← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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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 is where Hulu gets real. Stream now on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply. The ability to read and write is almost taken for granted in the modern Western world. I certainly don't think twice about being able to read a book or a road sign or write a script for a podcast. Not so for the ancient world. And the name of the Apostle Peter is given to several texts, including first and second Peter, found in the New Testament. But would a rural fisherman from Galilee have been able to write well enough to compose whole texts? Is it likely that he would have learned to write in later life? And if he didn't write, then who composed the works attributed to him? We'll be getting into all of that and so much more. 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. The ability to read and write in the ancient world was very clearly restricted to the wealthy. So why are so many written works attributed to the Apostle Peter? Was he a rarity, a literate peasant? Or is something else going on here before all of that? Bart hi. How are you doing today?
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B
Doing well. Glad I'm in England rather than the US for climate if nothing else.
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A
Yeah, there was I actually last week, no two weeks ago when I was driving to pick up my daughter from summer camp. Had to pull over because there was a fire on the grass in the middle. Like the central strip going down the highway. There was just a patch of grass on fire there and then the other side of the road. So I had to pull over and call the fire department. It's just been so hot and so dry here. Everything is just like A tinderbox?
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B
Yeah. No, I'm telling you, the thing is, it's not gonna get any better. It's heading in a certain direct. Yeah, okay. God help us.
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A
It's not the direction that gives us more rain.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So how is London? Are you enjoying yourself?
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B
How does one not? I mean, I'm sure I've said this. I mean, London's one of the great cities in the world and it's inexhaustible and there's so much to do here. I mean, you know, I don't do it. I sit around reading my books and writing. But I mean. But if I wanted to do things, there's all sorts of things. One thing I am doing this summer, it's what usually when I come to London for a stretch, I'll have a. A special dinner with some of my people on my blog. It gives me a chance to hang out in London all day. Then I go and have a blog dinner. So these are just people. I just write a note to people. People who are on my blog. I just said, no, okay, I'm going to be in London and let's gather for dinner this night and maybe do seven or eight people. Just enough to keep a conversation so it doesn't get out of hand with too many people. I do that most places that I go these days, and it's a lot of fun because just meeting people from different backgrounds who do different things. And often I'll do two or three of these things in London over the summer because you get different people and they're interested in the stu stuff we do, the stuff we do on the podcast, the stuff I do on my blog. And it's lovely, lovely things. I'm looking forward to that next one.
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A
It sounds like fun. I hope to be able to catch one of them one day.
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B
Yes, I hope so.
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A
Our trips to the UK so far haven't really coincided and my family are much further north, so I'm not around London very much these days.
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B
One day, people listening. Don't know. We've never met each other face to face. No. Wow. We could trade glasses.
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A
We could. That would confuse some people. That would confuse some people.
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B
No, I don't think so. I think the hair might be a giveaway.
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A
I'll, like, find a custom wig for you or something. Oh, gosh. We should get into some academic New Testament scholarship type stuff rather than. I mean, I would very happily just chat and swap costumes all day long, but I suspect that's not what people are here for. So who is Peter and what does the New Testament say about him?
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B
Right, so Peter is a nickname. This is somebody whose name was actually Simon. Before the New Testament, there was no name Peter that was never used as a name in any circle. Jewish, Greek, anything, I mean, whatever. So it comes from the New Testament. The word Peter is from the Greek word petros, which means rock. And it's the nickname that Jesus gave this person named Simon. Simon was his first disciple and his closest disciple. And at some point, Jesus gave him the nickname of Peter. He calls him the rock. And so I, in modern parlance, I guess we'd be calling him Rocky or something, but he. He's a rock. And. And I've always thought it was a little bit ironic. Maybe Jesus is trying to be ironic because when you read the Gospels, this disciple, Simon Peter, he is not a solid rock. He's more like shifting sand. He's all over the place. He's always putting his foot in his mouth. He's always doing the wrong thing. He ends up, you know, denying that he even knows Jesus at the end. And he's not a solid rock at all. So I. I've sometimes wondered about this name. But the name, and by the way Jesus would have been speaking, ar name in Aramaic is Kephos. That's the word for rock in Aramaic. And so that gets translated in English Bibles as Cephas. And so scholars usually have thought that Cephas and Peter are the same person in part because they have the same nickname. And In John chapter 1, verse 41, it says, you know, it translates Cephas as Peter.
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A
So do we know anything about his background prior to joining Jesus?
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B
Well, we know some things. I mean, he's talked about in all four gospels. And so we have independent testimonies about who he was and what he did. The testimonies all agree with each other. I'm not saying that all four gospels are completely independent of each other, but you have different stories and different gospels about this figure. In the Gospels, he is a fisherman from. In rural Galilee. He's from the town of Capernaum. If you go to Israel today, or if you see a map of Israel and you have the Sea of Galilee, it's a bit of a misnomer. It's not a sea, it's a body of water. It's like a lake. It's not a huge lake, you can see across it. But he fished on that lake. And his hometown is on the Capernaum, is on the western bank, the Sea of Galilee. And in the Gospels he has A brother named Andrew. And both of them are called by Jesus to be his disciples. And they appear to have been his first two disciples. Simon eventually then becomes sort of like head disciple.
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A
So archaeologists have associated Capernaum with the archaeological site of Telum. And do you know whether the site suggests that its inhabitants would have been educated people?
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B
Oh, well, yeah. So that's the relevant question. Because if. If you got these books that claim to be written by Peter, then the question is, could Peter write? And a very good way to begin answering that question is to figure out what his background was and what kind of education he might have had. And that would be completely dependent on his circumstances. If Jesus had a disciple who had grown up in an elite RO family in Rome, then, you know, that'd be one thing a person like that could write. What about a fisherman in rural Galilee? Could somebody like that write? And so the first step is what you're saying. You have to see what the environment was. The city, Capernaum, has been excavated by archaeologists. And most people who go to Israel, who go up into Galilee, will visit Capernaum because the archeological site is very interesting. But the question is, what was it like in Peter's day? And we have pretty good information about it. It was a small place. It was a very, very poor place. The archaeologists found no evidence of any public buildings of any kind. No synagogue in the time of Peter has been discovered. If you go there, there's a fantastic synagogue that everybody visits. And you'll see pictures of it everywhere. But it's from about three or four hundred years after Peter. And so there's no evidence of their one being in his day. There are no paved roads. There's no sign of wealth in the city. The kinds look for is you look for, like, nice mosaics, you know, or various kinds of ornamentation and things, or large, luxurious houses. There's nothing like that. The houses were very, very basic, made out of basalt rock. And you can still see the foundations, you know, the lower walls of a number of them. Small, probably insulated with straw or animal manure, with maybe thatched roofs. It's a small town in a rural area of Galilee.
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A
Based on that information, is it likely that really anyone in the village would have had any kind of literary education?
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B
So there have been a lot of studies of literacy in the ancient world. If people are interested in this, it'd be well worth taking a look at some of these studies. Because they're very sophisticated. And we don't have the kinds of demographic information that we can get to try and figure out what was writing like, who was learning to write, who could Write in the 1880s. We have good records for that kind of or the 1920s, but you don't for the 20s of the common era. But there is evidence and people have gone through the evidence quite carefully. Every piece of evidence. The classic study of literacy broadly in the Roman world at about this time is by William Harris in a book called Ancient Literacy. It's a classic in the field now. And Harris estimates that at the best of times, in the Greek and Roman worlds, maybe 10 to 15% of the population could read. And right, 10 or 15%, so means 85 to 90% were illiterate. And by right, that means something like be able to sign your name. It doesn't mean to be able to compose a book. Very, very few people could do that. The people who were educated were there actually two groups of people who could be educated. There were the upper class elite who had wealth, and there could be slaves who were educated in order to help the upper class elite with wealth. And so if you weren't a slave or very rich, your chances of getting an education, very, very slim. And that's because, you know, there weren't child labor laws. And the normal way of working, especially in rural areas, is that everybody in the family worked on the farm. They'd have a farm plot, small plot, and everybody would have to work and do whatever could be done to keep the family sustained. And so kids started working when they were young. They didn't have time for school. Places like Capernaum, there almost certainly wasn't a school. It's really highly unlikely that Peter would have had an education, especially because we're not talking about the broader empire where 10 to 15% might have been literate. There's a study of literacy in Roman Palestine, but I think that's what it's called. Literacy in Roman Palestine by Katherine Hetzer. H E Z S E R. She maintains that the literacy rate in Peter's time around that part of the world was more like 3 or 4% who could read or write. Those 3 or 4% would have lived in the major cities and they would have been wealthy. And none of that's true for Peter.
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A
Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back. We're going to talk about whether Peter received education in later life and then look at some of the texts that are attributed to him. So please come back and join us
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B
if you're enjoying the miss Quoting Jesus Podcast. You'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out@Barterman.com. you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast.
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A
So if Peter most likely didn't receive any kind of education in his childhood or adolescence, is it possible that he may have received something in later life, maybe after Jesus death?
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B
Yeah, you know, I wondered about that and people have suggested it to me as well. To learn to read and write took many years. So kids going through school, I mean they didn't, it wasn't like you could do it in six months, it was years and years and they would learn to read first. So they didn't have reading and writing done at the same time in the curriculum the way we do today. You would learn how to read, you'd recognize the letters, learn how to put them together, learn how to pronounce the syllables, learn how to pronounce the words, learn how to read a sentence, do all that. Then you'd learn how to actually make the letters and then write the letters. And then like even later than that's composition, we're talking a very long, many year process. And so Peter didn't go through that, I'm sure. But so some people said, look, you know, he was a missionary and so he went abroad. He must have learned Greek, right? Well, you know, he may have learned how to speak some rough Creek. Like, you know, today we have lots of immigrants in our country. I, I know a number of immigrants from Central America and Durham. Fantastic people, very, very smart. Their English is, is good enough for me to talk with them, but it's not great. And they would not be able to write, you know, they wouldn't be able to write anything in English. And so because really what we're talking about here, I guess we, we didn't get to this part. But you know, these books that we talk about Peter having written, they're written in Greek, he spoke Aramaic. And so it's not just getting an education, it's getting an education in a second language. And so were there facilities for adults to get a further education in the ancient world? The answer is no, there was not. I wondered about that one point. I actually looked into it and asked experts in ancient education about It. And it's a definite no, there was not. It's not like, you know, you could go to the Capernaum High School for evening school courses for adults. There wasn't a high school and there was no evening school anywhere. And so, no, there's no evidence of people learning literacy after they were children in the ancient world.
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A
So if it's unlikely that Peter was literate at any stage in his life, what writings do we have that have been attributed to him?
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B
Well, we have two in the New Testament, so two letters, first and Second Peter, two of the epistles of the New Testament. Outside the New Testament, we have a number of writings attributed to him. We have a gospel allegedly by Peter, claims to be by Peter, that nobody thinks Peter wrote. It's a fantastic gospel. We have a letter that Peter wrote to James, the brother of Jesus, who is the leader of the church in Jerusalem, where Peter trashes the apostle Paul not by name, but attacks the man who is my enemy, who preaches a lawless gospel to the Gentiles. And so it's like he's got salvation apart from the law to the Gentiles, it's Paul. We have three apocalypses that claim to be written by Peter. One of them is our first instance of a guided tour of heaven and hell that Jesus gives Peter, written in the first person by Peter. Another is an account by a completely different author who observes Jesus crucifixion and can't understand why the divine Christ within Jesus has left Jesus and looks like Jesus and is talking to him Peter, while Jesus is being crucified. It's a very confusing text. It's a Gnostic text. Fantastic. We have other letters written by Peter, Peter to Philip and so forth. So we have a large number of books that claim to be written by Peter. None of them in Aramaic, all of them in Greek, or the apocalypse of Peter I mentioned. One of them is in Coptic.
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A
Does the language or the style of writing used in these different texts give us any clues as to what kinds of people could have written them?
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B
Well, let me just stick with first and second Peter, because they're the ones that most people would be interested in because they are in the New Testament and they definitely claim to be written by this person Peter. And if they weren't written by this person Peter, that would cause a lot of readers problems in the modern world. We'd call that a forgery. If I write a book on ancient Assyria and claim to be Megan Lewis, but in fact, I'm Bart Ehrman, you know, and I publish it in the name of Megan Lewis. That's not good. So it would be that kind of situation all the time. I have people tell me that that was an accepted practice in the ancient world to write in the name of a famous person. And often people say, you know, nobody really took it seriously or everybody knew what was going on. Nobody. Nobody cared. It wasn't like a moral issue. And that's just wrong, just flat out wrong. If people want to see why it's flat out wrong. I wrote two books just on this issue showing that in fact, this phenomenon was. It was widespread, but it was not accepted in wider society. In any event, the question is first and Second Peter. There are very good reasons for thinking that whoever wrote Second Peter did not write First Peter. Their writing styles are very different. Even evangelical scholars will sometimes say that, yeah, they can't be the same person. So usually if somebody wants to say one of them was written by Peter, they'll say, well, First Peter was, and Second Peter is a later imitation of some kind. First Peter, though, I think, could not have been written by Peter. It is written in very elegant Greek. The Greek is high level. You know, I have really top level students in Chapel Hill, undergraduate students who have 16 years of education under their belt who could not write a book like that. And so in terms of the literary style, like, he uses rhetorical techniques and uses tropes and he uses all sorts of grammatical things that are sophisticated. They're not somebody writing in a second language, let alone an Aramaic language language. So I think the writing itself precludes the possibility of Peter having written it.
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A
If Peter couldn't have written First Peter, is it possible that he dictated it or used a secretary or someone to kind of elevate his writing style maybe?
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B
Yeah. Well, that's what, you know, that's what we always heard and learned. Even when I was in graduate school, I had professors saying that at one point I decided to look into it and to see what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. We know a lot about secretaries because we have a lot of references to secretaries and we know how they worked, we know what they did. We have no instance anywhere in the Greek and Roman worlds of somebody writing a kind of a treatise like this, like 1 Peter, a five chapter treatise that has been dictated to him in some of the language where, like Peter. Suppose Peter dictates it in Aramaic and this cry would translate it and make it really high level, rhetorical, historical Greek. There is no analogy for that that I have ever found. And I'VE looked at everything I could. I spent a long time looking up every reference to secretaries in every Greek and Roman source that mentioned them. I couldn't find anything like that. It's hard enough to think that somebody like Peter, who is an Aramaic speaker, who was uneducated, could dictate something at that level in Aramaic, you know, that literary level in Aramaic. And so he couldn't have done it in Greek. And, and whether a secretary translated or not, I mean, you can think that if you want. But you know, for historians we'd like to see, like, is this something that happens before? You know, it'd be kind of like, you know, if you say that somebody writing a letter in the, in the 1950s, they had a secretary put it down on their word processor on their computer. So, well, okay, you know, you can think that if you want, but were there word processors then? So it's that kind of thing. Were there secretaries who did that sort of thing? So far as we know, no. No. Again, I have a discussion of this where I actually cite the data in both of my books on forgery.
- [20:41]
A
Now if people really want to argue that Peter did write first Peter, one of the things that they might look for is a familiarity with Hebrew scriptures that you may expect someone from his background to have. Do we see this kind of familiarity coming through in the text?
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B
So one thing I'll say is that it's unlikely that a fisherman who's a lower class laborer, a hand to mouth kind of existence would have been memorizing scripture then any more than, you know, somebody today who's, I mean, today people can read scripture and memorize it. It's very hard to memorize things if you can't read the author. First Peter knows the Old Testament extremely well. And so. But the other point about it is he doesn't appear to know the Hebrew Bible. He knows the Greek Bible. The Bible is translated into Greek before the New Testament period in order to allow Jews from around the world to be able to read it. Most Jews didn't live in Israel any more than most people do now. Most Jews do now. Most Jews don't today don't live in Israel. They didn't then either. And so in America most Jews read, read the Bible in English and that was the same throughout the Greek world, even more so than the now that they would read in Greek. So this is a person who didn't live in Israel, who didn't know the Hebrew Bible, who read this, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible and he uses the Greek Bible in order to support his views throughout his book. So he definitely knew the Greek Old Testament, but there's nothing to suggest that like an Aramaic speaking Galilean that he knew the Hebrew Bible at all.
- [22:17]
A
If anyone wanted to make like a last final Hail Mary argument that Peter did write them, is there anything in these texts, texts that suggests that the Apostle Peter could have tangentially written them?
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B
The only reason anybody would possibly think that this book was written by Peter is because the author begins by calling himself Peter. If you didn't have that name to begin the book, you definitely, there would be nothing to suggest that this is written by one of Jesus disciples from Israel who is an Aramaic speaker. And nothing about Peter himself particularly nothing. In fact, some scholars have pointed out, pointed out that the theology in this book, in one Peter is very close in many ways to the theology of the Apostle Paul. If the author had called himself Paul instead of Peter, then probably most people would think that this is an authentic Pauline letter because it sounds the theology is very much like Paul's. And so I think the one thing going for it is that it calls itself Peter, but so do all these other books. You know, writing books in the name of Peter was something of a cottage industry in early Christianity. It's like, you know, if you want authority for your views, man, you write it by calling yourself Peter and then people pay attention to your writing. Otherwise, you know, if you give yourself your actual name, you're some nobody nobody's ever heard of. You know, you like you're Jacob of Antioch. Who's that? I don't know. You're not going to read his book if you read Peter, but yeah, I'll read that. So people were calling themselves that to get their views read and that happened in every other instance. I think it probably happened in this instance as well.
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A
So apart from his lack of literacy, is there any other reason for thinking that Peter most definitely didn't write these texts?
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B
There are other things and in my books I actually deal with one Peter in both my forgery books. One other thing that's pretty interesting is that the book is usually thought to have been written from Rome. Rome. And people think, ah, Peter's in Rome. Okay, so that's it. And there's actually no, there's not good historical evidence that Peter ever was in Rome. But apart from that, the reason they think that is written in Rome is because the author ends by sending greetings to his readers from Babylon. Think, well, okay, that means it was written in Babylon. Right? Now everybody realizes that by saying he's writing from Babylon, he's giving Rome the code word that Christians used for Rome, namely Babylon. So you find Rome, for example, talked about as Babylon in the Book of Revelation. In the New Testament, the great whore of Babylon is the city of Rome. And it became the name for the city of Rome. And so people say, so he's writing from Rome and he's giving it this Christian code name. But the thing is, when did they get this code name of Babylon? Babylon is the bad city. In the Hebrew Bible, Babylon is the city that destroys Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE. And so Nebuchadnezzar's armies destroyed Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, dispelled the Jewish people from there, and it was a bad place. Babylon. Christians started calling Rome Babylon because Rome did the same thing. They came in, they destroyed Jerusalem. In the year 70, they burned the temple, and it was a disaster is the second time the city had been destroyed and the temple burned by a foreign power since the first time it happened with the Babylonians. Then the Christians, who know all about that from the Hebrew Bible, started calling Rome Babylon. But the point is Rome did that. Rome destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70. That's when Christians started calling Rome Babylon. Peter, according to tradition, was martyred in the year 64. He wouldn't have been alive yet.
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A
That presents a problem.
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B
Yeah, it's a problem. And so, you know, that's an, an additional reason for thinking that Peter didn't write it. It comes out that, you know, there's just so much evidence against Peter having written this that anyone who wants to think he did, as some people do, they have to explain these things. And when you see the kinds of explanations they come up with, it's really kind of special pleading because it just, you know, it's. To me at least, it seems pretty clear Peter did not write this.
- [26:43]
A
I have one final question before we move on to our next segment. So you said earlier on that forgery was not an accepted, morally accepted practice in the ancient world and that so many people were using the name Peter in their writings to gain legitimacy, to encourage people to read what they were writing, because you wouldn't just read something written by Jeremy. So how did ancient people try and differentiate between these kinds of forgeries and legitimate writings?
- [27:13]
B
Oh, they did it all the time. I mean, you'll even have scholars claim that, you know, that, oh, nobody even bothered. Bothered to check. You know, everybody Just. And it's just not true. There was a whole industry of trying to figure out which books were authentic and which ones weren't. And writers got really upset if they found that somebody had forged something in their name, which happened. I mean, we have Roman authors who. Who complain about people forging things in their name while they're still alive, obviously, because they're complaining about it. They use the same kinds of tools that people would use today. They couldn't have been a sophisticated advocate because they didn't have our technological advances. They would look, for example, at writing sty style. Is this the style of writing of this author? What kind of points of view does this author set forth in this book? Is the kind of point of view that the. The alleged author himself actually had and what kind of vocabulary is being used and what kind of situations being presupposed. And they. So they apply these various criteria, especially stylistic criteria. And Christians did this. Christians often talked about books that were Christian books that were forged into the fourth century. You have people saying that, you know, second Peter is a forgery or the Book of Revelation is a forgery. They weren't speaking English. They used the Greek word words for this, but the Greek words were equally nasty. One of them is just lies. This book is a lie is a word that they would use. They certainly practice this. And we have lots of instances of it where they talk about it, doing it, and not being pleased when they find something that's forged. And when. When Christians said this book, in fact, is not written by this person, they said, well, it can't be in the New Testament then. And so you have those discussions going up through the 4th century.
- [28:55]
A
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. We are going to come back with some updates on what's going on in Barth's life.
- [29:06]
B
This is Barth's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings, and online course launches.
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A
Now, Bart, you and I obviously are on YouTube together quite a lot, but you do also talk to other people on YouTube, and I know that you've been doing some of that over the summer. So can you tell us about some of that? Maybe?
- [29:33]
B
I enjoy doing other interviews for other podcasts. I can't do as many as I'd like, but there are some that I really like doing. I did one recently with Alex o', Connor, who has this podcast called Within Reason. He has a huge following and it's a really good podcast. He's a really smart and intuitive, intelligent guy and so he wanted to interview me. I've done a couple of interviews with him. This one was on the Gospel of Judas and so that was fun. We should do a podcast on the Gospel of Judas. More than one maybe. It's the most important discovery of a non canonical gospel in recent times and its discovery made quite a splash when it happened. It's a very interesting gospel connected closely with Judas Iscariot. And there are debates among scholars whether Judas is being portrayed as the bad guy here or the hero or something else. He and I had a long talk about that. So when I do these podcasts, they tend to be either about a book I've written or about, you know, something in my, in my field. I wrote a book actually about this Gospel of Judas, the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. It but mainly people are just interested in this kind of topic. And so that's a good podcast to pay attention to.
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A
We're talking off air. We're not entirely sure when that will be released, but definitely take a look at Within Reason and keep your eyes open for that conversation with Bart. And as a last reminder for those who are interested, the Parables of Jesus course will be recorded this Saturday and Sunday. That's July 20th and 21st. This is your last chance to see AJ Levine live and to participate in the live Q and A. You can buy access to the course over at Bart ehrman.com parables and as ever, the code mjpodcast will get you a discount on the price of that course. So definitely take a look at that. We are going to go to our next segment which is Bart's books
- [31:27]
B
seeking to expand your knowledge of biblical studies. In this segment, Barth shares influential works shaping biblical scholarship. It's time for Barth's books.
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A
So Bart, what book are you going to be telling us about this week?
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B
Well, you know, when I was in graduate school, I had a couple of professors who believed unlike many then and many now believed in actually reading the classics in the field. And their view was that these people who were writing these classic works were really smart. And so many people write books now that tried to like, undo what others had said before, but they're just, you know, they're really not at that intellectual level. So one of the great classics, I mean, arguably the classic for people who ask me, you know, where do I start reading about the historical Jesus? I always say start with Albert Schweitzer. So Albert Schweitzer was just absolutely amazing human being and scholar. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He's best known for. For having given up a career as a academic. He's an expert in philosophy and theology. He was also a major concert organist who wrote books on pipe organs. Actually, while he was in medical school, he wrote this book on pipe organ construction in France and England, and he wrote his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. And he wrote his book that's translated into English as the Quest of the Historical Jesus.
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A
That is a very remarkable achievement.
- [33:02]
B
I just keep telling myself, you know, Albert Schweitzer, you know, he did all the scenes because they didn't have ESPN back then, then. So it was published in German, and it didn't have a catchy title. In German, it's called. In German, it's called From Reimarus to Vrede. So the first person to write an account of the historical Jesus in the Enlightenment was a man named Reimarus, a German theologian. And then the one most recently Schweitzer's time was William Vrede. W R E D E what Schweitzer's Quest is, it's a foundational study for anybody who's interested in his historical Jesus. It traces how Jesus is talked about by scholars from the very beginning of the Enlightenment. First one to do it Ramoris up to his own day. He goes author by author to explain how they did it, why they did what they said and why they were wrong. And he realizes that at different periods of time, people portrayed Jesus differently, depending on what was going on at that period of time. And so he has this famous view that every generation of scholars portrays Jesus in its own image. What was really funny to me when I was in graduate school is that I would read books by people writing in the 1970s who would quote Schweitzer, that everybody writes in their own image. And then they'd say, yeah, I'm not going to do that. And then they would do it. You read their book and say, yeah, actually. And so in the 80s, you have all these books by these guys who grew up in the 1960s that portrayed Jesus as this kind of countercultural revolutionary. Huh? Where'd that come from, Historical Jesus? Anyway? The thing about Schweitzer's book is that it is so insightful and brilliant and witty. It's not like reading. But if you're really interested in this thing, this whole history of the study, Schweitzer is the place to begin. At the end of his book, he sketches out why he thinks Jesus was an apocalypticist. That view has held since his day. His particular specific ways of. Of doing it are held by nobody. But the basic idea that he got absolutely seems to be right still today. So it's a fantastic book and it's one that I if people who are really the ones who are serious about doing, like understanding the historical Jesus from a scholarly point of view should look at his book, not to come away with his particular methodology, but for seeing how every other generation had done it and what they were doing, that. That really doesn't work.
- [35:27]
A
I think those kinds of books are incredibly valuable because they give you this brilliant oversight in the development of a field and the development of an argument that is just so very difficult to get without sitting down and reading through every single publication prior to your own existence.
- [35:43]
B
I've had New Testament scholars come up to me and tell me, oh, I've got this great idea about Jesus, and here it is. And again, they kind of lay it out and I'll say, oh, yeah, that's like the 19th century century rationalists like Paulus, Heinrich Paulus. They'll say, who? I said, yeah, okay, you really should know the history of the discipline before you try to write a book about it. Just read Schweizer.
- [36:05]
A
Bart, thank you so much for that recommendation. And now, before we finish for the week, could you just summarize what we spoke about today?
- [36:11]
B
Yeah, we're talking about the books and from early Christianity that claim to be written by the Apostle Peter. So I tried to explain who Peter was historically and why it looks like he probably didn't actually write any of these books, including first and second Peter in the New Testament, why he probably didn't dictate them to a secretary, why he didn't compose them himself, why in fact, it appears to be an author living later after the year 70, claiming to be Peter. Two different authors for first and second Peter. And it raises the question about people writing in the names of apostles in early Christianity. A major topic that was we we've talked before about on the podcast. But it continues to be an issue that scholars think about and debate.
- [36:55]
A
Thank you, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. that includes A.J. levine's course on the Parables we, which is Bart ehrman.com Parables misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [37:22]
B
Well, next time we are changing gears. You and I are going to be talking again, but this time I'm interviewing you so, you know, don't feel any pressure. But you know, I'm glad that I don't have to have any answers. I'll just have lots of questions. You too are involved with the study of antiquity and what you're doing is very interesting. So I want us all to hear about that.
- [37:43]
A
We will see. Thank you everybody and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday. So please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.