← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
A
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B
Did you know that Jesus didn't believe in the soul, heaven or hell? As an apocalyptic Jew, these ideas would have been completely foreign to him. So where on earth did Christianity get the idea that a life well lived would be rewarded with a place in paradise for your soul? Today we're talking about where the idea of heaven came from. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is Scholar Spotlight, and Bart's going to be telling us about a biblical scholar he thinks we should know about. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus Podcast with Bart Ehrman. Now, Bart, to begin with, when you were a believer, did you imagine a literal heaven? What did you think it was? And how would you get in there?
- [02:10]
C
Well, there. There was no other kind. It was it, man. There's a we're, we're going to heaven when we die. And at least those of us who are bound that way and those of us who are going to get in or when I was a believer, when I was a Christian, it was. It was only by accepting Christ and to be committing your life to Christ. Anyone who didn't do that was not going to go to heaven and was not going to be obliterated. They were going to be tortured in hell for eternity.
- [02:41]
B
Delightful. Is this based on anything that we see? Well, no. Let me back up. What visions of the afterlife do we see in the Old Testament before we get to the New.
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C
All right, yeah. So in the Old Testament. So I, people find it very confusing when scholars say things like there's, there's no such thing as hell in the Old Testament. There's not such thing as heaven in the, in the Old Testament. Part of the problem is that the way words get translated from Hebrew into, into English create the problem in both the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Hebrew Bible, the fairly consistent view is that people are, people come to life when they're born and that's when they become human, was when they start breathing as they're born, and when they die, they stop breathing and they're dead. They don't exist anymore. There are passages in the Hebrew Bible that talk about a place called Sheol, especially in, in poetic writings like the Psalms and in other, in some of the wisdom literature, she also shows up. And unfortunately that's translated as hell by traditional translators. It's not hell. It's, it actually is, it's referring to the grave or the tomb where people go when they die. But there's, there's not a sense in the Hebrew Bible that when people die, their soul separates from their body and their soul goes up to live in the divine realm with God. In the Hebrew tradition, body and soul together constitute the human. And when the body dies, the soul, there's no more soul either. Right? There's no life. And so if there's no life, there's no soul. And so, and so when people talk about being protected from Sheol in the Old Testament, being saved from Sheol, what they're saying is that, you know, God hasn't, you know, God's made it so they haven't died yet. But it's not so. There's no so there's no neither place in the, in the Hebrew Bible.
- [04:45]
B
So it's not an understanding that by being saved from Sheol, you're, you're not going to go to hell, you're not going to have eternal punishment. It's just that you are not yet dead and in your grave, not dead yet.
- [04:56]
C
And the, the, and it's not that you, you've been saved from hell so that you'll go to heaven. There isn't a concept of, you know, of the saints all going up to heaven and being with forever. In, in the Hebrew Bible, was there
- [05:13]
B
any kind of idea or understanding of people getting something better if they lived their life the way that, that Yahweh demanded?
- [05:23]
C
The idea is that you'd get you'd, you'd be rewarded in this life. It was true in, in most ancient religions that if, if they're, most religions worship the gods or in the case of Judaism, worship the God of Israel because life is really hard here and God is the us and he's the one who deserves to be worshiped. And if we worship him, he'll give us the things we can't give ourselves. You know, we can't heal ourselves when we're sick and we can't guarantee that, that a child who is born will survive birth or that the mother will survive childbirth. We can't control whether the crops grow or whether, you know, whether we have enough to get by on or whether we get rich. These aren't things within our control, but God can control those things. And so God is, God is worshiped for what he can provide in this life. But there's, there's not a sense that it's going to continue on afterwards.
- [06:18]
B
So when we're looking at the, the Old Testament and ideas of what happens once you die, is there anything. If people are resurrected, is there like a, like. Sorry, I'm being very inarticulate, but how does that kind of play into the whole picture?
- [06:36]
C
Yeah, well, that's, it's. No. Resurrection is the right term for it. Because what, what ends up happening in Judais time is that the idea that if you serve God you'll be rewarded and if you're opposed to God, you'll be punished. That's a view that you get throughout the Hebrew Bible. You get it strongly pronounced in the book of Deuteronomy when Moses is giving the law. You get it in the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the prophets. You get it in the Proverbs, you get it in the Psalms. That's the thing. You worship God well and do what he wants and you'll be rewarded in this life. And if you don't, you'll be punished in this life. Eventually some Jewish thinkers at the very tail end of the Old Testament period started thinking that it creates a problem of justice because so many people are righteous who suffer in this life and they're not rewarded by God and they're hungry all the time, or they starve to death, or they get defeated in war, or they're just horrible lives, even though they try to be faithful. Whereas people who are just really awful human beings often live greatly lives. And so that's not right. And so Jewish thinkers about 200 years before Jesus started thinking that in fact there's got to be justice, it clearly isn't in this life. It must be in the life to come. And so they started coming up with ideas of life after death. But since they had the same view that your body, the human being, is a body and soul combined, that meant life after you die means coming back to life, which means your soul will come back into your body. For the word soul, you can also use the term breath. You're alive as long as you breathe. God will breathe life back into people. And people who have sided with God will be rewarded when that happens. And so even though it looks like there's no justice in the world, no God is sovereign. God is just God. And if you sided with him, even if you suffered now, he will reward you later by being raised from the dead, not by, not by having a soul go up to heaven or anything like that. It's you, you. You will come back to life.
- [08:44]
B
Do we see a similar concern about justice in other ancient religions? I know that they have a similar understanding of the afterworld you die. That's kind of it. You might go into some dark, dank underground place, but there's no. There's no heaven, there's no paradise. So do you see this concern with, well, what's the, what's the points of living a good life? What's my reward? Does that similarly creep into other religions?
- [09:11]
C
It does, and in different ways and at different times. You know, when you, if you're looking at like the Greek and Roman worlds out of which. In which Judaism was situated and the, you know, later. You know, later in the time, like around the time of Jesus and where Judaism was situated, where all the religions were at the, in the, around the Mediterranean. If you look at those things, the oldest, the oldest traditions we have are like Homer, the. In the Odyssey. And it's clear in the Odyssey that the afterlife entails everybody's spirit going down to Hades and living this boring, uninteresting life there, whether they're good or not. And it's puzzling for in Homer, how do you account for this? You know, people who are superpower heroes in this life and virtuous and good and strong and bright and everything, they get the same. They get the same afterlife as somebody who's a real schmuck. And so you see that in the Odysse, and it's a bit puzzling to the author. Later on, you start getting. You start getting ideas that there have to be, there has to be justice in the afterlife. Just happened in Judaism. Eventually it happened in Greek and Roman religions as well but in Greek and Roman religions the idea was that the body, the body could die and would decompose but we have a spiritual side within us that can be separated from the body and it can go on forever. In fact it will go on forever. This is argued strenuously by Plato that the soul is immortal, the body dies, the soul lives on. And so in order to also deal with the idea of the injustice of the world, they started having ideas that the soul will live on and will be rewarded or punished. And so you get that already in some of the myths that Plato, Plato gives, that he calls myths. They're, they're, they're stories to explain what happens to the soul after death.
- [11:06]
B
Could you give us a quick synopsis of one of these myths? What did Plato think the afterlife would look like?
- [11:13]
C
Yeah, well the, the most famous one is in Plato's longest dialogue, the Republic, like the other dialogues, like they, they feature Socrates talking to, to friends and he's. The Republic is actually trying to show how, the, how, how society ought to be organized. And so it's kind of developing the idea of a utopian world, what it would look like. And it takes 10 volumes, it's a big, big dialogue. But the 10th volume, what sometimes happens in Plato is he'll, he'll extend his, he'll, he'll engage in kind of a reasoning process where he'll consider an idea and then show what was right about, then show why it's wrong and move on to another idea. And he called, it's called dialectic when you're kind of reasonably working out the logic of what's the right, an answer to something. But then at the end of one of his dialogues he'll tell a story, a myth and it's a story. And the, the end of the Republic booktan is the myth of er, er, who is a soldier who gets killed in battle but then wakes up. So he has a near death experience and he describes what happens in the afterlife because he went there and he saw and he gives a detailed description. But the short of it is that the souls that were righteous, that pursued understanding and knowledge and tried to be virtuous, those souls would be rewarded and the souls that refused and that lead lives of exploiting others and just trying to get rich and powerful and were mean spirited, they, they're, they are dreadfully punished, they're tortured. And so that's, and so that's one of his myths and he has myths like that trying to show that, that what the soul is immortal, the body dies, but the soul. There will be justice in the afterlife for the soul.
- [13:03]
B
Thank you. We're going to get more deep into this in a moment, but we have a quick break for an announcement. I'm excited to announce our newest semester long course coming this fall. Most people hear end times and think of the end of the world. But ancient Jews and early Christians often imagined something very different. The end of one age and the beginning of another. The renewed world where God's justice would be restored and his promises would be fulfilled. If you've ever wondered what Jesus, Paul and the earliest Christians actually believed about the future, you'll want to check out our newest course, Visions of the Early Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism, taught by scholar Dr. Jason Staples. In this 28 lecture course, Jason explores the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts to uncover the ideas about the end times that shaped the rise of early Christianity and the message of Jesus himself. We're offering early bird pricing through August 1st, so visit bart erman.com visions to learn more and enroll. As always, use the code MJ podcast at checkout for a special discount. So, but if we have this idea from Plato that living a good life, being righteous, and justice is a way to have a more pleasant afterlife, are there any religious requirements for this? Do you have to believe in a specific God or follow a specific religious path, or is it more to do with how you are treating people?
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C
Well, that's what strikes many people as very odd is that in Greek and Roman religions, including in Plato, what your religious belief beliefs are don't matter for the afterlife. It isn't what you believe. And religion itself isn't about faith and belief in, in these traditions, which were like the entire traditions of the entire world in polytheism generally in the ancient world, it's religion is a matter of honoring the gods and revering them and worshiping them, and mainly through acts of prayer and offerings where you offer things to the gods so that you give the gods things so that they will give you things and you acknowled them. And, and so you do that. And so it requires some kind of modicum of belief. I mean, presumably you've got to think there are gods, you know, there are things like that, but it isn't like developed within Christianity where there are certain beliefs you got to hold to. You know, it's got to be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like that. It's not. The belief is not the issue. The issue is worship in Greek and Roman religions. And so what really matters for the afterlife in these traditions is how you've lived. Because if you've lived a rotten life, you're going to have a rotten afterlife.
- [15:52]
B
So typical or traditional Jewish Israelite thought is that there is, there's no heaven, there's no soul. Once you're dead, you are dead, you are in your grave. That's, that's kind of that Greek and Roman thinking eventually kind of develops this idea of a pleasant afterlife. If you, if you live correctly and you see something similar developing in Jewish thought based on an idea of justice. Right. You have to be, if there's justice in the world, bad people, people who are cruel in this life should not have the same fate as those who, who live their life, lives correctly. Where would Jesus have fit into all of this conversation?
- [16:35]
C
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And, and so I, I need to clarify one thing because I just know a lot of people are hearing us talk about this and say, how can you say the Hebrew Bible has no stuff soul? The word soul shows up all over the place. Yes, it does, but it doesn't mean what you mean by it. It's the thing inside the breath inside of you that dies along with your body. And so. Yeah. So where does Jesus stand? Well, I, I had mentioned that in the Hebrew Bible, throughout the Hebrew Bible, death is it, you know, you, you just, you're dead. And until they start developing the idea of a resurrection of the dead, Jesus held to the view of the resurrection of the dead, which was that at the end of time, there's going to be a day of judgment and people who, people have died will be judged along with the people who are alive at the time. And so if you've lived a righteous life and died and you know, had no, nothing good come out of your righteousness, you will be rewarded when this resurrection. And if you, you thought, if you thought that you can be a horrible human being to everybody else to have what you consider to be a good life, and you in fact are a wretch human being, and then you die, you're not going to get away with it. God's going to raise you from the dead. So everybody will be raised from the dead. The wicked will face judgment. They will be shown the error of the ways and then will be ruthlessly annihilated and the righteous will be raised from the dead and be given an eternal reward. So this is the doctrine of the resurrection. It's a belief that was held widely in Judaism at the time of Jesus. It was held by most of the Jewish Groups and authors that we know of from the period. One kind of outstanding exception, the Sadducees who show up in the Gospels did not believe that there's an afterlife, did not believe in a resurrection of the dead, but Pharisees did, and the Essenes, the people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls did, and John the Baptist did, and Jesus did, lots of other authors did. And so that was the belief is that you're. You would be brought back to life and life eternal life would be lived here on this planet. Right. The planet was created for humans. And the afterlife is when humans actually can enjoy it, when they've been faithful to God.
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B
So we're not talking about any still no kind of soul. This is a physical resurrection and you will stay on earth and just have a more enjoyable, I guess, eternal physical life.
- [18:55]
C
Yeah. And there's a soul that's within you, but it doesn't exist outside of you. It doesn't exist. And so the analogy, I think I've done this before on the podcast is it really can the. The word can be breath for soul or spirit. Especially spirit means and breath are the same word. And so what happened, you know, when we to die, they died. Nobody asked where did your breath go? Right. Because you get. It doesn't go anywhere. You're dead now. And that's, that's. They understood the breath and the spirit to be the same thing. And so when you die, there's no soul existing outside of it. That's right.
- [19:28]
B
So when this kind of mass resurrection and eternal physical life didn't materialized, how did that I get idea get transformed into an eternal spiritual afterlife?
- [19:40]
C
Okay, so, so the way it works is really interesting. I think that this, the apocalyptic thinking that Jesus had and that other, many other Jews had understood that the reality we experience happens in like two periods of time. There's this age which is rotten, and people live and die, and there's the age to come where God will have destroyed the powers of evil. And the age to come for people who live into it will go on forever and it'll be a paradise. So it's this age and that age and all of kind of the, the religious thinking is centered around that kind of dualism. This world and the world to come. But the world to come will be here without evil. So what ends up happening is that kind of dualism that you might think of as a kind of a horizontal dualism. It's like a timeline, it's a line across the page. What ends up happening is the Christians end up flipping this dualism into a vertical line so that now it's not now and then, like chronology horizontally, it's down here and up there. It's still a dualism. But the problem is that the age to come never came. So that's one problem. Second problem, it's not really a problem. But most people who convert to Christianity by the end of the first century, most of them are not Jewish and were not raised with the Jewish idea of what it meant to be human. They were raised in Greek circles. Greek culture had infiltrated the Mediterranean world, and these converts were coming out of Greek circles. And they were born and raised thinking that the body and the soul were separate from each other. And so they brought that notion into their Christianity and they flipped it so that now it's not that the body will be brought back to dead and be reunited with the soul in the age to come, it's that the body will die and the soul will live on up above. And so it's still a dualism, but now it's a vertical dualism. And so basically what they've done, what the Christians have done is they've take to, to put in the most simple terms possible, which are simplistic, but the simple terms, they've taken the teachings of Jesus and they've combined them with the teachings of Plato and they've ended up with heaven and hell.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And it's not in the New Testament
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B
that is quite the combination of teachings.
- [22:07]
C
Well, it is, and it, it's kind of a natural move because the people who are converting to believe in Jesus, believe there with justice in the afterlife, but they also know that the body will die and the soul live on. And so they, they change it. So when I say it's not in the New Testament, it's not, it's not in the New Testament in a kind of a fully laid out form. There are a couple of hints about it in a couple passages in the New Testament, but really it's a development that starts, that develops in a serious way after most of the books of the New Testament were written.
- [22:34]
B
I see. So where do we see these, these hints in the New Testament?
- [22:38]
C
Well, you find places where the apostle Paul in, in 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 and in Philippians, chapter 2, seems to think that when he dies, he's going to be in the presence of Christ before the resurrection happens. And so he thinks that he, he originally thought. Paul originally thought in, in like in his earliest letters, like first Thessalonians, the first letter of his that we have indicates that what's going to happen at the end of time is that Jesus is going to come back, destroy all the enemies of God, and there'll be a resurrection of the dead. And Paul indicates he'll be one of the ones who's alive when it happens. This is 1st, 1st Thessalonians, chapter 4. And in 1st Corinthians 15, he indicates he'll be alive when it happens. Well, as time goes on, Paul's getting older and getting persecuted and he's starting to think, and he's in jail, he's thinking, I might get executed here, maybe I won't be alive. And so in later letters he starts talking about what it will be like when he dies. Surely he's in the presence of Christ now. Surely when he's dead there's not going to be like this interim period where he's not in the presence of Christ. And he started thinking there'll be this interim existence, he'll be up in heaven for a little while. Like his soul will be there before the resurrection. The resurrection is still going to happen. But. And so you get that. And so what ends up happening then is, you know, not even that happens. And so they shift entirely to you die and your soul goes up to heaven.
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B
Do we have any non canonical writings that tell people what heaven is going to be like or speak more specifically about the lack of a physical resurrection?
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C
I guess, yeah, we do. We absolutely do. And this is a subject that I deal with in my book Heaven and Hell, where I try to explain where these ideas of heaven and hell came from, since they're not what Jesus taught and they're not in the Hebrew Bible. So where they come from. And, and part of the thing I do is I talk about some of these texts. That one kind of text I got really interested in is not widely known outside of scholarship. But it's, it's the kind of text where Christians are given guided tours of the afterlife, starting with a book that almost made it into the New Testament called the Apocalypse of Peter, where Peter is shown what the torments of the damned are like and what the blessings of the saved are like up in heaven. And so, and he. And it, some of these, some of these narratives of these, these, these kind of fictional accounts of guided tours of heaven and hell in the Christian tradition there pretty much told in order to show people they don't want to reject Christ because they're going to be tortured forever. And here are some of the tortures. The Apocalypse of Peter gives 21 different tortures for people, depending on how they've lived and they are gory and they're not pleasant and, and so part of the function of these things is to convince people they need to. They need to turn to Christ or this is what's going to happen to them forever.
- [25:45]
B
So we have, we have 21 options, I guess, of torture if you, if you do things wrong. Do we have similarly descriptive accounts of what the nice stuff looks like? Or is it just like a. You get a nice robe and you get to be in the presence of God and do a lot of singing?
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C
Yeah, well, it's, you know, it is interesting in this Apocalypse of Peter, they discovered. We knew about this before because as I said, it almost made it in the New Testament, but then it was lost and it didn't turn up until the 1880s. And one of the things that is discovered in a tomb in Egypt, a book with this thing in it. And we found other parts of it now. And the thing that's surprised many people, not surprised, but it kind of. Whoa. Made them wake up and notice is that Peter does describe the blessings up above and the torments down below. But the blessings up above are discussed just in a paragraph, basically. I mean, it's just a little description. It smells great up there and everybody's happy and they're joyful and they're worshiping God the whole time. It's great. But the descriptions of hell go on and on and on. And I think it's because, you know, there are so much. Many ways you can describe eternal joy. You know, I mean, they're, they're joyful, you know, they're blessed and it's great. But man, there are lots of ways you could describe torment.
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B
Lots of options there.
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C
And if the idea is partly to convert people, you know, you kind of emphasize the torment. Fire and brimstone goes all the way back in the Christian tradition. And this is one of the early instances of it.
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B
Do any of the other early Christian apocalypses have similar depictions of. Of heaven?
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C
Well, they get more and more developed and so based on the Apocalypse of Peter, which is written in the second century, probably the first half of the second century. So, you know, just 40, 50 years after the end of, after the New Testament, most of the New Testament writings later. There was another person several centuries later who wrote an Apocalypse of Paul. Paul, where Paul is given a guided tour of heaven and hell. And this one's important because this is the. This was known to Dante when he wrote the Divine Comedy. He knew about the apocalypse of Paul. And so this is significant, you know, for lots of reasons, because, you know, the Inferno and Paradisio and they're based, you know, ultimately on Apocalypse of Paul. In the Apocalypse of Paul, there's a much more extended discussion of heaven. And one of the interesting things in it is that heaven comes in different tiers. And so that there are different levels of heaven and each one is infinitely better than the one before it. And so there's kind of competition for who can get to the highest level. And so you got to be really holy if you want the fantastic. I mean, look, it's all going to be fantastic, but, you know, you're going to be kind of jealous of the people are ahead of you. So you need to be even more righteous because being more righteous is going to give you more, more reward.
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B
And to both of these apocalypses, for both of them is the main requirement to get into heaven following Christianity. It's less the Platonic ideal of living a good life, doing like things to nourish your soul rather than attack other people. It's more, you have to believe the right thing.
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C
You have to believe the right thing. That's the sine qua none. If you believe the right thing, you will behave in the right ways. One way to know that you're not believing the right things is you're not behaving properly. You know, it's really hard to know what somebody's thinking in their head, but it's pretty easy to see how they act. And they'll act based on what they. What they believe. But when you start getting this idea of a tiered heaven where, you know, some are more righteous than others, then it's. Of course, everyone who gets in is a believer. But you've got to behave in certain ways in order to increase your holiness. And so there's a kind of a competition, a holiness competition which manifests itself in various ways actually in Christianity, with the start of the monastic movement in the 4th century, monks would sometimes compete to see who could suffer the most. You know, you go off into the desert by yourself for two years. Yeah, this guy did it for five, you know, and you eat bread and water. He man, he. He hardly. He needs sand. It's not quite that bad, but it's. And so it, it starts feeding into this competition thing that there's some people more righteous than others, but you've got to believe in Christ.
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B
The whole idea of a teared heaven is not something that I've really heard of before. Did that. Was that ever mainstream theology or did that kind of die out with the Apocalypse?
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C
Oh, no. That's a good. That's a good question. I think, think, you know, the, the idea of layers of things becomes. I think a lot of people end up believing that in the Christian tradition, it's, in part, it's kind of what leads to much later leads to purgatory. I think a lot of people misunderstand purgatory. I, I've known a lot of Catholics, devoted Catholics, who have been Catholic, you know, who are in their 60s, who've been Catholic their entire lives, who do do not understand what purgatory is. Purgatory is only for people who are bound for heaven. Heaven, but they're bound for heaven. But, you know, they still have some sins they haven't taken care of, and they've got to pay for those sins. And so purgatory is the place where they're punished for their sins for a period depending on how bad they were. So they were believers, so they're going to go to heaven. But, you know, you've got to go through this purgatory. And you could be centuries down, you know, centuries in purgatory being tortured, and you don't want that. That. And so that, that's. So that's another thing about this kind of a tier thing. Purgatory would be kind of like the entryway you got to go through. And, but, you know, it doesn't. We don't. You don't start getting that to the 12th century. And so it isn't, it isn't like an ancient idea, but it is dealing with this problem that the tiered heaven thing is dealing with that you've got Christians and you got Christians. You know, you got the, you got the woman who basically, you know, basically believes, but it doesn't really affect her life very much. And then you got this woman who' like, you know, Mother Teresa, you know, or something. It's just like. And they, they get different rewards because if there's justice, it isn't like one, you know, one thing for everybody. And so the whole thing about justice leads to these ideas that there's more. More blessed afterlives. So I had, I have a friend, I have a guy who's on my blog who I'm friendly with, who, who told me that he was sitting next to a. A table of women at a, at a very posh restaurant, Trump. And they were clearly evangelical women talking about the afterlife. And they were, they were saying how they, they. Each of them was going to have a mansion in heaven. These are very rich women. And apparently they're all going to have these mansions. They're talking about what kind of mansions they wanted. And then one of them said, you know, that we're also all going to have golf courses in heaven. And. No, she's serious. And then she said, of course my golf course won't be as nice as Billy Graham's. What? So. So the tradition continues.
- [32:55]
B
I, I have never heard of the heavenly golf course before. That's.
- [32:59]
C
I've played some hellish golf courses before. Yeah. Wow.
- [33:06]
B
Okay.
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C
It'll probably be a hole in one every time.
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B
Right.
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C
Because it's gotta be boring after a while. Yeah. Wow.
- [33:15]
B
Okay. So we get. This whole thing starts as a question of justice. And if I live my life well and I follow all the rules, it, it is not fair. It makes no sense that I am also just dead in the ground. And it evolves through time into this idea of tiered heaven with, with mansions and golf courses.
- [33:37]
C
Right. So it's because the, the, you know, the Jewish idea, Jesus was Jewish. His followers are Jewish. They were apocalyptic Jews. They believed in a physical resurrection and eternal life here on earth. And within a hundred years, most people weren't Jewish. And they, they, they, they hold these other ideas about the body and they, they bring those ideas with them into the church. And so the irony is that what, what ends up developing is since the resurrection of the dead was such a central teaching of Jesus, such a central teaching of Paul, it's in the New Testament. Christians continue to confess the resurrection of the dead, even though they don't understand what it means. It means your body comes back to life and you live forever here on earth. But in the creed today that people say at the end of the creed, it says, and I believe in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting. Yeah, but they don't. People say that, but it's not what they think because they don't understand. Resurrection means the body coming back to life, but they believe that their soul goes to heaven. So Christianity is oddly kept on with both things, even though they're at odds with each other.
- [34:52]
B
That's fascinating. As someone who grew up in the Anglican church and said that creed every Sunday, I was like, well into my 20s before I actually stopped and thought, hang on. Resurrection of the dead. That's. That sounds not quite right.
- [35:11]
C
Bodies coming out of their graves. It's what it is. And it's, it's, it's the traditional Christian belief that most Christians don't believe. It's a very. It's a strange thing, but, you know, the thing about the creed is most people, you know, I. I also grew up in the Episcopal Church, and, and we recited it every week and I had it memorized when I was very young. And once you got it memorized, you just say it and you don't really think about it. And most people have no idea what most of it means. I mean, they just don't. You can. I mean, so. Or. Or why it says what it does. Right. I believe in one God. Yeah. How many of you gonna believe it? I mean, what. Why am I saying this? I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ. Well, how many Lord Jesus Christ are there? What do you mean you believe in one of them? And so, so you really have to have kind of an understanding of the history of theology even to understand what you confess every week. But I think this resurrection of the dead thing is one of the really outstanding ones because it's the one that people, they just. They don't understand what it means and. But they confess it.
- [36:17]
B
Well, this has been absolutely fascinating, but thank you. I don't have any more questions. Is there anything that you want to add before we move on?
- [36:24]
C
Well, I just say, you know, a lot of people. A lot of people take. Take real comfort in belief that there will be a heaven. And I am not saying that I know what happens after we die. I know what I think. What I think is that there's no afterlife at all. That's me. But I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that that's the case. It's just what I happen to think. But people. I know a lot of people who are very, very committed to the idea of there being a heaven. And for a lot of people, it's because. A lot of people, it's because they don't want, you know, life to end. And of course, none of us wants to disappear, not exist anymore. And so that makes sense. A lot of people really want to see their deceased loved ones. And it's a. It's a hope that they have, and it's an important hope and a precious hope for people. Sometimes that too can lead to difficulties and kind of problems. I'm. My. When my mom was elderly, my dad died when he was 65, so he was young. My mom lived until she was in her mid-90s. And while she was still compos mentis, near like in the. At the end of her 80s, when she was 90 or so, she would get very upset because she was pretty sure that now that she was this old, my dad would not recognize her when she got to heaven. And, you know, I say, oh, mom, it's not going to work like that. No, he'll, of course he'll recognize you. And, but, you know, he'll look 65 and she'll look 94 and, you know, and she won't. And like, how's that going to work? And so it was interesting in early Christianity because the early Christians who started developing this idea of, you know, having eternal life and in some kind of, even if it's a soul, you're in some kind of physical shape, you can still, you still look like who you are, had to deal with these issues about, like, what's it going to be like physically if you've got, even if you're, it's a, your body doesn't come back to life, you still have some kind of physicality about it. And so how does it appear? And it's, it's a perennial problem, I think, for people. And so the, the idea of heaven is a, it is a very important hope for people, but it also has created real kind of mental difficulties for others.
- [38:37]
B
Thank you very much. But we are going to move to this week's bonus segment, which is the Scholar Spotlight, in which Barthes tells us about the biblical scholar he thinks we should know. Bart, who are you recommending to us today?
- [38:50]
C
Well, the preface of this is that I have just this week finished editing the third edition of my textbook on the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
- [39:01]
B
Congratulations.
- [39:03]
C
Thank you. I hate revising these things. It's a pain in the neck. But you need to keep them up to date because so people use them in their classes. I originally, I wrote this thing some years ago, and this is the third edition. And for the third edition, I decided that I really wanted to have a Hebrew Bible scholar do the Hebrew Bible part. So the book, the textbook, it's for, for undergraduates, but although it'd be useful for anybody really, because it deals with every book of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and tries to explain them and, and what scholars say about them and such. And I, my, my secondary field in, in my PhD program and in my master's program was Hebrew Bible. And so I've, and I've taught it a number of times over the years. But I'm not, you know, I'm not like one of the experts in the Hebrew Bible. Joel Baden, who teaches at Yale University, is, and he's a very fine author. He's a very good speaker. He's a great teacher and I asked him to be my, to be my co author for this third edition. And so Joel and I have just finished this and he, he redid the Hebrew part, Hebrew Bible part, I redid the New Testament part. Joel. Joel's an expert on many aspects of the Hebrew Bible and he's, he's written books, he's written books for scholars, but he's also written books for broader audiences that are worth looking up. So it's Joel Baden, B, A, D, E, N. He's one of the real experts on how the, the sources behind the Pentateuch, the Torah, the traditional sources, the four sources are J, E, D and P. There are a lot of debates about these things now, but, but he's like an expert in the sources. He's an expert on the history of King David. He's a history, he's like, he's an expert in everything in the Hebrew Bible. So for. He's somebody I would recommend people check out. He's done online courses and he's written books and he's, he's really one of these people who's, who actually knows a ton, but also can communicate. And that's, that's a good thing for a scholar to be able to do.
- [41:02]
B
Always helpful and not always something that as academics we are taught how to do.
- [41:07]
C
We are not taught that. No. When I was in graduate school, we had no classes on how to teach, period. No instruction on how to teach, period. We were just, you know, we were taught scholarship. You're just kind of expected to figure out how to teach. My colleagues, yeah.
- [41:23]
B
After I did my comps, my advisor recommended that I took. Took a class on pedagogy that wasn't offered by our department. It was an interdepartmental thing. And it was fascinating just from a perspective of how the human brain works. But it was incredibly helpful. And I remember being very surprised at the time that this was not something that was required for PhD students who were very often teaching within the university as part of their, as part of that PhD.
- [41:54]
C
Yeah. With no training, just throw, you know, tell. So, okay, we're going to assign you this class and they get some. Assigned some class. It's kind of related to something they do and they have to make a syllabus, they have to design the class, they have to pick the textbooks, they have to figure out how they're going to do it, how much discussion, how much how to give a lecture. It's like no training in it at all. So these days, these days, though, I will say that PhD programs focus on training in a way that we never did. And it's a, it's a good thing.
- [42:22]
B
But thank you so very much. Before we finish for the week, could you please remind us what we spoke about today?
- [42:28]
C
Well, you know, it's a surprise to many people that our view of heaven, that your soul dies and goes to heaven, is not in the teachings of Jesus. And it's not, it's, it's not in the Hebrew Bible at all. And the question is, well, how did it come about? And so I tried to, in our discussion, I was trying to explain how, how we got our current, current doctrine of heaven, even though it's not the original Christian view. That doesn't make it wrong, but it is worth knowing that this is not what the original Christians taught.
- [42:58]
B
Audience, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember, you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. Ms. Quoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [43:18]
C
So there's a, there's a, a new Christian apologist who's appeared on the scene named Wes Huff. Very smart guy, very articulate guy who says a lot of things in support of the Christian faith. And we're going to look at a few things that he says and I'm going to give my, my take on them to see. We, we don't agree on a lot of things, but, and I don't know him. Uh, but, uh, I'll just, I'll talk about some of the claims that he makes about, uh, the, the, the truth claims of Christianity.
- [43:46]
B
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 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.