million now. So. And it all goes. It all. I don't get a dime, unfortunately, I don't get a dime. And there's no overhead we take out of the membership fees. It's all, it all goes directly to the charities.
- [37:22]
A
Excellent. Thank you for sharing all of that. We're going to now go to some listeners questions.
- [37:31]
B
Now it's time for questions from listeners where BART answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart.
- [37:50]
A
Okay, but are you ready for some listeners questions?
- [37:53]
B
Okay. I hope so. We'll see.
- [37:56]
A
First up, how did Paul distinguish between commandments that Christians should keep despite not being a path towards salvation, like not committing adultery, and commandments that they should not keep, like circumcision?
- [38:09]
B
Well, the short answer is we don't know. He did make this differentiation and he made it quite clearly. And, you know, the, the traditional way of expressing, expressing it is one that I kind of subscribe to, although a lot of my scholarly friends don't like it at all. But I think that Paul differentiates between those commandments that are clearly designed to make Jews Jewish and those commandments that are just more kind of how to behave. And so circumcision is the mark of the covenant. Jews are known to circumcise their baby boys. They're known to keep kosher food laws. They're known to observe the festivals, they're known to keep keep the Sabbath. Those are things that identify Jews as Jews. And Paul does not want Gentiles to do these things if they come to believe in Jesus. But the commandments about like don't commit adultery, don't commit murder, don't bear false witness, these things that are about how you ought to behave, he does seem to think are appropriate. And so I think that it's a difference between what you might call kind of Jewish ceremonial ritual, kind of ethnic identity laws versus what we might call as ethical laws. And the reason a lot of colleagues don't like that distinction is because Jews in the ancient world did not differentiate between laws like that. You know, there were laws that were, I mean, God gave the law, the law is the law. It's a different thing. But it looks to me like Paul makes a difference between those two.
- [39:34]
A
Thank you. And now this next question is actually related to what we were talking about today. The questioner says, we all know that the story of the adulterous woman in John was added at some point by a scribe. My question was, is this story a piece of writing that existed outside of a New Testament that was taught elsewhere? And some scribe thought, oh, that would fit in well, here. Does it appear anywhere in non canonical writings?
- [39:59]
B
It's a very good question. It's a complicated question. One of the early articles I wrote as a scholar, before I started writing books and things, I wrote a book called Jesus and the Adulteress because, because I was interested in this very issue. The when, when you read scholarship on this woman taking an adultery, one of the things that scholars always say is that this story is not mentioned in any Greek commentator of the New testament until the 12th century. Like, you know, Greek, Greek writing, Christian church fathers don't mention the story until the 12th century. And in doing my research for my dissertation, I realized that the person I was doing my research on, Didymus the blind in the 4th century in a commentary that had never been translated into English, but was only available in Greek and then had it had recently come out in a German translation, he appeared to know the story in the fourth century. Whoa. But the way he knew the story appears to be in a different version from the one that made it into the New Testament. And we have hints of other versions that were floating around in church fathers. And so what I ended up arguing is that there were actually two versions of the story that were floating around that are very different from each other. And Didymus knew both versions. And what ended up getting into the New Testament later was a combination version. And so what we have now is like a, is actually a combination of two different, two different accounts been melded together. So there are hints of this kind of this one or two of these stories going back to as far as Papias. But then in, in various church writings, the story itself in its entirety is not known outside of this. Outside of this account or people much later referring to this account.
- [41:55]
A
Excellent, thank you very much. Going a little bit further forward in history, the next question asks what, if any, biblical scriptures were used by the Church or the Pope to justify the Crusades?
- [42:10]
B
I don't know specific verses. I think the, the idea was that, I think it ultimately goes back to the idea that this is the promised land that God gave to this chosen people. And in the Hebrew Bible, of course, those are the descendants of Abraham. They're not Christians. But when Christians became dominant, they started to identify themselves even before they became dominant as the chosen ones. And the idea was that just Jerusalem was the holy city of God. Christians were the ones who worshiped God. And so this, this was their city. And so that was the rationale for taking it from the Muslims who were in control of it. And that that's what led to the, you know, the kind of excitement, so to say, of Christians wanting to go back and conquer the infidels and take over the. Take over Jerusalem and the promised Land.
- [43:02]
A
Thank you. Final question for today is about a relatively recent episode on misquoting Jesus. The questioner said, I really enjoyed the episode about whether Julie, Whether Jesus, whether Jesus believed in heaven. I was disappointed, however, that the story of the poor man, Lazarus, Luke 16, 1931, was not addressed because that story seems to assume a heaven and a hell theology. What tradition is Luke working with here?
- [43:28]
B
It's a very good question. And I'll say that whenever. Well, while I was writing the book, whenever I tell somebody the thesis that, you know, Jesus didn't have concept of heaven and hell, the one passage they would always say, well, what about the rich man and Lazarus? Like, don't you read the Bible? It's right there. And it is right there. It's in Luke. And so I have to, I, I devote a good section of the discussion to that and what I try to show in my discussion and which we would have talked about if we had more time in the episode. These episodes are frustratingly short for us. It might be interminably long for some people, but they're like frustratingly short for us. But we, if we were to talk about it, I would, I would talk about that parable because it is found only Luke. And so when I said earlier, you know, you look for sayings that are found in multiple sources to see whether Jesus really said them, okay, this one wouldn't pass that criterion. And, and the, the story is the, There's a very rich man and a very poor man. Lazarus and the poor man starving, the rich man's feasting, they both die. The rich man's taken down to suffer down in, in, in hell and Hades. And the, the. And Lazarus goes up to the bosom of Abraham where he's feasting with the patriarchs. And, and so, and there's a discussion between Abraham and the rich man about how he can't get to. Can't get to Lazarus and Lazarus can't get to him. So it's in Luke chapter 16. And so doesn't that show that Jesus did believe in the heaven and the hell? What I try to show in my book is that this parable almost certainly cannot go back to Jesus. There, there are reasons for that. But one of them, this is the problem because when I explain this now people are saying, yeah, but. So I get the yeah, buts. But the but at the end of the parable, the rich man says, look, okay, if Lazarus can't come to me because there's a great chasm between us, can you at least send it back to earth to my brothers so that they know that they need to shape up or they're going to be down here with me? And, and Abraham says that they've got. Look, your brothers have Moses and the prophets. They can read their scriptures. If they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe even if somebody is raised from the dead. And so that last line is Luke saying, people who don't. It's part of Luke's major theme, that the teachings of Jesus, Jesus himself are predicted in Scripture. And if you just read the scriptures, you'll understand, understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of prophecy. And that's. And in this passage, he's saying, if people don't believe that they're not going to believe even if somebody's raised from the dead. He's talking about Jesus resurrection from the dead. People won't even believe after the resurrection. And so it's really a prediction of Jesus resurrection, which is something that would happen, be written about after the resurrection. And so this is. So it's not a parable that Jesus himself told, but it certainly does accord with Luke's understanding of the afterlife, because even the other passage in Luke is with only Luke, again, is where Jesus talked to one of the other people being crucified and tells him, today you will be with me in paradise. Luke thinks that when you die, you go to paradise if you're on Jesus side, if not, go off to be punished. So that's Luke's view. It's definitely Luke's view, but it's not the view of the historical Jesus. Jesus. So again, it takes a while to demonstrate that, but that's, that's basically what I try and argue in the book.
- [47:06]
A
Excellent. Thank you so much. Now, before we finish for the week, Bart, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about?
- [47:13]
B
Well, there are a bunch of sayings about sayings allegedly by Jesus outside the New Testament, certainly outside the Gospels, but also outside the entire New Testament. And the question is, are the questions are, are any of these possibly authentic? Could Jesus have said any of these things? The answers were, yes, he could have. We evaluate them the way we evaluate any saying attributed to Jesus. And if they're not authentic, why would they matter? They actually matter a lot. They matter a lot for understanding how Christianity was developing and understanding Jesus over the years after his death. And so scholars, some scholars devote themselves to studying these things and they are pretty interesting audience.
- [47:50]
A
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the Them 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.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [48:10]
B
Yeah, well, this one's a little unusual. We're going to be talking about a new discovery. People ask me all the time, do manuscripts get discovered? Yeah, they do get discovered. We're going to talk about a manuscript discovery in Egypt that radically affects our understanding of Jesus view of women.
- [48:28]
A
Join us next time for that. 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 list, listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.