← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Did Ancient Scribes Alter Jesus' Words? Evidence from the Gospel of Matthew
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Shopify.com setup the gospel of Matthew was copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press. And each new copy introduced new changes to the text. What were those changes and how have they impacted the meaning of the gospel? Today on misquoting Jesus, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to discuss how scribes changed the Gospel of Matthew and what those changes mean for us. Welcome to Misquoting 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 again. Before we get started, I wanted to make sure you knew about the specials we're running this December on all of our Christmas themed courses. Highlights include a brand new course with Dr. Jodi Magnus Herod, the tyrant of Christmas, plus a new face to face on the Bible discussion asking was Jesus really born in Bethlehem? A lively conversation between Barth and Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin. We're also offering up to 60% off our Christmas courses with a limited time Christmas bundle. Head over to barterman.com courses for all the holiday deals. Good for December only and as always, use the code mjpodcast at checkout for a special discount. Welcome back everybody to miss Quoting Jesus where today we are talking about how scribes rewrote the Gospel of Matthew. We've also got our bonus segment which this week is listeners questions right at the end. And I'm going to be asking Bart why early Christians were so fond of the book of Revelation, among other things. So be sure to stick around for that. But we, before we get into all of that, you and I finally were in the same room this weekend.
- [02:24]
B
I know.
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C
Which was lot of fun.
- [02:26]
B
This is, this is what episode 160something167 or something like that. We never met and so yeah, that was fun. We had a. Yeah, I had my retirement lecture from From Chapel Hill, retiring from university teaching. I'm not retiring from this or anything else, but. And. And you and the team came. It was most of the team. It was great.
- [02:50]
C
Yes. Look.
- [02:51]
B
Oh, look at there.
- [02:52]
C
Picture of proof that we were in fact in the same room.
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B
That is. There it is. It's like. And it's not even doctored.
- [02:58]
C
Oh, I know, I know.
- [03:00]
B
Well, that's nice. I haven't seen this one. Oh, yeah, look at that. So that's. So that is many of the members of our team, some people weren't able to come, but just see what a happy group it is.
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C
And I don't think, except for you and Chris and obviously Chris and Joy, I don't think any of us had met each other before this weekend.
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B
Yeah.
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C
In person.
- [03:19]
B
So for people who are just listening to this and not watching it, we're seeing some. Some pictures here of like this. This very happy team. Good.
- [03:28]
C
We had a lovely time. And Bart's lecture was the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. I'm not going to tell you what it was because the. Sorry, there's a cat trying to get on my lap again. The replay. The recording is available now on YouTube so you can go and watch it and learn for yourself. But it was such a fun weekend. We met not only each other and the rest of the team, but so many people from just well, biblical scholars, but people from the Biblical Studies Academy. I always want to call it bsa. I can never remember what the essay stands for. So that. That stalling was me trying to remember what an earth. The acronym means.
- [04:11]
B
It could mean other things, but it does mean Biblical Studies Academy.
- [04:16]
C
But it was so nice to meet everybody.
- [04:18]
B
Oh, no. It was really quite astounding. I had no idea. We had people fly in from Argentina and Taiwan and England, not to mention like the west coast and the east coast. And I had no idea, but it was. Yeah, that was so much fun. And there's so many people who are just happy to be there because, you know, a lot of people, including, I think a lot of people listen to this podcast, are interested in this material, but they don't have people that can really talk too much about it. You know, like they're the, you know, the family isn't that interested or neighbors. Forget it. You know, friends. Yeah, really, that's what you're interested in. Where. Whereas, you know, you get together with a group of people, are interested in the. The historical understanding of the New Testament and early Christianity and such, and you have things to talk about. And people were so excited about being there. It was, it was just a ton.
- [05:09]
C
It was lovely. So if we met you. Thank you so much for coming. If you couldn't make it, obviously not a problem. People have been sort of suggesting maybe we do another one next year.
- [05:20]
B
Yeah, I'm for it. This is a blast. Yeah, Some kind of first in person event. Be great. Yeah.
- [05:27]
C
Okay. We should. Sorry. Stop boring everyone with our reminiscing of last weekend and get into the Gospel of Matthew. Now. This is kind of second in a miniseries. We spoke a few weeks ago about the Gospel of Mark and changes to the manuscripts in there. So when we're looking at the Gospel of Matthew, what are the oldest manuscripts that we have for it?
- [05:49]
B
Okay, so we have. We're a little bit better off for Matthew than we are for Mark when it comes to old manuscripts. Matthew was written after Mark, probably usually dated around 80 or 85 of the common era. And we, unlike Mark, we actually have a couple of manuscripts from the second century. So maybe just within 100 years of it being written. Unfortunately, these two manuscripts that we have from that period are fragmentary. In fact, they just contain a few verses each. So it's, you know, that's great. It's great to have these old manuscripts, but they're very. They're tiny fragments and so they don't help us much to know, you know, what Matthew said. But at least we have them. We start getting. We have several more, half a dozen or more from the second or third centuries. Again, these are very fragmentary with just scattered verses here and there. There's one that's called Papyrus 45 P45 that has. Has portions of four of Matthew's chapters toward the end. And so that's. That's kind of the longest one we've got before our first complete manuscript. Our first complete manuscript is the same as with the Gospel of Mark. Both Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus are complete manuscripts that have Matthew in them from beginning to end. That's the same with Mark. These manuscripts date from. Usually they're dated around the year 375 of the Common Era. And so they are about 290, 300 years after Matthew did his book. And that's the first time we have an entire manuscript that actually has all
- [07:36]
C
the verses in it apart from the manuscripts of Matthew. Do we have other ways of knowing what the author wrote?
- [07:44]
B
Yeah, you know, I mentioned when we did the Mark thing, I pointed out that we have translations of the Gospels in other ancient languages that were doing that were Done already in the second century, probably the Latin translation and Syriac and Coptic. Coptic was language spoken in Egypt and there was a Christian community there. So they. Somebody translated into Coptic and. And Syriac is up in Syria and people translated there. And then Latin was the entire Latin West. And so as with Mark, we have. We have these three versions that go back to the second century. And then we have later versions in translations into Armenian and Georgian on Old Church Slavonic and other other things that help us know what these. What the Gospel looked like, what the wording was in the times and places that the translators were doing their work. The difficulty, though is that we don't have the originals of those translations either. We have the later manuscripts of those translations. But often you can reconstruct what that. What looks like the original of those versions were and compare that with what we have for our Greek manuscripts. So that's good. The other thing is that we have quotations of Matthew in church fathers. And in this case we're better off than Mark because Matthew was very commonly quoted. The two most commonly quoted gospels of the New Testament were Matthew and John. And so early church fathers didn't quote Mark very much on its own because most of Mark is replicated in Matthew. And they tended to think at the time that Mark was actually a condensed version of Matthew rather than one of Matthew's sources. Today we think Mark was one of Matthew's sources, but since it wasn't seen that way in the ancient world, they preferred Matthew. But that means we have a lot more quotations of Matthew than we have of Mark in church fathers. None of them actually names Matthew as the book they're quoting until the end of the second century, starting with the church father Irenaeus. But after that they'll quote it. And sometimes they'll name which book it is, and sometimes they'll give a quotation. It's obvious it's Matthew because it's the only. The verse is found only in Matthew, or they're quoted in a form that is different from the way you'd find it in Mark or Luke. So you know that they're quoting from Matthew. So you have the church father quotations starting at least in the second century. And then you have the versions and you have the Greek manuscripts.
- [10:13]
C
So when we spoke about Mark, we kind of defined various types of changes that were seen in the text. You've got accidental changes, deliberate changes, just so we're all on the same page. People might not have watched or listened to the previous episode. Could you just describe those for us and what kinds of things they show.
- [10:31]
B
Yeah. So, you know, since we don't have the originals of Matthew or the, any of the other books, we have copies made later by scribes who are basically, you know, being a scribe is, it's a conservative enterprise. You're trying to conserve the writing that you, you know, you've got a copy of it and you want another copy of it either to distribute or because case the other one's wearing out or something. And so the idea is to copy the text in front of you. But scribes often would make mistakes, just accidental mistakes where they would misspell a word or they'd leave out a word or add a word, repeat a word, write it twice and things like that. And so you have lots and lots of these accidental mistakes in Matthew as well as in Mark. You also have places where it looks like scribes have tried to change the text intentionally have altered it in one way or another. That's always a, it's kind of a judgment by a scholar. Is this an accidental change or is a scribe trying to change it? Some places it's pretty clear it's got to be an intentional change because it's not a slip of the pen. And so you get, you get both. The thing about Matthew is that since it was used more often, we, we have more manuscripts of Matthew in some ways. But the interesting thing is, and I was just actually thinking about this this morning, because I've never really kind of grappled with this seriously enough, I think, is that there seem to be fewer intentional changes in Matthew than in Mark. Changes that look like a scribe has intentionally changed something. And I think it's because Matthew is so popular that if there's like a difference between Matthew and Mark and a scribe notices, wait a second, they're copying Mark and say, wait a second, you know, that's not how it is. It's because they have Matthew in mind, but they're less likely to change Matthew in conformity with Mark because Matthew's the more popular one. See what I'm saying? So I, I, so I was just puzzling this morning because there aren't as many kind of, you know, bold, in your face changes in Matthew as in this, in the manuscripts of Matthew as there are in Mark, but there are tons of accidental ones.
- [12:43]
C
Thank you very much. We're going to take a very brief break and we'll be right back to look at some very specific verses and what changes they show. And I did kind of announce this last week when I was interviewing Dr. Tabor, we have started our year end holiday sale. There are two special offers. They began last week and will run until December 31st. The sale includes 40% off all titles in our online course catalog and that's over 30 courses to choose from, including these amazing semester long university style courses that we recently began offering. The full course list with descriptions is available at Bart ehrman.com courses and you can use the code mjpodcast4040 to get the discount. The second offer, if you'd prefer to gain access to all of the courses all at once, is to sign up for the Biblical Studies Academy, which we mentioned a little earlier at the lowest rate we've offered in over a year. It's not just great value for all of the courses that you get access to, but it gives you access to a fantastic, thriving community of people, people who are all very passionate about the Bible. And like Bart said, if your friends and family's eyes glaze over when you try and discuss the formation of the Pentateuch or why Paul has two different modes of salvation, I know that finding new friends and family is not an easy thing to do. You can just come and join the BSA instead and talk to them about it. The normal price for BSA is 49.95 per month, but from now until 31st December, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial and then pay just $34.95 per month after that. So definitely take a look at those if this is the kind of thing you enjoy. Okay. Before our little break there, Bart, you gave us kind of an overview of how we know about Matthew outside of the manuscripts and what kinds of changes we see. I am going to grill you. Not really grill you because you gave me these verse references yourself. So you know what's coming. But we have a selection of verses to go through to kind of explore some of these changes and see what they are and why people think they happened. All right, we're going to start at the beginning, chapter one and verse 16. What's going on there?
- [14:55]
B
So this is a very interesting change and I'll, I'll introduce this one by. So I don't say this every time. We're not going to have anything of the magnitude of Mark where the last 12 verses about Jesus resurrection appearances were added later. There's nothing like of that magnitude, but they are some really interesting ones. And it's the one we're starting with is an odd one and it's, I think it's gotta be A mistake? Like an accident? I don't know, maybe not, but I, I think it's gotta be. So, so it's in the genealogy of Jesus. So, you know, my, my, my students, they, they don't much like genealogies and, you know, so and so begot. So and so begot. So and so begot so and so. And they think, oh my God, really? But yeah, I tell them, look, when you're dealing with Matthew, you're only talking about 16 verses here. You know, if. Of genealogy, if you want a real genealogy, go to First Chronicles, the first nine chapters of First Chronicles. And so, you know, don't complain about Matthew. But, but in Matthew, the way it works, it's tracing Jesus genealogy from Abraham and it's saying, you know, that Abraham was the father of Isaac, who was the father of Jacob, who was the father of Judah, etc. And it goes down from, from father to son until it gets down to verse 16 that at the end of verse 15, Mathon was the father of Jacob, Jacob was the father of Joseph. And then the text that most manuscripts have, as Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who's called the Christ. So in other words, Jesus is not said. Joseph is not said to be the father of Jesus because he's not in Matthew, Mary's a virgin. And so it's this odd thing where it traces a genealogy, genealogical line that Jesus doesn't belong to because he's not Joseph's son. And everything else is about his father and grandfather and such. But it is interesting that we have, we have a couple of witnesses that, that read something else. In fact. Well, there, it's actually, I mentioned the Syriac translation. It's actually in the Syriac translation where for some reason it says that Mathon was the father of Jacob, Jacob was the father of Joseph, and Joseph, being engaged to Mary, was the father of Jesus. Whoa, wait a second. It completely undercuts the virgin birth. And so, you know, it could be. It could, you know, theoretically, it could be that a scribe really thought, you know, Joseph was the father somehow and put it in. Or it could be that he was so used to copying, was the father of us, the father of. That by the time he got to this one, he just assumed it was the same and slipped up.
- [17:43]
C
I can see that happening. Sometimes when you're copying, it just gets very repetitive.
- [17:49]
B
Well, people don't believe that. Try copying Matthew sometime. Just sit down one evening and try to copy Matthew to see how many chapters.
- [17:58]
C
Okay, so we go A couple of verses on to chapter one, verse 18. What's that one? What's going on there?
- [18:06]
B
So this one's, this one's interesting because it's very minor, it involves one letter. But it's interesting and it's interesting to puzzle out whether it was an intentional change or not. And the change of this letter doesn't affect how the word is pronounced. It's one word with one letter. So 1:18 says, now the birth of Jesus Christ took place like this. And then it goes on to start explaining about how Mary is betrothed to Joseph, etc. And it gives the birth narrative. But this word that, this word, the birth of Jesus was this. The word that's used there is the Greek word that we get our word Genesis from. It actually is the word Genesis. It says Genesis. And the word Genesis is a word that, you know, like in the Book of Genesis, it's called the Book of Genesis because it's, it's the very beginning, so the beginning of Jesus Christ. But the problem is that one could take that to mean that this is the point at which Jesus came, that Christ came into existence. And for early Christian scribes, of course, Christ had always existed. And so this is not describing his coming into existence, it's describing his birth. And so it's very interesting that we have a large number of manuscripts that actually change it from Genesis with 1n Genesis to the word Genesis with two ends. And when Genesis, the word Genesis has two ends, it actually comes from a different word. It doesn't mean become, it means born. And so they've changed it to say that, that the birth of Jesus Christ was this way, where it's emphasizing, it's. There's talking about him being born, it's not talking about him coming into existence. And there's so many manuscripts that have. That you suspect, you know, maybe it may well be that these people were nervous saying that this was the very beginning of Jesus Christ, since they didn't think so.
- [20:10]
C
That must be really hard to try and puzzle out, though, if it's just that one word and not one word, one letter, and it's the letter that's already in that word. How many people just slipped up and how many people said, no, don't like that one, we're going to change it. That's fascinating.
- [20:25]
B
Exactly right. So, you know, I have a. In my book, the. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, it's. It's written at a scholarly level, but I deal with changes like this at some length where I try to explain you know what the options are. Is this an accident? Was it on purpose? And what the arguments are both ways. And I try to render a judgment and in this case it's not quite clear to me, but I think the first one we talked about almost, I think it's probably an accident. This one. I, I suspect maybe there was a reason for, for. And, and I actually, it isn't just kind of guessing. I actually give some what the actual evidence is that it's probably may well been an intentional change.
- [21:01]
C
Fascinating. Thank you. Still sticking with chapter one. Moving on to chapter one, verse 25. What can you tell us about that?
- [21:09]
B
So 25 is in chapter one, verse 25. Everyone will recall, since it's in the Christmas season now that that Mary is, is impregnated not by. By Joseph, her betrothed, but by. By God. And she's a. She's a virgin. And Joseph gets really upset about this because, you know, he assumes somebody's gotten her pregnant and then he has a. As one. As one would assume, you know, if you're in betrothed is pregnant. I mean, somebody got her pregnant and so it wasn't you. And so he's upset. But then a dream, he has a dream and in this dream he learns that in fact the spirit has impregnated her. So it hasn't. She hasn't had an affair or anything like that. And it says that he woke up from the dream and he did what, you know, he followed the angel's instructions to him. And it says in verse 25 that he, the, the literal word is he did not know her, meaning he did not have sex with her until she had born a son and he called his name Jesus. Okay, so they didn't, you know, so they never had sex until Jesus was born. But that, that kind of bothered some people because if it says he didn't have sex with her until he was born, that could suggest that he had sex with her after he was born, which seems likely historically since Jesus had brothers, but even in this Gospel. But some scribes didn't much like that. And so there, there's just, there's actually just a couple of manuscripts. One of them is actually that same Syriac thing and also a Latin manuscript that take it out where, where instead of saying that he did not know her until she had born a son, it just says and he called his name. Jesus leaves out this bit about when he started to know her.
- [23:06]
C
Oh, it's quite a chunk to take out. Not.
- [23:09]
B
It's a massive. But, well, it's you know, it's a number of words. And it's. It doesn't look like it was taken out accidentally. It looks like, you know, it was. It was taken out on purpose, about six words. And some, you know, scribes just took it out because they weren't probably because they're uncomfortable with the implications.
- [23:29]
C
All right, so we are done with chapter one. We're going to skip all the way ahead to 17, chapter 17, verses 12 to 13 to be exact. What is that?
- [23:41]
B
If those are watching this, I'm looking these things up to make sure I get these right. So 17, 17, 12 is this interesting passage where the disciples are. They're kind of wondering who Jesus is. And they've just seen Jesus transfigured on the mount of transfiguration. And he. On the mount of transfiguration, Jesus starts glowing, he starts radiating. And Elijah and Moses show up and start talking to him. Them and Peter, James and John see this. And then Elijah and Moses go away. And they asked. They asked Jesus that they come down from the mountain. They say, so why is it some people say that Elijah has to come before the Messiah? Why does Elijah have to come first? And he replies, well, Elijah did come and that they didn't know who he was. He's referring to John the Baptist. He's seeing John the Baptist as the Elijah figure who is supposed to come before the Messiah. But the way he says it is, they did not know him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man will suffer at their hands. And then verse 13 says, Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist. The problem is that when it says they knew he's talking about John the Baptist, it comes right after saying something about the Son of Man. And so you could read this to think that John the. That Jesus is saying that John the Baptist is the Son of Man, even though it's Jesus who's the Son of Man. And so what scribes did is they flipped those two lines. So they did to him whatever they pleased. The disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist. And then he says, they're also going to do that to the Son of Man. So, I mean, it's like it's just one of these things you wouldn't think of anything about. But scribes get nervous because. Especially because, you know, it was known that John the Baptist had followers who thought he was the Messiah. And so you change this around so it can't be misread, that Way, slight change. Kind of interesting.
- [25:50]
C
Just to make sure people aren't going to be spreading heresies.
- [25:53]
B
Yeah, you don't want. You don't want people spreading heresies. That's a bad thing. Yeah.
- [25:58]
C
All right, the final verse on my list is chapter 24, verse 36. What can you tell us about that one?
- [26:06]
B
Yeah. So this is where Jesus is telling the farewell discourse. Not the farewell. This is where Jesus is giving the apocalyptic discourse. It's his final long speech in the Gospel of Matthew. Takes all of chapters 24 and 25 and his. He's describing the cosmic destructions that are going to take place at the end of time and how, you know, all craziness is going to break out on the earth and the end is going to come. And the disciples want to know, well, when. When's it going to be? What are we talking about here?
- [26:43]
C
That would be my question too.
- [26:44]
B
Yeah, like Jesus, you're a Son of God. Come on, just. Come on, tell us. We won't tell anybody. Just. We just want to know, man. But, but Jesus won't tell them. And he has this line that, where he says, but of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father. Only scribes came to that bit and they got a little bit nervous. The Son of God doesn't know when he's coming back. The Son of God's all knowing. How could the Son. How could the Son of God not know? And because of that, a number of scribes took that part out, the part that said nor the Son. The angels don't know, nor does the Son. But the Father only they take, took out, nor the Son, because they. They didn't want it to be implied that, that Jesus was, wasn't, was not omniscient because he must know all things since he's a divine being, even though in Matthew Jesus is clearly subordinate to God the Father. So just a kind of a side note about that is that verse has been used by people to argue that nobody. That people should not predict when Jesus is coming back. Even though many prophecy seekers among fundamentalists actually pick dates for when Jesus is coming back. And that it happened one time when that happened, in kind of an interesting way, was when I moved to chapel hill in 1988, and there was a tractate around, floating around, saying that Jesus was coming back during Rosha, the week of Rosh Hashanah in 1988. And the person who would make this claim had other fundamentalists object to him by saying, look, Jesus Says no one knows the day or the hour when it's going to happen. And this author said, yes, no, I don't know the day or the hour. I just know which week it's going to be. It's going to be the week of Rosh Hashanah. Yeah, I got the seven day thing. It's like, I don't know which day or hour, but it's going to be one of those days.
- [28:56]
C
Okay, so there are some fantastic specific examples of people, scribes changing things in the Gospel of Matthew. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think would be helpful here?
- [29:08]
B
Well, a couple things I'll say. One, one is that there are hundreds of things like this in Matthew, but most of them, most of them are not very interesting. They're just like, you know, misspellings and things. But textual scholars who do this for a living, they're, they're professional people. This is what I did my first 20 years of my career. I was really studying the New Testament for these kinds of variants. And it's a, it's a, it's a difficult job, Let me just say. That's one thing. The other thing is there's another passage that many people have talked about as being an addition to Matthew. It's a very important two verses. It's the final two verses of Matthew's Gospel. And so the end of Matthew, unlike Mark, in Mark's account, when Jesus dies, he's buried third day, the women go to the tomb. They're told, go tell the disciples that he'll meet them in Galilee. And they don't go and they don't tell anybody. It ends with them not telling anybody. In Matthew's Gospel, the disciples do learn that Jesus is going to meet them in Galilee. They do go up there and they meet him and he gives them a farewell. He gives them a farewell. The farewell. The final bit is chapter 28, verses 16 through 20. But many people, including textual scholars, sometimes have argued that the final two verses were not originally in Matthew. The final two verses say, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he gives them the great commission. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always to the end of the age. Okay, so some people have said this great commission did not originally end the Gospel of Matthew, that somebody added it later. First thing to say is that, that every manuscript we have has the last two verses. So that if somebody did add these verses, it would not be a textual. If somebody did add it, we would not call it a textual variant because there are no texts that are lacking it. All the texts have it. But. So it would be what we would call an interpolation where somebody has added something, somebody's added a text, and it's found in all of our manuscripts. Okay. But they added it after the author produced it. So that. That is entirely. That's entirely possible. It is worth noting that some church fathers quote Descent of Matthew, but do not quote the final two verses, 19 and 20, the Great Commission. So Eusebius, the church father of the 4th century, actually quotes this passage, but doesn't quote the last two verses. And so people say, so Eusebius didn't have these last two verses. I think that's a misguided judgment because church fathers are always just quoting the part that they're interested in quoting. They never quote everything. And so we don't really have good textual evidence or any textual evidence. But there are two reasons that people have said this does not belong to Matthew. One is it mentions the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That's the Trinity. Matthew didn't know about a Trinity. And you don't get the Trinity in the New Testament. Here you get it Father, Son and Spirit. So that's a. That's an important concern that one has to look at carefully. My view is that it doesn't have any relevance to this situation because Matthew does not state the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is not just that you have a Father, Son and Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is that those three are completely equal in every way. They're of the same substance, and they're different people, but there's only one God. That's the doctrine of Trinity. And Matthew says nothing about that. He just mentions Father, Son and Spirit. And early in Christianity, people acknowledged that there was a Father, Son and Spirit. So I don't think that's a compelling argument. The other argument that people use is that here Jesus tells his disciples to go preach to the Gentiles. But throughout Matthew's Gospel, he's always telling them, don't go to the Gentiles. And so it seems like a contradiction because Matthew says, don't go only to the house of Israel when he sends out the disciples. And now all of a sudden he say, go to the nations. So people say, well, that's a contradiction then. So it probably wasn't in Matthew. Again, I don't think that's convincing either because Matthew's point is that the message that Jesus brings was to be taken to the Jews. His ministry was to Jews, his apostles were to go to Jews. But at the end of the Gospel, the Jewish people reject him. Chapter 27, verse 25. At Jesus trial it says all the people cried out his blood be upon us and our children. It doesn't say all the crowd, it uses the word that you would use for the Jewish people cry out his blood be upon us and our children, taking the responsibility upon themselves. So that the Jewish people are shown in Matthew, whatever you think of this historically in Matthew they're being portrayed as rejecting Jesus and therefore the message now is to go out to all the nations, to all the peoples. So I don't think it's a contradiction with the rest of Matthew. I think it's very intentional. In any event, this, this is a very interesting passage that some people think does not belong to Matthew, but, but many others, including me, think does belong.
- [34:42]
C
Thank you very much Bart for explaining that. That's really interesting. I didn't know that people thought those final two verses were extras.
- [34:49]
B
Yeah, I get emails about, people ask me, you know, that can't be original, right? Yeah, no, I think it is.
- [34:57]
C
Well, thank you very much. That is all for today's interview. We're going to move on to this week's bonus segment with listener question and answer. We have some fantastic questions. First one is about forgiveness. I am curious about forgiveness. It seems every Christian every day has a get out of jail card. Murder and all sorts of mayhem are forgivable and entrance to heaven is available to them even if they are the worst sinners. Where did this particular idea of forgiveness come from?
- [35:27]
B
Well, it isn't that God forgives people, just, you know, willy nilly that. It's that, you know, it's not that. It's not like everybody gets forgiveness. You get this in the teachings of Jesus, which are based on things you get in the Hebrew Bible. The idea of forgiveness in the New Testament is different from the idea of forgiveness that you get in the broader Greek and Roman worlds. This is something I talk about in my book that's coming out in March on Love Thy Stranger where I try to show that forgiveness in the Greek and Roman worlds happened on only if you could convince the person you hurt that either you didn't know that you were going to be hurting them or somebody stuck a sword to your throat and you had no choice, you had to do what they told you to do. And so if you can convince them of that, then they would forgive you. But the word in Greek for that is called. It's a word that means something like coming of the same mind. If you, if you get them to agree that really not your fault, then they would let you go. Otherwise, forget it. You aren't going to be forgiven. Jesus and possibly other Jewish teachers before him, taught it that, taught that, that God actually forgives sins with. You know that and he does it. If you repent of what you did, you did something wrong, you acknowledge you did something wrong, you regret it, you're sorry you hurt somebody or that you offended God and you repent and you genuinely plan to change your ways, then it's not held against you. That could be seen as a get, get out of jail free card. But it really requires serious regret, remorse and repentance. And so it isn't just kind of a, you know, kind of a flimsy, okay, I forgive you kind of thing.
- [37:11]
C
Thank you. I read that some early Christian martyrs, including Justin and Perpetua, were especially fond of Revelation and, and the Gospel of John. This seems surprising. Revelation is clearly written by a Jew who is skeptical of, if not downright hostile to gentile Christians, while the Gospel of John verges on anti Semitism. Why do you think these two were beloved as a pair?
- [37:40]
B
It's a very good question. It's hard to establish that Justin and Perpetua were like, personally much attached to these books. Justin, for example, quotes Matthew, quotes the Synoptic Gospels. There are two passages where he seems to be. He may be quoting. You must be born from above or must be born again to see the kingdom of heaven. He doesn't attribute it to John. And it's not clear whether he's actually quoting John there. And it's like the only two places where he even has any kind of connections with John directly. Although he does have a theology that might be dependent on John's theology. It's hard to say. John's Gospel was always accepted as far as it was read. And the idea that it was anti Semitic didn't occur until the modern period. And so ancient people didn't see it as anti Semitic, anti Jewish, the way that we would say today. And the same with the Book of Revelation. There were problems with Revelation that people had problems being things such as, you know, the, the grotesque violence of the Book of Revelation, that all because of God's wrath and the wrath of Christ. And people don't like that and that. And understandably, in the ancient world there were other problems with it. So I don't know why one person likes these books and other doesn't. Eventually John, everybody liked. Who knew John in the early church that we know just about. Just about everybody did. Revelation was debated, but the idea of the. The kind of anti Jewishness almost never came into the question because these people were not particularly concerned. These church writers were not over concerned about opposition to Jews because they engaged in opposition to Jews.
- [39:25]
C
Thank you. Next question is about the book of Job. My favorite verse in the book of job is 42 8. We are where we are told that Job spoke the truth about God, but his friends did not. Are there hidden clues to find out where Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar lied about God? This seems to be a huge disclaimer for a very influential text that I've never heard anyone address.
- [39:49]
B
It's a difficult verse because the. I'll tell you one of the reasons it's difficult is because Job is made up of two different writings that have been put together. The first two chapters and the final chapter tell the narrative the story of Job, the righteous man who suffers as a test to see whether he will curse God or not. And he refuses to curse God. Even though the most horrible things imaginable happen to him, he stays faithful to God. The middle part of the book, which takes up almost the whole thing from chapter three all the way up into into chapter 42, is poetry. It's not a story about this righteous man, Job. It's poet, a poetic thing where these three friends accuse Job of having sinned. Deep, deeply sinned, done something really horrible and that God is punishing him. And Job keeps insisting on his innocence. The point of the poetry is very different from the point of the narrative. The understanding of suffering is different. In the narrative. Suffering is a. It's a test from God. In the poetry, Job cannot understand why this is happening to him. And at the end, God refuses to tell him and accuses him of even challenging him. And that even asking why you suffer is not a problem appropriate before the Almighty. So different views. The confusing thing is this verse in 42:8 where Job has done the right thing and the friends have done the wrong thing. Because in the. In the narrative, Job has done the right thing. The story. But the friends don't do anything. In the narrative. They come and they sit with Job for days without saying anything. Comfort. They're just there to comfort him. And they don't say or do anything wrong. But then all of a sudden at the end, Job has to make a Sacrifice because they've done something wrong. So that normally is taken to suggest by scholars that this short story that begins and ends the book had more in it that we don't have anymore where the friends did something wrong, that job has to do an atoning sacrifice for. That sounded like a convoluted answer, but it wasn't meant to be.
- [42:13]
C
Sometimes we need long answers to fully answer the question.
- [42:16]
B
Well, you know, if people are interested in this, my book God's Problem lays out this business of job and try to be pretty simple language about how it has these two parts and how they're being put together.
- [42:30]
C
Thank you. A final question for the day. Do we have any way of knowing roughly what percentage of Jews in Jesus day were or shared the views of the Sadducees? And then the same with the Pharisees?
- [42:44]
B
Not really. You know, when I think, a lot of us, when we think about Judaism at the time, we think, okay, you've got these groups. You got the Pharisees, you got the Sadducees, you got the Essenes. You know, you have these zealots who are trying to take back the land. And we have these groups in our head and we kind of imagine them that it's, it's, it's like Christian denominations where not so much anymore, but it used to be, you know, you say, well, you know, what church do you go to? Oh, yeah, I'm Lutheran, you know, or I'm Baptist or I'm Episcopalian. And like, everybody belonged to some kind of denomination. And it's less that way now. But we, we tend to think of ancient Judaism like that. You know, everybody was a Pharisee or a Sadducee or an Essene. And in fact, it wasn't like that. It was more like the local civic clubs, like the, you know, you got the Rotary Club and the Elks Club and the Chamber of Commerce. And you don't go up to somebody and say, which of these clubs do you belong to? Because most people don't belong to any of them. And so, you know, they're just few. And so Josephus, the Jewish historian Josephus, who knew people in each of these groups, was himself in one of the groups, tells us that the Pharisees were the largest group at the time, and there were 6,000 of them. This is in a Jewish world population of four and a half million. And so most people don't belong to one group or another. So the question has to be asked, were the views of one or the other? You know, do we know how many Jews subscribed views of one of these views or not? And the answer there again is no, we don't really know. Part of the problem is that three of these groups, the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Zealots, are principally located in Israel, and most Jews live outside of Israel. It's clear that there were some Pharisees outside of Israel because Paul, who did not grow up in Israel, identified as a Pharisee, but he's the only one we know of, and so we don't know. Pharisees emphasized the importance of rigor in keeping the Jewish law. Sadducees emphasized the importance of following God's rules for the worship in the Temple. Essenes emphasize the importance of maintaining your own ritual purity because the end of time was coming soon, and then you needed to be ready for the Day of Judgment. And the Zealots wanted a military uprising against the Romans. So some people might have preferred one emphasis or another. My guess is most people thought, yeah, well, all three of those are right. But we, we don't really know because we don't have evidence.
- [45:11]
C
Thank you. Now, Bart, before we finish for today, would you mind reminding us what we spoke about?
- [45:17]
B
Well, today we talked about textual changes in the Gospel of Matthew. The changes in Matthew are numerous. Most of them don't have any effect on the meaning, but there are some, we looked at a handful of them that actually do affect the meaning in interesting way. And one of the points of this particular episode is to show that these textual changes sometimes are very small, but you change one letter of a word and sometimes it actually can make a difference. And so that's kind of an introduction to this field of textual criticism. Looking at Matthew, and we'll be looking later at Luke and John as well.
- [45:53]
C
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 it future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ Podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. and until the end of December, you can use MJ Podcast 40. That's 40 for more substantial discounts in line with our holiday sale misquoting. Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?
- [46:23]
B
Well, you know, we're going to talk about the Book of Revelation. Revelation is hardly read these days by most people. The people who do read it tend to think it's predicting what's going to happen soon. We're going to talk about whether that's right.
- [46:35]
C
Make sure you 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. 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 Erman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.