← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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B
Apply if you've ever done any research on the Bible, and if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have, you might have noticed that most Biblical scholars agree with each other on a lot of basic points. These can include the dating of specific texts and whether some events recorded in the Bible are historical, among other things. Why is that and is it some kind of conspiracy? Today, Dr. Chris Ralingas joins me to talk about the academic consensus, the stories of Jesus early life and how early Christians made meaning from them. 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 and lets begin. Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today I am joined by Dr. Christopher Lingus, professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He studied at Greensboro College in North Carolina, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and earned a PhD in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Frelingas writes and teaches about Biblical literature and early Christianity and his publications include Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Family Troubles in the Infancy, Gospels and Spectacles of Empire, Monsters, Martyrs and the book of Revelation. Dr. Flingas, thank you so much for joining me today.
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A
Well, thanks for having me Megan. It's great to be back.
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B
It's going to be so much fun. Before we get into things, I do have a quick Housekeeping Housekeeping A Quick Housekeeping Note Today's episode is the second of a two part special on this topic. Prior to previously I spoke with Dr. Joan Taylor about her book Boy Jesus Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times, which does challenge a very widely accepted consensus among scholars that we can know very little about Jesus early life. In this episode I'll be asking Dr. Frolingus what scholarly consensus is and what scholarly consensus says about Jesus pre ministry life. We're also going to be talking about how people make meaning out of stories of Jesus childhood and birth. So please, if you haven't listened to Dr. Taylor's interview. You don't have to to understand what's going on here, but it was a fun interview, so I would recommend it. Now, we haven't yet started the interview portion of the podcast and I've already used the consensus probably four or five times. So for those audience members who haven't spent their lives working in and around academia, could you just explain what the scholarly consensus is, please?
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A
Yes, sure, I'm happy to. So it's a term, I mean, I think it's a term that we hear more often, consensus with match with the term scientific or even medical. So we might hear like the scientific consensus around climate change or medical consensus around vaccinations, that kind of thing. In the classroom, I tend to say something like. And I think that this is kind of a synonym for consensus. Scholars agree that. And so what we're trying to get at when we say scholarly consensus is something like a widely held view, a widely subscribed to view about an interpretation based on evidence. And I would say publicly, but publicly available evidence. Yeah. So it's something that people, experts in the field agree to. I once heard a talk, and I wish I could give credit to this person. I can't remember who said it, but it's the kind of thing that we typically don't have to defend when we're giving a paper before other experts. This is something that everybody says, yes, that's right. And we move along. So it's become part of the critical vocabulary of scholarship.
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B
Excellent. Now, how does scholarly consensus become consensus? How do people agree on these specific facts and get to the point where actually they don't need to cite their sources when they're talking about that kind of thing.
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A
Right. And so this is another really great, great question. And for. Right. So again, it brings to mind, like the difference between what we might do, say in the humanities, as opposed to, say scientific consensus or medical consensus, which is based on experiment and reproducibility of results. We do something similar, I think in the humanities. We're testing and retesting hypotheses with the evidence, the data that we have. Does that ring true for you, Megan? I mean, that's kind of the way I would think about it, that it forms over time through this testing and retesting.
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B
Yeah, I would say. So each time you get a new archaeological discovery or a new textual translation, it is put against what people currently know about whatever area of whatever field they're studying. And you see how it either changes the conclusions you draw from the whole picture of evidence or whether or not it confirms what people generally would already agree on? I think.
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Yeah, I mean, you know, scholars, like. I mean, scholars like to argue. You. As, you know, we. We like to debate. We like to argue. So it's not. I hesitate to say that things are just a given, but, like, I would. You know, one of the things we tend not to do in humanities is just take polls. We don't. We don't really do that. But if we did take a poll of professional biblical scholars and we asked the question, do you accept the theory or theories of underlying sources and the composition of biblical books, just put it that way as broadly as possible, I would be stunned if that didn't come in at like, 99%. Like, I just. I think that that's something that we operate with. It's in the. It's in the water, so to speak. We. This is just something that we beat. We begin with. That said, there's constantly, I think, proposals about how to revise the way we understand how sources were incorporated or used. So there are lots of arguments about that. But the. I just. The basic idea that there. That there are sources that are used in the composition of biblical books, I would say that that's a kind of a. That, that's a consensus view.
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B
So it would be consensus to say that the Bible was not written by a single individual working to produce a coherent whole. But people still do debate and argue with each other about the exact process in which all of these different books were either written and then came to become what we know as the Bible.
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A
Exactly, exactly. Like, how much belongs to the writing process, how much belongs to, say, oral tradition? What is the scope of any of these sources? Those are really live questions. But I don't have to. If I'm going to give a talk that has something to do with, say, the synoptic problem, which I know has been discussed on this podcast quite a bit. I don't need to go in before a group of experts and start by, you know, defending the synoptic problem is a problem like that's. That's just a consensus.
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B
Now, would you say that it's. It's difficult or challenging to change academic consensus once this information is kind of accepted, once people accept that the Bible wasn't written at any one time by a single person, how would one then go about trying? If you find some evidence that you think really challenges this, how do you go about trying to change that consensus? And is it something that people can be resistant to?
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Yes. Right. Right. So how easy is it to change someone's mind? That's kind of a question of human nature and cognitive bias. So experts on that, and there are a lot of scholars, actually, I think that study precisely those questions, questions of paradigm shifts and the kind of baggage that we bring in and how resistant we are to kind of new ideas and changes in ideas. I think I probably should say something here because I really enjoyed your interview with Dr. Taylor, and I admire scholarship. It's tremendous, high quality scholarship. I think that she was aware in the interview with you that much of what she's saying about these stories is going to bump up against consensus views. And I think for that reason, I mean, she's aware that there's going to be pushback, that there's going to be resistance. I think that's part of the scholarly process. Oh, hello, Kat.
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It doesn't matter where I sit in the house. He's late.
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Yeah. Cat. You're trying to change a cat's mind. That's not going to happen either. Right. So, you know, I. I still would like to think that most scholars, what they want to see is the evidence, and they want to understand how you arrived at your conclusions based on that evidence, and so they want to give you an open hearing. So I don't think it's a situation where somebody walks in with a new idea, you know, kind of a maverick idea, and then people just, like, stand up and walk out of the room like that. I just don't see that happen at scholarly conferences. Maybe. Maybe you've got a different experience, but that. Right. People, like scholars, want to hear. They're. They're excited to hear new ideas.
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B
When I. When I run up against people online who often people who. Who have theories about what other languages Sumerian is related to or whether or not Mesopotamia was found or Mesopotamian civilizations were founded by aliens, a lot of what I run into is people saying, oh, well, you're just resistant to change. It's all a big conspiracy. And it's quite astonishing to me because every academic that I've had the pleasure of working with has been intensely interested in the actual evidence and making sure that the conclusions they and other people draw from the evidence are reasonable and probable and just related to that. I think if I could prove that Mesopotamian civilizations were founded by aliens, I would be incredibly famous and incredibly wealthy and I could buy all of the ancient history books I could ever desire.
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That's right. The only role, I mean, the only goal there would be to expand the home library. So yeah, yeah, right. You know, another. Another factor here. And again, like, I'd be interested. Your experience. I mean, almost all of us are engaged as well. I mean, at the same time, we're doing scholarship. We're engaged in teaching in some form in the classroom, online. You know, the idea that students are coming to our class and they're just like, okay, whatever you say, there's a real myth to that. So even if students aren't as familiar, say, with the critical vocabulary or the concepts that most of my colleagues have, it doesn't mean the questions are unsophisticated. And students can often spot things, gaps, blind spots that some of my, you know, in conversations with my peers will overlook. I don't think that there's a conspiracy. I just. I think that that's the way that scholarship works. That's the way knowledge is produced. And there's a lot of. There are a lot of different people involved in the conversation. You know, I would always hope for a greater audience for scholarly monographs. That's not always going to happen. But many of our ideas are getting distributed among students, among other audiences, in person, online, and they're getting tested there. And so these big consensus ideas are also getting tested. If you take a course in the critical study of the New Testament or a course in the critical study of biblical literature, you are probably, as a student, you're going to encounter these theories about sources, and if you haven't encountered them before, they're going to raise real questions in your mind, and you're going to want to have answers to those questions. So. Right. These things are getting tested and retested all the time, these ideas. Right.
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So I think it might be helpful to have a specific example for people listening. What does scholarship, consensus scholarship conclude about the stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke about Jesus birth in Bethlehem?
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Yeah, this is a. This is a really good example. I want to first start out, and I don't mean this to sound just as like a disclaimer, but I mean, I think that that's the way it's going to come across. And I say this in front of my students as well. I recognize just how meaningful these stories are to billions of people across the globe. I mean, I, you know, I don't know that there's any holiday in the Christian religious calendar in North America. At least, that's more important than the Christmas holiday. And these stories are bound up with all kinds of things outside of the classroom. For my students, they're bound up with, for many of them, with Childhood memories, friendships, all kinds of things. And that might, you know, kind of be a preview of the way we'll, we'll talk about how people derive meaning from these stories. But if what you want to know is what do scholars think about the historical value of the stories about Jesus's birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke? I think it's fair to say that the widespread view is that they have to be taken with a grain of salt, that they do not represent for us some kind of dispassionate journalistic account of events, that they are principally about making meaning, and that the authors tell us along the way that that's what they're about, that they're about fulfilling scripture, that they're about connecting Jesus to events in his adult life. And so these are precisely the kinds of things that scholars are thinking about when a student or a colleague poses the question, what do you think about these stories? Did they actually happen this way? So I think the consensus would be for much of these stories, there are real questions about the elements of these stories.
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Okay, so if we just narrow in on that specific question, I would still, I want to broaden out just a little bit to the way that scholars might approach a question like this. So let's say you wanted to write an article or something about whether or not the claim of Jesus being born in Bethlehem is historically accurate. So you'd first start to try to collect the evidence around this. So you would want to collect internal evidence. So what is, where do we find references to this in the Gospels? And there we're talking about two out of the four. So Matthew and Luke both contain stories of Jesus's birth, but Mark and John do not. I tell my students, and this is this kind of silly, but that if all we had was the Gospel of Mark, then we wouldn't have any stories about the birth of Jesus. And if we didn't have any stories about the birth of Jesus, then we wouldn't have Christmas. And if we didn't have Christmas, we wouldn't have Amazon and so then where would we be? So I think many readers of the Bible, even close readers, expect that such an important event would be, would be found across the four gospels of the New Testament, but they're not. So we've got two gospels. Once you look outside of the New Testament, in other books of the New Testament, there, there's no mention of Jesus being born in Bethlehem. It's just, it's not there. So you've got the internal evidence that you've collected. So before you analyze that, then you'd also want to start asking questions about some of the huge events recounted in these stories. So is there external corroborating evidence for something like the worldwide, the empire wide census that Luke describes that Augustus orders? And there isn't. Is there corroborating evidence for Herod's massacre of babies in Bethlehem? And look, no one liked Herod. So if something like that happened, you would expect it to be recorded somewhere else besides the one place it's recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, and it's not. So you collect the evidence and then you do your analysis on it and you, once you get thrown back into the internal evidence and see how limited it is, then you start to ask questions about, well, what would be the motives for telling a story about the birth of a messiah in Bethlehem? And then you start to see connections to passages in the Jewish scriptures that clearly meant a lot to the Gospel writers of Matthew and Luke, passages like from the book of Matthew and the, the book of Micah in the Jewish scriptures. And you start to wonder, well, was it important for Christians to tell a story that somehow in their minds and hearts fulfill the expectation of the birth of a messiah in Bethlehem? So those I think would be some of the factors that you'd want to start to think about. And you're already a long way down the road, I think at that point of raising doubts about whether we could just take these accounts at face value. Right, so I'll stop there. I don't want to just keep going on and on about it, but I'm just starting to get into, I think some of the problems that scholars encounter when you start asking questions about the historical accuracy of these. A coup.
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If there are so many internal problems or internal maybe flags within the texts that suggest to people that actually maybe this isn't historical, maybe it's not intended to be historical, would do you think that I say the discovery of an additional source talking about Jesus birth in Bethlehem would be enough to start to maybe question the consensus or shift the consensus or do you think it would take something more than that?
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No. So I think again, like, scholars are open to new evidence. I mean, that would be very, very exciting. And that would probably begin to change the way that scholars thought about these accounts, but it wouldn't necessarily overcome some of the other issues raised by the accounts that I didn't, you know, I didn't even broach. But like, and this is something that I believe you've talked about in the podcast before, if you lie, and this is something I did with some of my students earlier in semester, if you compare the accounts in Matthew and Luke, they don't really align. They, they don't, they certainly don't align perfectly and there's not an awful lot of overlap. So you'll have stories about the massacre of infants in the Gospel of Matthew, no mention of it at all in the Gospel Luke. And then the Gospel of Luke mentions this world, this empire wide census, no mention at all in it of the Gospel of Matthew. And so my students, having made a list of the things that happen in these different accounts, they wonder, well, why would such headline earning events not be found in both? So it's not that they necessarily contradict one another. I wouldn't say that they're not reconcilable. I mean, I think that Christians that attend churches on Christmas day and see some kind of nativity play acted out before them will almost always see elements drawn from both accounts. You can put them together. So that's not, I think what scholars are saying. What they're saying is that these accounts seem to be doing different things. And that's a better way of accounting for these different elements than saying, well, you know, they're historically accurate.
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I see.
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So even, you know, a surprising archaeological discovery, it would definitely be a conversation starter. But I don't think that that would be enough to overcome some of the other questions raised by looking at these two accounts.
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So I want to turn now to looking at how early Christian communities used these kinds of stories because you've mentioned a couple of times that they're probably not historically factual. It doesn't seem from conversations I've had in the past that they were necessarily intended to be factual. So how do you think that people were using these stories when, when they were being told the first couple hundred years?
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Yeah, I mean, I agree with your leader, Amir. I think that that's right. I don't, I'm not, you know, the Way we think about what a fact is is I think, conditioned by our, you know, our stem infused assumptions. I think that early Christians believed these events happened, but their parameters for what counts as, say, truth may be different from the assumptions that we make about when we, you know, use truth in fact as synonyms. Which is essentially what I think many of my students do and, and most of us do all the time. Like we, you know, if we want the truth about something, we want to know the, the facts of it. I, I think we're thinking in the ancient world we've got a kind of different set of parameters. But I'll, I won't, I won't dwell too much on that. I, so I think the making meaning process begins in the New Testament. So I already mentioned that in the letters of Paul, for example, just as writings outside of the Gospels, we don't have a whole lot of interest in the birth of Jesus. Paul mentions that in his letter to the Galatians that Jesus was born of a woman. I remember as a graduate student, Bart finding that just hysterically funny. Like, of all the things that Paul could tell us about the historical Jesus, why did he pick that he had a mother? Could have figured that out on our own. But he doesn't like at that point in Galatians, like, why not also mentioned born of a woman and in Bethlehem. But Paul doesn't do that. Paul does say something about Jesus being the descendant of David, which is interesting because that is something that does jive with, you know, resonate with what we find in Matthew and Luke. But then when we get to Mark, the earliest of our Gospels, Mark is supremely uninterested in the birth of Jesus, says that Jesus comes from Nazareth and that's it. And so we meet Jesus as an adult. We learn a little bit about Jesus's family later in Mark, but nothing, you know, there's no, like trips down memory lane. There's no nostalgia for his childhood. If we follow the two source or four source hypothesis, the idea that Mark was used as a source for Matthew and Luke, I think what we see is that the writers of Matthew and Luke, they, they agree with a lot of what Mark has to say about Jesus. They make some changes here and there. But maybe their biggest disagreement is that Mark doesn't include anything about the birth of Jesus and they both know stories about the birth of Jesus. And I'm not suggesting here that we know who actually wrote Matthew or who actually wrote Luke or who wrote Mark. I don't think we do. But just for Convenience sake, they knew some stories about the birth of Jesus and they thought that those stories mattered. And I think that they probably used elements from tradition, stories that they had heard, but they also shaped these stories in the writing of them. So Matthew includes a bunch of what scholars call fulfillment quotations where he'll quote a passage from the Jewish scriptures and then say, and this passage corresponds to a very specific detail, specific element around the birth of Jesus. A really good example of this is Matthew quotes the book of Hosea saying, out of Egypt, I've called my son. Now, in the context of Hosea, this seems like a callback to the story of the Exodus. But for Matthew, this is a passage that fits into the story that he knows about the flight of the family of Jesus out of Bethlehem to flee from the massacre that Herod had ordered and then returning from Egypt back into, back to Nazareth. So Matthew is already making new meanings, weaving together the Jewish scriptures and in a sense inviting his audience, the people that, that he wrote for, to say, look, these scriptures are your scriptures too, and they're meaningful in these specific ways. And stories about the birth of Jesus allowed him to do that. Luke is doing something very similar. And I think we see these, this kind of dynamic of meaning creation continuing beyond the New Testament as well.
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I want to come back to that beyond the New Testament in a minute. But how do you see modern Christians taking both of these very different stories and then using them to create again their own new. Well, I mean, not new, I guess, for us, because it's based on a long, long tradition, but creating another meaning that wasn't necessarily intended by either of the writers.
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Yeah, that's a really, that's a, that's a good question. I should just say, just out of deference to my colleagues who study, say, American religious history or scholars who are interested, say, in contemporary, more contemporary forms of Christianity. This isn't really my area of expertise, but I do think that what I would call the harmonizing of these stories in performances like nativity dramas or nativity plays and crash scenes tells us something about how biblical meaning making works in a contemporary Christian world. And I, you know, I've heard and I've read different ways that these stories get used, attaching stories about Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt to concern for refugees in the contemporary world. And those connections are being made by Christians, by Christians, Christian run nonprofits, Christian charities who have these, you know, deeply embedded concerns for the welfares of refugees in, you know, domestically and abroad. So that's one way that I Think these stories, these stories get used, but another way, and just to go back to what I said, I kind of set this out of order maybe, but that the importance of the kind of the nuclear family unit in say, contemporary American society again, resonates well with the story about a small, small family around whom it seems like world events are revolving. I mean, it, Matthew's story is dramatic in one way. I mean, it's a, it's a story about life and death and large scale tragedy. Luke's story is cinematic in another way. I mean, you begin with this reference to an empire, an emperor. And for the first readers of this gospel, the knowledge that the person that they believe is their Savior will eventually end up crucified by the order of this, this empire. Like that's the broader story, but with within that story the kind of, what's the phrase, kind of depth of focus, attention to the small family amid all of these events. Well, for the Christmas holiday, which is focused for many families on kind of the importance, the meaning of those close family relations, it's a drama that mirrors their, you know, their own emotional lives. So I, that would be kind of two ways. And again, I'll just say as a disclaimer, that's not really my area of expertise, but that's, that's what I would, that's what I would say as an amateur. Absolutely.
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B
Thank you. Now, we're, we're nearly out of time, but I did want to ask you, going back to what you said about things beyond the gospels, about other later non canonical gospels like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto Gospel of James, what do these tell us about some additional ways that early Christians were using birth stories, stories of Jesus, early life, early childhood, to make their own meanings?
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A
Yes. Thank you. Yeah. So that's, that is what I wrote my second, my second book on. And I was really delighted to be on the podcast earlier and talk with Bart a little bit about these texts. So they're really fascinating gospels, like many of the gospels not included in the New Testament, not well known to Christians today, but very, very popular, it seems, among Christians in the ancient and then into the medieval period. We just know copies of these gospels were translated into lots of different languages. They were probably written within maybe 60 to 70 years of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and they extend this process of meaning making. So the one that I'll talk about, I'll set to the side the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which is more an expansion of the one story about Jesus as a child in the Gospel of Luke as a 12 year old. A really, really fascinating story on its own in chapter two of the Gospel of Luke. The proto Gospel of James is a kind of prequel to the stories found in Matthew and Luke. And it tells us a little bit about the childhood of Mary, how she ended up meeting Joseph and expands in some ways the background and then the elements involved in the birth of Jesus. What it tends to do is borrow elements from both the accounts of Matthew and Luke, which is one of the reasons why we know it was probably familiar with both of those gospels. So there is a census as well as kind of blood thirsty Herod involved in the, in the two stories. And I think that what this shows is that Christians were interested in adding more depth to these characters that they had come to love through these stories. Of these additional Christmas stories, they, they wanted to know more about Mary, they wanted to know more about Joseph. These stories kind of meet those expectations, those questions. One additional point is, and this is always kind of interesting to me and I talk to my students about it, is that while the proto Gospel of James, I think introduces some more problems for say, historical questions, it also tries to solve some problems raised in Matthew by Matthew and Luke. So one of the interesting questions is both Matthew and Luke contain genealogies. So tracing Jesus ancestry back specifically to David, they do so in different ways, probably to outline messianic expectations. But the question always is, well, but if Joseph isn't the biological father of Jesus, what is the point, point of those genealogies? So the proto Gospel of James solves that problem. It's not Joseph that's the descendant of David, it's Mary who's the descendant of David in this later gospel. And so Jesus's genealogical connection to David and to the messianic line according to this gospel is intact, whether or not, you know, Joseph is involved. So it's an interesting attempt at solving, solving a problem.
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B
Thank you so much, Dr. Flingas. This is really, really interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
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A
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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B
Absolutely. Now before I let you all go, I do have a brief announcement. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but we have a brand new semester long course coming up with Dr. Jones, Travis Proctor. It's going to be starting on May 20th and is called Demons and ghosts in the Bible and promises to be absolutely fascinating. While people across the globe throughout history have claimed that evil spirits and ghosts live in our midst, very few realize that these spirits appear in some of the most famous biblical narratives. This course will examine ancient ideas about ghosts and hauntings and how they influenced biblical ghost stories, study the origin of demons and Satan, and study the ancient connections between magic, spirits, demons and how they influence ancient Judaism and early Christianity. As I said, this is a semester long course, so that's 26 lectures. It will start on May 20 and run twice a week until August 14. Early bird pricing is available now for standalone purchase at bartolman.com forward/demons and Ghosts. Be sure to use the Code mjpodcast for a special discount and as always, it's available through the Biblical Studies Academy, our online platform that gives you access to all courses. All of the details can be found at bartiman.com forward/demons and ghosts Dr. Frlingis, thank you again. This was truly a pleasure 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 a few future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartern.com misquoting Jesus will be Back Next week We are going to be talking about how the one God of Israel compares to pagan deities and Bart will be back again. 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 Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.