← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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. Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. The textual variations exist in the manuscripts of the New Testament. It's probably not new information for anyone, especially if you're watching this podcast or listening to this podcast, but how do these variations change how the Gospels are understood and the message that they convey? Why describes make these changes and how much of an impact could small changes have on the theology espoused? We're going to take a closer look at variations found in the Gospel of Luke and see exactly how influential a few small words can we are both still out of the country, so this is filmed at some point in the past, but we will be back on our regular recording schedule soon. But you're still in the UK in the future when this is airing. But how are you today when we are recording in the present?
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A
Yeah, I'm doing well. My grading is finished, my grades are turned in, and I am now at liberty to do what, you know, I do most of my life, which is watch soaps and eat bonbons.
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B
Having the grades turned in must be a wonderful feeling. I do not believe for one second that you're watching soaps and eating bonbons.
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A
I never have done that. But yeah, I keep noticing. Maybe I should. But no, I've got it's really nice to have, as we've said a number of times, you know, research scholars who are serious about the work don't ever really get any time off. But I did take a day and that's nice. And we're, we have travel plans lined up so. But it's nice to have time to be thinking about topics and reflecting deeply on what I'm reading and what I want to be writing about without having administrative chores and department meetings and counseling sessions with students and, you know, preparing lectures and that kind of thing. So it's, it's. This is a good time, Good time. How about how you, how are you in your present?
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B
Good, actually. Yeah, very good. Everyone is, is healthy and happy. The end of school is fast approaching and the children are all excited about that. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them apart from going to the ARL of Skye for a month. So they may not be so happy when we get home again and they realize that actually I have to keep working and I'm not just going to be entertaining them all the time. But for now they are excited and they're happy and everyone's very much looking forward to our trip. So, yeah, it's a good time.
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A
No, it all, it all sounds great. You know, it's what. When I was a kid, most kids didn't have a mother that worked full time, but I did. My mom was a, was, was a full time worker plus doing everything in the house. And so I didn't get, you know, seriously damaged by that. Now that's what happens. And so kids, yeah, kids are great.
- [03:44]
B
My mum was similar. She was a single parent for a fair few years. But I have very vivid memories as a child of essentially just being thrown out of the house at the beginning of the day in the summer. And we lived in a really rural area. So we just kind of, and wander around in a field somewhere
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A
for a
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B
few hours and then come back and eat some food and go back out again.
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A
You know, Sarah and I talk about this all the time. You know, we used to just be outside all day long, just running around doing. And kids, just, to some extent, they can't do that. And a lot of times they choose not to do that because they've got too much social media to worry about. We had none.
- [04:22]
B
Yes. So we should get to Luke. And I think regular listeners will probably know the drill by now. But can you orient us in terms of the textual evidence we have for the Gospel of Luke? When and where do scholars think the original was written and do we have the original manuscript?
- [04:40]
A
Right, so it's important to keep repeating this information because people, some people haven't heard it and the people who have heard it need to be reminded of it. The Gospel of Luke was probably written about 50 years after Jesus death or so sometime in the 80s. We don't have the copy that Luke made when Luke wrote it out by hand. We don't have that thing. It got copied and then the copy got copied. Then the copy of the copy got copied and it went on like that. We don't have a copy of Luke, and it's not a complete copy. But the copy, the earliest, relatively like, has big chunks of it, is from around the year 200. And so it was written, you know, 120 years copied. 120 years or so after the original Luke was first put into circulation. We don't have a complete copy of Luke until the. Toward the end of the 4th century. So probably about 300 years after that, we start getting more copies. The vast majority of our hundreds of copies of Luke come from the later Middle Ages, so many centuries after Luke. One of the many tasks scholars have is trying to figure out, well, we got these copies, you know, and you can compare them with one another. And this is worded differently, and that's worded differently. And most of the times it doesn't matter. But like, sometimes it really matters that how do we know what Luke wrote and what do we know about how readers read it? Because readers read things other than Luke wrote. And so it's interesting to know what Luke wrote. It's interesting to know what readers read throughout history. So that's the field of textual criticism. Most people don't understand. It's a technical term. Textual criticism does not refer to how you interpret texts. How do you understand texts, how do you put texts in relationship with each other, how do you find contradictions in texts? It's none of that, textual criticism, not just in the New Testament, but for the Hebrew Bible, for Shakespeare, for Milton, for Dickens, anything. Textual criticism is the attempt to figure out what the author originally wrote and seeing how it got changed. That's the field that I did my. Both my Master's and my PhD specializing in. It's the field I did my first 20 years of research in as a research scholar before I started writing books for general audiences. And so it's something I'm really deeply, deeply interested in for Luke.
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B
Do we have textual witnesses apart from the Greek manuscripts?
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A
Oh, so this is. Yeah, this is a really good question because it's not something I talk enough about and many people don't understand what the situation is when you have an ancient book like this. This is true of all the books of the New Testament and other books as well. If you want to know what the author wrote, your primary evidence would be the Greek manuscripts, if it's written originally in Greek. And so you want to see how it'd been copied over the years. But we have two other sources of information that can help us know what the author wrote. One is a book like Luke was translated into other languages as Christianity spread throughout the Roman world. And so Luke got translated into Latin, for example, probably in the second century, it got translated into Syriac, the language of Syria, where Christianity was very important. Probably in the second century, again, it got translated into Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language. Probably in the second century later, it got translated into Gothic and Armenian and Old Church Slavonic. And there are a whole range of languages, Ethiopic, that it got translated into. We don't have the original copies of any of those translations, but you can study the surviving copies of those translations to try and reconstruct the oldest form of that translation. And that oldest form of the translation was based on a Greek copy. So in theory, if you can reconstruct what the oldest form of the Syriac or Latin text is, in theory, you're talking about something that came out of a second century Greek manuscript. And so even if you don't have a second century Greek manuscript, you may in theory know what at least some Greek manuscripts looked like because of these later translations. So the translations are called versions, and so these various versions. And there are text critics who then are expert in each of these languages, who work on the manuscripts of Luke in these languages. In addition to that. So you've got the Greek manuscripts, you've got the versions, various kinds with their own manuscripts. In addition to that, you have church fathers who quote these books of the New Testament. And so you have church fathers already in the second century who are quoting the Gospel of Luke. If somebody is quoting the Gospel of Luke, if they're quoting it from a manuscript they've got in front of them, then you could, in theory, look at their quotation. You don't have their manuscript, but if you have their quotation, then you can figure out how that verse was worded in the manuscript that was available to that person. Okay, so that if you have Justin Martyr, say, in the year 150, quoting a passage from, say, Luke chapter three, then you can see how Justin quotes the passage to see if it lines up with any of the Greek manuscripts that have different wordings. So this verse maybe is worded in three different ways in different Greek manuscripts. And the way Justin quotes it is just like one of those ways that would show that even though these Greek manuscripts are later, the ones that contain this particular form of the reading was available to Justin around the year 150. See what I'm saying, the problem is we don't have the original copies of Justin, so you have to reconstruct. It gets really down there in the weeds. And man, when I was a graduate student, I just ate this up. I thought, this is the most fantastic detective story you could find. It's just digging through all this evidence.
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B
I was going to say, it's like being a detective.
- [10:35]
A
Oh, God, it's so much fun. And most New Testament scholars think. Think that this is completely boring and uninteresting. All of my friends in graduate school made fun of me because I was really interested in this stuff. And I'm telling you, I was so interested in it. And I said, yeah, you guys don't even know what you're talking about. This is great. They said, oh, my God, that's so detailed. So who wants to do all that technical stuff? I do.
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B
I'm glad someone does.
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A
Yeah, exactly. That's. That's what they always say. I'm glad someone does it because I don't want to do it, but it ends up being really important. I'll tell you, part of the thing with my career is that when I started out, like other nerd manuscript nerds like me, I started out, all I wanted to do was to compare manuscripts to each other, to see their differences. But then I developed, you know, I really wanted to find out what the original text was. And so I had to figure out ways of doing that. And then I started realizing these changes really matter. And I think textual critics had not done a very good job for most of recorded history in trying to show why these differences really, really matter. And so a lot of my career in textual criticism has been dealing with this issue. Why does it matter? And turns out it matters a lot.
- [11:50]
B
When we're looking at textual variations between the different manuscripts, how much of a change are we talking about? Is it the deletion of entire paragraphs are like just little small words changed here and there? What kind of thing are you at?
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A
So with the entire New Testament, we have over 5,600 manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, which are either complete copies. Just take the Gospel of Luke. You got hundreds and hundreds of copies of the Gospel of Luke in Greek. Some of them are complete from beginning to end, the whole thing. Some of them are missing parts, some are just little fragments. The size of a credit card is all we have left of that manuscript. And so you have all these hundreds of manuscripts within the New Testament. These manuscripts have about somewhere between 400 and 500,000 differences among these manuscripts. And that's Absolutely factual. But most of the differences don't matter much. So we're not talking about scribes who write Luke and change it so much that it reads like Dickens. Great Expectations. It's not like that they're trying to copy a text. Most of the time, scribes are just trying to copy a text and they'll make mistakes. Like they'll misspell a word, they'll leave out a word, they'll leave out a line, they'll leave out a letter. Sometimes they'll add something. Like they'll copy the same line twice, or they'll copy the same word twice, or they'll just inadvertently add something. Like they're copying Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer and Matthew has a longer version of the Lord's Prayer. And where they're copying Luke, they'll just inadvertently just add Matthews, or they'll intentionally say, well, he left some lines out, and they'll add Matthews. And so people start adding things, they start omitting things, and sometimes they just change the words. They just like it says this and they change it to say that. Sometimes inadvertently, sometimes probably on purpose. And so those are the kinds of changes you don't normally get, huge chunks of things changing radically. You do sometimes. The story of the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John was added on. It wasn't originally there. Mark's last 12 verses, where Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, were not originally there. The doctrine of the Trinity that was inserted into First John chapter 5, was not originally there. So there are big things. Most of them are small things. But people come to realize that sometimes these small things really change everything.
- [14:22]
B
And I think that's. That's what we're going to spend some time looking at. We've got some specific variants that we want to go through and how they change the meaning both of the passage and of the Gospel of Luke as a whole. So first we're going to look at a couple of passages that talk about Jesus parentage, which is Luke 2:33, 48 and Luke 3:22. Most modern Christian denominations teach that Jesus was the literal son of God born of a virgin. But the earliest view appears to be that he was a mortal man who was adopted by God at some point later in his life. How do the passages, those two passages in Luke and the variations associated with them affect that particular argument?
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A
Luke is interesting because I'll start with chapters one and two. You have the account of Jesus being born to Mary, and she's explicitly said to be A virgin. The issue with the entire gospel story in Luke and in all the other gospels is that the author is recording stories that he's read or heard before. He wasn't there when these things were happening to Mary, you know, and so he's, he's heard stories about them, but he's heard different stories from different sources. And sometimes when you combine things you've heard from different sources, you end up with differences that you may not even. It doesn't even occur to you that, like, oh wait, that doesn't really fit very well. It's kind of what happens with this, because in just. I've got my text in front of me. And just in chapter in Luke 2. 33, this is the incident where after Jesus is born, he's taken to the temple by his parents. And there's a man in there named Simeon who realizes that this is the son of God who's being brought to the temple. He's an infant still. And Simeon recognizes him and sings out a kind of a song of praise. And after that we're told in chapter two, verse 33, Luke says, and that when Joseph and Mary hear this, it says, and his father and mother marveled at what was said. His father, wait a second. And so most readers would pass by that, not think anything of it. But it's very interesting that in some manuscripts, in fact, in most manuscripts, the majority of manuscripts change his father to Joseph, Joseph and his mother marveled. This is the kind of thing where you'd ask, well, why would a scribe want to change? That was because Luke is emphasized and the scribes believe that Joseph is not the father. That's the whole point. And you get a similar thing later when Jesus is a 12 year old in the temple. Luke is the only gospel that records an event in Jesus life prior to his baptism, after the birth narrative and before his baptism. In Luke chapter two, you have the account of Jesus as a 12 year old who goes with his family to Jerusalem for a Passover feast. And there's a group of people go, there's a caravan that goes, they celebrate the feast. Then they all pack up and the caravan goes back. And three days later his parents realize, wait a second, where's Jesus? Oh my God, we lost Jesus.
- [17:30]
B
We had a kid around here somewhere.
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A
I think you've lost the Son of God. It's like, this is not good. And so, so they go back and they go back to Jerusalem to try and find him. They search for three days. So it's not an accident that he's Gone for three days and then reappears. Okay, this is foreshadowing the resurrection narrative. They find him in the temple. His mother finds him in the temple, arguing with her, talking with the Jewish leaders about the law. And she's relieved, but she upbraids him. She says, why are you here? Your father and I have been looking all over for you 248. And scribes changed it to things like, we have been looking all over for you so that she doesn't call him, doesn't call Joseph the father. You know, it's just a little word. But it's interesting why scribes are changing it because, you know, if it's really Joseph in this story, Joseph appears to be the father, and that's problematic if you believe in the virgin birth.
- [18:24]
B
How do we know that those little tiny changes are not actually original to the text and that the father was not added later?
- [18:33]
A
Yeah, that is the question that scholars have to wrestle with. And in some places where there are these changes, there are, you know, there are dozens and dozens of changes just in these first two chapters in the different manuscripts. And at every point, you know that somebody has changed it, either accidentally or on purpose, because you've got different forms of attack. So somebody has to have changed it. So that's not debated. Then the debate is, well, which was the original text and which was the change? Scholars have developed a large number of criteria. It really goes back to the 18th century when they got serious about this. Scholars who were very pious Christians, who were very devoted Christians, who wanted to know what the text said because they considered it the word of God, developed ways of figuring out what it says. And so the basic idea is that you look at what kind of manuscripts are in support for one reading or another. Do the oldest manuscripts all have one reading, and then later manuscripts started having something else that would tell you something. Do you have manuscripts from various parts of the world that all have the same reading that's in the old manuscripts? If it's from various parts of the world, then it was widely spread. If it's just in, like, Egypt, you only get this reading. Maybe some Egyptian scribes changed it. And it's not the oldest reading. You look at things about the manuscripts. Some manuscripts are better than others. Some you can just tell, you know, they're just copied better. So you look for the best manuscripts, the oldest manuscripts, etc. But you also look for which of these two ways of wording it is something that the author is likely to have written based on what you know about his Writing style, his religious views, his theological views, his understanding of Jesus, his understanding of God. Which one conforms with his way of normally saying things is one question. And if something conforms and another reading doesn't conform, then probably the one that conforms is more likely to be something he wrote. But you also try to ask, this is where it gets tricky and really interesting. If you've got two forms of the text, one says this, one says that, which one would ascribe, have more likely liked? Which one would a scribe have preferred? Because if you have a reading that a scribe would have preferred, that's the one he's more likely to have created. If you got a reading that the scribe would not have preferred, he probably wouldn't have created that. So this was a criterion that was developed in the 18th century by a very devoted Christian theologian who's trying to named Johannes Bengel, who wanted to know what the original text was. And the, the criterion is that the more difficult reading is to be preferred. The reading that's harder. Harder. Like it's like grammatically problematic or it's theologically problematic, or there's something that makes a scribe say, whoa, whoa, wait a second, that's the one that's probably original because that's the one the scribe would want to change. Okay, so it's not an ironclad rule, but as it turns out, usually the one that is the one that's harder, that is like scribes would prefer not to have. Most of the time it's in the earliest manuscripts too. And so you look for it like you look for things that. And often it's coincides better with the author's style. And so, so you look at all this stuff, so you have these big arguments, you write an entire article on this one verse about this word, right? And so. But in this case, there's not a lot of debate about it. Scribes almost certainly changed the word father to the word Joseph because of the problem with the virgin birth and because internally, you know, she said to be a virgin. Now you're talking about her father, his father. Well, scribes are going to change that. And it's also in the earliest manuscripts. And so that's how you do it.
- [22:12]
B
I see. Thank you. Moving on to another example. In Luke, we look at the idea of atonement, that Jesus died for the sins of humanity, which again, another central concept to Christianity as we know it today. But not a central theme in Luke's Gospel, and possibly not even there at all to begin with. Luke 22, 19, 20 contains the last Supper speech is relatively well known in which Jesus says that his body will be broken for you and his blood will be shed for you. Can you talk about the two versions we have of that Last Supper scene from Luke and why you think that this language may not have been there originally?
- [22:51]
A
Yeah, this is a little bit more complicated and it's not as simple to solve. And there are debates among scholars, among experts about this passage. So it's the passage at the Last Supper, Jesus is going to be betrayed after this meal, and he's going to be handed over to the authorities and he'll be crucified. And at the last meal, he indicates that his body is going to be broken and his blood is going to be shed for the sake of others. This is a passage that Luke. Luke had copied Mark. So scholars are pretty convinced that Mark was one of the sources for the Gospel of Luke and including this Last Supper passage, where in Mark's Gospel it says, Jesus took bread at the Last Supper. He took it and said, this is my body. He took a cup. He said, this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many. So he's giving his body and his blood for many. In Mark's Gospel. Gospel. So in Luke's Gospel, it's done differently. At the Last Supper, Jesus is eating with his disciples. First he takes the cup before he takes the bread. And he says, take this, Divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that I won't drink of it again until the kingdom of God comes. Then he takes bread and he gives thanks. He breaks it, and he says, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Likewise, the cup after supper saying, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. So he's saying that his body is given for you. The cup is the new covenant, My blood poured out for you. So he gives the cup, then he gives the bread, then he gives the cup again. There are old manuscripts of Luke, ancient manuscripts that omit about half of that in these old manuscripts. What happens in Luke is that he gives the cup. He says, take this, divide it among yourselves. Then he gives them the bread. And he says, take this and divide it among yourselves. But he does not say, this is given for you. This is the bread given. My body given for you. And he doesn't say, this cup is my blood being poured out for you. That verse and a half is missing from one very old Greek manuscript and several old Latin manuscripts. And so the question is, did that Originally occur in Luke or not. Without getting too far into the weeds, here's the deal. Mark's gospel that Luke is based on understands, as does say, the apostle Paul, that Jesus death brought an atonement for sins. What that means is that it's Jesus death that makes a person right with God. That Jesus died for others, that his death somehow reconciles the person with God. You find this repeated in Mark's gospel. For example, Mark 10:45, Jesus says that he, the Son of man, came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. When Luke copied Mark, he left out that verse. Interesting. Why would he do that when Jesus is dying on the cross? In Mark's Gospel, he dies. The second he dies, the curtain in the temple is ripped in half. That is almost always taken to show that Jesus death now has given people access to God who lived behind the curtain in the holy of holies. In the temple. God lives in the holy of holies. In the temple. That's where he dwells on earth. Nobody can go in there except for the high priest on the day of atonement to make atonement for sins. Once a year, Jesus dies and the curtain rips so that now people have direct access through God through the ultimate atonement in Mark. Luke changes that. In Luke, the curtain rips in half before Jesus dies. So it's no longer a sign of atonement because the death hasn't happened yet. Luke has a different symbolic significance for the ripping of the curtain. Both of these places. He's gotten rid of Jesus death being an atonement. Luke also wrote the book of Acts in the New Testament. And the apostles in the book of Acts preach how Christ brings salvation. And they never talk about atonement. What happens in Luke is God wants people to repent of their sins. And when they repent of their sins, he forgives them. Forgiveness is different from atonement. So here's how I explain to my student. Okay. You, Megan, you owe me a thousand bucks for something, right? And time for you to pay. You don't got the thousand bucks. So a couple ways we could deal with this. One is you could convince a friend of yours or your mother or somebody to pay me the thousand bucks. Then I'll say, okay, fine, great. Okay, done. Someone else paid for you. Or I could just say, ah, forget about it. Don't worry about the thousand bucks. I forgive you the debt. Forget it. The first case is atonement. Somebody pays the price. The other is forgiveness. Nobody has to pay the price. Mark has a doctrine of atonement. Christ has to die for you. Luke has a doctrine of forgiveness. When the apostles preach how Jesus saves you, you repent and God will forgive you. Nothing about atonement that's consistent in Luke and Acts except this verse and a half at the Last Supper.
- [28:18]
B
Interesting.
- [28:19]
A
If these verses are original, then for some reason Luke included a passage on atonement where everywhere else he got rid of it, or scribes added it because they wanted atonement in Luke. That's the debate.
- [28:32]
B
It seems intuitive to me, at least, that this was probably added back in. Are there academics who disagree and think that Luke originally preserved this?
- [28:42]
A
Yeah, but it's a complicated argument. Part of it is which would a scribe want to put in? Part of it is what would Luke have written? And it's interesting. Interesting if you put it in hardest reading as well. Hardest reading, but also it's hard. It's hard for another reason, because if you leave it in. In the Eucharist meal that the Christians celebrate, you know, they have the bread, then they have the cup, or, you know, they have these two elements, and it's imitating the Last Supper. But you put these verses in, then you've got two cups, cup, bread, cup. That doesn't make sense. And so all sorts of arguments dealing with it. I don't think they were originally there. I think they were added by a scribe.
- [29:16]
B
Interesting. But it's a relatively small change that significantly changes the theology of that section.
- [29:23]
A
So Luke and Acts together make up a fourth of the New Testament. And without this verse and a half, there is no doctrine of atonement in Luke, Acts that's substantial, that's rather significant. So it doesn't just change the passage, it changes this entire theology.
- [29:39]
B
So, final example, Luke 22:43-44 describes Jesus agony prior to his crucifixion. He sweats blood and has to be comforted by an angel. What theological maybe arguments can be made against it being original to the text of Luke?
- [29:56]
A
This is where we get the idea of sweating blood from. This is like the original reference to it. The text is a little bit tricky. It says that he was in deep agony and he's sweating drops as if of blood, and an angel came to comfort him. This is after the supper in Luke. He goes out to pray and he knows that he has to be crucified. And he. And so he goes to pray. And this is when this episode happens. But it's missing in some of our oldest and best manuscripts. So is it original or not, in this particular case, there's a different issue going on. Luke has not only rid Mark of the atonement, he's also surprisingly rid Mark of the idea that Jesus was in anguish going to his death. Well, Luke's narrative of Jesus death is sometimes called a passionless passion. It's a passion narrative about his suffering. But he doesn't seem to suffer much. And so if you just take this passage, for example, you just compare it to Mark in detail. You look at what Mark says and what Luke says word for word. Mark says that Jesus goes to the garden of Gethsemane, and it says that he is in deep agony. Luke leaves that out. Jesus says to his disciples in Mark, my soul is troubled unto death. Luke leaves that out in Mark. Jesus goes off to pray by himself, and he falls on his face to pray. Luke has him kneel down. In Mark, Jesus prays three times that God will take away this cup from him. In Luke, he prays once with the preface, as if you're willing, you go through this. And like everything indicating agony has been taken out. And at the crucifixion scene, it's even more stressed. Jesus is not in agony. In Luke, he has a conversation with women on the road. Unlike Mark, he's being nailed to the cross. And he prays, father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. Not in Mark, instead of crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As in Mark, he says, father, into your hands I commit my spirit. I mean, it's just one thing after the other. There's the agony's taken out, except for the bloody sweat. So when Jesus in with the addition of these verses, of the bloody sweat, without these verses, Jesus goes from the disciples, he takes his knees and he says, father, if it's your will, take this away from me. He gets up from his knees, he goes back to his disciples, and it's just like, you know, there's no agony here. With this, though he's in deep agony. And the question is, if Luke took out the agony everywhere else, why would he add it in here? And if he added in here, why is it missing from the oldest and best manuscripts and that kind of thing? And so scholars debate this passage, but I am firmly of the judgment that they're not original even in translations. Both of these passages that we've just talked about are debated enough that many modern translations will maybe include them with a footnote or maybe put them in brackets with a footnote or Just leave them out and put them in the footnote. Whereas many other changes, you know, they just say, okay, this is probably the original, but in this case it matters. Jesus, agonizing or not, are there any
- [33:08]
B
literary features that suggest that this particular bit is, was inserted later?
- [33:13]
A
I think it's my first year in graduate school. I was taking a class on the Gospel of Luke, sitting next to my buddy in the program, Mark. So Mark Plunkett is a, you know, another first year student. So we're sitting next to each other's Gospel. And so he reads a paper on this passage where he points out that the passage is structured with a particular literary feature that people hadn't noticed before. And he presents this paper to our seminar and he shows that it's. It's called a chiasmus. A chiasmus is this literary structure where you have a statement, then a second statement, then a third statement, a fourth statement, and then the fifth statement is just like the third statement. And the sixth statement is just like the second statement. And the first statement is just like the seventh statement is just like the first statement. And so they called it chiasmus because a chiasmus is an X, goes like an X, half of an X. So that's a literary structure that sometimes Greek authors would use. You've got this chiasmus here. Jesus tells the disciples, pray so that you not enter into temptation. He leaves them, he kneels and he prays, gets up from kneeling, he returns to them and he says the same thing again. Pray that you not enter into temptation. Okay, so it's an exact chiasmus. So my friend Mark Pleckett read this paper and he sat down, they started talking about something else in the semi turnover, said that solves the textual problem. And he said, what textual problem? I said, the bloody sweat. Because of the bloody sweats in there, it ruins the chiasmus. And so we, the two of us wrote an article. It's the first article I wrote on the New Testament. The two of us wrote an article that got published in the. In a journal, arguing that this thing was added later by scribes and that the chiasmus was one of the reasons for thinking.
- [34:51]
B
So why would later scribes have added this back in? What did Jesus agony depict? That they wanted to be in Luke.
- [35:00]
A
So the chiasmus was Mark's discovery. And the answer to this one was my discovery. I decided I'm going to see what church fathers quote this passage and how they quote it. There are three church fathers from the second Christian century who Quote the passage of the bloody sweat, where, you know, Jesus is nagging, he's sweating blood and so to say, and an angel comes to visit him. Justin, Irenaeus and Hippolytus. Okay, so I look at these. All three of them use this passage precisely to show that Jesus was not just a divine being, but was fully human in every way. They are countering what's called a docetic Christology. A docetic Christology is a Christology that understands Christ as somebody who only appeared to be human, but wasn't really human. What we argued in that, and as I argued in later publications too, is that what happened was that the scribes were wanted to insist on Jesus humanity, where they weren't seeing a lot of this in this passage in Luke, where he's not suffering at all. And so they added a passage of him in agony precisely to show that he was fully human, which is how these earliest church fathers who quote it use it. So I think their use of it shows something about the motivation for inserting it.
- [36:20]
B
Interesting. And Jesus physicality is kind of emphasized at the end of Luke as well, when he's taken up into heaven right after his resurrection. But then in Acts, his ascension doesn't happen until 40 days after the resurrection. What is exactly going on there?
- [36:39]
A
Well, this is another really confusing one that scholars can't agree on. The last part of Luke, Luke, Jesus dies. He's buried. He's raised from the dead. He appears to his disciples and he takes them out at the very end, the last few verses in verse 50, chapter 24, verse 50, he takes. He takes the disciples outside of Jerusalem and to the city of Bethany, and he blesses them. And after he blesses them, it says that he went up to heaven and they go back to Jerusalem worshiping him. And they stay in Jerusalem for a long time. And when you get to the book of Acts written by the same author, Luke is the first volume, Acts is the second volume. We don't know how much time there was between writing the first and the second. But when you read Luke in the Gospel of Luke, chapter one, it starts out with Jesus with his disciples in Jerusalem, tells them again, don't leave Jerusalem. He tells them that in Luke and tells them that here, don't leave Jerusalem. And then it says that he spent 40 days with them, proving to them with many proofs that he'd been raised from the dead. That's Acts 1:3, which I always thought is one of the most interesting verses of the entire New Testament. He spends 40 days with them Proving to them that he's been raised from the dead with many proofs. How many proofs do they need? He's standing there talking to them for 40 days. I mean, what is what? It's a strangest verse, but for our purposes here in Luke, if you actually look at Luke, you just read chapter 24 where he rises from the dead. Everything happens on that day. And at that hour this happened, and then that hour this happened. And then while they were talking, this happened. It's all the same day. He goes up to heaven on the day of his resurrection. Acts is equally emphatic. He was with them for 40 days before he ascended. So which is it? The thing is, is that In Luke chapter 24, verse 51, that phrase he was taken up to heaven is missing from some of our manuscripts. So would a scribe have put it in or would a scribe have taken it out? This is really interesting because of the contradiction with Acts. Would a scribe have taken it out because it sounds like it's a contradiction to Acts, or would describe it put it in because he wanted to end the gospel on a high note, Jesus ascended to heaven. And how do you decide? This one's much debated. I go back and forth on this one. I wrote a book where I argue, yeah, this was added. And later I thought, I wonder if that's right. This is not a clear cut case.
- [39:16]
B
Wonderful, thank you. I think that's a really good set of examples that show tiny changes that can have very big impacts and also how it's not always terribly clear if something was added or taken away. Thank you.
- [39:32]
A
You have evangelical scholars who will repeatedly say, we know what the words of the New Testament are. We can be sure we've got the original words. And they say that to assure people because they hear crazy folk like Bart Ehrman saying that we don't know in places, but if they are factually correct that we know what the words are, why do they all disagree with each other about what the words are? In other words, they themselves can't agree. What was the wording in chapter 24, verse 51? They can't agree. If scholars don't agree, that means we don't know. And you might as well just admit we don't know.
- [40:09]
B
Well, we will wrap up the conversation there. Thank you so much, Bart. We will be right back after the break 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 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 Gospel's 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? At barterman.com/forward/authors thank you. Welcome back everyone. And now to Listeners Questions.
- [41:44]
A
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 bars
- [42:01]
B
okay, we have some good ones. I always say that, but they're always good, so I'm never lying. Luke 2 contains the only gospel story, as you said, about his birth and initial visit with John the Baptist. Oh, between his birth and initial visit with John the Baptist, his visit as a boy to the temple in Jerusalem, how likely is it that this story, which doesn't involve miracles or preaching, actually took place? Questioner says it seems a strange story to include if it didn't take place. But if it did, is it indicating that Jesus in his unknown youth was already marked as being special?
- [42:35]
A
I think it definitely does that it shows that Jesus as a young man wasn't a man yet. He was 12. He hadn't reached puberty in this understanding of things that he was already able to dialogue convincingly with adult experts of the law. Moreover, the passage shows that the Temple was central to Jesus ministry and to Luke's understanding of Jesus. Jesus is found in the Temple in chapter one when he gets born. He's presented in the Temple at the end of Luke. As I just pointed out, the disciples after his ascension go back to the Temple. Luke has a very big emphasis on the Temple. The three Temptations of Jesus in the Wilderness In Luke chapter four, the Last Temptation in Matthew, Jesus is first tempted to turn the stones into bread because he's hungry to eat them. Then he's tempted. He's taken to the temple and tempted to jump off so that the angels will catch him. And then he's shown the mountain, the entire earth on a high mountain, and tempted to worship Satan so he could inherit the earth. That's a logical progression. The temptations get more severe in Luke's Gospel. The third temptation is the temple incident. The temple is hugely important for Luke and he changes things around to make it important. And this story focuses on Jesus in the temple, arguing with teachers of the law. And so this is a. It's a very important story for Luke because it's foreshadowing what will be important in Jesus ministry and foreshadowing something about Jesus. So I don't think it's a strange story to be included in Luke. I think that in fact it makes a lot of sense. Luke is more like Greek and Roman biographies of famous men, where stories of childhood behavior are often included to foreshadow what the person will be like as an adult. Since Luke is more like those Greek and Roman biographies, it makes sense that he includes a story about Jesus as a young man. And I don't think there's any way to establish that this is historical. It seems completely implausible to me that these very, very poor rural Jews up in Galilee are annually making a trip that would amount to a month, a month trip to Jerusalem for Passover. When they, they're living a hand to mouth existence, they wouldn't. It's implausible, I think.
- [44:54]
B
Thank you. Our next question is comparing Matthew and Luke. The questioner says Matthew lists nine Beatitudes, eight of which deal with spiritual values. And Luke has four, three aspects of oppression and poverty, but nothing about meekness, mercy, purity of heart or peacemaking, and pairs each blessing with a curse for the rich, or so on. The question is, does Matthew or Luke have a more socially conscious view of Jesus?
- [45:20]
A
I think that answer is fairly easy to answer. Luke is long known to stress social issues more with Jesus. And so in this particular case it's a great example because in Matthew, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount begin with blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Luke's Beatitude is blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God, so that you know, is it poor in spirit or is it poor? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For Luke, it's blessed are you who hunger and thirst. Luke generally has a stronger social agenda than Matthew, where Jesus is concerned about the poor, the needy. He is in Matthew as well, of course. But it's a bigger emphasis in Luke and he's concerned more about the outcasts. He's concerned more about women in Luke, who were often in a patriarchal society, weren't given as much freedom, obviously. And so these are the kinds of concerns Luke has. And it is notable in the Beatitudes. That's right.
- [46:21]
B
Excellent. Thank you. Going to the Book of Acts now. Questioner says Book of Acts depiction depicts the disciples being warned to stop preaching in Jesus name. They continue to do so and are jailed for it. To what extent, if any, do you think this, that there's a kernel of historical memory here or is this a completely legendary account?
- [46:40]
A
It's a very good question. Acts is our earliest and only real account about the activities of the apostles in the 30 years after Jesus death. And so we would very much like it to have a lot of historical information. There are some parts that we can evaluate, particularly with respect to Paul, because sometimes Acts will talk about things connected with Paul that Paul himself talks about. And so we can compare what Acts says after Paul's death with what Paul himself said. And when we do that, we find that the basic views of Paul, many of the basic views are on target, other basic views are not on target, and a lot of the details are wrong. And I assume that that's true. Also, where we don't have a primary source to compare Acts with and these accounts early in Acts of the apostles preaching and getting in trouble and thrown in jail, there might be some kind of kernel of truth in it. In that I don't think the narratives themselves can be shown to have happened. I actually doubt if the apostles of Jesus early on were preaching in Jerusalem. Matthew's Gospel says that Jesus sent the disciples after his death up to Galilee. And they stayed up in Galilee. And that's where they him Luke says they stayed in Jerusalem. This is a contradiction. You can't have both Luke and Matthew write about where Jesus appeared because Luke insists they stayed in Jerusalem. They never left Jerusalem. And Matthew, they go straight to Galilee. So it's very different. Luke wants to emphasize the conflict in Jerusalem because Luke wants to emphasize that the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem not only rejected Jesus, he rejected Jesus message after his death. And for that the disciples have to stay in Jerusalem. The kernel of truth is I think the disciples of Jesus did proclaim that he was raised from the dead. And Jewish authorities, wherever they were, didn't like it. And there probably was some kind of persecution. But I think the specific narratives of being thrown in jail in Jerusalem are probably not historical.
- [48:38]
B
I see, thank you. Next question is about the oral tradition before the Gospels were written down. Why is it that scholars say that there was even an oral tradition before they were written down? Is it not possible that what we have were copied from even earlier scripts that were then lost? The example given is that if the manuscripts we have right now were lost and the people of 3000 AD find a 2021 AD Bible, it would still be inaccurate to say that, oh, okay, up until 2021 there were oral traditions used to transmit the Gospels.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah, it's a great question. So the reason for thinking there are oral traditions is because we know there were oral traditions in Jesus own lifetime. People were telling stories about him. If not, then the only solution is that people wrote down things the second that Jesus said them and that stenographers were there recounting his every deed and that it was a written record from the very beginning. No one can possibly think that the Gospels are based on records all written down at the moment Jesus said or did something. That means that somebody had to tell the stories that somebody else heard. And so there has to be some kind of oral tradition to begin with. And the question is, how long does the oral tradition go? The oral tradition went on for centuries. There's nobody who doubts this either because you get oral traditions about Jesus in later gospels that are not found in the New Testament. And when you come to a gospel like the Gospel of Infancy, the infancy Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus as a 5 year old is doing these amazing miracles and zapping his playmates when they get on his nerves. You know that guy, I mean, unless somebody wrote this down when Jesus was a 5 year old, then somebody's telling stories like this. And they're the kind of stories that almost everybody agrees they're circulating orally. The issue is not whether there was an oral tradition. There had to be an oral tradition. The question is, are our gospels necessarily entirely based on oral traditions? And the answer to that is we don't know. We know that the earliest writings of Jesus, the earliest that don't survive, had to be based on oral traditions. How much are our gospels based on oral traditions? The only clues we get are one clue that's important is that Luke 1:1:4 says that Luke had many. Luke tells us he had many predecessors who had written accounts of what Jesus said and did. And Luke says he's not satisfied with these and so that he's writing one that's actually in order and that's done based on accurate research. Okay, so that, that shows that he at least is claiming that there were other written accounts available. The Gospel of John indicates that there were written accounts available. At the end, Mark doesn't say anything about written accounts. So our three choices of Mark are that Mark based everything that he wrote on oral traditions, which is what I, I basically think, but I can't prove it. Another option is that Mark had written predecessors that he's basing many of his accounts on. Some scholars. When I was in graduate school, it was very common to say that Mark had available to him a passion narrative, that chapters 11 through 16 were based on a pre written source. The more I looked into that, the more I realized there's no evidence of it. And so I don't know if it's true or not, but it's possible that Mark had written sources in front of him. So one option is that he had heard everything from oral traditions, that he was the first to write one down. Second is that he had both oral and written sources available to him. The only other option is that he's making it all up. But he can't be making it all up because we have other confirmation of things that he says about Jesus that aren't based on him. And so he can't be making it all up either. I think it's got to be primarily oral sources and some written or all oral from Mars. The same with Matthew, of course, used Mark and so did Luke. And so they had a written source and probably q another written source. But they obviously heard stories about Jesus too. So I think oral tradition is a very big deal. The important corollary about how reliable is oral tradition is something we probably should do an episode on. But it's the subject of one of my books, Jesus before the Gospels, where I delve into what we know about oral traditions and how they worked.
- [52:59]
B
Thank you. One final question. Looking at the canon, the gospel canon, could it be said that the gospels in the canonical New Testament were chosen because they were superior literature? Intelligent people read all the gospels and said, okay, this is the exemplars that we want to preserve in our, in our canon. The questioner says, and these are fighting words to me, that the non canonical dos gospels by Peter or Thomas sound like bad literature with outrageous contents that are obviously written by an author with ambitions to be a best seller.
- [53:32]
A
Yeah, I don't agree with that. I don't think you can say that the books of the New Testament were included because they were the best literature available. Or if you do say that, then you've got to say it was a very low bar. Because just as literature, if you take the book of Revelation, the man can't write Greek. It's not high literature. There are grammatical mistakes just in chapter one. And so it's not high literature. And so it's not included because. Because of its literary merits, the Gospels of the New Testament. The problem with this kind of evaluation is that we are accustomed to reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And they're part of our mentality, part of our psyche, part of our culture. We see cultural references to them, they make sense to us. We grew up with them, basically born with them. And so anything else sounds weird, but, you know, if John was not in the New Testament, if John didn't make it in, and all you had was Matthew, Mark and Luke, and you read Matthew, Mark and Luke the whole time. If you found John, all of a sudden you would say, oh, God, this is weird. This is not like the story of Jesus. People don't believe me when I say that, but it's absolutely right. People had told me that, and I didn't believe them. When I was in graduate school, when I was doing my master's program, it was a three year master's program, and I knew people said John was really different. Not really. I decided to read Matthew, Mark and Luke for three years during my master's career and not read John at all. When I finished my master's program after three years, I sat down one day and read John in Greek. And I said, oh my God, this is different. And that's even knowing John, I mean that it's very, very different. So I don't think that literary quality is what got these Gospels in. And I will point out that we have discussions among church fathers about which Gospels ought to be in and in none of the Gospels is it because these are the best literature. The discussions are never about which is the best literature. The discussion is which one goes back to an apostle, which one is old, which one has the right theology, which one's widely used. Those are the kinds of questions they ask. You know, you might personally think these are better books, and that's perfectly fine. You know, it depends what your criteria are for better books. I know some people who think that the Da Vinci Code was the best book ever written. I personally don't think so. So it's a matter of taste, but I don't think you can say they were included because of their high literary merit.
- [56:04]
B
Thank you very much for that. And that is the end of our questions. Audience, thank you so much for sending in your questions. They are always absolutely wonderful. But before we finish up for the week, could you just summarize what we talked about and let people know where they can read more if they're interested, tested?
- [56:20]
A
You know, for a long time, I've talked about how there are all these differences in the manuscripts of the New Testament. And I'll occasionally, you know, point out, you know, a passage or so here and there. We thought for this episode we would just take. We took like four or five variants in Luke's Gospel. Among the hundreds of variants that exist, we took four that are particularly meaningful because depending on which manuscript you read, the passage has a different meaning. And in some places, the different meaning of this passage affects the entire understanding of Jesus and Christianity in Luke and Acts. That's rather significant. And it's often based just on a tiny change of the text. And this was just illustrative. There are other passages in Luke that we could talk about we made down the road, and passages like this in all the Gospels and in. In throughout the New Testament, so that these changes of the text really do matter for interpreting a text and for understanding what these authors are trying to. To say, which ultimately affects our understanding of early Christianity. And so this is just to say that the kind of hardcore technical work that textual critics do in trying to establish the original text really matters for things broader than studying manuscripts. It matters interpreting the New Testament and understanding the. The theology of the New Testament.
- [57:39]
B
Thank you. Do you have any book recommendations for people?
- [57:43]
A
Yeah. So the book where I deal with this myself is my book Misquoting Jesus, which is what the podcast is named after. And I deal with some of the passage we've talked about. I can't remember if I dealt with all of them, but I deal with a lot more other passages in the New Testament that have this kind of issue. And I explain more about the history and the background of this field of study, if somebody is really wants to be hardcore about it. One of my early scholarly books was called the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, where I definitely dealt with these particular passages at length at a scholarly level, then people could actually understand most of this book that I wrote. But there are parts where it really gets down in the weeds more than they'd want to. But those would be two places to go to, to. To look with bibliography. Bibliography. So you can go to other authors too.
- [58:34]
B
Wonderful. Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast. To make subscribe sure to you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [58:55]
A
We're talking about the phenomenon known as Gnosticism. I think probably over the last 30 years a lot more people have have heard about Gnostic Christians and the Gnostic Gospels, but many people have a very kind of fuzzy idea, a faint idea of what Gnosticism was. It's a complicated topic because Gnosticism is not simple, but it is really interesting. And when you find out if the Gnostics really thought, it can be mind blowing. We're going to provide a kind of an easy introduction to what Gnosticism was to show you just how interesting this phenomenon was in the ancient world.
- [59:31]
B
I hope you can join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.