← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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Host or Advertiser
Look at him eating whatever he wants, never gaining a pound. Well, I'm stuck with the boring special and can't lose an ounce.
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Bart Ehrman
How's your lunch, man?
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Host or Advertiser
Amazing. Yours?
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Bart Ehrman
So good. Oh, I'm so happy for you.
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Host or Advertiser
Cool, buddy.
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Megan Lewis
Weight loss isn't fair, but Mochi Health is the affordable GLP1 source that can fix your frustration with food.
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Bart Ehrman
So same time next week?
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Host or Advertiser
No, Definitely.
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Megan Lewis
And your friends learn more@joinmochi.com Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists. Results may vary. Hell, the fiery eternal torment known from many Baptist pulpits is maybe the ultimate consequence for misbehavior. But is it an afterlife that is present in The Bible? Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to discuss what Jesus believed about life after death, whether the idea of hell came from and whether we can even find it in the Bible. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author, 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. Welcome back everybody to Misquoting Jesus where today we're talking about hell and the afterlife. We've also got our bonus segment which this week is Misquoting Bart where Bart will be responding to a misunderstanding of his words. But before all of that, how are you doing this week?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm doing well. So I don't think I've said this publicly yet, but I've changed what my next book is going to be.
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Megan Lewis
Oh, that's exciting.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it is, yeah. I mean I'm still going to do the book on the canon. You know how we got to 27 books of the canon. But my, my publisher has urged me with some urgency that she would like to have a, a book on Jesus and capitalism. And so, you know, obviously not that Jesus was a capitalist or a social. Well, some people say, you know, people have written books claiming Jesus was a capitalist, Jesus was a socialist, Jesus, whatever. But it'd be interesting to have a biblical scholar who actually, you know, studied the historical Jesus to talk about those kinds of things. And so yeah, so it looks like that's what. And so, so I've just started doing. And so it's great fun. I don't have to do much work on the Jesus side because like I, that's that stuff. I know. But like, you know, re I haven't read History of Capitalism stuff since. Wow. When you know, Das Copy top Carl Martin like, okay, college baby. So. So it's, it's really. Yeah, so it's kind of a fun moment, but I'm definitely going to do the other thing, but I think I'm gonna do this thing first.
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Megan Lewis
That sounds like fantastic.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So it's good? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Okay. So how are you doing right now?
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Megan Lewis
Yes, good, thank you. Sorry, I was about to say healthy, and generally we are, but this blasted cough won't leave me alone. But no, doing very well. Enjoying. Just enjoying life and finishing off projects and starting new projects and, you know.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Never sitting still.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Okay, our icebreaker for this week related to books and publishing. How was your experience publishing your first book different from your experiences publishing today?
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Bart Ehrman
My very first book. Wow. My very first book was. It's actually funny because people say, tell me, you know, some. Somebody will say, oh, I've read all of your books and, and I'll say, oh, did you enjoy, did you enjoy. Did you miss the Blind and the text? What, what's that? I said, yeah, you don't want to read it. So, so that was my dissertation. And it was, it was a very technical. Is very, very, very technical book that even within New Testament scholarship, nobody New Testament, 99% of New Testament scholars would not be interested in the book. It was about how this one church Father Didymus the blind in 4th century Alexandria, Egypt, quoted his. The, the manuscripts, the New Testament that he knew in relationship to other Greek and Latin manuscripts throughout early Christianity. To see what we could say about the transmission of the New Testament text, 4th century Alexandria, Egypt. And it's all the statistical analyses comparing two dozen Greek and Latin manuscripts with the quotations of Dittos. Oh my God. That was like, really, that was a lot of work. Back before you could like use computers to do things like you couldn't write. You had to do it all by hand. Oh my God, it was terrible. So, yeah, so it's not like that. And you know, but, but my idea was I was going to just, I was going to write scholarship like that. You know, my idea was to do that my whole life. That's what I was going to do. Be the expert on church fathers quot. Of the, of the New Testament. And eventually I got into writing a textbook. Then I got into writing a book for general audiences. And I liked that. And so, so I. So, you know, the most recent book that I've written, Love Thy Stranger, is a book for a general audience. And so it's a very different kettle of fish, these books for general Audiences are also really hard to write. They are, but hard in a different way. And so I enjoy both doing the deep level scholarship and doing the books for popular audiences. And I like them both, but they're not the same. And once you, you know, so this book, I guess is maybe the 35th book I published, like, either edited or written. And by now, like, you know, I'm pretty used to it. And so the first one, you're just all anxious. You don't know. You know, it's like, yeah, no idea what it's all about. And now, yeah, I pretty well know what it's about.
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Megan Lewis
You can do it in your sleep. It's all fine. Okay, we are talking about hell today. But when you were an evangelical, what did you believe about hell?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, when I was an evangelical, I believe pretty much what I believed even before I was an evangelical. I was raised a race Episcopalian, but we were a Christian family and we simply believed that the traditional Christian doctrines were right, that some things that people who were right with God would go to heaven and people who were not would go to hell and hell would involve eternal torment. And I thought that from the time I was a young kid, and that may have been one of the reasons I was drawn to evangelical Christianity when I was 15, because I thought, you know, they were very confident they had the answer to heaven and hell. And we're very confident that people who are not evangelical Christians. Christians did not have the right answer. And so it was kind of a fire insurance policy. Make sure you avoid the fires of hell. And. And so I. Yeah, so that's what I thought. Eternal, eternal torment for those who are not on God's side.
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Megan Lewis
Were there specific biblical verses that you used yourself or someone used when talking to you to explain or show evidence for this, like, fiery torment?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, we didn't need evidence, really, because we just knew it was true. And it was. If, if it becomes part of the, the talk about religion in a household that talks at all about religion, then you simply assume it's true. And so you don't need evidence, you know, and you don't, you just, it's just like, you know, it's like saying, you know, how many planets are there in the solar system? It's just something, you know, you know, and it's not, you know, questioned really. And so when I became an evangelical, though, I was more intent on the question of heaven and hell because I was convinced that people who had not committed their lives to Christ as their Lord and Savior would go to hell. No matter what. And so I was concerned to try and convert people and. But even then, we didn't need specific verses because we just all knew it was true. And so I guess if we were studying the question. If I was studying the question to see if it's actually in the Bible, which would never have occurred to me at the time, but to see if it actually. There were passages you would go to, of course, where Jesus says things like, you know, it's better if your right hand sins, it's better to chop it off and to. And to enter into the kingdom than. Than to go into hell without being maimed, you know, and because. And so. Or you have the Lake of Fire in the Book of Revelation, where everybody's. Everybody who isn't right, kind of believer in Christ is thrown in with the devil and the Antichrist to roast in the lake of fire forever. And so there are. There definitely are passages that we could turn to if we needed to.
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Megan Lewis
So let's turn to some of those passages if we're looking at this lake of fire in Revelation, because I think that's possibly the most direct correlation to the. The eternal fiery torment that lots of people think about. Is this a picture of an afterlife or is this something else?
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Bart Ehrman
I think it's something else. I'll have to say, though, that until about 10 years ago, I don't think I realized that because I, you know, I had read Revelation, of course, since I was 17 years old, and, And I had studied it, but I hadn't intensely studied it from a historical point of view until I wrote my book on heaven and hell. And that came out, you know, some years ago now. And when I was doing the research for that, I really worked through Revelation very, very carefully in Greek numerous times, reading what all the commentaries said about, scholarly commentaries, and just really absorbing what's really going on in the Book of Revelation. And one of the things I realized is that the Lake of Fire is not a place of eternal torment for human beings. The Lake of Fire is designed for the devil and. And his immediate minions, including the Antichrist and the Devil. The Devil is an immortal being in early Christian thinking. He's not immortal. He can't die. And that's true. That's throughout. In the ancient world. Throughout the ancient world, beings who are gods, even if they're like evil gods or goddesses, they're eternal. They're immortal. So when the Devil gets thrown into the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation, we are told that he will be there forever in torment. You know, Floating around in the lake of fire. Later at the judgment day, humans who are opposed to God or who are not worshiping God in the proper way are also thrown into the lake of fire. But they're mortals. This is how they're destroyed there. So the, it's an eternal punishment. This is throughout the New Testament. Throughout the New Testament it talks about eternal punishment, but it is never talking about eternal torment. The reason it's eternal punishment is because it's. A person is destroyed, they're annihilated and it will never be reversed. And so it's an eternal punishment. So when people are thrown into the lake of fire, they're not there forever. In the book of Revelation, that's just the way that they are wiped out.
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Megan Lewis
Do we see this fiery torment being referenced elsewhere in the New Testament or is it restricted to the Book of Revelation?
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Bart Ehrman
No, it's actually in the teachings of Jesus. Well before Jesus talks about the destruction that's coming against those who are opposed to God. Some people will enter into God's kingdom, others will go into the, the fires of destruction. And so you get that for example in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew chapter 25, where those who have, who have helped those who are in need, who are hungry and homeless, who've taken care of those in need, are brought into God's kingdom. And those who refuse to help others and are completely self centered, they are taken off to be just. They're sent to the hell, the, the hell of fire, the destruction of fire. But they're not taken there to be tormented in fire forever. And there are good reasons for thinking that just in the teachings of Jesus, I mean, he likens the coming destruction to what happens when somebody, there's somebody who has a field and the field has good crop growing, but also has weeds growing and the weeds that are growing, when it comes time for the harvest, he picks the weeds and he throws them into the furnace. And Jesus says that's what it'll be like at the end of time. The angels would gather people and throw them into the furnace of fire. Well, what happens to weeds that are thrown into a furnace? They're not there 20 years later, let alone 2 billion years later. They're destroyed. That's it. They're not alive anymore. And that's what happens to people. People will be destroyed. So the threat is you will not have eternal life. You will be, and you'll be painfully killed, annihilated, but that's the end of the story. So it's not eternal conscious torment.
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Megan Lewis
So it's not necessarily an afterlife. It's your method of execution.
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Bart Ehrman
It's an afterlife in the sense that for Jesus, it's an afterlife because even people who have died are going to be brought back from the dead, both the righteous and the unrighteous. At the end of the age, there'll be a resurrection of the dead. This, this idea of Jesus is found in other Jewish writers at the time. And the idea being that there are, you know, there are lots and lots of people who have been righteous during their lifetimes and had miserable lives and they've died. And you have other people who are completely unrighteous, unholy terrible schmucks who go through their entire life and have a pretty good life, but then they die. And like, if that's the end of the story, where's the justice in the world? Isn't God just. And so this view, this apocalyptic view that there'll be a resurrection at the end of the end of time is that everybody will be raised from the dead. And those who have sided with God will then get their reward. And it'll be an eternal reward. And those who have been schmucks, who have been mean spirited and licentious and whatevers, they will be shown the error of their ways and realize they botched it. And then they'll have a horrible destruction that'll be an eternal destruction. So it is an afterlife in the sense that people will be raised from the dead. Some of them will live forever in the kingdom, but others will be destroyed forever.
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Megan Lewis
I see. Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break and then we will get back to afterlife beliefs at the time of Jesus. Now I want to say something to any of our followers who grew up loving the community around church, but have since deconverted or changed their stance on the Bible or Christianity and no longer feel welcome or at home in a church setting. It's a big problem and it's one of the ones that we've worked hard to create a community of our own to replace this church experience. It's called the Biblical Studies Academy, or bsa. But before I go any further, Bart, what did you used to enjoy about church when you were young and what challenges did you face when you left the church?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I of course enjoyed the worship services and so that disappeared when I left the church. But the thing I really liked, I think just as much was being with like minded people who I didn't hang out with regularly. You know, they weren't necessarily friends they might have been friends, but they're mostly not. And having social experiences with these people who were kind of thinking along the same lines about like the big questions in life where you could talk about, you know, big issues like why are we here and what's it all about and, and what should we do with our lives, but also talking about problems we were having, even strange virtual strangers, talking about, you know, problems you're having or having like some kind of community is having a community where you could share concerns and things and could come into it, go out of it. And that kind of communal experience is something that's very hard to get once you leave the church. And so, yeah, so that's what I really enj it, I think.
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Megan Lewis
And, and the BSA is really designed to kind of fill that void for people. It's, it's something quite unique. It's a community of Christians, agnostics, skeptics and history buffs who study the Bible seriously and respectfully. We host lives discussions, scholar interviews, book clubs, mixes, trivia nights, and you get access to over 50 university level courses. The past couple of weeks we've been talking about the new courses that we're offering like Judaism Before Jesus with John Collins and Through the Eye of a Needle with Bar. You can stream all of those inside of bsa. So while you might not get the singing, the prayer or the articles in the bsa, you will get deep insights into the Bible and really make meaningful connections. It is really a fantastic community. And if you would like to see what it's like, you can try it for free for 14 days at Bart ehrman.com forward/BSA. Now I didn't actually pull any stats or anything, but there are a lot of people who are members of bsa. Now. Do you have any ideas what numbers we've got?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's growing and growing. We just started a couple years ago. We have about 1500 people in it now. And this communal aspect is really something because it's, yes, you can, you can sit in on the courses and things and that's, that's a major selling point. But also we have these groups where people like communicate with each other, you know, and so chat rooms and discussions and, and different, on different topics on different levels. And, and you don't have to be a Bible star to do that. You're just like somebody who's interested in any of this, this kind of thing. And so, and so people make connections and yeah, it's really, really great.
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Megan Lewis
So you can take a look at that. The address again is bartiman.com/ford/bsa. Now we are going to get back to hell and the afterlife. Before the break, you were talking a little bit about the, the kind of fiery destruction that Jesus talks about that we see in the book of Revelation. Do we see anything similar to this in the Old Testament?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. No, not really. And so the Old Testament, of course, the Old Testament's a big book there, you know, in English There are 39 books there by different authors at different times over course of centuries. So there's not like a, a view of much of anything in the, in the Old Testament Testament. But there are, there's a lot of talk about death and there's no, there's no description in the Hebrew Bible of a place that your soul goes to, to be tormented forever. That's not, not a conception in large part because throughout the Hebrew Bible and tradition, throughout Judaism generally, even after the Hebrew Bible, the concept of what it meant to be human was not the idea that you, you've got the kind of the shell of the body and something separate within it that's a soul or that's separate from the body is, that could survive outside the body. The human being is like, is the one thing. It's, it's body and soul together. And it's rooted all the way back in, in the creation story when, when God. In Genesis 2, when God creates Adam, the first human being, he takes a bunch of dirt and forms it into this humanoid thing. It looks like a little statue on the ground, I guess, and, but then he breathes into it and the, the, it, this thing he's created becomes alive, becomes Adam. And in, in Hebrew and in Greek, the word for breath can also mean spirit. And so this is when the, the human being begins to exist, when they breathe. So they've got the breath or the soul or the spirit in them. And when the soul, the soul doesn't leave and go anywhere. When Adam dies, when anybody dies, they're not a human being anymore. They don't exist. The body decays, the soul doesn't exist. And so the good analogy is that if we think about it as breath, if you ask somebody today, when you die, where does your breath go? It doesn't go anywhere. You just, you're not alive anymore. And that's how they were thinking about it. And so in the Hebrew Bible, there is not a conception that your soul goes someplace and, and you know, either is rewarded or punished. Yeah, you die.
- [20:50]
Megan Lewis
So if You. There is no real understanding of a soul. Your breath just kind of goes, and you're dead. Is there a belief of some kind of afterlife? What's. What's. I know Sheol is a thing. How does that play into the whole thing?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So shield. So just as background in. We'll probably get to this a little bit deeper. But in. In other circles outside of the Hebrew Bible, like in Greek circles, they have Hades. Hades is this place where you die and your. Your soul kind of goes down there, and it's just like a dark nether world where nothing interesting is happening. It's boring, and it goes on forever and ever. And in the Hebrew Bible, you have a place called you. You have references to a thing called Sheol. And people have often thought of Sheol that way. For years and years, I thought of Sheol as that way. It's just. It's the Hebrew way of talking about going to Hades, where your soul went there and not much happens. And it's kind of this gray, dark place, and there's no physicality and nothing interesting, and you're just kind of bored for eternity. And I don't think that's actually what Sheol is. The term Sheol, unfortunately, is translated in some English Bibles as hell. And so it looks like the Hebrew Bible talks about hell, because that's how the English translators translate Sheol sometimes. And it's a big mistake because Sheol is not hell. Hell, in the Christian thought at least, is the place where your soul goes to be tormented forever. That's not Sheol. Sheol is a TR. Is a tricky word. It occurs just about 60 times in the Hebrew Bible, most of the time in poetry, most of it in the Book of Psalms. And there's a way of figuring out what it means, because the poetry in the Hebrew Bible is not like English poetry. English poetry, of course, there's all kinds of English poetry. But when, you know, when we were in fifth grade, we learned English poetry where, like, the end of the words would rhyme, right? You have rhyming. Rhyming words. And that's how to write your poems in Hebrew. They didn't have rhyming words. They had rhyming ideas. And so in Hebrew poetry, often it'll be a couplet. Like there'll be two lines, a couplet, and one line will say something. The second line will say the same thing in different words. Okay, you'll use synonyms to say the same. Basically the same thing. You find this throughout the Psalms, throughout all the poetic books. And so if you want to know what a word means and you don't know what the word is, you can see what the synonym is in the parallel line. See what I mean? And the parallel for Sheol throughout the Hebrew Bible is almost always something like grave or tomb or death. So Sheol is not a place that souls gather together when they, when they die. It's, it's. It's where you're buried. And there's no, there's no life there. And God's not even there. Like you're dead now. And so, so even though it gets translated as hell, it doesn't mean hell. And so, so there. And there's no, no place in the Hebrew Book Bible that talks about people going, going to Sheol as a place of punishment.
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Megan Lewis
What about Greek and Roman pagans? What were their very general afterlife beliefs?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, most pagans, like most Jews in the ancient world, did not believe in an afterlife. Most. Most pagans thought that you. You know, we're alive for a while, then we die, and that's it. And so there's this, especially in the Roman world, I teach my students this, this gravestone inscription that was common in, in Roman cemeteries that we can still see today in some preserved Roman, you know, tombstones that we have today. People use RIP sometimes rest in peace RIP in Hebrew. I mean, in Latin, they had one that was seven letters long. It was N, F, F, N, S, N, C. And it stood for non fui, fui non sum non kuro, which in English means I was not. I was, I am not, I care not. Okay, so you no longer exist. It doesn't bother you. You don't exist. And so that seems to have been the most prevalent view. But there were people who. There were a lot of people going back to Homer in the Odyssey, where there was this concept of Hades as a place where people's souls or spirits would go. And they're sometimes called shadows because it's not like really a living being, but it kind of is. And they're powerless. They have no strength. They have no knowledge. They can barely. They can't speak. And it's just where these, where this goes after death. Eventually, within Greek and Roman circles, there did develop an idea that there might be rewards and punishments, and that that's going to relate to the development of hell within Christianity.
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Megan Lewis
That was my next question. What do we know about the afterlife beliefs of early Christians?
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Bart Ehrman
Okay, okay. So the earliest Christians agreed with Jesus that there is a future resurrection of the dead, that. That for God to be just the righteous have to be rewarded and the wicked need to be punished. But it obviously doesn't happen much in this life. Certainly doesn't happen consistently in this life, which means there must be an age to come. And so Jesus and his followers believed that people would be raised from the dead. The resurrection of the dead involves this Jewish idea that you cannot exist without a soul and body. And so what, what happens is God breathes life into the physical remains and they come back to life. So they're living again. And some people are brought back in order to have an eternal reward. Some are brought back in order to be shown the error of their ways and to be shown that they're now going to be destroyed forever and there's nothing else. And so that, that was the earliest Christian belief. And it was a belief that held on, I mean, among Jesus Jewish followers for, for a long time because they were Jewish and that was their understanding of things.
- [27:12]
Megan Lewis
So how do we get this kind of transfer from this, this one idea about the afterlife, that the people are kind of following Jesus example on to this eternal fiery torment without death or. Yeah, not without death, but like without end.
- [27:31]
Bart Ehrman
It's a strange development in some ways, but it also makes sense in some ways. Early on, Jesus followers after his death were Jewish. Not long after that, Gentiles started converting. You have the ministry of Paul, who's converting mainly Gentiles. By the end of the first Christian century, the Christian church is made up mainly of Gentiles. These people do not have a Jewish understanding of body and soul. They have a Greek understanding of body and soul. Going back well before Plato, but popularized by Plato, was the idea that the soul is immortal even though the body dies. This is a major emphasis in Plato in a number of. A number of his writings, but especially the. You. You get it in the Phaedo, for example, where, where Socrates argues this, that the soul will be immortal. Well, if the soul is immortal, it's got to go somewhere. And there develops, even within Greek mythology, there develops the idea that those who are righteous will be rewarded and those who are unrighteous will be tormented. And so the term for that in Greek for the place of torment is Tartarus. Tartarus is this region where people who are really wicked are tortured forever. And so Plato, in some of Plato's myths, when he's not doing his dialogical thing with Socrates, developing arguments logically, but when he's telling some kind of story to convey the truth, he will tell stories about souls going down to Tartarus because they're so wicked. And those who are philosophers never go down that philosophers, you know, they have great afterlife, but. But those are not like they're just living for their bodies. Yeah, their bodies are going to be tormented forever and. Or their spirits will be physically. So. Okay, so that, that becomes the. The. You know, if Greeks do think in some kind of afterlife, it's something like that your soul separates from your body and then it gets rewarded or p. Christians, after. After a while are mainly gentile, they're not Jewish, and they. They no longer really think about the future resurrection of a life that's going to be lived here on earth. They start thinking that in fact the soul will live on and be rewarded or punished. And so you already start getting that in the second century where. A second Christian century where you start getting talk about the soul being tormented forever in hell. And eventually you get very, very graphic descriptions of it. You have apocalypses that unlike the revelation of John, you have later apocalypses like the apocalypse of Peter or the apocalypse of Paul that talk about the specific torments that are going to happen in hell for people who have sinned in one way or another, have not repented. And so that become. That becomes the standard view. So much so that throughout the ages, that's simply what everybody assumed Jesus taught, even though it's not at all what he taught.
- [30:24]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. That is all I have for today's interview. We're going to be moving on to this week's bonus segment, which is misquoting Bart. And I'm going to be playing a TikTok video for Bart, which is someone talking about him. This is all just complete opposite of general YouTube advice, which is never read the comments. So we're going to read the comments, we're going to watch this video, and then Bart is going to tell us what this gentleman has wrong about his. His thoughts and opinions.
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Bart Ehrman
Let Bart say that he has not seen this before.
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Megan Lewis
No, Bart has not seen this before. Chris sent it to me and it's just. We're just gonna have a look.
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Bart Ehrman
Okay?
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Host or Advertiser
Bart Ehrman is skeptical about the story of Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus. He says the story may have been invented by Christians who wanted to make sure that they could say with confidence that the tomb was empty on the third day. The story of the resurrection more or less required a story of burial in a known spot by a known person first. This is what's called an ad hoc argument. There's no actual evidence or reason to believe what Ehrman is saying. It's just an excuse for him to be skeptical. This ends up being unintentionally ironic because Ehrman is accusing early Christians of inventing a story in order to support their beliefs. Meanwhile, Ehrman himself is inventing this story in order to support his own beliefs. Second, his argument seems backwards. He claims the Christians made up the part about Joseph burying Jesus to give the resurrection plausibility. However, the reason it works as evidence is because people could in principle verify it simply by going for a short walk and looking for themselves. Making this whole part of the story up without people being able to go to the tomb to check wouldn't have made any sense. Thirdly, fabricating a story about a member of the Sanhedrin converting to Christianity and honoring Jesus with burial would be an absolutely insane lie to make up if Joseph wasn't a Christian or didn't bury Jesus. Joseph himself, his family, the Sanhedrin and Pilate all could have easily contradicted the story. Plus they had huge motivation to contradict the story because they didn't want Christianity to flourish. Honestly, it looks like skeptics like Bart Ehrman pull stuff out of thin air with zero evidence to support it all so that they can avoid historical truths like the empty tomb.
- [32:34]
Megan Lewis
Alright, there was a lot in that.
- [32:38]
Bart Ehrman
Wow.
- [32:39]
Megan Lewis
What are your thoughts? Bus.
- [32:43]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so the question is did was there originally the. The story in the New Testament is that there's Jesus is crucified on a Friday and when he's. When. When he dies, Joseph of Arimathea requests from Pilate the right to take the. To bury the. Bury the body. This person is saying that since I claim that probably did not happen, that I'm making stuff up and that I have no reason to do it. The only reason I'm doing it is so that I can be skeptical and okay, maybe we should talk about that. Maybe he and I should. Maybe he and I should have a face to face on this one sometime. It's not true that I have no reason for saying that this is made up. This person. I don't know who this person is. He's obviously not a historian. And so I approach questions like this as a historian. Quite apart from belief or non belief. What's this? What would history tell us about this kind of thing? Do we. So we, we know a good bit about the practices of Romans when it came to crucifixion. We don't have any detailed descriptions of like how they nailed people to the cross or made the cross stand up. We don't have detailed descriptions of that kind of thing. But we do know about people hanging on crosses and how Romans dealt with people who have been crucified. The consistent record. If you, if you simply look up every reference in Greek and Roman sources about what Roman policy was about crucifixion, you will find that Romans left the victims on the cross for days or longer so that they not only died, but they would be begin to decompose on the cross and they would. And scavengers would attack them. In my book, How Jesus Became God, I give instance after instance of. Of ancient records talking about this. The punishment was so that the people was. The person was not giving a decent burial, but he was humiliated publicly even after death. This shows what happens to people who cross, the power of Rome. And so they don't allow decent burials. We have no record of anybody doing what Joseph of Arimathea did in the Gospels. Among our records of people being crucified, we have no record of a person named Joseph of Arimathea existing. When this apologist says, well, somebody could just have asked Joseph of Arimathea what Joseph of Arimathea. The whole point is that we don't have any record of somebody like this. Then he says that, well, you know, if anybody thought, you know, the tomb was empty, they could have just gone to the tomb. If they didn't think it was empty, they just check it out. Why not check it out? What to. And what's he thinking about? People could just check it out or the. The pilot would want to check it out. This person has no understanding about his. How it worked in the ancient world. It in the Gospels, the disciples flee town. They're not there. So who is it that would convince Pilate that he had to go check the tomb? What Romans did usually is they waited for the body to decompose a bit and then they just threw it into a common tomb someplace. Or they. A common grave. Or they, you know, they did something with the remains, but they didn't, you know, they didn't give them proper burial. And so the idea of an empty tomb is not mentioned in any Christian source until 40 years after the event by somebody who was not there, who didn't know anybody who had been there. You first find it in the Gospel of Mark. And so even Paul. Paul says nothing about the tomb being empty. Who's writing earlier? So, so when was Pilate supposed to hear about this? Exactly? And is this person imagining that what was happening is that you had thousands and thousands of Christians converting in Jerusalem the week or two after Jesus Death and that Pilate would have heard of this, and so he would have won. Well, I wonder if that guy really did rise from the dead. I better go check his tomb. It's just ridiculous. It's not being history. What he's doing is he's taking the biblical accounts and he's saying, well, okay, that really happened. And if you doubt it, it's just because you want to be skeptical. No, it's not because you just want to be skeptical. Of course, I used to believe, too, that there was an empty tomb. Then I looked into it historically. Is it likely? No, it's not likely. And so, you know, it's one thing to attack somebody and say, well, he's just trying to be skeptical, but, you know, why don't you provide some evidence on your part instead of saying, well, that's what the Bible says.
- [37:26]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. I appreciate you watching that and giving us your thoughts.
- [37:32]
Bart Ehrman
Now, this was kind of like a soapbox, wasn't it?
- [37:37]
Megan Lewis
It's a very targeted soapbox. I like it.
- [37:39]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
- [37:40]
Megan Lewis
Now, before we finish for the week, would you mind just reminding us what we spoke about today?
- [37:45]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about where the idea of hell came from. And what I was arguing is it's not in the Hebrew Bible. It's. It's not what Jesus taught. It's actually not in the New Testament at all. There are passages people turn to to refer to hell, like, you know, the lake of fire or some of Jesus teachings, but they're not talking about hell. Even though the word sometimes will be translated as hell, it's not hell. And so the questions of where does it come from? It actually comes from a combination of the teachings of Jesus of justice in the afterlife with the teachings of Plato others that the soul is forever. That combination leads to the doctrine of hell, but it's not. Not biblical.
- [38:23]
Megan Lewis
Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. 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.