← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
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B
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. This week we are talking about Jesus as God. It's one of the central tenets of many denominations of modern Christianity and the Nicene Creed describes him as of one being with the Father. But just how old is this idea? If you asked Jesus disciples if he was man or God, would they have affirmed his divinity or accused you of blasphemy? And if Jesus was divine, then was he considered to be God made flesh, a human with some divine features, or something else entirely? As always, Bart is here to shed some light on the subject. And we're not going to be doing our weekly check ins at the moment because we are filming in advance. Bart is traveling in the UK and I'm on the Isle of Skye with my family and I definitely don't have Internet where I am, so.
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C
Yeah, but you've got the Isle of Sky.
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B
I do. I have the Isle of Skye, which is beautiful and perfect. So the next few episodes are just going to be us diving straight into it while future us enjoy family time. But before we get into Jesus specifically, I wanted to talk a little about the boundary between mortals and the divine world. In the ancient world, I feel it was a much more permeable membrane for ancient people than it probably is for us today. You've got things like divine kingship in ancient Egypt. There's instances of human divinization in ancient Mesopotamia. And then in ancient Greece, of course, you've got a whole host of figures who were born to Zeus and immortal woman. Is this the kind of atmosphere that Jesus was living and preaching in?
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C
Right. I think the issue is that today most people who are in our culture think of the separation between God and humans as a vast chasm that cannot be breached. I mean, God is up there. God is transcendent. And it is. He has ways of communicating with us and dealing with us, and we have ways of communicating with him, but it's a vast chasm that cannot be breached. Throughout antiquity, in various cultures, it wasn't understood that way at all. From Mesopotamia to Egypt to Israel to Greece to Rome. I mean, it just. One way to think of it is as a kind of. That the divine and human realms are kind of on a. More of. On a continuum. And it's more like a kind of like a pyramid where you've got the ultimate divine being at the very top of this pyramid. And below this divine being are other kind of less powerful divine beings, but still incredibly powerful divine. Below them is another layer of divine beings. They're not as powerful as those. And you go on down until you get down to people who are so amazing. They're not like us humans, you know, people who are so strong or so brilliant or so beautiful, they just ain't human. They're superhuman. And then you get down to the rest of us peons. So the idea, though, is that this is a. A kind of a continuum. And you certainly get that in the Greek and Roman world that Jesus was born into, where you. You might have like a chief God. Like in Greece you might have Zeus, but then under Zeus you might have the gods of Mount Olympus. And then you've got gods who are gods of the city. And gods, if you have gods of forest and meadows and streams, you've got gods of your household. And then you've got some humans that are divine. Like the emperor of Rome would be a divine being in some sense. But it doesn't mean he's Zeus. Right? He's much, much more lower, but he's above us. And so that's the kind of continuum you get. And you get it in Judaism as well. This is the surprising thing. To many people, even within Judaism, there's a continuum because you certainly have God Almighty, the God of Israel, but below him there are archangels and there are angels and there are seraphim and there are cherubim. And these are beings that are far superior in strength and everything else to humans. And there are some humans who are superior to the rest of us. So there's still a continuum even in Judaism. And that is the world Jesus was born into, where most people in that world understood that the divine realm was somewhat connected with our realm through continuity.
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B
So there's kind of Gradations of divinity then for God. Specifically in terms of Greek and Roman pagan religions, how was it possible for someone to be both human and, and divine at the same time?
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C
You know, today when people think about Jesus, Christians would say, of course he's both human and divine. And I think most non Christians understand that's what Christians say, that he's both God and human. And that seems unusual to us. And most people think that's unique. You don't have something like this and in fact you have it all over the place in Greek and Roman religions and in Greek and Roman myth you have various ways where a person can be both human and divine at the same time. So there are certain several ways it can work. One way is that in Greek and Roman mythology, as in, as in Jewish and Christian thinking, sometimes a divine being will become immortal for a time, being for a period. And so Zeus, as you pointed out, will come down in the shape of a, of a human being because he's attracted to some woman and he wants to have sex with her. And so he comes down as immortal. And you have gods who come down to talk to people and to advise people in human form. And of course you get that in Judaism as well. Throughout the Old Testament you have angels and things coming down as humans. So one thing is that a divine being can become a human being temporarily. Sometimes a divine being begets a mortal with a mortal woman so that the person who's born has a divine parent and a mortal parent. And so someone like Hercules, for example, in the Roman tradition was born of Jupiter and a woman. And so he's kind of, he's got both. There are other instances that are even in some ways more interesting where you have a human being who's just a mortal being, but because of some kind of spectacular characteristic, either because the person is. Yeah, well, totally powerful or totally wise and intelligent or totally beautiful or totally whatever that they are at the end of their lives. Instead of going down to wherever one else goes when they die, they go, go up to live with the gods and they are made a divine being. And the interesting thing is you get that throughout the world that Jesus was in. It's not that everybody believed it, but it's a widely held view in Greece, Rome, Israel. I mean, this was a held view.
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B
How did then the Roman emperors play into this? Because they were, it's my understanding they were divinized while still alive.
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C
Eventually that's what happens is that even while alive they're considered to be a divine being. Originally it didn't work that way. The idea that the emperor is divine starts out soon after the death of Julius Caesar, who was not an emperor. He was a dictator of Rome, proclaimed himself as a dictator for life, which meant he had supreme rule, which is why the many people in the Senate didn't appreciate that, and then murdered him. But then his adopted son was a person named Octavius, and he inherited Julius Caesar's power and wealth, and he eventually became the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. After Julius Caesar died, Octavius proclaimed that he had been taken up to heaven to live with the gods. And there happened to be a comet that was visible at the time in Rome. And he declared that was Julius Caesar's spirit going up to live with the gods. People believed him. This was a very convenient thing because he was Julius Caesar's adopted son, which meant that if his father was God, what to make him so he's the son of God? This became a very useful tool for the emperors to claim that they had divine roots. And so the initial idea was that when an emperor died, the Senate would vote. And wasn't quite that they were voting that he, you know, whether to decide he was a God or not. They, they weren't voting to make him a God. They were deciding whether, in fact, he had been divinized or not. And the good emperors were understood to have been divinized. And the, the wretched ones like Caligula, you ain't going to be voted to be a God. But eventually, people like Caligula, while living, did want to be acknowledged as divine beings. That obviously helps politically. You're less likely to have a coup if you're trying to stage a coup against a God. All right, let me just finish this by saying throughout the Roman Empire, the, the, there was worship of the emperor as a divine being, not as the ultimate divine being, not as one of the powerful gods, but as a divine being on earth. This emperor cult, as it's called, became very popular in parts of the Roman Empire. And it was not started by the emperor, and it wasn't started by the Senate. Local aristocrats in a town, say, in a city, would petition for the right to have a temple to the emperor. And if they were given that right, that was a status symbol for them. And so the local elites wanted to play off of this to develop their own power. But among the masses, it appears to have been widely believed that in fact, this person is a divine being who is here to, to help us.
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B
Do we have examples of mortals in ancient Jewish thought crossing that human divine boundary.
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C
Yeah, you've. You. You actually get it in all the directions that I mentioned. You. You certainly have divine beings who become human temporarily. There's some very interesting passages that I think people overlook in the Hebrew Bible where this happens, where it's actually God himself who appears to become human for a while. And so one of the early ones is In Genesis chapter 18, Abraham is visited by three heavenly visitants. These heavenly visitants are coming to see Abraham because they're off to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, the place where Lot, his nephew Lot is. And we're told that there are three men and Abraham cooks a meal for them. And later we're told that two of them were angels and the other one is called the Lord. And so it's God himself is one of these three. And so this is God who's taken on a human form to have a meal and to talk with Abraham. And so you get that sort of thing where a divine being becomes a human being. And you get this in a number of places, including the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament and in, in Exodus chapter three, the angel of the Lord appears to Moses. Then the passage continues. It's actually the Lord himself. And so there's this kind of continuity between the angel of the Lord and the Lord. And they're both kind of the same thing in some way.
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B
So what other ways then could you. Either mortals become God or God, or divine beings become mortal.
- [11:27]
C
It's less common for a divine being to come down and have sex with a woman and create offspring. But that does happen. Actually, it's another very strange passage in Genesis, Genesis chapter six. We're told this is before the Flood, and we're told that the. The sons of God looked down upon the daughters of men and saw that they were beautiful. And so they came down and they cohabited with them. And they had these offspring that are related to the Nephilim, these giants on the Earth. And that's in this story. That's why God had to destroy the Earth to get rid of these giants. They're from a union of a divine being, an angelic beings and mortals. And this gets played out in later Jewish apocrypha. We have a book called First Enoch. That's not in the Bible, but it's a. Was a very popular book that describes in detail who these angelic beings were. There are 200 of them. It gives us their names. And they come down and. And they cohabit with these, with these women in some ways, the most interesting, though thing that people would not expect normally is that within Judaism, human beings are sometimes called divine beings, are made divine beings. This happens with Enoch. Enoch in the Old Testament is the great grandfather of Noah. And he was so righteous that he walked with God. And so God took him. This very short little verse in Genesis 5, which was understood by Jewish interpreters to mean that God took him up to heaven, so that instead of just dying, he went up. And we have a book like Second Enoch where we're told that Enoch, when he was taken up to heaven, became a glorious angel. And in fact, more glorious than any of the other supernatural beings other than God himself. But even more striking, you have. You have Jewish writers who declare that, for example, Moses became a divine being and is sometimes called God. By Philo of Alexandria, this Jewish philosopher calls Moses God. He doesn't mean that he's God Almighty, but he is. He's been given all the attributes of God. And there are other figures too, where you have this, where there's a tradition that the rabbis hated, the rabbinic authors hated this idea, but there are some traditions that. That there's a second God, a God sitting on a throne next to the other God. So there are two powers in heaven, is how it's sometimes described within Judaism. Rabbis hated that, and so they got rid of it. So most people think Judaism can't have something like that, but in fact they did in the days of Jesus.
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B
So how do prophets fit into this kind of scheme of mortal divine continuity? Are they. Are they human with some divine characteristics? Are they kind of somewhere in the middle? Where do they land?
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C
Prophets are normally understood to be a kind of a different category. They're the human beings that God has inspired to speak his word. They're not predicting the distant future. They are often predicting the imminent future. But they're mainly understood to be people who are speaking God's word, that God has filled them with. With a spirit, and they're speaking God's word to his people. So it's a way of God communicating without himself becoming a human or without sending an angel down. It's just communicating through. Through a human being. But the prophets are normally understood to be normally understood simply to be humans.
- [14:55]
B
So you mentioned just now that there are examples of there being two gods on the throne of heaven. Are there any points where. Where Yahweh is considered to have an equal? So is there, what I'm asking, really, is there a precedent for the elevation of Jesus to, like, full status of Godhood?
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C
Yeah, I think So I mean, Moses, as I said, was understood to be to have been exalted to such a state that he himself is called God. You have a variety of divine figures in Judaism, so much so that it's a little bit hard to categorize them all in kind of into discrete categories. But the idea that God has another with him, who is ruling with him goes back pretty far and before Jesus. And it's for example, it's one of the ways that some Jewish interpreters understood what happens in the book of Genesis 1 when God creates humans. God says, let us, let us create man in our own image. And Jewish interpreters said, well, who's he talking to? And it came to be thought that he's talking to the one who is his co creator. And so the idea that a human would be exalted to become divine is found long before Jesus. It's found in Greek texts, it's found in Roman texts, and surprisingly it's found in Jewish texts. And so the idea that a human could become divine is fairly standard in that world.
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B
Even for maybe ancient Jews who lent more towards the monotheistic worldview, would this still have been something they were familiar and comfortable with?
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C
Some were completely comfortable with it and others were not. Let me give a little bit of background on this. Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible, what we think of as monotheism was not really the dominant view. Monotheism is the belief that there's only one God. That's it, one God Mano, one God. Throughout most of the Hebrew Bible though, the idea is that there are other gods. You're just not supposed to worship them. You're supposed to worship only Yahweh. Yahweh is the God of Israel. He's the one you have to worship. You can't worship other gods. The doctrine was not that there are no other gods, it's that you're not to worship them. And you get this already in the Ten Commandments, the first commandment, depending how you number the commandments. But the first commandment is you shall have no other gods. But before me. The commandment is not you must believe there's only one God. That's not the commandment. The commandment is you shall have no other gods before me, which presupposes there are other gods. That view is by scholars is sometimes called henotheism. It's h e n o theism, which is that not that there's only one God, but there's only one God who is the superior creator God that you're supposed to worship. There's only one for you is that idea. And that's what we find out find through most of the Hebrew Bible. But in some of the later writings, like at the end of the Book of Isaiah, it's called Second Isaiah, which was written probably in the 6th century BCE Yahweh declares, I alone am God, there is no other. To me alone shall every knee bow and every tongue shall confess there's no other God. So there you start. That's a rare place where you find monotheism. But the interesting thing is that even in the first century you have Jews who are claiming that some other being is the being that God is referring to. Enoch is the one to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess. Some Jews had strict monotheists and others tried to figure out how you can have these other divine beings and sometimes thought there were others who were at least sitting on the throne next to God.
- [18:43]
B
Thank you. That's a much more, I think, complicated picture than I expect many people realize is going on. So if we look then specifically at Jesus now, we've got all of that kind of background knowledge. Do the Gospels say anything about Jesus divinity or maybe lack thereof?
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C
Yeah, they do. And not just the Gospels, but throughout the New Testament. The Gospels are a little bit tricky because the Gospels are narratives. They're not statements of systematic theology. You know, you don't have Matthew coming out and describing his doctrine of God. He's telling a story and so the it has to be read into it. But it is interesting that in the New Testament you do get all three ways that I mentioned of humans and gods somehow being this, you know, a human being, a divine being. But you certainly get the idea that Jesus starts out as a human who gets exalted to be a divine being. At the resurrection, he's taken up into heaven and that's when he becomes a divine being. You find that in the New Testament. You also find in the New Testament the idea that Jesus is born of the union of a divine being and a mortal being. In Luke chapter one and two, when you have a description of the virgin birth, the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says, you're going to conceive a child. And she says, how's that going to happen? I've never had sex. I'm not planning on having sex. What do you mean? I'm going to conceive a child. And the angel Gabriel says, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the One born of you will be called holy, the Son of God. It's because she gets pregnant by the Holy Spirit that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a union of a mortal and a divine being of some kind. So you get that. And then you also get the idea that Christ is a figure who came down from heaven. He was a divine being who became a human being. You get that in the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And so the Word is a divine being who becomes a human being. And when it becomes a human being, that's Jesus Christ for the Gospel of John. So all of these books do appear to think that Jesus in some sense is divine. But they do it in different ways. They have different ways of understanding how he could be divine. He's either exalted or he's born, or he's brought down as a divine being.
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B
Excellent. That's a lot. And again, a lot of variety I think, that people probably aren't intensely familiar with. If we look maybe like the Gospels of Mark and John, are there significant differences there on Jesus divinity?
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C
Yeah, I'd say pretty radical differences. Mark is our earliest gospel, almost universally thought almost to be our first gospel, written around the year 70. So, you know, 40 years after Jesus death. In Mark's gospel, Jesus hardly ever says anything about himself. When he teaches, he teaches about God, and he teaches about the coming kingdom of God, and he tells parables about the coming kingdom of God. And about the only things he says about himself is that he has to go to Jerusalem and be rejected and executed. And then he'll be raised. On the third day. Mark calls Jesus a number of things, the Son of man, the Son of God, Messiah, he calls him all sorts of things, but he never comes out and calls him God. So that's Mark. When you get to the Gospel of John. In contrast to Mark, where Jesus hardly says anything about himself, in John, he gives extended discourses. And his discourses are almost exclusively about who he is. And in this case, Jesus says that he is a divine being. He is equal with God. He has come down from the Father, and he's going to return to the Father. And he's the Son of God, but he's of equal status with God. He's not saying that he's Yahweh. He's not saying he's the God of Israel. He's saying that he's a divine being who's Equal with God. And that's how he's portrayed in the gospel itself. He's called God in this gospel. And so it's a radical difference in both cases. He's divine in some sense, but it seems to be a very different sense where in John he's out there saying that he's God and that's what the author says about him.
- [22:54]
B
So these views probably represent quite a development from how Jesus may have been viewed within his own lifetime, given how far removed they are chronologically speaking. Could we talk for a minute about the pre Pauline creed that you find in Romans 1, 3, 4, what that might tell us about the really early views of Jesus divinity?
- [23:16]
C
It's hard to do this without getting into the weeds too much. But Romans is a letter written by Paul. It's not the first letter he wrote. It's probably the last letter he wrote that we have. And he's writing this letter to explain to the Roman Christians what his preaching is about Christ because they suspect that maybe he's not on the up and up. And he wants them to be on his side because he wants to use them as a mission base to go to further his mission. He's writing to them and he introduces his gospel, his letter by summarizing his gospel, which he says is the gospel of Jesus Christ, who was the son of David according to the flesh, but was the Son of God in power according to the Holy Spirit at the resurrection of the dead. Wait a second, the resurrection? What? Jesus is the Son of God at the resurrection. And when you look at this closely, when you read it very closely, it looks like what Paul is doing is quoting a standard formulation of how earliest Christians understood Jesus. It would take a long time. We could spend an entire episode on Romans chapter 1, verses 3 and 4. I one time wrote a 30 page paper on these two verses in graduate school. And so there's a lot there and I was just scratching the surface, but the basic idea is that Paul's quoting something they're familiar with. So that kind of calm them down. Look, I've got the basic view here that everybody else has. Jesus was descended from David and so he was the. He's the Son of David, he's the earthly Messiah, but he's also in some sense a divine being. Because of the resurrection, the Holy Spirit made him, made him the Son of God. You think, wait a second, the Holy Spirit made him the Son of God, What? At the resurrection, what? But in fact, you have this teaching elsewhere in the New Testament explicitly, one time explicitly on Paul's lips in the Book of Acts. In Acts, chapter 13, Paul says that God made promises to the Jewish forefathers, the ancestors, and now he is fulfilling them by raising Jesus from the dead. And then he quotes a scripture to prove it, as it is spoken in the second psalm. You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Wait at the resurrection. Yeah, today I've begotten you. So I'm not saying this is Paul's full theology, because it's not. But he is representing. What were the earlier views among Christians? That at the the resurrection, Jesus, the human Messiah, was made into a divine being. God was rewarding him for his faithfulness by making him a divinity. So that comes as a shock to people. But I call that an exaltation Christology, which means Christ starts out as human, but he's exalted to divine status, just as Enoch was and just as Moses was. And just like the emperor, just like Romulus, the king of was and the emperors were, he's an exalted being, becomes an exalted being.
- [26:15]
B
Do we see a different idea of Jesus divinity elsewhere in Paul, or is this kind of consistent with what he says?
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C
No, the striking thing is it's inconsistent with what he says, which is why scholars. One of the reasons scholars have thought this passage in Romans 1, 3, 4 is not his own formulation. It's not how he would have said it. But he wants to quote this so they'll be on his side about this thing. His own understanding of Christ is a little bit complicated because it appears to be a kind of a combination of both the idea that a person can be human and divine by being a divine being who comes down to earth for a while, and also a human being who gets exalted up to heaven. You find this clearly in another passage that scholars have long thought is Paul quoting something. But this time it's pretty clear he holds to this one. It's in Philippians, chapter 2, verses 6 through 11. This is a passage that scholars have called. They sometimes call it the Christ Hymn, but it's not a hymn, it's a poem, some kind of poem. So I call it the Christ poem. It's a fantastic passage. It might be the most written about passage in the New Testament, certainly the most written about passage in Paul by scholars. It says Christ was in the form of God, but he didn't regard equality with God, something to be grasped after. So he emptied himself and he became a human. So he starts out in God's form. So however you interpret that, somehow he's formally God. He's in the form of God, and then he becomes a human being. And as a human being, he's obedient to God and he suffers death, even death on the cross. So that's halfway through the poem. And then Paul says, therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that's above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Well, wait a second. So God highly exalted him, gave him a name above every name. So he was in the form of God to begin with, and he became a human because he died, God exalted him even more highly and he appears to have given him the name Lord, the name of God in the Old Testament. And that passage earlier when I quoted two Isaiah and I said that God says, I alone am God to me alone shall every tongue confess every niche about. That's what Paul's quoting. He's saying, that's going to happen to Jesus. So now Jesus. Yeah. Wow. It's like, now Jesus is the one. Jesus is being treated like Yahweh. He's not Yahweh, but he's being treated because God has exalted him that high. So he starts out of a divine being that comes down and then he's exalted even higher as a divine being afterwards. For Paul, that's quite an understanding of Jesus.
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B
That's really interesting. And I love how diverse all of these. These viewpoints are and how they're all represented in the New Testament in something that I think a lot of people maybe think has a much more consistent view of Jesus divinity.
- [29:10]
C
Well, and the interesting thing, of course, is people think that the consistent view it has is a view it doesn't have. The consistent people that is like it's the Council of Nicaea 300 years later. Is the view the New Testament? No, they. Nobody in the New Testament. You quoted the Council of Nicaea earlier. Yeah. Christians in this period were not thinking that way.
- [29:28]
B
This was my, my final question, actually. How do all of these different views of Jesus as divine in some way differ to what a modern Christian might understand Jesus divinity to be?
- [29:40]
C
I have answered in two ways because what modern Christians tend to think, at least almost every Christian I've ever known, tends to think have a view of Christ. I mean, committed Christians tend to have a view of Christ that is not the orthodox view, the view that they hammered out in early Christianity as the orthodox view. Most people today, I would say, simply understand that Jesus is both God and human. Most people have a kind of a fuzzy idea about how it works, but they do think that he was a pre existent divine being who was born through the Virgin Mary and then died for the sins of the world and then returned to his heavenly realm and that he's somehow both human and divine. That is an orthodox view so far as it goes. In early Christianity, though, they had to figure out how can he be both human and divine. And I think what most people think today is that he's like 50% of each or something, or he's like half and half. My sense is that most people today say that Jesus is human and divine, but they really mean he's divine. If push comes to shove, he's God and he's not really human. He just kind of seems human because, you know, people think that Jesus was, you know, he, he, he was all powerful. He was all knowing. He could do anything he wanted on earth. Well, humans can't do that. And they assume that, you know, Jesus could probably, you know, speak Swahili when he's a 2, 2 month old, you know, because he's, he's a human, he's God, he could do that. Yeah. So they think, they kind of think it's 50, 50, but it's really more divine. And the way it gets hammered out, we'll probably have some, some more episodes on this. The way it ends up getting hammered out is that Jesus is fully God and fully man. That does not mean 50, 50. It means 100, 100. He's 100% human and he's 100% divine. And you say, well, yeah, but that doesn't work. That's right, but that's the doctrine. He can't be more one than the other. He's both at the incarnation, he's completely human and completely divine. So that's a view that the New Testament authors were not deeply philosophical in their thinking in the kind of traditional Greek philosophical ways. And they didn't have the philosophical categories to work that out, especially the earliest followers of Jesus who don't even know Greek, let alone Greek philosophy. And you need deep philosophical categories to work out how you can have one person with two natures and 100% of each nature in the one person. These are, these are categories that they just didn't have available to them yet.
- [32:08]
B
Well, thank you very much. That was really very interesting. We're going to take a brief break and then we'll be right back. We're skipping Bart's weekly update because he's off gallivanting around the uk, but we'll be back with some listeners Questions have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want To Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospels of authorship, such as why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did and where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john@barterman.com Authors thank you.
- [33:47]
C
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart
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B
and we are back with some listeners questions. Thank you to everyone who sent questions in for Bart's to answer. We're just going to get going because we have some excellent ones this week. Did knowing Jesus name make it easy easier for pagans to convert to Christianity? The questioner says that they were recently watching an interview with Karen Armstrong and she mentioned pagans knowing the name of their deities gave them a type of power over the deity, and that the Jewish God purposefully withheld his name for this reason as pagans had a deity to pray directly to with a name in Jesus. Do you think this was a factor in converting pagans to Christianity as opposed maybe to converting them to Judaism?
- [34:45]
C
I'm not familiar with what Karen Armstrong said. She's obviously a very, very fine thinker and a very important writer. The paraphrase of what she just said that this person's given, I wouldn't say is right. For one thing, the Hebrew Bible's God's name was known, it just wasn't pronounced. Jews knew the name Yahweh, they just didn't say it. So there's that so far as we know, almost all gods are named, all divine beings are named, and Jesus name is simply his name, Jesus. It's just it was a common name in antiquity and so there's nothing particularly special about it. It's just that that was his name. And so they did call Jesus God. And of course they. It helped to know his name to worship him. There are instances in the Greek and Roman worlds where a God will be worshiped without having a name. Sometimes though, one kind of popular worship was a being that they just called the highest God because they didn't. They thought period or every name. But in Jesus case, yeah, I mean, they could only worship the name. But I don't think there's nothing to suggest that having the name helped convert anybody because all the gods had names virtually.
- [35:55]
B
I have a question going off the back of that. Was it at all maybe not common, but did it happen for pagans to convert to Judaism or because Judaism was very much an ancestral religion, was that just not something that happened?
- [36:11]
C
It did happen, but I think what many people don't understand is that Judaism throughout history, but especially in the period we're talking about now, was not an evangelistic religion. Jews did believe that there was only that Yahweh was the only God they were going to worship. And they had their own customs and culture and rules and everything. They weren't out trying to get converts. I think a lot of Christians don't understand that. I mean, if you've got the right religion, why wouldn't you convert everybody? Most Jews didn't believe in an afterlife. And this was their religion. You can have your religion. We have our religion. It was more of an ethnic thing and, and it wasn't. It wasn't exclusive that way. So when Christians became missionary, that was the unusual thing because Jews. Jews were not. Even though people, sometimes people say that they were. They. It does not appear that they were at all. They would accept converts, but often it was. They would accept them reluctantly, just like today. I mean, a lot of times a rabbi won't be too eager to convert somebody unless, I mean, they really. You gotta really want to, I think.
- [37:14]
B
Okay, thank you. Next question. Says in Mark, like other gospels, Jesus seems to be able to quote the Old Testament freely. And they ask what's the best explanation for this? And some options are given. But the, the sense that I'm getting is did Jesus actually have large passages from the Old Testament memorized, or is this something that was likely inserted later by the writers of the gospel?
- [37:38]
C
Yeah, it's A really good question. I'd say ultimately it's impossible to answer. We don't know. It seems unlikely that Jesus would have had access to books or he could, like, memorize passages of the Hebrew Bible. He certainly would have heard passages from the Hebrew Bible during synagogue worship services and maybe in other contexts. The reality, though, is we don't know how much he quoted the Bible, how extensively he quoted it, when he did quote, how long the quotation was, whether he knew it, where it was coming from, how accurate he was. We don't have any access to information like that most of the time. In the Gospels, though, he doesn't quote long passages. In the Gospel of Mark, there's not really much in terms of he doesn't quote numerous verses. You know, Jesus doesn't. The only place where he quotes an extended passage, the only major place in the Synoptic Gospels, probably in any of the Gospels, is in Luke chapter four, where he quotes a long passage from Isaiah. But the passage he's quoting from Isaiah, he's in Luke 4, he's reading. He's precisely not quoting it. I don't know if that's a historical event. I don't think Luke 4 is actually describing something that happened. But I would say that Jesus was known to be familiar with important passages of the Hebrew Bible, but there's not much evidence that he was quoting them verbatim from memory. He may have been able to do that. What I'm saying is we don't know.
- [39:01]
B
Okay, thank you. Since the New Testament did not contain verse or chapter divisions until the 15th century, how did their introduction affect how people read and interpret the texts?
- [39:12]
C
Well, chapters and verses came in at different times. Chapters came in earlier in the 12th century, and the verses came in after the invention of printing in the 15th century. Right. So how does one read it? Well, the reality is most people couldn't read, and so it wasn't an issue. The reason you start putting in chapters, chapters and verses is to help with references so that if you're trying to describe where something is in the Gospel of Luke, if you can say it's in chapter 10, verse two, somebody can go right to it. If you don't have that, then you have to say it's after Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, but it's before he does this. And then if people know the text well enough, they can pretty much kind of imagine where it is. When you don't have that, it's very hard to track down a passage. When I was in graduate school, I was interested in Greek manuscripts and we used to collate manuscripts just as an exercise. Collating a manuscript is where you compare two manuscripts word for word in the same passage to see where the words differ. The problem is these ancient manuscripts, they don't have chapters and verses. And we used to have micro. Have to use microfilm. So I'd be at a microfilm reader and I'm trying to look up John 14, right. I've got this manuscript of the entire Gospels. And I'm twirling the microphone, I'm reading. Okay, where am I? Oh, God. That's. That's still. That's. That's Mark something. Oh, my God. Okay. Oh, that. I think that's. Yeah. Then you go. It's like, oh, God. You're going back and forth. If you don't have a book of chapter verses, that's just kind of how it is. So I think one advantage, though, one advantage of not having chapters and verses is we tend to think that when you go to the next chapter, you're onto something else. But they weren't writing them in chapters and verses. And so if you skip from 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and you stop reading there and you don't continue to 1 Thessalonians 5 because you're at the end of the chapter. Now you miss out what chapter four is talking about because you understand what it's talking about when you read chapter five. But it wasn't chapter five. It's just. He just kept writing. You see what I mean?
- [41:20]
B
Yeah. No, that makes sense. Question about the word faith. In English, when you talk about faith, you're kind of presupposing belief in something with no proof. Does the Greek word for faith and early Christian understandings of faith conform to how we would understand the word today? Or does it mean something different?
- [41:41]
C
I'd say in English that faith is a. Is a complicated word because it means a variety of things depending on the context. You know, faith, faithfulness, being faithful, there's a general sense about it, but it means something concrete. If you're talking about, say, in a marital relationship, being faithful, or in Shakespeare, when you talk about, you know, having faith, breaking faith, it has to do with, like, breaking a promise or something. I think. In English. In English, in Christian theology, it's often thought about as having. Believing something without proof. That that's mainly because of the Book of Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1, the way it describes faith as the things hoped for and faith, you know, belief in things unseen. The interesting thing is that in the New Testament, there are various understandings of this term faith, and it's often misunderstood, especially with respect to the Apostle Paul. For Paul, faith is a very important thing. I guess I need to clarify this, that our verb believe and our noun faith are the same root in Greek. So it's the same word. You could do believe and belief, but you can't do faith. And like, there's no verb, so people tend to translate it. The verb is believe and the noun is faith. And so you don't realize that's the same word. For Paul, though, faith isn't just kind of something you can't prove. Faith really isn't a intellectual ascent. For Paul, faith is better understood as something more like trust, where you trust something and so you trust God to bring you salvation through Christ. You trust Christ's death to be sufficient for salvation. It's an attitudinal thing, a relational thing, not an intellectual thing. When you get to Hebrews 11, it becomes an intellectual thing. So it's a complicated question. It's really not an easy one to answer. I will say, though, that faith in the Greek world generally, this word faith, pistis, was. Was understood to be kind of a secondary level of understanding something from the word knowledge.
- [43:46]
B
Interesting. Thank you very much. And we have one final question before we wrap up. Questioner says that they are deeply committed to an historical critical approach towards the Bible, but also understanding the texts without the translators. Theological assumptions. They're using Greek scholar Rudin's translation of the Gospels and D.B. hart's translation to try and get a more historical understanding of Mark's texts and its implications. And they ask what your opinion of Rujen and Haas translations are in terms of historically accurately understanding the texts in an historically accurate manner.
- [44:21]
C
I haven't, you know, studied those two translations, so I don't have an opinion about them. I'll say that it's impossible to avoid translator bias. It's not that like it. It's not like some have bias and some don't have bias. Every translator has biases. They have biases of their beliefs, biases of their philosophies, biases of the worldviews, biases of their ethics, biases of their understanding of language and how language works, biases of how they interpret these texts. You cannot translate a text without interpreting it. It's not humanly possible to do even if you program a computer to translate. You're programming the computer. There's no way to avoid the human element, period. So the best thing to do if you don't learn Greek, the best thing to do is learn Greek. But if you don't learn Greek, the best thing to do is to get a number of translations. Sometimes you can buy these Bibles that have multi translations side by side. One way to do it is to read across the translations. Everybody has their own perspectives on translations. The most popular translation into English is the New International Version, which I like for its readability, but I don't like. Sometimes the biases get more in the way than others. I mean, everybody's biased, but some really allow their biases to kind of to creep in more. And I think the translator's bias creeps in more. With the niv, I especially like the New Revised Standard Version because the committee that was doing it didn't have a single theological perspective. The NIV translators all had to have a particular theological bent to be on the committee. And in the nrsv, you have different people with different, you know, faith commitments or no faith commands. So what? It wasn't as much of a problem. But I think one good thing to do is just take a couple of translations and read them both. And I don't know what you do when they disagree. Go to the third. I don't know. I mean, it's like, learn Greek.
- [46:18]
B
No, email. Email me and then I'll ask you on, on the episode. If you're trying to get an historical understanding of the text, is there a resource that can help with that?
- [46:29]
C
Yeah, you know what I do with my students that I recommend everybody who, who asked me this? I. What you really need is a good study Bible with a good translation. And again, those will have biases in them. But the one that I really like the best that I think is, I think it's the most useful is the Harper Collins Study Bible. It is done by a group of, by a committee. There are different kinds of people who were on the committee. You have Jews, you have Christians, you have Protestants, you have Catholics, you have, I mean, it's, it's not so, it's not kind of toeing a line. It's really just trying to present scholarship that's done by scholars, whatever their particular views of things are. And so of course there will be some kinds of biases, but the, each book is introduced, so the author gives up to date scholarly understanding. What, when Mark was written, who the author was, where he lived, what his themes are, what basic things like that. Then at the bottom of each page, they'll have footnotes for difficult passages to explain what this word means in its context or what this, this sentence is probably taken to mean. And I think it's a very, very helpful tool that everybody should have.
- [47:36]
B
Excellent. I think I'm probably going to get one myself because I have several translations. I have a few in Hebrew. There's a Septuagint wandering around the house somewhere. But a study Bible is not something we own. Thank you for that. Before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about. About. And if you have suggestions for resources, that would be. That would be great.
- [47:57]
C
Yeah. So we were talking about understandings of, of Jesus as both divine and human in earliest Christianity, in the, in the New Testament especially, and in its own historical context. In its context, there were other instances of human beings who were also understood to be divine beings. There are various ways that that could happen, but you find these ideas throughout Greek, Roman and Jewish circles. And the Christians also had this view specifically about Jesus. And one big argument is that if you really want to understand what the Christians meant by calling Jesus both human and divine, you have to understand what that would have meant in its own environment. And so that's the reason for knowing all this other information. One of the most striking things is that there were non Christian Jews at the time who thought that there were. There were beings, human beings who had been elevated to a divine status. And so the idea that that happened to Jesus doesn't necessarily make him unique in that world. It made him unique for Christians because the Christians said he's the one. But others would have recognized what all that meant. And one of the very interesting questions is how does that develop without within Christianity? How does. Do Christians always have the same view? Do they have different views over time? Does it develop? And it absolutely developed. I think so. I have a book on this called How Jesus Became God. This is a book that discusses many of the issues we talk about today and lots of other issues. And there are other authors that you can look up who are good scholars that deal with this one. Popular authors, Larry Hurtado, for example, who has books on Jesus being a divine being and how that works.
- [49:42]
B
Excellent. Thank you so much, Bart. It's been, as always, a delight audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we going to be
- [50:05]
C
talking about next week? We are talking about something that is a little bit unusual for us. We're going to be talking about the phenomenon within universities of tenure. Tenure for faculty members is coming under increasing assault in some parts of the country now where universities are deciding to get rid of tenure for universities. This is a very serious issue and it seriously impacts religious education and especially biblical education in the universities. And so we're going to talk about how academic freedom and tenure are important for the kinds of things we're doing here on this podcast.
- [50:43]
B
Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you all, audience 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.