← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, he's here again.
- [00:02]
B
Oh, who hun? Sammy, the puppy I had when I was a kid. This is the second time he's seen Sammy. Could this be related to his Parkinson's? I don't see him hon, but I know you do. About 50% of people with Parkinson's may experience hallucinations and or delusions over the course of the disease, seeing things that aren't real and believing things that aren't true. Symptoms generally worsen but are treatable. Learn more@mortaparkinson's.com and take the screener to see if it's time to start a conversation with your doctor. Maybe you've sat in church and heard a sermon about the importance of generosity. Your pastor reads a few verses from the New Testament, maybe Paul's letters or the Gospels, and challenges you to be a better, more generous person. That's a pretty familiar church experience, I think for a lot of people. But what happens if you were to take a class on the New Testament at a university? Is it a similar learning experience? What are you taught and how does it change the way that you see the Bible? Today we're joined by New Testament Professor Hugo Mendez from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to explore all of these questions and 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 now. Bart is still off gallivanting around the world as he does, but his absence is definitely our gain as we have Dr. Hugo Mendez here today. Hugo, thank you so much for joining us.
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A
Thank you for having me.
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B
Now Hugo, for those who aren't familiar with him, is a renowned Bible scholar and co author with Barth of the New A Historical Understanding to the Early Christian Writings, one of the most widely used New Testament textbooks in the US So we are definitely in good hands here. Hugo, we're looking today at differences and similarities between New Testament education in a church setting and in a secular university setting. So to start up with the very basics in churches, I think it's fair to say that sermons often focus on moral lessons or faith inspiration, while in a university setting the Bible is approached really quite differently. Could you tell us how you think that approach differs to what people may be familiar with from a religious setting?
- [02:27]
A
Yeah, sure. You know, I think the first thing that you kind of have to state up front Is that, first of all, there's such diversity in Christianity that it's even hard sometimes to kind of create general rules, always for every single church that one can conceive of. Right. There are traditions that might sit on different levels in terms of their ability to entertain critical conversations. The universities also come in very different types. Right. So you can go to a small, conservative Christian college and have a very different experience than one might have at a large public or private secular university. I'm representing that latter world. I'm, you know, teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I formerly taught at Yale University, and I represent that kind of critical mainstream of scholarship. But suffice it to say, yeah, there are different emphases in that setting. So as you noted, right. In churches, you're often approaching the biblical text with the desire to, for instance, draw moral inspiration from its text to think about its devotional uses. You know, how does this potentially bring me closer to God? In the university, when we study the Bible, we tend to be more interested in connecting the Bible to other humanistic areas of inquiry. So this might be history, this might be literature, but it's in the word humanist. Right. In the sense that we are looking at the human dimensions of Scripture. We're trying to place the Bible and contextualize it in a context that says something about the human history that it's a part of that perhaps shines a new light on the human authors who wrote it. The, you know, very kind of interested, temporally bound, contextualized authors. Right. So I think that's one difference that's certainly there, the kinds of questions we might ask. I think another thing that probably broadly characterizes the Bible and university settings is that in this kind of setting, we tend to be much more interested in the cacophony of the biblical text, all the things that make the biblical text tensive. Right. So, you know, I think that one thing that probably broadly would cover many Christian approaches to scripture and church context is that, you know, you might hear an Old Testament scripture read, you might hear a letter from Paul, you might hear a gospel or something like that. And it's often the preacher's work to harmonize all of those, to kind of really bring in what is the common meaning of all that, especially from the faith position that God is the ultimate author of all of these texts and that there is a common meaning and a common design to all of them. In a critical university frame, we work with the idea that we're focusing on human authors here, and we are intensely Interested on when and where these authors are different from one another. Right. We're interested in getting right down to when do these texts not agree? How might they not agree? When we find things that are tensive, we're not so much interested in forcing them into harmony. We're actually really interested in picking apart the shards of difference because we think that we're going to find something unique and distinctive about each human author in those particular shards. If you think about it as kind of broadly, maybe the project of what we might do in a university setting,
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B
when you're teaching undergraduates, and this may be their first experience really with the critical study of the New Testament, do they find it surprising to see this cacophony, whether or not they're coming from a religious or a non religious background? Because I feel like even in secular society, the Bible is often presented as a coherent whole. So do you get surprise from students with this?
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A
Yeah. And even on the level of the Bible comes packaged to us as a whole. Right. It comes with one very nice leather binding and, you know, it all has one table of contents. It definitely gives us the kind of appearance of being very, very much one product, even though it's actually made from dozens of texts that, you know, span a millennium, etc. Yeah. So I think my students, whether they come from religious backgrounds or not from religious backgrounds, I think are initially surprised by the internal diversity of the Bible. And to your point, it's often very true that, you know, one of the first activities I have my own students at UNC Chapel Hill do in my Intro to New Testament class, which I teach for something like 240 students, is to take biblical stories from different gospels, different accounts of the life of Jesus, and just have them pay close attention to what makes them different from one another. So, for instance, take the story of Jesus resurrection and, and look at the differences. Or look at the story of Jesus birth, for instance, and take a look at the differences. I find that in those early weeks, my students have trouble seeing difference or seeing tension. At least they have this incredible sort of gravitational pull to want to harmonize, even though the exercise is not actually to try harmonizing these texts. Just list out the differences for me. Sometimes those can be really hard for them to capture.
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B
So you've given us some really excellent general differences between how a church setting and a university setting would treat the New Testament. I wanted to take the Book of Acts and ask you to give us a real life example for people just to kind of really ground it in the text itself. Acts Tells the story, for those who don't know, of the growth of the church after Jesus resurrection, with a very strong focus on Peter and Paul. Now, on the surface, it definitely reads very much like a history book, but it's not. So how might the study of Acts in a church setting compare to what you yourself would teach in a classroom?
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A
Yeah, so I think Acts is a great laboratory for understanding some of the differences between, for instance. Right. How a church might approach the biblical text and how we might at something like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You mentioned that Acts is a book of history. One of the things that we fundamentally do in a university is we interrogate historical narratives. We question the historical narratives that come down to us. If you go to a history department, you take a class on the US Civil War, you'll be immersed in all the scholarly debates that surround, you know, what actually happened? What's the mythology that has ended up surrounding these events? How do we distinguish between what reports we've received about this event and what actually might have happened based on our best estimates, or how do we deal with competing narratives of the same event? When we look at the Book of Acts, we recognize, first of all that Acts itself is a text that describes pieces of Christian history we find in other places of the New Testament. And sometimes those histories don't exactly cohere easily. There are, you know, really subtle tensions sometimes in the story. So the way that Paul might talk about his life in Galatians 1 and 2 differs a bit from the, I'll say, sometimes rosier picture, cleaner picture that, you know, Acts can give us of those same events. That's something that stands out to us. Another thing that I think we care a lot about in the university is being true to what history meant for first and second century readers. You know, we exist in the 21st century. There are centuries and centuries and centuries of just cultural development, scientific development, all of these factors that have shaped what we think history is. So when we go back to the Book of Acts, and this is something that I bring out for my students, I shine a quote early on in the class that shows that when ancient historians did things like represent speeches in their particular writings, they note that at times they had the liberty to create speeches for a particular historical account, that they could more or less give impressions of what might have been said on that occasion without it necessarily having been a strictly word for word transcript. In many churches, the Bible is read as a word for word transcript of what might have been said, let's say, by Paul on a particular occasion. And one of the things that we try to do in the classroom is to recontextualize that text for the expectations of first and second century readers who might not have thought that a historical text needed to be exactly verbatim accurate. So with Acts, we get to play around with lots of differences and how we might think about this text as not so much potentially inspired scripture, but how we would treat it if it were a modern historical text, which we might critique, or even an ancient historical text where we might apply different assumptions to it than we might even today.
- [11:45]
B
And those are obviously two very different learning and teaching methods. Taking something as the inspired word of God, that it's actually representing accurately something that happened, and then really sitting down with it and interrogating, well, how far can we in fact trust this? What are the aims of the author here? Could you comment a little on what you personally get out of this kind of academic, rigorous study of the Bible, and maybe what audience members who've never tried approaching it in this manner might get out of it as well?
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A
I think that one of the first things you really get out of it is the freedom to ask questions. Right. And to really dig into something that in many church settings growing up, and I grew up in a church setting, of course Bart grew up in a church setting. I mean, this is kind of. A lot of us who have this extraction in scholarship have definitely been through Christian settings and at different points in our lives, you know, there are certain settings that don't facilitate certain kinds of questions. You know, in Sunday school, you know, you could be the kid, and I was that kid who could ask the really hard question about how do we know this? Or how do we think about this? And it wasn't until I ended up in, you know, higher education that I could really actually find a space where I could ask that tough question and try to answer it and try to answer it as boldly as necessary, you know, to kind of give it the justice that it deserves. I think that has been a very freeing experience for me. It's also. It can be a challenging experience, especially when you reach the limits of what we can know. That's always a great difficulty. I'll throw that one out there as kind of the most essential one that stands out to me.
- [13:23]
B
Thank you. And I think that for a lot of people, myself included, once you start really sitting down with the Bible and taking away that assumption, whether you understand that you have it or not, that assumption that it is historical fact, and this is what happened, it becomes a much more interesting reading experience. And the more research I do in preparation for these, these interviews that I do with Bart and with other guests, and the more I learn, the more interesting I think it becomes. And obviously people who have been watching for a while will know that Bart and other people do many, many different online courses that are available for non specialists and for people outside of university settings to access to kind of take their own learning deeper. And we actually sold over 12,000 courses last year, which I think definitely speaks to the fact that people are passionately interested in this stuff outside of a religious church setting. So I wanted to ask you briefly, and we'll be getting into this in much more detail later on in the interview. You're going to be teaching an upcoming course on the New Testament, which is perfect for anyone who's really just curious about this kind of study, but doesn't have the time or the finances to dive into a university education in the area. Would you be able to share a little bit about what students could expect from the course for those who might be interested?
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A
Yeah. Yeah. So this is a really exciting opportunity. We've designed this entire course where I'll be teaching essentially the same lectures that I give in my university classroom. So this is your chance to really step into, if you will, the virtual classroom of UNC Chapel Hill, or what I was doing at Yale, and to experience what approaching the New Testament in that particular space. Those spaces looks like. What we'll be doing is over the course of multiple months, going through 27 lessons in which we're going to cover the New Testament comprehensively. We're going to be looking at every single text of the New Testament, touching all the bases, if you will. We'll be looking at some of the literature that also is adjacent to the New Testament. And what we're going to be trying to do is to contextualize the story of how did this collection come together? The Bible comes to us again in this very neat package. You know, it's got a nice little Thomas Nelson publishers on the side. It looks like it was always meant to be there, but the process of it arriving in that form was a really complicated and not at all inevitable process. We're going to be getting into the individual text. We're going to be understanding how, for instance, their authors probably never intended those texts to be side by side. They have sometimes not only tensive, but even competing views. We're going to look at the forces that eventually forge these kinds of harmonizing readings and harmonizing approaches. To these texts, we're going to understand how different other processes, you know, church councils, tradition, et cetera, gradually shaped this into a single collection over the centuries. It's kind of this incredible story of the New Testament. So for those of you who might have taken Mark Goodacre Synoptic Gospels course, this is, you know, kind of taking that and then bringing in the Gospel of John and the letters of John, the Johannine literature, bringing in the letters of Paul, bringing in the Catholic epistles and Revelation into this much broader, more exciting story of how we got from A to our ultimate point, B.
- [17:03]
B
It really is. It's absolutely fascinating whenever I talk to Barthes about, well, what was the criteria for including things in the canonical New Testament, why were things left out? And how that then has shaped the trajectory of modern Christianity is. It's absolutely fascinating. And like I said, I'll be asking you a lot more about this toward the end of the show. But audience, if you are interested, you can take a Look at Bart ehrman.com for forward/nt to check it out on your own. Now, I would like to dive into a little bit of Bible discussion so the audience can get a clearer picture of how you approach the Bible and approach the figure of Jesus. So when it comes to understanding Jesus historically, there's often a difference between, like, the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. So could you explain a little bit about what that means and how it shapes the way that academics study the New Testament?
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A
Yeah. So the New Testament presents us with four accounts of the life of Jesus in the form of gospels, Right. These entire books that give us at least windows into who Jesus was. And one of the first things that we recognize as scholars when we sit down with these texts is that they differ from one another. You know, maybe not in some larger arcs, but definitely at the fine grain of detail. But sometimes in larger arcs, we'll be honest with that. And so one of the challenges we have as scholars is how do we deal with competing traditions between these. We assume that there is a real historical reality that is behind all of this. That's a very safe assumption to make. The question is then how do we kind of triangulate all the information we have and try to arrive at who the Jesus of the past was? What this inevitably leads to, I think for us is the recognition that at some point there were traditions that were invented, that some of our gospels, when they disagree, are representing the kinds of historical processes that. That eventually led Christians to create entire new speeches for Jesus, invent potentially episodes in his life. And so one of the things we're going to be doing in this class, for instance, one of the things that we do more broadly as scholars in the university, is we teach students how to, if you will, discriminate between all that material, how to pull apart these kinds of strands that might represent invention and these strands that might represent history. What are the criteria that we use to try to distinguish those. How do we use these criteria appropriately, wisely? Those are the kinds of things that we try to dig through. So for me, in the classroom, I think I'm trying to guide my students into, at least conceptually, let's take all of the, if you will, cacophony of the Gospels for what they are. Let's really be honestly confront this material. But. And then begin to figure out how, as historians, can we pull together the past.
- [20:03]
B
So when you're looking in the classroom at the Bible and understanding and helping students really see that it is not this coherent, singular whole and it was never supposed to be, how do you take all of the different texts and set them out so that they can be understood and appreciated on their own terms, but then also see how they inform and relate to one another?
- [20:27]
A
Yeah, and that's a very gradual process. Right. It only happens by working one book at a time. It doesn't even happen by working with part of a book. It happens by. You know, one of the first activities that I give to my students in the classroom is they need to sit down with the Gospel of Mark, and they need to read it from beginning to end in one sitting, because they. They can't let the assumption that Luke and John and Matthew stuff is going to leak in there influence their reading. So, and I actually do this activity where I have them write down at the beginning, tell me everything you know about Jesus that you might know about Jesus, any teaching you might remember, any episode in his life that you might remember. And then they read Mark in one sitting. And then at the end, I ask you, I ask them, what did you see from your list? And it's this way of getting them to see that their image of Jesus has always been shaped by multiple influences, harmony, organized, brought together. And so it's those kind of activities that sort of begin to sort of open their minds to, okay, what would it be like to take Mark on its own terms? And that's the next question in my class that I'll usually give my students. So if you just read the Gospel of Mark, pretend there was no other Gospel, what would you have known about Jesus? What would you be missing from the well of knowledge that you currently have about Jesus? Why does that difference matter? How might it have shaped your potentially religious experience if you had one? How would it shape your conception of who Jesus was? You know, one of the things you're going to get out of that exercise is the turn the other cheek, pacifist Jesus of Matthew is not going to be represented in Mark. And so what would that mean for how you might think about Jesus outside of that? So it's this very gradual process. We take it book by book. But by the end of the semester, students start to understand that, yeah, there is something distinctive about authors and individual texts. And they can begin to then think about that hard question of, well, then, how did we put these all together and why these?
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B
So it leads me really nicely, actually to my next question, which is the one about authorship. Obviously, in a religious setting, very often the Bible is presented as divinely inspired, if not divinely dictated, or that varies depending on what faith tradition you're talking about. But when you're in a classroom setting looking at individual texts as individual texts and thinking about the differences and the messages they convey, how do you help students think about authorship and who the people were who were writing these and why they were writing them?
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A
I think on the one hand, part of what I'm trying to do in the classroom is I'm trying to help students understand that authors in the first century had very different sorts of backgrounds and agendas than any Christian writer would in the 21st century or any Christian reader would have in the 21st century. You know, just helping them. I tell my students that the hardest thing for us to do is to leap over the scientific revolution, to leap over 20 centuries of history. I teach this one course in the university, Early Christian Worship Ritual and Bodies, which makes this point a little even more more directly than my New Testament course, which is that we share much more in common as 21st century readers of the Bible with one another than we do with Christians reading this text in antiquity. It doesn't matter if you're Christian today, atheist today, Muslim, Hindu. If you sit down with the Bible today, you are having a more similar experience with one another than you would actually jumping back into how ancient Christians might have encountered this text. And it's because so much has changed in our understanding of the universe, in our culture, in our expectations surrounding literature. So part of what I want them to do is to understand that ancient writers, for instance, had very different outlooks on very simple things like astronomy. What we might think of as medicine, psychology, things like that, that will inevitably shape how they're describing writing about scenes like encountering demonic possession, talking about the stars and the afterlife, and that we need to kind of begin to understand that difference exists.
- [24:44]
B
So when I'm talking with Bart about either a text that we haven't spoken about for a while or one that we haven't covered before on the podcast, I'll try and start by contextualizing it. Where was it written? Who was it written? Why? And a lot of the time, the answer is we don't really know. Here's our best guess. So how then, with the limited information we have, how do we start in university settings to get at the authors and whether or not they are the people that maybe the church would teach there?
- [25:17]
A
And that draws in a lot of different kinds of questions, right? So, on the one hand, there are these established Christian traditions about who the authors of the Gospels are, who authored the letters that we, of course, today attribute to Paul. And the reality is that those traditions, as. As long as they are, have vulnerabilities, have weaknesses. We can see in some cases, how those traditions developed over time when we go back into history. And so we can understand that that attribution wasn't necessarily always there, and that gives us space to question authorship in a certain way. As scholars generally, what we try to do is we try to look at the texts themselves. We try to look at the internal data of the text. So once we've already begun to recognize the problems with the church traditions that surround these works, we can begin to just ask, well, what does the writing style tell us? How does it compare to the writing styles of other works that we might attribute to this author? What do the ideas of the text tell us about the intellectual influences, backgrounds of these authors, about the literary influences in front of these authors? What clues in the text might help us date the text, and what would that dating suggest about the plausibility of a particular authorial tradition? So, like, if a text dates the second century, you know, there's not any chance that this was written by an immediate disciple of Jesus. And so those are the kinds of things we pick apart. I will say, to that kind of large question of how does the study of the Bible and the university differ from churches today? You know, today those traditions have extremely powerful influence over many Christian traditions. One of the things that I teach my students is if we go back to the 4th century, if we go back to the writings of the church historian, Eusebius, he will tell you that, for instance, not all people thought 2nd and 3rd John were genuine. He quotes Origen in the 3rd century describing how not all Christians thought 2nd and 3rd john were genuine. Works by John the apostle Eusebius will say that works like Jude are counted by Christians among the disputed texts. They're texts that some Christians thought could have been written by Jude, but other Christians disagreed. There was a freedom in ancient Christianity to ask really tough questions about authorship, about authorship traditions that circulated in Christianity that for some reason, we don't often feel in faith communities today. And so part of what I'm trying to get my students to understand, on the one hand, is that it was once a very authentically Christian thing to actually claim that potentially this text might not have been written by a particular figure, and then, on the other hand, to then ask the critical question, but then why do I feel so guilty, uncomfortable asking that question today? Why is that something that bothers me today? What historical forces, what political forces, social forces, what parts of church history help me understand why this no longer became something that was okay to ask? And how can I then rethink how I want to approach this text in the 21st century?
- [28:32]
B
So you're obviously asking some pretty difficult questions. I would imagine, for a lot of students. Like most classrooms in. In the US you'll have people from all kinds of backgrounds coming through your doors. How do you feel that the different perspectives of your students really impact these kinds of discussions? And do you feel like they're able to learn from each other? Or is it just so unsettling on occasion to have these kinds of questions that it's. You get like a fight or flight response?
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A
It's all of the above. I mean, I will say that I think the vast majority of my students are interested and engaged, right? And the flight response is a very rare thing today. And I think it's partly because a lot of the students who have come through my classroom, let's say at unc, are students who have only known religion as something that has been kind of given to them, thrown at them. And maybe thrown at them is really, really the verb that I should be using, where this is the first space that they have to actually ask questions for themselves and to not feel that there is necessarily a right answer to them. That's immediately, I think, freeing for a lot of students. I think another thing to your question is that this becomes also the first space where students get to ask questions about the biblical text in an intrinsically inclusive environment. So, you know, in a public university classroom, the fun of it is, you know, If I have 240 students, I promise you a large segment will be Christian by identity, and that's why they selected the New Testament class. But because of electives and general education requirements and things like that at the university, a large segment will be non religious, or a large segment will be, you know, perhaps Christian growing up, but no longer engaged very strongly. I will have Muslim students, well represented. I will have Buddhist students, Hindu students, and that entire kind of spectrum. And what's really exciting about that is to see students get to discuss the text together on this kind of very, as far as we can, neutral playing field. Right? I say. I say as far as we can because as you know, even if the philosophy is neutral, individual class dynamics and personalities, you'll just have to balance and rebalance all the kind of characters in your class. But there's something that's so fascinating for my students about that. I remember one of the most rewarding experiences I had early on as a junior professor at unc. I taught a course on the Gospel of Mark. And absolutely the best student in the class was a very visibly Muslim young woman, wore a hijab, who approached this text with such intelligence and passion and rigor and all the complexity of an outsider reading this text that I just remember so many of my identifying Christian students coming up to me after class and thinking, I've never had this experience before. I've never gotten to be in conversation with someone who wasn't Christian about this text. I've never been able to see how someone else might read the exact same thing that I might read, and just how both inspiring it was to them on some level, but both confounding on another level. And those sorts of experiences are so rich about this kind of job. I think it's the place where I love so much more what I get to do in the classroom than being in any other sort of setting with this text.
- [32:05]
B
That's amazing. Thank you very much for sharing that. Now, I have one more question before we kind of transition back to talking a little bit about your upcoming course, which is based on the title of the episode, which is very provocatively, Church versus Universities. Who gets the New Testament? Right now, we're not trying to set up some kind of battle royale here. The answer is obviously going to be different for different people. But do you find that one approach, the devotional or the critical, is more right than the other, or do you see strengths in each one?
- [32:37]
A
I will say that what works with the critical academic approach is that it does certain things, right, that the other ones can't potentially do. So, you know, the analogy that I like to use in my classroom is the X ray. I tell my students that a lot of what we're going to be doing in the class is something similar to X raying the New Testament, okay? So if you shine an X ray on a body, you are going to see bones, you're going to see a skeletal structure that automatically helps you see something that you actually can't see with your naked eye. Only using that particular instrument can you possibly see the skeletal structure, the broken bone inside a human person. What you will not see on the X ray is potentially the skin color, the eye color, for sure, the skin color, the eye color. You won't see the musculature in the same way. You will not see the organs and, you know, state of disease. You will not be able to detect very small, minute aspects of those organs. You won't see the thoughts of a person, the emotions of a person. And I kind of say this to say, and yet we need X rays. We need X rays to do this one thing that only they can do and that only they can do well. So kind of in this, you know, analogy, you know, my students might encounter the Bible in other sorts of contexts. They might encounter it devotionally, they might encounter it in worship settings, they might encounter it in small Bible studies, they might encounter an online forums where they are actually very negative towards the Bible and toward what the Bible represents politically, socially, et cetera. My class kind of cuts past a lot of those questions and gets to these fundamental issues of, but who wrote the text and when and why? And what are the agendas behind this? How do we think about this text as a work of literature, as a historical artifact? And in that respect, we're asking questions that can inform some of these other ways that my students might approach the Bible, but that isn't asking the same kind of question. And that in some ways is going to be freer and more capable of answering some other very important questions about this text.
- [34:49]
B
Thank you very much. Now, we mentioned earlier that you're going to be teaching a course for Barthes, which is the New Testament experience, exploring the Christian New Testament, which is going to start on January 27, so the end of this month, and then running all the way to May 5th. So it's a very different format to the weekend long courses that people might be more familiar with. It's a very extensive course. So I wanted to begin by asking, does it require Specialized knowledge on the part of students. Who do you think would be able to take and really enjoy and get a lot out of this course?
- [35:24]
A
Yeah, I don't assume any base of knowledge for the students who enter into my classroom. It's the same principle that I have to take into my university classroom. You know, the students that might sign up for my class are students who have very deep religious backgrounds or no religious backgrounds. And so one of the things that I'm trying to do is gloss just about every key word and expression that I might have to. I can't make those assumptions. Some of my students, even in the classroom, are international students coming from cultures that are non Christian, completely non religious. And yeah, we start from scratch there. In terms of who can get something out of this class, I'll just say from the outset, I think everybody can get something out of this class. I think everybody can also be challenged by this class. I think that's part of the genius of what we do in a university setting. Right. But yeah, I think that students who approach this text coming from religious backgrounds will find plenty in this class that will open up new terrains for them that they never thought about with respect to this, you know, particular body of literature, the Bible. I think that there are aspects of what we'll talk about in class that will be challenging for students who might have certain faith positionalities, who might again come from different backgrounds that require the Bible to be read a certain way. I think that engaging, wrestling with those, grappling with those questions is actually really rewarding if you're a religious person and if you're not religious. I think part of this is building fluency in this text, being able to actually talk to people who are religious on some level. If you have a vested interest in raising critical questions about the Bible, we will raise those galore in this class. So I think there really is something for just about every person who might be interested in signing up.
- [37:15]
B
Thank you. Now, I can see that the course has 27 lectures. There are obviously 27 books in the New Testament. Does that have anything to do with the structure? Are you going to start with Matthew in lesson one and then Mark and continue on down to Revelation?
- [37:28]
A
Yeah, I think that has more to do with the semester structure and how many days we actually end up having in roughly a 13 week kind of semester? No, there are some texts that I think require much more attention. Philemon takes second John as 250 words. The gospel of Mark is 10,000 words. And it's so different. The landscape so, no, there are some texts that we're going to give a lot of attention to. And, you know, sometimes what we do is we try to read one type of text, you know, kind of in a more focused way. We might give more attention to a particular gospel and then use that as a platform for talking about some of the other gospels more quickly. Or we'll take one letter of Paul and really stretch it out and then use that as a platform for talking about some of the other ones. Yeah, well, we'll touch all the bases by the end, but we'll kind of major in some things, minor in some things, and. And hopefully build a really comprehensive base of knowledge for everyone.
- [38:26]
B
Would you be able to give us a sneak peek with maybe a couple of the lesser known things that students will learn in the class?
- [38:33]
A
You know, one thing that I talk a little bit about in this class is kind of the broad question of why do we do critical academic biblical studies? Like, what's the history behind doing this? And one of the things that I'll bring out is that a lot of this began, strangely enough, in the 15th century with the fall of Constantinople. So, you know, kind of the really sort of Genesis moment in biblical studies was when the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks. There were thousands of Greek refugees who came west bringing their biblical manuscripts with them in Greece. And Latin scholars in the west sat down with these texts and for the first time, really are getting to really spend time with Greek versions of the New Testament. And they discover something really alarming. They realize these manuscripts disagree with our own. Like, there are just minor places where this reading doesn't match up with that reading, and in ways that could even impact theology in some ways. And that encounter of east and west, if you will, is this really seminal moment, because Latin scholars in Western Europe now are starting to look at the Bible, the text that they chant, the texts that they venerate, the text that they might use incense with during the Mass, and suddenly ask the question, does our Bible have mistakes in it? And what would that mean? And how far do these mistakes go? And are they simply about the text of the New Testament, or are there mistakes in the traditions in the New Testament? And even it opens up this entire world of scholarship, this entire debate and dialogue that we're still a part of. And so part of, I think, you know, to kind of tease some things that we do in my class is I want to get my students thinking about why we do the critical exercise of the academic study of the Bible. I also want to encounter the texts that we study in new sorts of ways and really usher students into the kind of current state of debate on some of these texts. So Bart and I author the eighth edition of the New Testament, A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings with Oxford University Press. And one of the things that we have had to negotiate in our writing of the textbook together is the fact that we disagree on some fundamental questions. So, you know, Barth believes that there was a Q document that stands behind Matthew and Luke. I do not. We have different ways of approaching texts like the Gospel of John. We have different takes on the authorship of some of these New Testament texts. And so I think another thing that's going to be really fun for students is to get to here in the classroom, me sort of talk to all of the complexity and diversity of even biblical scholarship today. I think one thing that I really appreciate doing as a teacher is walking my students into. We actually don't have one answer for this. We have several competing answers. And here's the case that this person gives, and here's the case that this person gives, and. And here's what you might want to know if you want to answer this.
- [41:43]
B
Thank you. Now, finally, what are you most excited about when it comes to this new course?
- [41:50]
A
There are parts of this that are just fun to kind of step outside even the university classroom that I'm in and to reach such a wider audience. There are people who have never had the opportunity to study the Bible in this way. I think it's something of an honor and a privilege to be able to be in this kind of a format and begin to walk students through 27 books, the new Testament, and to really kind of help them negotiate all of the different possibilities and questions around this text. I find that very, very rewarding. And again, especially for students who have never had the chance historically to ask the hard questions. So I went to a tiny fundamentalist college. You know, that was something that was kind of baked into the religious background that I grew up in, that I was, you know, end up at a school like this. And I remember the experience of being shut down in the classroom, the experience of not being able to ask really important questions about the biblical text, of being told that there was just the right answer, When I know now there isn't just a right answer to this. There's a lot of questions. Probably the most interesting thing to me today, I'll say as a scholar, is that I'm a New Testament scholar at all. I. I took a two semester New Testament course undergrad at one of these kinds of colleges. And I was bored to death in that course. And I think it was in part because it was taught from such a frame of we know exactly who wrote this, we know exactly when this was written, and we know exactly what it means. It means exactly what we believe. And none of the diversity, none of the kinds of most frustrating, you know, ridiculous parts of this text ever get to shine through. Here we have that opportunity for a really open space. We're going to have an online community of students from all sorts of backgrounds, religious and non religious. We're going to have live Q and A and that's going to create all of that kind of real circus, I think of questions and that's just so profoundly rewarding for me as a teacher today. And it's something that I really enjoy working with.
- [44:00]
B
I think it's going to be a really valuable experience, obviously for you, but for everyone who decides to take it as a student, it sounds really like a fantastic course. For those who are interested, the course is available for purchase early bird pricing@barterman.com NT if you purchase before January 12th, you can get it for $349 and you can use the MJ podcast code to get an additional 10% off and the regular price will be $395. So after January 12th it will go back up. You can still use the MJ podcast code though to get that 10% discount. I want to remind you also that the course will be available to stream in our community and training school, the Biblical Studies Academy. If you are on a budget, this is definitely the way to get the course. You can sign up for a 14 day free trial at Bob ehrman.com BSA after the free trial, membership is only $39 a month. If you're interested in this, I would recommend you join now because the price is going to be going up to $49 a month after Hugo's course starts on January 27th. So again you can take a look@barturman.com BSA all of the links will be in the description as well. Hugo, thank you so much for joining me. This was a real pleasure to talk to you.
- [45:18]
A
Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.
- [45:20]
B
Of course audience, thank you all 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. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week and so will Bart. We'll be talking about how we separate history from myth in the Gospels. So be sure to join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Barterman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.