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- [00:00]
A
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B
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. Hello everyone and welcome back. Today we're going to be talking about how Christianity went from a minor cult that was regarded somewhat suspiciously by the general public to the essentially official religion of the Roman Empire. But before then we should check in with everyone's favorite biblicist. Bart, how are you doing today?
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A
I'm doing, yeah, I'm doing pretty well. We're kind of moving into the term now and it's, it's a lot, but it's great. The students at Chapel Hill are just so terrific and I really like this generation of students. You know, I started teaching in the mid-80s and virtually everybody that I taught when I was teaching at Rutgers, basically they were taking classes so they can graduate and get a job. Most of them actually took five years to do it because they didn't want to get a job. But, but taking classes was a way to make a lot of money eventually. And now these students, I don't know why it is I, but it, they just seem more invested to me. They're just like interested in these issues. But it may be because of the economy, maybe because of COVID I don't know what it is. So that's great.
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B
I've noticed something similar.
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A
You're not in the classroom. Did you ever teach in the.
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B
No, I taught a couple of like classes as a substitute for my advisor. But I've noticed a similar shift I think in the high school generation. I have a 15, well, nearly 16 year old. They're much, much more in tune and more engaged just with life in general, I think than I was when I was that kind of age. They're very aware of what's going on in the world and really just more invested in things, I think.
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A
Yeah, I mean it's great and it's, it's a good time for people to Be invested in things because things are a mess. Yes, maybe that's part of it.
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B
On that delightful semi apocalyptic note, but not actually apocalyptic because we're doing that next week we will move to the main event. How did Christianity take over the Roman Empire? So we're going to concentrate this week on how Christianity was received by the Roman Empire of the official administration and the general population. And we'll get into the nuts and bolts of how and why people were converted, chose to convert in later episodes. But Bart, why do you think we should be looking at the reception of Christianity by the Roman Empire?
- [03:05]
A
As with most scholars, every scholar thinks that what they do is important. And do not ever ask a PhD student what their dissertation is about because they will tell you forever because it's like the most important thing ever done. So I get that. But I gotta say, the conversion of the Roman Empire is pretty important because it is arguably the most important event has happened in Western civilization. Because if you go for the last 2000 years, by far the most powerful and influential institution in the west has been the Christian Church over the longue. I mean, it just is not just religiously. If you think about late antiquity and into the early Middle Ages, throughout the Middle Ages, down to the Reformation, and you get the Renaissance in the modern period, there is no, no institution that's more powerful than the Christian Church. It's not just a government in one land. It has radically affected not just religion, but our culture. I mean, you can't talk about Western music and art and literature and philosophy. We without Christianity in our world, socially and politically, hugely. And today, you know, There are over 2 billion people who are Christian. It's the largest religion in the world. And so the thing is, it started out as this tiny little group of nobodies. And that's the question. So I wrote a book on this called the Triumph of Christianity. And it deals with this issue. How do you get from such a small group to like taking over the Roman Empire? I mean, it starts out with, in the New Testament itself, after Jesus dies, he's got 11 disciples who are still around, men disciples, and he's got a handful of women who've joined them in Jerusalem. And so you got what, like 20 people who believe in the resurrection of Jesus. And by the year 300, you know, less than 300 years later, you got something like 3 million people who believe it. How do you get from 20 lower class, you know, uneducated, Aramaic speaking peasants from rural galilee to be 3 million people? And by the end of the 4th century, it's 30 million people who. Of the empire. So that's pretty important because if that had not happened, not only religiously, we'd probably all still be polytheists, I guess. And you wouldn't have had Islam, which is another almost 2 billion people, if you did and had some kind of Christianity. So it's not only that, but it's affected all of us on every level. And so my question is, how did it happen? The importance. I think it doesn't matter if you're a Christian or not. This is really important historically and culturally. I think.
- [05:31]
B
I think before we get to the shift from kind of insignificant weirdos to a major official religion, we should probably talk about the place Christianity occupied in the Roman Empire when it was first formed, when it was like that band of 20 or slightly more. A lot of historical movies show very early Christians as a highly persecuted group meeting in secret and in the catatombs for like, fear of imprisonment or violent retribution from the empire. Does this map onto what we know of very early Christian history?
- [06:01]
A
Right. It's the right question because, you know, most people know nothing about early Christianity, and what they do know is wrong. And so this is like, this is the thing you get from the movies, right, that the early Christians, the idea in the. Early. In the. You get in the movies and that Christianity was an illegal religion, that the Romans had declared it illegal, it was against the law to be a Christian, that Christians were hunted down and persecuted, that they had therefore to go into hiding, and that Christians hung out in the catacombs of Rome so they wouldn't be detected, and they would identify each other by drawing a sign of the fish in the sand or something so that they would know the. The fish thing in case where people don't know. The reason for the sign of the fish in Christianity is that the Greek word for fish in Greek is ichthus. And Ichthus, if you take the first letter of the word Ichthus, fish, it spells Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior in Greek. And so that would be the way to indicate you're a Christian, according to this theory, is that, you know, you draw the fish in the sand. And none of that's true. Christianity was not declared an illegal religion in the early centuries. Christians were not hounded out and persecut. They were not martyred by the thousands. There were persecutions, there was opposition, but there was never any official opposition for over 200 years in terms of like an emperor or something, an emperor deciding to make Christianity out illegal. It was never declared. I mean, wasn't technically declared illegal ever. There was legislation a couple hundred years later against Christianity, but it didn't start out that way. Christians were not hiding in the catacombs at all. And so. And the idea of drawing the fish say, yeah, somebody just made that one up.
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B
It's a nice romantic idea, though.
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A
It is, yeah. That's great. Yeah.
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B
So like you said, this isn't to say that there wasn't persecution of Christians. And you know, like a few hundred years into the life of the religion, there are some official reprisals against Christianity and Christians by emperors and officials. Am I right in saying that Pliny the Younger is the first recorded instance of official persecution?
- [08:07]
A
Yeah. In terms of an official doing it. People listening to this, and we'll talk about, I'll talk about Pliny in a second, but I'll say that people listening this will say, yeah, what about Nero? He persecuted the Christians. Right? That's. You got an emperor in the 60s persecuting the Christians. And, you know, I talk about all this, of course, in my book, because this is critical information to understand how Christianity was not welcomed with open arms by the Romans. They did not welcome Christianity open arms. And they kind of came in kicking and screaming. But then once they did, they were there. But there was definitely a thing going on under Nero and I need to explain what it is so people can understand it. In the year 64, Nero was the emperor of Rome. And Nero did a lot of good things for Rome and they were all of problems with Nero. But Nero is the emperor of Rome and there's a fire that started in Rome. One problem in the ancient world is that urban centers were really packed with buildings and there was no really good way to put out a fire. And so, so this fire started in Rome in the Roman circus. And the circus isn't like a fairground. It's. It's a place where they have the old events. It started there and it, it took over and it, it was a massive fire. There were 14 major districts of Rome and after six days they put it out. But then it started up again and by the time the thing was done, it had burned to the ground. Three of the districts and 10 of the others were in rubble. Three. It just completely destroyed 10. And so the deal was that some people in Rome who had been burned out of house and home, which were a lot of people thought that Nero might have started the fire himself, that he had ordered the fire. And the logic they used was that Nero had wanted to implement some architectural designs for the city. And he couldn't do it very well while the city was still standing. And so he had ordered it burned down. We learned this, by the way, not from a Christian source. We learned this from a Roman historian, Tacitus, who tells us in his Annals of Rome about the year 115 that that's what had happened. And this people suspected Nero. And what Tacitus tells us is that, that Nero wanted to take the blame off himself. And so he picked scapegoats and he chose the Christians because everyone knew that they hated the human race. And Tacitus, you know, he's not a Christian, he's a Roman pagan, but he says, you know, the Christians were known to hate the human race. And so, okay, gathered them up, you think, why would Christians hate the human race? That sounds the opposite of Christians, right? Don't we love everybody? But, you know, Romans thought that since Christians didn't participate in communal life and in Roman religion and worshiping the gods, that they were antisocial and they hated everyone else. There was ain't everyone else is going to hell. He rounded up the Christians and he subjected them to horrible executions. According to Tacitus, he had some these Christians wrapped up in animal skins and he set wild dogs on them to be torn to death. He crucified some and he had some rolled in pitch and used them as living torches to light his gardens. This is not good. So that's the persecution under Nero. But the thing is, what historians have recognized in the modern period is that even as Tacitus describes it, Nero was not persecuting Christians for being Christians, he was executing them for committing arson. They maybe didn't do it, but that's what he said. And so it wasn't a charge of being Christian. And moreover, he never declared it illegal. Nero never declared Christianity illegal. And it was only in Rome, just in the city of Rome, that this happened. So this is not the first persecution of Christians.
- [11:36]
B
So is Pliny then doing something different? Is this persecution being carried out because of faith?
- [11:42]
A
Right, so if Nero is in 64, Pliny's about 110. So it's about 50 years later or so. There are two Pliny's in the ancient world who are famous. Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. The Elder was the uncle of the Younger. The Elder was a scientist who wrote books on natural history that we still have really an important author. The Younger was a. Was an official in the empire who was a governor of what is now kind of part of Western Turkey. So Bithynia Pontus is the area. One of the great things about Pliny the Younger is that he wrote a lot of letters and collected them and published them. And we still have them, 10 volumes of his letters. And so if you want to know what's going on in, like, Roman administration, you've got these letters. And a lot of them go to the Emperor trajan in the 10th book of his letters. In the. He writes the letters, the 96th letter in the 10th book, he describes a situation that he was confronting in his province, that there were people who had been accused of being Christians. He writes his letter to Trajan, the emperor, and he says, look, I don't know what to do. You know, I refer to you when I don't know what to do. And I don't know what to do in this case because I know that there have been prosecutions of Christians, but I've never been present at one. And I don't know what the issues are and what the, you know, what the procedures typically are. So this is what I've done on an ad hoc basis. Is it? Okay? And then he describes it. He says, if somebody's accused as being a Christian, what I do is I. I bring them in and I ask, are you a Christian? If they say yes, then I give them two chances to stop being a Christian.
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B
Seems reasonable.
- [13:15]
A
And if they won't do it, then I execute them. Less reasonable, right? And so, you know, I tell them, look, stop, or I'm going to execute you. They won't stop. Okay, I execute them. He said, unless they're a Roman citizen, in which case I send them to Rome for judgment because Roman citizens have to be judged in the city of Rome, they can't be judged in the provinces. Okay? But he says, suppose somebody says. He says, when somebody says to me, no, I'm not a Christian, I don't know whether to believe them or not. So I make them prove it. And the way I make them prove it is I bring in statues of the gods and of the emperor, of you, the emperor. And I tell them they have to offer a sacrifice of wine and incense to the divine being and to curse Christ. And if they do that, then I know they're not a Christian, so then they go free. But the other really interesting thing he says is that if somebody admits that they had been a Christian, but they've stopped being a Christian and they do the sacrifice, then I let them go. The reason that's interesting is because crime is never treated that way. If you're a murderer Right. You can't get off by saying, well, I used to murder people, but I'm not murdering anybody now. But with Christianity, if you were a Christian, that's okay, as long as you're not one. Now this entire proceeding shows what the problem is for plenty, which is that Christians won't worship the Roman gods. And in Roman religion, if you don't worship the Roman gods, the Roman gods get ticked off. And the Roman gods are the ones who made Rome great and they're the ones who support the state. So if you don't worship the Roman gods, it's a political act and it's dangerous. And so you got to kill the people who don't worship the Rome. Everyone else is a pagan. Jews had exemptions for this kind of thing, but everybody else, 95% of the world's pagan. But these Christians, they won't worship the gods. And so you got to get out of here. And they take them out.
- [15:04]
B
That's interesting. So it's not that they're worshipping Jesus or the Christian God, it's that they won't also worship the Roman gods, which is very necessary for peace and stability and the continuation of the Roman Empire.
- [15:18]
A
It's a very interesting thing because it's not wrong to worship Jesus. It's fine, you worship any way you want, but you better worship our gods too. Yeah. So it's a very different mindset when Christianity comes along. It's the first religion to come along and says, yeah, if you're worshiping Jesus, you can't worship any other gods. You worship the God of Jesus, you can worship Jesus, but that means you cannot worship the other. It's the only religion in the world doing that. Jews of course are saying, you know, we're only going to worship our God, but they're not telling you to worship their God. They're saying we're going to worship. Christians are saying, yeah, you got to worship our God, we're going to worship our God, it's the only God. So it's exclusivistic. It's the first exclusivistic religion that we know of in the ancient world.
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B
So these styles of persecutions, even if they're not widespread and maybe like a top down approach, did they last for terribly long?
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A
Well, yeah, because, you know, because there are other persecutions besides persecutions by officials. The Roman world didn't have a lot of kind of federal law that we would think of as federal law. And so, you know, in the United States we're used to having laws that, you know, there are a lot of state laws and city laws and things, but there are also, there's federal law that governs lots of things. The city of Rome rarely had laws that extended throughout the empire. They had, they had like strong suggestions from the senate or from the emperor. As you know, they, they're more like strong suggestions, but they weren't enforceable. There wasn't like a national police force or anything like that. There were not rules really, except local rules about what you could do to one another. For the most part. Most of the persecutions that Christians endured were not by officials, but were by, you know, people who ticked off at them and took it out on them. Well, you know, the Christians, you used to go to the festivals with them and you'd hang out with them and you'd go to the temples and have them have a meal together and you would, you know, enjoy worshiping Apollo together, then going to worship Zeus for a while, then going off to see Athena. You know, it's part of the social life. And Christians have now formed these small communities where they're not participating in the communal life. And people think it's weird and antisocial. And they're also kind of, there are rumors floating around what these Christians are doing in secret and why aren't, why aren't they doing this in the open? And, and so they, they were not liked. And sometimes that led to violence. Not necessarily sponsored by an administrator. But you know, it could be that your next door neighbor just beat you up or burns your house down. There are things like that that were happening. There'd be a group of people that would complain to an administrator who would then do something about it. But it really wasn't top down until the middle of the third century. I mean, even with Pliny, it's not top down, it's just Pliny, it's the governor doing it on an ad hoc basis.
- [18:02]
B
Was Christianity viewed as difference to other mystery religions in the ancient world? Because the secrecy is something you do see with the worship of Mithras and Isis, for example, and it doesn't seem to have inspired the same level of distrust as Christianity did.
- [18:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. And the mystery religions are a very interesting phenomenon. If people, many people know what those are. There's all sorts of public religions in the Greek and Roman worlds. Hundreds, thousands of religions worshiping, you know, different gods. But there begin to be these religions that are sometimes called mystery religions, mystery cults. We've used the word cult a couple times here. And I should clarify that when historians use the word cult, it's not negative. It's not a derogatory term for a crazy group of people following some wacko leader who makes them drink the Kool Aid. It's not that at all. Cult simply means, it comes from the Greek word, the Latin word cultus. The cultus de orum refers to the care of the gods. It means a cult is just a group that worships. So occultic activity is a worshiping activity. So the mystery cults or the mystery religions were ways of worshiping one or another God. And there were a range of these mystery cults. They're called mystery cults. That sounds kind of like they're secretive and they were secretive cults. But the word mystery actually comes because you have to be initiated into this particular practice. It's not just anybody could go and join this cult without having an initiation process. And so there are secrets that are revealed in the cult dealing with a particular God or goddess. And these secrets are conveyed. And these secrets are very important for a person's well being. And even people know about the mystery cults today. Like people look them up on the Internet and stuff, don't realize that because these are secret cults, the people who were in them were under oaths of secrecy, which means we don't know a lot about them. We don't have information. Like you mentioned the Mithras cult. Mithraism was a very big religion. It's a mystery cult that was in the Roman Empire. We have a couple of ritual texts from Mithras. We don't have any text that describes what the religion is or what happens in it. What we have basically are archaeological remains where they find a number of these shrines, these Mithraea, where it was practiced. We actually know very little about what happened. And it has to be reconstructed based on an analysis of what the cultic sites look like and a few other things. So we don't know much about them. But what we do know is that they were not exclusive. So if you join the Mithras cult and you're worshiping the God Mithras, in the Mithras cult, you're still worshiping Jupiter or Juno or Mars or any of the other Roman gods and the city gods and local gods. And so joining a mystery cult didn't separate you off from everyone else in the sense that you're being antisocial. It's just a different way. One of the ways that you're practicing the worship of the gods, Christianity was different. It Was like, this is it, you're in this group and you ain't in any other group.
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B
I see. So it wasn't as it was secrets, but it wasn't set apart in the same way that Christian worship and Christian communities had set themselves apart.
- [21:11]
A
That's right. Sometimes it involved gods that were known elsewhere in the empire. Mithras. There are debates about Mithras, but it looks like Mithra was probably a Persian deity that came into Rome and you get the cult of Isis. I think he mentioned Isis. Isis was an Egyptian deity that got taken into the Roman Empire. But these got more or less kind of, they kind of infiltrated the polytheistic religions of the empire rather than setting themselves as an exclusive opposition to the other cults.
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B
Okay, thank you. That was very interesting. And to move ourselves slightly back on track again, we have this persecution. It's not necessarily an official persecution, but you have people regarding Christians and Christianity with deep suspicion and being generally very upset that they won't contribute to the religious life of the wider community. Because that was very important to worship the gods to keep your community strong. And then in like 311 CE we have an emperor issuing the edict of toleration, which from my understanding says that as long as Christians are praying to the Christian God for the well being of the empire, they shouldn't then be persecuted for not praying to traditional Roman gods. Do we know what prompted this edict and did it actually have an impact on how people were treated?
- [22:27]
A
Right. It's a very, very important moment in Western history. It's important to set up the background to it, which is Christianity is growing and growing and growing. We'll talk about in a later episode about how that's happening. But Christianity is taking over things and as I said, because Christians are the ones saying, yeah, it's only Christians, Christianity is the only true one. You got to join us, you can't have any others. As Christianity grows, the other religions are shrinking because if you move from one pagan religion to another, you don't give up your pagan religion, you just kind of, you start adding another one. You know, you just start worshiping more gods in more ways and things. But if you join Christianity, you stop being a pagan. And so Christianity is growing and growing. By the middle of the third century, there's some concern at the higher levels finally about Christians. And there begin to be empire wide persecutions or at least emperors are urging empire wide persecution starting in the 250s and, and you have persecutions in the 250s, a couple of emperors order persecutions. In the early 4th century you have Diocletian, who's a really a major emperor, one of the great, great emperors of Rome. But he's rather infamous because he started a really serious persecution that's sometimes called the great persecution because it went on for a number of years. And what ends up happening is in the middle of that persecution, another major Roman official, Constantine, converts to Christianity. And that's going to change a lot of things that we'll talk about later. But before that you get one of the emperors giving a kind of an act of toleration. What ends up happening is that the Roman emperors realize this is really a problematic situation having these persecutions going on when you have so many more people converting to Christianity at the same time they decide, you know, the persecution option isn't working too well. And so let's, let's maybe, you know, loosen it up a bit. The Edict of Toleration was given by Galerius, who's one of the major emperors at the time. There are actually four emperor. It gets confusing. There are four emperors at the time. It's not just one anymore. There are four who are ruling the empire. And one of them, one of the main ones, Galerius, does his edict of toleration on his deathbed. The idea is that it's supposed to loosen things up. It didn't really loosen that much up. It did some. The big difference came a couple years later when two of the emperors agreed, okay, we're just stopping this nonsense. And for the first time in history, this is the year 313, the first time ever in history, a major government issued a declaration of freedom of religion. People could do anything, you know, it doesn't matter. Follow your conscious conscience, do what you want. And the government is not going to intervene anymore.
- [25:09]
B
That was actually my next question. So we have the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in what, 312, which is right after the Edict of toleration. And then you get the Edict of Milan, which is this freedom of religious expression. What effects did these things have on the empire as a whole and on the life of your average day to day Christian?
- [25:29]
A
Right? Yeah, well they had a huge effect. I'm sure we'll have an episode just on the conversion of Constantine. For one thing. I really think he did convert. Many people say, ah, you know, it's just a political ploy. There's reasons to maybe think that, but I don't think it's right. I think there's really good reasons for not thinking it. I Think he really did convert. He was one of the, one of the emperors. But because of various political things, it ended up that the four emperors had become two. Constantine and he had a. He had a colleague in the East. He was the emperor of the western part and Libanius was the emperor of the East. They got together. Constantine converted in 312 and the persecution was still official going on. He called a halt to persecution. He and Libanians got together and they issued this decree that made it okay for anybody to worship any way they wanted to as long as you weren't like, you know, doing nasty things to other human beings. That did make a big effect. It's not that it made the empire Christian. Constantine did not declare Christianity the official religion of Rome. People think he did and he did not. He did not declare Christianity official religion. He made it a legal religion. It was licit. Now, it had been more or less declared illegal by these decrees in the 250s and then early 3 hundreds. But he makes it illicit religion. And so what that does is it removes all penalties, especially for the elite. There is hesitancy among people, like in the city of Rome itself, to become a. If you're a senator, if you are a Christian, you could be. You could have all of your property confiscated. So elites especially were reluctant because they had a lot to lose and they would lose it. And so what this ends up doing is it makes it possible for people to convert without fear of reprisal. The emperor himself is a Christian. And so it's not that everybody jumps on the bandwagon right away, but people start to jump on the bandwagon. And for that reason it's a huge thing because now there's no problem really with converting anymore. And that we'll talk about in a later episode, whether that really is what opened all the floodgates, but it certainly opened the floodgates to many of the elite. I would say.
- [27:38]
B
Was Christianity ever made an official state religion of the Roman Empire or did it just kind of stay at this freedom of religion level?
- [27:46]
A
Well, so it's kind of hard to answer the question because it, what ends up happening is Constantine isn't, you know, doesn't say any, doesn't do anything like that. They start passing some legislation against pagan religions in various places. Constantine and his son, who became ruler after him, passed legislation near the end of the 4th century. There's an emperor who's a very gung ho Christian, Theodosius, usually called Theodosius I because there's another one some years Later, Theodosius I was a very committed Christian and he started passing legislation that made it punishable to sacrifice to the pagan gods, even just your household gods. There's a piece of legislation in 391 that outlaws you even worshiping your own household gods in the privacy of your home. That does more or less kind of outlaw paganism. But the problem is that as I was saying earlier, the Roman government didn't have any enforcement mechanisms. And so you could say, you've got to worship the Christian God, say that all you want, but there's nothing to kind of enforce it as a law when Theodosius does that. Still, you know, the majority of people are still pagan at this point and they continue being pagan for, for some time. So the convert, entire conversion of the empire doesn't happen right away because of that. The problem that ends up being is that the elites actually start following these rules about not worshiping the pagans and the pagan religions, the temples and the priesthoods, and they're expensive and they're supported by those with money. And if those with money convert to Christianity, basically it starves paganism to death. And that's what happened. It starved it to death.
- [29:28]
B
That's really interesting. And I never made that connection before. Thank you. It makes an awful lot of sense actually, that if you are taking the money away, then people can worship in their own homes as much as they want, but the temples aren't going to get their upkeep and they aren't going to be priests to take care of the cult.
- [29:44]
A
Yeah, no, that's right. And then after a while, you know, you wonder, what's the point? Maybe I'll just, maybe I'll join up too and, you know, go where everyone else is going.
- [29:51]
B
That's probably all we have time for today. We're going to take a brief break and then we'll be back with Bart's weekly update. Then we have some audience questions.
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A
Are you interested in learning about important academic topics but don't want to go back to school? You need to check out Wondrium, the service that streams university level courses taught by top scholars who are also skilled communicators. I've done nine courses for them and can tell you for high level adult learning, there's really no other game in town. For a free trial, go to barterman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supporting our show. If you're enjoying the Misquoting 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@barturman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast.
- [31:23]
B
Welcome back everyone. We're going to have Bart's Weekly Update.
- [31:29]
A
This is Bart's Weekly Update, where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings, and online course launches.
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B
Bart, what do you have for us this week?
- [31:45]
A
Like a lot of scholars and authors, I have a lot on my plate. So the way I deal with that in part is by not watching tv. And so I don't, I never watch tv, except I do watch sports. Some sports and a lot of sports, actually, as my wife tells me. Yeah. So one of my sporting pleasures has become a very guilty pleasure right now is watching football. And so I feel guilt every time I watch it because of the issues of the big issues. But you know, super bowl is coming up and I'm an NFL guy. I just, I just really, I watch the NFL and I just think athleticism is so aesthetically pleasing and to see these athletes, what they can do is just mind blowing for me. And so I just love. So anyway, so yeah, super bowl is coming up pretty soon and I have watched every Super super bowl since the first one. I watched every single Super Bowl. Yeah, I was 10 years old and my Kansas City Chiefs with Lenny Dawson were playing the Green Bay packers with my namesake Bart Starr as the quarterback. And so I watched that in 10. I watched everyone said, so anyway, yeah, so that's what I'm doing. I'm thinking about, yeah, Super Bowl.
- [32:50]
B
This is really a lifelong love for you then.
- [32:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, it is. But you know, I always feel like I should give it up because all the entries and but I guess I could have more damaging things to myself to have his habits.
- [33:02]
B
I'm not, I'm not a huge football American football person. I do enjoy super bowl time because on Twitter there are several classicists who, instead of celebrating the super bowl, celebrate the superb owl and put up pictures of Athena's owl and ancient Greek statues. And I enjoy the puns and I Enjoy the statues. So yes, I enjoy that very much.
- [33:22]
A
That's good. My view is it doesn't have to be an either or.
- [33:25]
B
Quite great. And now we actually have listeners questions.
- [33:33]
A
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 askbars
- [33:50]
B
it's been a couple of weeks since our last listener's questions, I think. So this will be fun for everybody. First question. In your writings and lectures, you've stated that there were just a dozen or a few dozen Christian believers after the crucifixion. And you said this at the top of the episode also. But what about the people who followed Jesus during his ministry? There seems to be, from what the the Gospels tell us to have been thousands, if not tens of thousands. Is that accurate? And if it is, what happens to those people?
- [34:19]
A
So the Gospels absolutely say that Jesus has thousands of followers when he feeds the multitudes. In the Gospel of Mark, we're told that he feeds five loaves and two fish and he feeds 5,000 men, not counting the women and children. So that's 13. What is it? It's got to be 10,000 with the women with wives and then you got the kids. So what is it? 13,000 people. That's a lot of people. So these have to be exaggerations. There's no way in the world that that could be have happened. And Jesus is never mentioned in any sources from the first Christian century except for the Jewish writer Josephus. So he didn't have the huge impact that we, we imagine. But he certainly had some followers. And the question is, well, what about them? Weren't they, you know, they may have, they may have converted. The New Testament doesn't say anything about it. We don't have any records about what happened to the people up in Galilee who had listened to him during his ministry. However many that was, all we learn about are the ones who followed him, the 12 disciples, and the handful of women who followed him to Jerusalem and what they did. But we don't hear about anyone else from his lifetime.
- [35:23]
B
Okay, thank you. Next question. Even though we know the Gospels weren't written until several decades following Jesus life, the widespread circulation of Mark seems to be referenced by Matthew just a few years later. And it is quite an achievement. Was it common for religious texts to take root that quickly or was this unique to Christianity? And could it be that the pagan culture made the adoption of a new religion or A God. Like a smoother transition. Because I think maybe what the question is asking, is it more usual maybe than we would expect for new gods to come in? Like we were saying with Isis and with Mithras.
- [36:00]
A
Yeah. There's no real problem with a new God coming along. That's true. The thing about the circulation of Mark. That's a very good question. I wish we knew more about it because we don't really know much about it. What scholars have long thought, since the 19th century, is that Mark was the first gospel to be written and that Matthew and Luke both had access to copies of Mark. Their copies of Mark may not have been exactly like our copies because copies make different changes, but they had copies of Mark that they themselves copied, and that would show that Mark was in circulation and that both Matthew and Luke in different cities had access to it. The thing is, we don't know when that was. Usually Mark is dated to around the year 70 or so. Matthew and Luke are usually dated to the mid-80s. So we're talking 10 or 15 years later. That would not be unusual at all. Texts did circulate around the Roman Empire because people traveled. There wasn't a mail service, but people travel and they took their precious books with them. And so we know instances of all sorts of literature, Greek and Roman literature, Jewish literature, letters, writings of all sorts that circulate. The way it happens with the Gospel of Mark is almost certainly that if Mark is written in a major urban area of some kind, maybe it's written in Rome, as it's traditionally thought, or maybe somewhere else. People would be coming and going to the city on business or whatever. And if they were Christian, they'd go and they'd try and find the local Christian community. And if they found out that they had a book about Jesus life. So, whoa, I want one of those. And so they copy and then they take it back. And so that's how it's circulating is by copies being taken around by people who happen to be traveling. And so there's nothing. Nothing particularly unusual about thinking that. And so it's not distinctive to Christianity and it's not distinctive to religion. It's just how books were circulating in the. In the ancient world.
- [37:46]
B
Excellent. Thank you. This is our final question, and we touched briefly on this, but maybe if you could elaborate a little bit. Once Christianity started to take hold in the Roman world, how did the politics of power help shape Christian doctrine?
- [38:00]
A
Oh, well, that's another boy, we need an old episode on that one because. Yeah. How did it shape doctrine Here, I'll tell you just one, one aspect of it. This was one of these kind of blinding moments that I had. I was in Turkey with a friend and we were just driving around. We didn't have any agendas. We just. We just wanted to go to archaeological sites. And we'd both been in Turkey before and we rented a car. We were just driving around for two weeks going to places. There's a place on the western coast called Pryni. And I was interested in Prini because when I was. A long time ago, I edited a volume of inscriptions from Priory. Like got all the published inscription and put them in one. In one volume. Had to kind of edit them a bit. So I was interested, but I hadn't been there. So we go to this archaeological site. There's nobody there. It's not like one of these sites where everybody visits. It's a ruin. And it had been. You know, there are excavations that had taken place there over time, but they didn't. Hadn't reconstructed. Constructed much. And so I'm just. We're looking around and I'm. We're outside a temple structure of some kind. And there are all sorts of stones, you know, on the ground that have inscriptions on them. I'm just looking at this thing and one of these inscriptions. And one of these inscriptions is dedicated to the Caesar, to Augustus, who's called the Son of God. Augustus, Son of God. And so this would have been, you know, sometime in the first century. I look at this and all of a sudden it just hit me. I can't believe I never thought of this before. When Christians are calling Jesus the ruler, the Son of God, this is a competition. Christians are in competition with the emperor who is the son of God. Is it the emperor or is it Jesus? And so it just made me realize that in fact, when Christians develop their discourse about Jesus, it is completely in relationship to the political realities that they deal with. With the emperors could be called Lord and Savior. Christians say Jesus is Lord and Savior. The point is Jesus, not the emperor, is the Lord and Savior. That's one kind of way that it starts out. It starts out as using political designations to show that Jesus is greater than the other rulers. Politics and religion were not separated from each other. People didn't think of the separation of church and state at all until basically until the modern period, until the Enlightenment, before that. The reason you worship the gods in part is because it makes the state great. And the reason you support the state is because the gods are behind. And so there politics and religion are integrated for Christianity, that that ends up being true as well. So that, so that the political situation absolutely affected how Christians understood their own religion.
- [40:39]
B
Excellent. Thank you so much for answering those. I, I hope the audience found it helpful and enlightening. But before we finish for the week, would you mind just giving a brief summary of what we spoke about and where people can find more?
- [40:51]
A
You know, we talked about the persecution of early Christians and the issue is how were they received in the Roman Empire when Christianity started? Well, they weren't welcomed warmly. They aroused opposition. In a later episode, we'll probably talk about more details about why, you know, why exactly why they aroused opposition. But originally, the opposition Christians were local and not official. Eventually, over time, as Christianity grew, officials became concerned and they started implementing policies to try and squash Christianity and didn't work. And eventually, then, eventually in the 4th century, Christianity did take over the Roman world. But it was, it was a struggle. Over time, Christianity is more than welcomed with open arms. It becomes the religion of the empire.
- [41:33]
B
Thank you so much, Bart, for that audience. Thank you for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. And remember that you can use the code njpodcast 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?
- [41:56]
A
Well, next time I'm doing the interviewing, my colleague and friend Mark Goodacre, who's a prominent scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, is going to be on the show and I'm going to talk to him about the most famous and probably important gospel that did not make it into the New Testament, the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in the middle of the 20th century. Really a very interesting gospel. Mark's an expert on it. And so we're going to have a really nice chat about that.
- [42:23]
B
That sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. So everyone check back next week for that one and I'll be back the week after. I'll see you then. Thank you everyone and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday day. 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.