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- [00:00]
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- [00:34]
Megan Lewis
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.
- [00:55]
Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. Today we're going to be talking about Jesus. Huge surprise given the name of the podcast. Was he a real person? How do we even know the answer to that question? And how far can historians trust the sources that they have to rely on when looking at this? But before we get down to business, Bart, hello. How are you?
- [01:16]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm doing better now. We, you know, UNC with COVID they started instituting something they call wellness days every now and then in the semester. Like three times in the semester they'll have a day that they just blow off classes. And so we had a wellness day yesterday. Oh my God, is that great. I normally teach a couple classes on Thursdays and it was off and man, it makes a big difference. And for the students too, they're just. They're kind of burned out. So. Yeah, it's a nice thing. So I'm flying high today.
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Megan Lewis
I feel like this point in the semester is always so hard because you're so close to the finish line and you've been going for so long, but you still have to get that last bit done.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I know. I mean it's. It's a weird cycle teaching because it just isn't like a normal, like most people's jobs. It's not, you know, it's not a nine to five thing and it's not a. It's a whole different sequence and to outsiders it seems kind of cushy and I get that. But. Oh man, it's not. Anyway. Yeah. So. Yeah. How are things on your end?
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Megan Lewis
Okay. Actually, I've spent the last week in a bit of a panic because we are going. I'm taking all of the children home to see my family for the first time since the pandemic started, which is very Exciting. But of course, because we haven't been anywhere in several years, I have not been keeping up to date with the status of our passports, which means that everybody needs a new one. And because I'm a British citizen, I have to FedEx my old passport back to the UK as part of the application process. So that was a little more stressful than I would have liked. But everything is kind of in line for that and we should make it in time.
- [02:54]
Bart Ehrman
So how many of you load up on the plane?
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Megan Lewis
It's me and the five kids.
- [02:58]
Bart Ehrman
Hey, then. Hope you got some coloring books and things.
- [03:02]
Megan Lewis
Yes, well, luckily our eldest is going to be. She's 16 at the end of this month. So I have like a kind of surrogate adult to help at least keep everyone in one place, which is always tricky when you've got four who can just wander off at a whim.
- [03:18]
Bart Ehrman
You know, you could just charter a plane.
- [03:21]
Megan Lewis
The thought did occur to me.
- [03:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Right. Okay, well, good luck with that. That's going to be great.
- [03:26]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Yes, it will be wonderful. But I definitely need some luck. We should get into talking about Jesus, though. And before we start, I do want to have a quick caveat right at the beginning to say that we're not talking about mythicism, which is the idea that Jesus is a mythical figure who was created without any historical fact, which is a big enough topic that it needs its whole own episode. And I'm not even sure that my definition was accurate. Today what we're focusing on is what sources we have for Jes as an historical figure and whether we can trust them when we start reconstructing this piece of history. So this is obviously a pretty big question, Barthes, but why do you think it's worth discussing?
- [04:07]
Bart Ehrman
You're right. We don't want to talk about mythicists today, except to say that there are people who say that he didn't even exist. That's what mythicism is. You defined it correctly. It's the idea that Jesus himself is a myth. And that's not an issue that's seriously debated among experts in the field who are New Testament scholars, but they are nonetheless very concerned about knowing what kind of evidence do we have for Jesus, not. Not just his existence, you know, because the evidence for what he said and did, of course, is evidence for his existence. But the fact that we have sources that. That are, you know, all the sources agree he existed. But still, that doesn't help you much knowing who he was and what did he teach and what did he do and, and what happened to him. And, and so it's really important for people to understand what kind of sources of information we have for all of that. That's a topic that scholars have really wrestled with for a very long time.
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Megan Lewis
So the scholarly consensus then is that, yes, Jesus was an historical figure. So when we're trying to determine whether a person actually existed and we have to rely on historical data, but what data do we have from the ancient world concerning Jesus?
- [05:16]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we have a lot more than for, you know, 99.99% of the rest of the population. Because, you know, the reality is that in the days of Jesus, you know, there were probably about 60 million people in the Roman Empire at the time. And we have very, very little information about many of them. For most of them, we have no information at all. It's kind of hard to say how many Jews there were in the empire at the time, but usually it's said around like 5 or 7%. So, okay, so 3 or 3 to 5 million Jews in the world at the time in Jesus day. So Jesus would have been living in the first century of the common era and so say the first 30 years. And in those years we know about outside of the Bible, we have very little information about any of them. But in the case of Jesus, we have records. We don't have contemporary records. In other words, people who knew Jesus at the time didn't leave us any writings about him. But nonetheless, we do have sources of information far beyond what we do for most people.
- [06:19]
Megan Lewis
How much of a problem is the fact that we don't have contemporary records for Jesus? Obviously we, we'd all prefer for there to be some kind of census maybe that has his name and place of birth and family ties and all that kind of thing, but we don't. Is this a problem for ascertaining who he was and indeed whether he actually existed?
- [06:40]
Bart Ehrman
It's not so much a problem for whether he existed because of things we will get into once we get around to talking about those mythicists, but because we have so many records from so many independent sources that it's pretty clear he existed. I mean, and one of our sources is in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, who actually knew Jesus brother. So, you know, if Jesus didn't exist, you think his brother would know it. And Paul knows some of Jesus disciples and he just mentions them casually. He's not mentioning them in order to prove there was a Jesus. He's just, you know, he's mentioning them. And so it's not an Eyewitness Paul. Paul didn't know Jesus during his lifetime, but he knew people who did know Jesus. He met with them, he talked with them, spent time with them. And so that's one thing. But it's a very big problem that we don't have contemporary records if we want to know exactly what he said and did. Our primary sources of information are the Gospels of the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are written between 40 and 60 years after his death. And so they pose a lot of problems for scholars. But one thing I want to emphasize at the outset is that there are a lot of people who say that we simply can't trust them at all because they're in the Bible and you got to go outside the Bible. And for a historian, that's just nonsense. Matthew, Mark and Luke did not know they were writing the Bible. They weren't writing Scripture. They were writing accounts of Jesus that they had heard and read and that had been in circulation for years. That is both a plus and a minus. The plus is it means that there are all sorts of stories floating around about Jesus in all parts of lots of parts of the world by the time these guys are writing. And so it shows that there are independent lines of transmission going out with these oral traditions. And historians love to have independent lines of transmission about somebody because if they're independent lines, they haven't been based on each other. And so it helps getting information. And so you can't just discount the Gospels as historical sources because they're in the Bible. You have to treat them as historical sources written by people who did not imagine that they were writing Scripture, they were just writing their accounts. And so they're just as valuable as historical sources as any other historical source.
- [08:58]
Megan Lewis
So when we're looking at the Gospels, then how far can we trust them as historical sources? There are contradictions and obviously very legendary mythical elements to them. You think about the miracles that get reported. Matthew and Luke give two conflicting reports of Jesus birth. When we're faced with evidence like that, how do we decide which is closest to historical fact? What is maybe legend that built up around Jesus after his death?
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Bart Ehrman
Basically, since the Enlightenment, scholars have realized that the Gospels are not objective biographical accounts of what Jesus really said and did. For some of the reasons you're mentioning. When you compare the Gospels to each other, there are discrepancies and contradictions. A lot of them in minor details, lots and lots and minor details that are just flat out contradictions. But in other places that are really fairly major events about Jesus Life that are reported quite differently in ways that cannot be reconciled if you look at them closely enough. Most people don't look at them closely, of course. They just kind of read them over quickly and say, yeah, that's saying basically the same thing. And that's fine. But when you actually look at the details, they're quite different. These books are written 30, 40. Well, they're written 40, 50, 60 years later by people who did not know Jesus, who did not live in Israel, who didn't speak Jesus language, Aramaic. They were Greek speakers and they're basing their accounts on oral traditions, stories about Jesus that have been in circulation for many years. And you know, stories get changed when they get told and retold and retold and retold. Those are all the downsides of the Gospels. And your question is then, well, what do you do about it? I mean, how do you. Is there anything reliable there? And how do you know? And that, of course, is the big issue that scholars have wrestled with for many, many years.
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Megan Lewis
So one of the things that historians look for when they're trying to understand an historical event is multiple sources, like you said, independent streams of transmission. You've said that we do have these independent streams for Jesus existence. And I wanted to ask about the Gospels specifically. Given that Matthew and Luke are written using the Gospel of Mark as a base, do we count them as three distinct sources or are they more properly considered as a single witness?
- [11:10]
Bart Ehrman
That's a great question. And the answer is yes and yes. So the deal is that Matthew, Mark and Luke are very similar to each other. As you point out, the scholars have long called them the synoptic Gospels. Synoptic means to be seen together. And it's because they tell many of the same stories. Matthew, Mark and Luke. The stories are usually in the same sequence. First this happened, then this, and this and this. There are lots of changes too, but the basic skeleton is very much similar. And sometimes they tell them in the same words, word for word, the same. You'll have an account of Jesus doing something. You have a sentence that's just the same sentence in all three of them. Now, my students have trouble sometimes believing me when I tell them that if you have two sources that report something and they're word for word the same, then somebody's copying somebody. They don't believe me about that. And so I do this little exercise when I'm teaching this to my class. I'm teaching a New Testament class and I'm trying to explain why. Why it is the synoptic gospels have these similarities. And I say, yeah, somebody's gotta be copying somebody. They don't believe me. So what I do is I come to class one day when we're gonna talk about this, and I come in. I come in a little bit late to make sure everybody's there, and I. I start fussing around in front of the class. I take something out of my bag, and then I turn off the lights and turn back on. Then I mess around the computer. Then I put the books back in my bag, and I take off my coat and I put it back. I like doing stuff, and they're looking at me thinking, what. What's going on? And so after about three minutes of doing this, I say, okay, I want you to take out a pen, piece of paper, and write down everything you've just seen me do. So they write out their descriptions, okay? Like 300 people in this class, 350 people in this class. And I do this. And then I say, I'll take four volunteers here. And I just randomly pick up four papers and I start reading them. I said, we're going to do a synoptic comparison. We're going to see how many of these have the same sentence word for word. And you all out there, the other 350 of you, you know, see if you've got any of the sentences that's exactly like any of these. And I go through and I do a comparison, and they're all different, like my. You know, they'll often mention similar things about my taking some out of a bag or turning off the lights, but they never, ever have a sentence the same. And, you know, I've done this thing for over 30 years. I've never, ever had it where somebody gets it the same. Then. Then when I finish, I say, okay, now what would you say if I picked up two of these things and they had a whole paragraph that was word for word the same, and everybody said, oh, somebody cheated. I said, yeah, yeah, somebody had a copy else. Would you get it? I mean, if you got. I said, you know, and, you know, if you get the same thing word for word, how else could you explain it? And some guy in the back road invariably raises his hand, says, it's a miracle. Yeah, okay, it's a miracle. And I said, you know, actually, it's not. You know, even if somebody's copying something, it doesn't mean it's not a miracle. It could still be a miracle. I'm not precluding a miracle there. I'm just saying somebody copied somebody so with the Synoptic Gospel, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you get that, okay? You get those similarities. So isn't that just one source then? Doesn't that mean that if they're all copying the same thing, they're all the same source? And the answer is partly yes and partly no. It's partly yes because scholars since the 19th century have recognized that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources independently. They had access to a copy of Mark, and they built their Gospels off of the accounts found in Mark, but they also have other material not found in Mark. And so that means they didn't get it from Mark. If they didn't get from Mark, then they got it from an independent source. So some of the material in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark is word for word the same, like, you know, the Beatitude to the Lord's Prayer, very similar, you know, word for word in places. And so the thinking is that they got it from another source. Either Luke copied Matthew or Matthew copied Luke, or they got it from another source. And there are good reasons for thinking that in fact, they got it from another source that scholars have called Q. And so you have Mark and you have Q, and these are independent sources. But then Matthew has a lot of stories that are just found in Matthew, and Luke has a lot of stories just found in Luke. So they did get them from Mark and Q. So they got them from other sources. So these are all independent streams of tradition. Mark, Q and what they call M, Matthew's sources, and L, Luke's sources. And then you get the Gospel of John, which has a bunch of stories not found in any of them. Those are also independent sources. And then, then they're questioned about other gospels from outside the New Testament, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter. Are they getting all their stuff from the New Testament Gospels? No, there's a lot of stuff, and they're not in the New Testament Gospel. So you do get independent sources of information. And what you look for in these independent sources of information is the same kind of information you're not looking for word for word agreements, because that would show borrowing. Suppose you have sources, a bunch of sources where Jesus talks about the kingdom of God by using a parable about seeds. You get that a lot in different sources. That's independent attestation that Jesus probably talked about the coming kingdom of God by using parables about seeds. You know, it's not certain, but it makes it more probable the more independent sources you have that say something like that.
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Megan Lewis
I See? Thank you very much. So you mentioned earlier that the Gospels date to several decades after Jesus death. They don't always agree with each other, and some cases are a little bit light on the details. What can we say with any kind of certainty about the life of Jesus?
- [16:27]
Bart Ehrman
This is where the rubber really meets the road. Because what scholars do is the people who are really serious scholars on this, of whom there are many, many who have spent their entire lives just on this question. Smart people who can not just read the Greek of the New Testament, but they usually understand Aramaic and they know Hebrew for the Old Testament and they know scholarship in French and German and Italian. And like, they spend their lives studying all this stuff. Like this is what they study. And what scholars do is they look at a range. They basically go line by line through all of our sources, the Gospels in the New Testament, Gospels outside the New Testament, the things that Paul says, the things mentioned in other sources of various kinds. And they evaluate every possible datum. And they do this in order to try and establish both the basic contours of Jesus life, what he stood for, what he represented, what he basically preached, but also down to the details. Did he say this? Did he say that? Did he do this thing? Did he do that thing? And they apply a number of criteria that are comparable to what historians do for every field. I mean, anybody who's studying Thomas Jefferson does the same thing, or Julius Caesar or Charlemagne. You, you take the sources and you apply critical criteria to them. And so one of the criteria is the one that we mentioned just now, the independent attestation. But another one that's important for understanding historical Jesus is when you realize that the people telling stories about Jesus are telling these stories precisely because they're trying to proclaim something important about him. They tend to be Christians. If they say something that is really the kind of thing they'd want to preach. Anyway, you're not quite sure if that goes back to Jesus or not, because it may be somebody made this up in order to develop his own views. But if you got something that actually, man, nobody would make that up about Jesus because that, that doesn't make him look good or that that introduces a real problem for early Christians. Christians would not have wanted to invent that one. If you have something like that, then you think, yeah, well, okay, that one's probably, that probably is historical then, because nobody would have made it up. And so you have these various kinds of criteria that you would use for any historical figure that you use for Jesus. And when you do that, then the, you know, the question is, what can you say about him? There are some things that I would say, you know, 99% of everyone who studies this intently would, would agree on. I mean, basically, I mean, Jesus was from Galilee. He was of the northern part of what we think of as Israel. Came from a place, small town named Nazareth. He was lower class. He became a teacher. He left home to engage in an itinerant preaching ministry. He had people who followed him around who thought that he was a very important teacher, possibly a prophet, possibly a messiah. The last week of his life, he went to Jerusalem to proclaim his message and he got on the wrong side of the law and offended, apparently offended, Jewish authorities there and was turned over to Roman authorities who considered him a troublemaker and had him crucified for claiming to be the future king of the Jews. That much almost everybody would say. And there's a lot more things that people would say. But that basic structure, that basic structure is one that almost everybody would agree on.
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Megan Lewis
Is it odd that we don't have contemporary references to Jesus? So even if most people were illiterate, which I think is a well agreed fact, if there was an itinerant preacher wandering around the wilderness causing unrest, would we not expect the Roman authorities to write about him? Or is this our modern sensibilities of Jesus? Is this much of an important person? He must have been this much of an important person in the ancient world as well.
- [20:07]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I think that is a modern sensibility because it just kind of makes common sense to us that if somebody is a important figure, they'll make the newspapers and the newspapers will be around for centuries. And so it all makes sense to us. It didn't work that way in the ancient world. We don't have contemporary records about most anyone in the ancient world. I mean, you just think, for example, who would have been the most important Jewish figure? Well, let's say from the first century. The most important Jewish figure for us, for the first century, for historians, is the Jewish author Josephus. Josephus was a historian who was very involved in the Jewish uprising in 66 to 70 that ended up to the destruction of the temple. He was a leader of Jewish troops there. He ended up being captured by the Romans and eventually was made a court historian by the Roman emperor Vespasian. And he wrote a bunch of books that are our best sources of information about first century Judaism and for the history of Judaism in the period. He was a high upper class, elite aristocrat, very involved, very important in the history of Israel at The time who is our most important authority. He's never mentioned in contemporary sources, so. Or you think about Pontius Pilate. So Pontius Pilate would have been the most powerful figure in Jesus day in Judea. He was the governor for 10 years between 26 and 36 CE. Now, we do have a couple of sources from his time, but they're not written sources per se. We have one inscription that was discovered that refers to Pontius Pilate that was discovered in the 1960s, which is a stone slab in Caesarea. And so it does mention his name and says he was a prefect. And we do have some coins. But if you talk about, like, were other people writing about him? There's no written record of him in the first century at all. And he was the most important figure in Judea at the time. The idea that you don't have writings about Jesus should not be used as an argument about anything, because about whom do we have written records from Israel at the time? No one, basically. So that complicates matters. But scholars, of course, are fully cognizant of it. And so what scholars do is they take the records that we do have that come from later, which are similar to the records we have of other people. I mean, about Pontius Pilate. He finished his rule in 36 of the common era. And we have some references to him later by a Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt, Philo, who's writing about the same time as Paul, so probably about 20 years or so after Pilate's rule, and then by. By Josephus. And so once again, it's decades later about this most important person. So we do. We deal with understanding Pilate the way we deal with understanding Jesus. We look at our sources, we consider their biases. We see if they independently support one another, and then we render a judgment about what. What he probably said and did. And so far as we can tell.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. I think that's a wonderful summary of how we use ancient sources as best we can, even though they might not be the sources that we would like if we could wave a magic wand and just have whatever we needed.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, evangelicals get upset with me. Evangelical scholars get upset with me sometimes because they say, look, what would you want? You know, we've got these four Gospels and we got, you know, what do you want? I tell them in all seriousness, well, what we want are about a dozen sources written, you know, while Jesus was alive or right afterwards that are independent of each other that basically agree about what he said about what he did. Well, that's completely unreasonable. You asked me what I wanted, you
- [23:44]
Megan Lewis
didn't ask me what I like, what was possible. You asked me for my wish list.
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Bart Ehrman
I mean, it's hard for us today to establish what leading politicians actually said. I mean, are you watching MSNBC or Fox News? I mean, which, you know, and, and these are contemporary sources. The next day. And it's very difficult sometimes. I mean, if you have a recording that helps, not always those, it turns out, but if you're dealing with antiquity, there's a lot more uncertainty. And most historians live with the uncertainty when it comes to understanding Seneca, for example, or, or even Nero. But Christians don't like the uncertainty when it comes to Jesus. But we're in the same boat, only we're actually in a more difficult boat with Jesus. There's a lot we can say. There's absolutely a lot we can say, much more than the broad outline I just gave you that with relative certainty. And scholars can be evaluated what's more certain, what's less certain. But that kind of uncertainty just comes with the territory when you're dealing with the ancient world.
- [24:42]
Megan Lewis
Bart, thank you so much for answering my questions. We have some news. I think we spoke about it a couple of weeks ago. You have a new course or webinar, I can't remember which one. And the live recording is April 15th. Can you tell us a bit about that?
- [24:58]
Bart Ehrman
Right, yeah, April 15th. So this used to be sort of D day, tax day. Luckily it's on the weekend this time the lecture is going to be on the Rapture, the second coming of Jesus. And so the Rapture is this idea that's been around in evangelical Christian circles since the 1830s, not since biblical times, since the 1830s, that Jesus is coming back to take his followers out of the world before a seven year period of tribulation, of horrible, horrible suffering on earth when the Antichrist arises and then all catastrophes break out, that Jesus followers will be taken out of the world at the Rapture, so they don't have to experience that. This has been, it's been around evangelical circles since the 19th century, but it really started taking off in the 1890s. And today it's just common knowledge among evangelical Christians that this is going to happen. And an amazing number of people in our world believe it's going to happen and that it's going to happen soon. And so my lecture is going to be about that, about the fear among evangelicals since I was, before I was in college, but when I was in college the fear was, you will be left behind. You don't want to be left behind. That's the title of the lecture, will you be left behind A history of the Rapture. And so it's going to try to explain how you will not find the Rapture in the Bible, even in the verses that everybody says refers to the Rapture. I'm going to show they don't talk about a Rapture. People didn't believe in a rapture. For the vast majority of the Christian church, I'm going to explain where it came from and why it's not a biblical concept.
- [26:35]
Megan Lewis
And I have to say, given the conversations you and I have had about revelation, I would not want to be left behind either if this was an actual thing that was going to happen. So the webinar then is called will you be left left behind A history of the Rapture? You can sign up for the live recording, which is happening on April 15th, and the cost of that is $14.95. Even if you don't make it to the live recording, you can still access the uploaded recordings on Bart's website and you can learn more about that and sign up@www.barturman.com. left behind. Now we are going to have Bart's weekly update.
- [27:16]
Bart Ehrman
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings, and online course launches.
- [27:30]
Megan Lewis
So, Bart, what do you have for us this week?
- [27:33]
Bart Ehrman
Since my book on Armageddon came out, you know, a couple weeks ago, and so I'm, I'm still in the, in the midst of doing, doing a lot of podcast interviews for this. I've had some, some nice ones. I did, I did the Sam Harris podcast and I did Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which both of these are always great fun because they're fantastic interviewers. And now I still have a lot of those coming up. And so just about every day I'm doing some kind of podcast or another. It's a great fun because you get to talk about your book. It's very interesting, these different podcasts, because sometimes someone like Terry Gross will be all over it. She'll be, man, she'll be right on target. She's not a Christian, obviously, or a believer in this. And other people are really great interviews are, are Christians who are really into this, you know, and kind of know all about it. And then sometimes you get really interesting people who don't know anything about it. And so they Ask. It's a different set of questions and so it's, it's different every time and it's really interesting and you never really quite know what to expect. So yeah, so I'm, yeah, I still have some of those things coming up and so that's all good.
- [28:33]
Megan Lewis
That sounds like a lot of fun and also an awful lot of work.
- [28:37]
Bart Ehrman
It's not much work because I don't have to prepare. I wrote the book already.
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Megan Lewis
That's true. That's very true. Well, I'm glad that you're enjoying it at least. And we're going to go to questions from our listeners now.
- [28:52]
Bart Ehrman
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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Megan Lewis
okay, we have a nice selection of audience questions this week. I'm just going to jump right in so we can get through as many as we can. So question one. Suppose we only had the Gospel of Mark as a narrative, a narrative first century gospel and Paul's references to having met Jesus brother were not preserved. Would historical scholars be likely to conclude based on just Mark's gospel that Jesus
- [29:32]
Bart Ehrman
is a mythical figure, that he's a mythical figure? Probably not. I mean, I think if you have one lengthy biographical source for an ancient person that is far better than we have for any other ancient person and there's nothing particularly that would cause suspicion that the person's been made up in this one account. Historians would think that, you know, these miracles that are being narrated or the account of the resurrection are probably not historical, but they almost certainly would conclude there really was this person and they would try to figure out what it was. That's what we do with just about every other source. I mean, you know, we have, you know, when you have basically a single account of Apollonius of Tiana, people don't think somebody just made him up. They think that he existed and that you can say some things about him based on this one source. And so no, I don't think, I don't think people would consider Jesus to be a myth if we had only one source.
- [30:28]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. What do you think about John P. Mayer's hypothesis in A marginal Jew volume 2, that the deadline statements such as Mark 13:30 this generation shall not pass away until these things take place do not stem from the historical Jesus, but rather come from the early Christian community.
- [30:47]
Bart Ehrman
John Myers multi volume work on the historical Jesus is a major, major work by a Very serious scholar. He was a Roman Catholic priest. He died recently. But he's a very, very fine historical scholar. He and I disagree on a number of things. I think that Jesus himself did predict that the end was coming within his own generation. It's not just in Mark 13:30. It's the constant motif you get in his preaching about the coming end. And the thing that is striking is that we have evidence that a similar thing was preached by other apocalyptic Jews. His day it was preached, appears to have been preached by John the Baptist, his predecessor. It was certainly preached by the Apostle Paul, who came after him. It's in the Synoptic gospels. As I said, it's a belief of the Synoptic Gospels. It appears to be the belief of the earliest Christians. And so it's attested in the kinds of circles he ran around in before his ministry. And it's attested by his followers after his ministry. And his ministry is what connects the two, connects his predecessors with his followers. And so it would be very strange if he didn't predict it himself because everybody else around him was. And that can be documented. I think a lot of. A lot of Christians simply don't want to say, look, Jesus could not have said that because, you know, it didn't happen. But historians don't worry about that kind of thing, about whether a prediction comes true. They want to know whether somebody predicted it or not.
- [32:17]
Megan Lewis
Excellent, thank you. Next question. Did the historical Jesus have delusions of grandeur in thinking that he would be made king of the New kingdom? Or does this conviction somehow come from a place of compassion? Notwithstanding how difficult it is to discern historical figures, motivations? Is it still possible that Jesus was a decent person in light of his inflated claims about himself?
- [32:39]
Bart Ehrman
I'm not sure how many inflated claims Jesus made about himself. People do think in terms of the Gospel of John, where Jesus says things like I and the Father are one, or before Abraham was, I am. He makes very exalted claims about himself in John that he does not make in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In Matthew, Mark and Luke. If you just take our earliest Gospel Mark, Jesus doesn't say much at all about himself. He does say that he's going to go to Jerusalem and be rejected by the scribes and elders and be executed and then raised from the dead. But it's not clear that's what the historical Jesus said. In fact, we should have an episode on this. I don't think Jesus was predicting his death at all. I don't think he anticipated dying. But this is where the Idea of grandeur comes in because I do think that Jesus imagined that he was going to be the one who was appointed to be the ruler of the coming kingdom. He believed the kingdom was going to come within this generation, that a heavenly figure was going to come in judgment against the earth and was going to re establish Israel as a sovereign state and that Jesus would be made the king. So that's what Jesus meant, I think, when he suggested or maybe even told his disciples that he was the Messiah. So is that a vision of grandeur? I suppose it is. But I don't think that we can use our psychological categories from today to understand somebody 2000 years ago in a completely different historical context and ideological context. Jesus was an apocalypticist, like other apocalypticists who thought God was going to intervene soon and destroy the powers of evil. And if you have people on the street corner today saying, you know, the end is near and you know that, and predicting exactly what's going to happen, you'd say, yeah, well okay, that person's nuts. But you wouldn't say that about ancient apocalyptics thinkers and probably shouldn't say it about modern thinkers either. They have, they have their own ideologies. You know, we all have ideologies that are crazy. In 200 years people are going to think that almost everything we think is crazy. But it doesn't mean that we're crazy. You know, I do think that Jesus had apocalyptic hopes and expectations. I think they were wrong. I don't know whether he had visions of grandeur because there's no way for me whether, you know, like he was kind of a little bit extreme. There's no way for me to do it. Psychoanalytical analysis, and I don't think it's the most, most helpful way to try and do history is to try and psychoanalyze somebody rather than try to understand what they mean in their own context.
- [35:05]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Are there any non canonical gospels claiming to be written by Jesus? And if not, why not?
- [35:12]
Bart Ehrman
So a couple things about Jesus writing in the New Testament. Jesus is only said to be able to read once in the New Testament in Luke chapter four. It's the only place Jesus reads. And so the question is, was he literate? Jesus isn't said to write anything in the Gospels except for that non original story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery where he writes on the ground. But that was added by a scribe. It wasn't originally in the Gospels. There is one place where Jesus writes in the New Testament, it's in Revelation chapters two and Three, but he doesn't put pen to papyrus. He dictates letters to John of Patmos, who writes them. That was considered writing in the ancient world. And so the question is, are there any non canonical accounts of Jesus writing? There's only one, but there is one that nobody knows about except for scholars. There's a correspondence with a king of Edessa named Abgar. This is an apocryphal account quoted in Eusebius. So Eusebius is a church historian from the 4th century, and he reports that the king of Edessa, Abgar, was very ill and during Jesus life. And he wrote Jesus a letter saying, you know, I'm very ill, I understand that you can heal people, would you please come and heal me? And Jesus writes, Jesus writes him a letter back and says, sorry. Basically the basic line, sorry, I've got other things on my hands, I gotta go get crucified, you know, so he's, he's gotta go be executed, so he can't come. Sorry, but after I die, I'll send, I'll send one of my followers. And then you have the account of Thomas actually going to Odessa and healing the king and converting the entire city. So that's the only writing we have from Jesus hands. Why don't we have gospels written by Jesus? I think the gospels that were in circulation were attributed to his followers. And it was just kind of thought that they're telling the accounts. There's no reason to make up something about Jesus writing something. It'd be interesting if we did find something like that, but you know, we don't have it yet.
- [37:12]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. And our last question for today. Would you consider the Book of Ezekiel an early example of an apocalypse, or Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy a late revival of the genre? In other words, do either or both of these works share a substantive continuity with the Book of Revelation?
- [37:28]
Bart Ehrman
I'd say kind of. So Ezekiel is not exactly an apocalyptic text, although you might consider it as a text that could be used by later apocalypticists. I don't want to get too deeply into the weeds here, but apocalyptic texts generally are texts that are using high level symbolism in visions in order to explain the realities of Earth that can't be explained otherwise by simple means. Ezekiel is kind of like that. You get these visions in Ezekiel, very, very bizarre visions that are of equal weirdness to what you get in Revelation and other places. And the Book of Revelation, of course used. The author of Revelation, used Ezekiel. But Ezekiel doesn't have the idea that apocalypses tend to have that, you got these, these powers of good and evil that are in combat with each other. Ezekiel's still very much in the Israelite tradition that God is sovereign and he's mysterious, but he doesn't have like a devil that he's fighting or powers of evil. God is causing the punishment against the Israelites. And if Israelites will repent, God will return them to his favor. Apocalyptic texts tend to emphasize not that God's punishing his people, but the forces of evil are punishing his people. The first place you get that in the Old Testament, something like that apocalyptic version view is in the Book of Daniel, chapter seven through 12, the last book of the, of the Hebrew Bible to be written. Dante, in a sense. So the thing with Dante is that he's just in terms of form, describing a journey, a guided tour of the Inferno and of, of Purgatory and the blessed realms. And so that idea of a journey to heaven and hell is found in early Christian apocalyptic traditions. My recent book, Journeys to Heaven and Hell, is about this, about the early Christian forerunners of Dante. The Book of Revelation is kind of like that, but not quite. The one that starts really kicking in is the apocalypse of Peter in the second century. And then you get an apocalypse of Paul and you get various journey narratives where somebody sees the realms of the dead and describes them as a motivation for how people ought to live now. And so that's what my book is about. And trying to situate those journeys in Christianity in light of Greek, Roman and Jewish similar texts, going back to Homer's Odyssey and Aeneid's Virgil's Aeneid, and then going up into other Christian other texts. So Dante's more in that line. Scholars call those kinds of texts katabasis texts. Katabasis means going down. And so Odysseus goes down into Hades and it's. You go into the other world. And Dante is more in that line than directly in the line of apocalypses.
- [40:19]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much. And before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about and where people could find more if they're interested in this topic?
- [40:28]
Bart Ehrman
So there are, there are questions about how do we know what Jesus really said and did. Very deep and probing questions as scholars have long asked. Historians who work on the historical Jesus almost, almost never, ever say, well, there's no such man. There was a man. And we have better sources for Jesus than for almost anybody in his day. But they are still highly problematic. They're difficult to establish the details of Jesus life. And so scholars work on this by applying various criteria to our surviving sources to try and understand the life of Jesus. And the basic contours are agreed on by most scholars with lots and lots of differences once you get beyond the very broad scope. But we can certainly say that Jesus existed and that he was a Jew from Galilee who was a preacher who had disciples and ended up making a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover feast where he was arrested and crucified. That much is pretty certain. The details, though, are where it gets murky.
- [41:28]
Megan Lewis
And you've written a book or two about this, haven't you?
- [41:31]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so my first book for a popular audience was about this Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet of the new millennium. Another book that takes what I thought was a really pretty interesting approach is called Jesus before the Gospels, where I studied memory. What do we know about memory? How does memory work? Do people remember things? Do they misremember things? Do they come up with false memories and how that affects the oral traditions about Jesus? Did everybody remember things accurately in the ancient world because people couldn't write? Or is that just a modern myth that oral cultures pass on their traditions accurately? And I apply that to the traditions of Jesus to figure out what we can say he really said and did, given the problems of memory and oral traditions.
- [42:13]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. So there's some reading recommendations for those of you in the audience who are interested in finding out more. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. Remember also that you can use the Quote MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com Ms. Quoting Jesus will be back next week. Thank you everyone, and goodbye.
- [42:42]
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.