← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:36]
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. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we are talking about fundamentalism and whether fundamentalists actually follow Jesus. If you ask a fundamentalist if they follow Jesus, the answer is likely to be an incredulous or very enthusiastic yes. But what did Jesus actually teach? And is it recognisable in how modern fundamentalists live their lives? More crucially, would Jesus have approved of Jerry Falwell before we get to that, but how are you doing?
- [01:25]
C
Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. We said before, I've taken the semester off to work on my book. I'm at the point where I'm going to actually start writing the thing. I think I've spent a couple years doing a lot of reading on moral philosophy and Greek and Roman moral philosophy, and I think I'm ready. You know, the thing is the question when you're writing a book is when are you done with the research? And for a trade book like this, my answer is I'm done with the research when I'm reading things that aren't teaching me anything I don't already know. It's not that I know everything, you know, it's just like, yeah, I've read this before. Like, you know, after a while you read book after book after book about whatever, and after a while you're just like, okay, yeah, I got it. Now when I get to that point, that's when I start writing. And I think I'm nearly there because I'd like to get it, get it written before the summer starts.
- [02:13]
B
That's exciting. I was going to say, does it, once you start the writing itself, does it take you very long?
- [02:18]
C
No, I write crazy fast. And so most of My trade books, the actual writing has taken me two weeks because I can write 10,000 words a day or so. For a while there, I was averaging about 14,000 words a day. You do that for a few days, you got a book. The key, though, is to know what you're going to say. And so. Right. For me, I know exactly where I'm going to go with something because I make extensive outlines and I know exactly where I'm going to go with it ahead of time. So. So I'm not thinking about that at the keyboard. What I'm thinking about the keyboard is how to put this into interesting prose. And I can just do that as fast as I can write and type. The writing is like, the least of my problems. And most people, it's not like that way. You know, people have. Everybody has a different way of writing books, but for me, that's just kind of how it works. So how about you? Are you doing any research this. This term?
- [03:08]
B
No, not at the moment. I've just finished up teaching Acadian and like, the spring tends to be quite busier than normal for me because the nonprofit I run starts accepting applications for summer scholarships in. I think we started in February this year and close in March. So we're getting to the end date. And then we start interviewing end of March, beginning of April. So I'm in the midst of going through applications and kind of shortlisting those to get the, I think, 20 people that we're going to be interviewing.
- [03:40]
C
This is for a grant for a fellowship to provide some funding for people doing work in ancient Near East.
- [03:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely. The charity is called Humans Against Poor Scholarship. And the main grant, Josh came up with the name, the main Grant is a $2,000 grant for PhD students working on some aspect of the ancient near east to try and bridge the gap, the financial gap that occurs for a lot of students over the summer months. If you're a PhD student, quite often you get a stipend. So the university will pay you. You know this I'm telling everyone else. So the university will pay you living expenses and things during the semester when you're in school, but not everywhere will kind of give you money to live on over the summer. So students are stuck with either having to get jobs or apply for funding. And it can be quite difficult. So we try and help bridge that gap a little bit.
- [04:33]
C
It's great, great idea. More people need to do that.
- [04:36]
B
It's a lot of fun. Yeah. We should go to fundamentalist Christianity, though, and whether they follow Jesus and I think a great place to start is by saying that when we ask that question, we're asking whether people are following the ethical teachings of Jesus. And obviously you're working on a book about the ethics behind Jesus teachings. So I feel like this is a perfect topic for right now. Now, scholars have known for a while that it's quite difficult to know for certain what Jesus actually taught. So could you just explain about that briefly for us?
- [05:08]
C
Yeah, I won't go into depth into it. We could spend a number of episodes on this. But the issue is that scholars have long recognized that there are differences among our gospels in what Jesus is reported to have taught. And the question is, how do we know what he really taught? And so scholars have to engage in a kind of a historical analysis, just as they do with every other figure from the past. What did George Washington really say? What did Abraham Lincoln really say? You know, if you have different reports, it gets easier today when you've got recordings. But even then, people can't agree what people say. As we know, it's in the news every day about one political candidate or another. You know, everybody completely disagree. Even though you got recordings, it doesn't matter. But with the ancient world, it's much more difficult. And so scholars have to decide what they say. So my book, for example, is going to be about what did Jesus himself actually teach? Based on what I think is a historical reconstruction, that's acceptable. That's more or less what we're talking about today would do. Fundamentalism. Christians follow the actual teachings of Jesus about how to live one's life.
- [06:10]
B
So even if there are problems knowing the exact words that Jesus said, is there a lot of dispute about the ethical framework or the ethics behind that?
- [06:19]
C
I don't think there's a lot of dispute among scholars about many of the basics about what Jesus message was, his ethical message. Some aspects of Jesus teaching are very difficult to discern. Some are horrifically complicated, and others are not as complicated. And one reason they're not as complicated when it comes to the ethics is because we have these gospels. These gospels have independent sources behind them. So that, you know, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they're not all just making stuff up. They're getting information they've gotten from other sources. And some of these are written sources, and sometimes they shared sources, and sometimes they're independent sources. But if you actually map it out, there are a number of independent sources behind our gospels. So if you've got a lot of independent, independent sources, they're all reporting the same kind of Thing that Jesus was teaching, that's likely something he probably taught. And so when it comes to the ethical teachings, there's not so much a controversy about what he said. There are controversies, of course, more controversies about whether he could really mean it. Lots of controversies about that.
- [07:23]
B
Is there a big difference between what the Gospels say Jesus taught as his ethics and what academics think the historical Jesus actually taught?
- [07:32]
C
Not in these main outlines that I'm talking about. I think that this saying or that saying is debated very much. How this was probably worded is complicated. It's complicated by all sorts of factors. If you just take for example, the Sermon on the Mount, that's found only in one of our sources. It's only in Matthew chapters five, six, and seven. It's a sermon that Matthew reports from 55 years later, 60 years later, he wasn't there. So how does he know what Jesus said? And students always tell me, well, back then, you know, oral tradition, everybody kept things so accurately. And I said, really? No, actually, if you look at your research into what we know about oral traditions, it actually did not work that way, Even though people say it did, but they don't haven't looked at the research on it. I'd say, moreover, like, even without oral tradition, I'd say, how many of you heard Biden's inauguration address? You know, maybe half the class would have said, okay, repeat it to me.
- [08:30]
B
Don't make any mistakes.
- [08:32]
C
Yeah, it was a couple years ago. What if it was 60 years ago and it wasn't you? But something like, what are the chances? And so the specific sayings in the specific context in the Gospels are problematic. But as I said, so many of the sayings have the same themes in independent sources that didn't get it from each other. That's one of the ways we're fairly confident we have a pretty good idea at least of what he said.
- [08:56]
B
What would you say are the overriding values that Jesus is presented as promoting?
- [09:02]
C
I think this part's pretty clear. Jesus himself, of course, is Jewish living in first century Israel. And to understand what he's saying or even to reconstruct what he's saying, you obviously have to think about what we know about first century Israel and what Jews were saying. In thinking that we have a number of gospels from outside the New Testament, for example, that portray Jesus saying all sorts of things that make zero sense for a first century Jew in Israel. Just like we have any record of anybody ever saying anything like this until like 150 years later somewhere else. And so you have that kind of thing. Jesus as a Jew in Israel, first century, certainly would have seen the Jewish Scriptures as he knew them to be, authoritative. And you would expect that his teachings in some way as a Jewish teacher would be related to the teachings of Scripture. And when you actually look at these kinds of sayings that you find all over the map in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and even in John, you find Jesus saying things related to what the Jewish law teaches, but giving his own interpretation of it in a way that in some ways intensifies what's required ethically of people. And so I'd say his basic framework comes to him from the Jewish Bible, where he privileges some parts of the Jewish Bible over others. And he tries to put it in his own way that he sees as the correct interpretation of Scripture.
- [10:27]
B
What parts of the Jewish Bible does he privilege then? Does he put this emphasis on?
- [10:32]
C
I think all Jews at that time would have accepted the Torah as Scripture. And so the first five books, the Pentateuch, with the laws found in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy especially a number of those laws are not what we today would call ethical laws. A lot of them have to do with how to worship God. So cultic laws about, you know, how you perform sacrifices, for example, or how you celebrate festivals and what you do about other special days like Sabbath, what kind of foods you eat, things like that that we today wouldn't consider to be ethical laws about, like, you know, how you behave toward one another. But there are a lot of laws about how you behave toward one another, and these are laws that Jesus focuses on. He also appears to be heavily influenced by a number of the prophets of Scripture, such as Isaiah and Amos. Isaiah, I think, especially can be shown. But other prophets like Amos and Hosea and some others have a fairly strict ethical view of things. And Jesus absolutely buys into this view. The basic view that you find in these works is that you need to help those who are hungry and without clothing and are, you know, are desperate. You should help the needy. And if you don't, you're going against what God has to say. And these prophets don't like, they don't quote chapter and verse from Exodus to prove this. They just say, look, God wants you to take care of the needy, and instead you're really abusing them. And so you're going to be wiped out if you don't turn around. And I think Jesus bought into that basic message.
- [12:06]
B
Do you see a substantial difference in the kinds of messages that Jesus presents between the Gospels? Or is it relatively Coherent in terms
- [12:16]
C
of his ethical teaching. I'd say it is pretty coherent between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I think it changes a bit when you come to John. The big change, I think, is that all of these gospels emphasize the importance of loving others. You know, that won't come as a surprise to anybody that Jesus has taught you should love one another. But it's actually a more complicated topic than most people realize. In the Hebrew Bible, we find these two commandments that Jesus says are the most important commandments of the entire Torah, the entire law. And he says that, in fact, the entire law can be summarized by these two commandments. The first is found in Deuteronomy, chapter 6, which is not an ethical commandment. It's a commandment that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength, and so you're to love God above all else. And Jesus says that's the first commandment. But he says the second is, like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So that's not from Deuteronomy, that's from Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18. You shall love your neighbor as yourself when that law is found in the Torah. In Leviticus, neighbor means your fellow Israelite. You're to love those who are fellow Israelites. It clearly means that because Israelites are not supposed to love outsiders, they're supposed to destroy the Canaanites, supposed to kill all the Midianites. You're supposed to be like, you're not loving that. You're loving your neighbor, which means Israelite. I think a renovation that Jesus makes. We can discuss why he makes this kind of new interpretation. But his new interpretation is that your neighbor is not just your fellow Israelite. It's everyone, all humans, even your enemies, even those wretched Samaritans. You need to love everyone. So when it says neighbor, Jesus is interpreting it as fellow human being.
- [14:13]
B
So why would Jesus make that change?
- [14:16]
C
I think one thing we have to remember is that Jesus is not writing at the time of when these laws were being written down centuries earlier. He's living in the first century of the Common Era. And Judaism at this time is a different kind of religion in many ways, still has the Torah and the commandments and laws, but there are ways of interpreting them in light of the new situation, which always happens, of course. New situation. You have to adjust how you're going to behave in the new situation. The new situation involves a new ideology that has been around maybe for 200 years by the time of Jesus, which is this Jewish apocalyptic view. We've talked about on the podcast before. The sense that the evil in the world is getting worse and it's growing in intensity and there's more suffering than ever and more misery than ever because evil is being caused by evil forces that are opposed to God and his people and they're increasing in power. But God is soon to intervene and wipe them out and to restore his world to the paradise that he originally designed it to be. Jesus subscribed to this idea that the end is coming soon and that very soon the powers of evil will be destroyed. And so you need to turn back to God and prepare for it. In part because of this message, Jesus, I think, revolutionized the teachings of Moses about love. Teaching of Moses speaking broadly in the Mosaic Law, Jesus thought the end's coming soon. And that called for radical action. And so it's not time for half measures. And so you're not just supposed to be helping the poor by giving them some money. You're supposed to be selling all you have and give to the poor because like, the end is coming soon. This is not a time for, you know, for going part way here. So he radicalizes it that way. And also, this kingdom of God is coming to the world. It's not coming just to Jews. It's going to include everybody who does what the God of Israel wants them to do. And so love your neighbor doesn't mean just being kind to the person who lives next door or the person who lives in your city or the fellow Jew. It means everybody. And so Jesus emphasizes the universality of this commandment of love, which was, it wasn't unheard of, but it was very distinctive of Jesus.
- [16:34]
B
Thank you. We are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we will be diving into the values that Christian fundamentalists hold and discuss whether these actually reflect what Jesus taught.
- [16:47]
C
If you're enjoying the Misquoting Jesus podcast, you'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out@Barterman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast.
- [17:24]
B
So I feel like we have probably a pretty solid understanding now of what Jesus ethical framework was, what he was teaching, the overriding themes, if not the specific words and phrases. How is John different from what we've discussed here.
- [17:39]
C
Yeah. You know, what happens in Christianity is that the teachings of Jesus tend to be changed over time. And we'll be talking about big changes now, but in the ancient world already, as soon as Jesus died and his followers believed he got raised from the dead, it changed how they understood many of his teachings. And my book's going to be about that change, partly that change. But how that change, even though it wasn't kind of the full bore teachings of Jesus, it still was revolutionary in the Roman and Greek world and changed our culture for ways that many of us would think very good things. But how did they change? Well, one way that it changed is that the kind of, you might call it, kind of tribal mentality that is found in most cultures, certainly in Israel. The Israelites are what matter, and the outsiders, you know, they don't matter nearly as much. Jesus was against that. He believed in loving your enemies, loving your Samaritans, loving those who persecute you, loving. But I need to stress when he's talking about loving people like that, he's not talking about having a gooey feeling about them. Love in this context is not an emotion. Love, the way Jesus uses it and his followers use it, is an action. It's how you behave toward others. You treat them in a way that is in their best interests, even if it's at a cost to your best interest. So that's the whole spiel. But Jesus thought this was to be how his followers were to treat everybody, not just fellow Jew. By the time you get to the Gospel of John, which is written, you know, 60, 70 years after Jesus in the Gospel of John, love is a very important topic, a very important theme. But it's about love within the Christian community. Love one another so that the outsiders can see how you love each other. And it's all about loving within the community. And that becomes the Christian teachings. It's more about loving Christians than it is about loving outsiders. Even though in the Christian tradition historically it still has been loving outsiders. But the focus is on the inside group. And you see that focus very clearly in John in ways that you don't see nearly as much in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
- [19:42]
B
Okay, so if we then start to look at fundamentalist Christianity, for starters, who exactly are we talking about? And what would you say are the core concerns or beliefs that this group hold?
- [19:55]
C
Yeah, so it's a little bit difficult to define fundamentalism because almost nobody thinks that they're a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is always the person to the right of you, who's way more conservative than you are. No matter how conservative you are, it's the guy to the right. But, you know, when I was a fundamentalist, we didn't mind it. We said we're fundamentalists because we held to the fundamentals of the faith. And for us, that meant the literal interpretation of the Bible, the inerrancy in the Bible, a literal physical resurrection of Jesus, the literal virgin birth. We have these kind of sets of doctrines that we used to subscribe to. And that used to be kind of what fundamentalism was. I need to, I guess, differentiate between evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Evangelical Christians, broadly speaking, were called that originally because they believed in preaching the good news. They were evangelistic. They were evangelistic, so they're evangelicals. They believed in that Jesus is the one way of salvation that you have to believe in his death and resurrection. You need to be born again to have a moment where you confess that you believe in Jesus as your savior and that the Bible is a reliable guide for how you understand Jesus and God and salvation and everything else. And so that's kind of the basic outline of evangelical Christianity. And fundamentalist Christianity is kind of an extreme version of that, where you get those, you get all of that, but you also get the strict inerrancy of the Bible. Can't have any mistakes of any kind. If anyone cracks on any of the least of these doctrines, you know, they're out here. It's much more kind of in your face going after, like, these ideas. So that's kind of what we mean by fundamentalists. But it's not a clean break. And within evangelical Christianity, there's enormous range within, just within evangelical Christianity, which tends to be a form of Protestant Christianity. So when my students ask me for a quick definition of fundamentalism, I tell them that it's actually pretty simple. A fundamentalist is no fun, too much damn and not enough mental.
- [22:02]
B
Do they like that definition?
- [22:04]
C
Yeah, I think that's pretty good. If somebody asks, somebody says, yeah, no fun, too much damn and too many lists. Fundamental lists. So, yeah.
- [22:15]
B
So what would you say are some core values or core concerns for that group of people?
- [22:20]
C
You know, historically, fundamentalism was and has been more about doctrine than anything else. In the 70s, when I was involved, when I was at Moody Bible Institute, we were particularly intent on believing the right things and having the right doctrines. But, you know, one of those doctrines was the inerrancy of the Bible. And so we were concerned about certain social issues that we saw reflected in Bible, such as the role of women in the church. Women cannot speak in church. And that sounds kind of like a cultic religious issue or a church issue. But it's also an ethical issue, obviously, because the relationship of men and women is really primarily ethical implications. And so we thought women were inferior to men, and they were just made that way. Men should make decisions, women should not make decisions, because the Bible says so. So these days, my sense is that fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity generally has moved away from a stress on doctrines to a stress on kind of social behavior, social agendas, social policies, even political policies. So that evangelicalism broadly, and fundamentalism in particular, has become more of a social movement than a kind of theological movement. And it's a lot more about accepting the kinds of values and social agendas that other people in this group still accept. There's a really good book about this, by the way, by a scholar of American Christianity called Christian Cobes Dumas, and it's called Jesus and John Wayne. This is a really interesting book where she. She tries to. She shows how evangelicalism is. Isn't really about doctrin anymore, the John Wayne bit. Evangelical conservative Christians started realizing they had to muscle up or nobody would pay any attention to them. And so it became a very masculine form of Christianity, using that with a stress on the maleness. It's masculine Christianity, and a lot of evangelical Christianity has moved that way. So it's really more kind of a social identity and how you fit in socially and in terms of your ideology, your political views, your social views, than it is about worrying about when the rapture is going to happen, which is what we used to worry about.
- [24:42]
B
So in what ways would you say that fundamentalist behavior or concerns are in line with Jesus teachings?
- [24:49]
C
Well, first let me say something about how they're kind of out of line, I think, especially about the ethical teachings. Let me stress there are proportionately as many good human beings who are fundamentalists proportionally as they're good human beings who are anything else. People who do their best, who try hardest, who try to be good people. People that I worked with in churches when I was a very conservative evangelical. Most of them tried to be really good people and to do their best. And so that this is not about trashing evangelicals or fundamentalists. But I will say that the agenda, the ethical agenda that is foremost for many fundamentalists that I know about today, it's an ethical agenda that actually is either contrary to what Jesus was interested in and taught about, or at least was absent from anything Jesus was concerned about. I mean, I can pick a couple examples. The kind of obvious one is the issue about abortion, which is it's a litmus test for whether you're an evangelical Christian, let alone a fundamentalist. You have to be opposed to abortion. And it wasn't always that way. Strangely, people don't know this. It wasn't always a Republican thing. I mean, I don't know if people know. Surely people do. It's in my life. Republicans used to be in favor. They weren't like in favor. Nobody's in favor of abortion. I'm not saying no one wants, but I'm saying, you know, they approved of abortion as legitimate in some instances. No, basically until Nixon. But apart from that, the idea that to be a Christian you have to oppose abortion and the logic is because abortion is murder and accepting abortion is accepting murder and God values life. So I get that. I completely get that. And I'm not going to take a stand myself here on the issue of abortion. What I will say though is that it's not an issue that Jesus ever talks about, period. And it's not an issue that the New Testament ever talks about, period. It's not an issue that the Bible talks about, period. Except possibly in two Old Testament passages which clearly show that their authors do not think that the fetus, an unborn child, is, is a human being yet. Numbers 5 and Exodus 21, we won't get into that here. Those are the only two passages of relevance about the human status of a fetus. So my point is that, yes, I agree, Jesus is pro life. Jesus would have been completely opposed to murder. The issue though is did he think that the unborn fetus was a human being yet? And people would say, well, of course he did. Really? Why do you think that historically? Why do you think that? Do people generally think that in the ancient world? Did Jews generally think that in the ancient world? What's your evidence for that? I don't think Jesus thought that an unborn fetus is human being. He probably didn't even think about it. You know, just like I don't think he really thought much about the institution of slavery that today we'd say, oh my God, you can't have. Jesus must have been opposed to slavery. No, I doubt it. So anyway, abortion, you know, to make that your main issue strikes me as strange when we know what Jesus main issues were and it wasn't that.
- [28:00]
B
So are there any of the main issues that Jesus was concerned about that do line up with what fundamentalists believe or how they behave?
- [28:08]
C
Well, so abortion is one he doesn't talk about, so it doesn't line up either way. But there are others that are directly relevant to what he says that are completely contrary to the fundamentalist mindset today. And there are others that I would say are in line with what fundamentals and most Christians would say. But just to pick another, an example of something that Jesus seems to be pretty clear about that is contrary to at least the fundamentalists that I, I know who talk about this is the sense of kind of how, you know, America is a special place in the world and Americans matter more than others and that we need to protect America first and that so that American nationalism is a very big thing among conservatives generally, but conservative Christians as well, and they seem to see it somehow in the B. And I've got to say Jesus is against nationalism. He just is. He says to love your enemies, not to hate them. And the person he picks out as the person who loves his neighbor as himself is a Samaritan. So you know, I'm not quite sure what the analogy would be in the modern world, but the Samaritans were kind of famously hated by many, most Jews as being sort of inferior half breeds with bad beliefs and bad actions. And they were the enemy. And so we, you know, Americans have enemies, we have political enemies, we have outsiders. And my sense is a lot of fundamentalists now have bought into an ideology that outsiders of American Christians are not to be of a concern for us. We're not very much of a concern to us. And so this affects things like policies of immigration. What would Jesus say about immigration? Well, I mean Jesus had as his Bible the Jewish scriptures which says to welcome the foreigners into your land and treat them like yourselves. Jesus whole line is that Jews can be followers of God, but so can Gentiles outsiders. National boundaries do not matter to Jesus, but they matter to a lot of fundamentalists. And so I think that's just contrary to what Jesus is saying. I'm not saying that Jesus is going to give us our, you know, he's going to solve our immigration problem. We have a huge immigration problem and everybody knows it. But it's not that like Jesus is opposed to people who are brown skinned or black skinned or other colored skin. He wants us to treat them as well as we treat ourselves. And you know, we don't.
- [30:44]
B
Do fundamentalists seem to acknowledge or understand that there is a discrepancy between their core belief system and what Jesus actually seems to have held to?
- [30:58]
C
Well, I would say, you know, that in many ways Fundamentalists, of course, do try to follow the teachings of Jesus. And as I said, I mean, like all Christians, they realize that loving one another is very important. And many do try to do good things for people and try to help those in need. Many give to charity, although when I was in fundamentalist circles, a lot of the giving to charity meant giving to missionary efforts to convert people rather than efforts to feed the poor and such. But there are a lot of fundamentalists who do wonderful things in the world who try to help the poor. It may ultimately have an evangelistic motive, you know. And like when I was in Chicago at Moody Bible Institute, I worked at the. As one of my assignments, I worked at the Chicago Rescue Mission, which was a soup kitchen for people who are on the streets. But, you know, we were concerned about feeding people, but we did make them listen to the sermon first. So it's that kind of thing where you're using your charity for what you think is the greater good, which is converting people. And Jesus was not about putting all your effort into converting people like that. The historical Jesus was not going around telling people you had to convert people to save them from hell. You'll get that in Christian teachings. But it's not what Jesus is all about. He was about helping people, even people you didn't know. So I think fundamentalists do subscribe to the idea that you should love one another and you should help one another, but it's within the framework of converting the other. It's not really loving them for themselves and appreciating them and realizing that God's loving them. It's that God will love them if they'll convert. So I think that's different. I would say no. Of course, fundamentalists don't think that they're violating the teachings of Jesus. They think that what they're following are the teachings of Jesus. But my sense is they get the teachings of Jesus from what their fundamentalist leaders tell them are the teachings of Jesus, rather than seeing what Jesus actually says and actually trying to understand what Jesus says, to understand what the man, Jesus himself, preaching what he was trying to tell us to do and what we should emphasize in our ethical lives. Are we to put all our eggs in a few baskets that are not even mentioned in the New Testament or that are contrary to what Jesus says? No, I don't think so. I think we probably should be giving of ourselves for the sake of others if we're interested in following Jesus.
- [33:24]
B
This isn't strictly fundamentalism, but something that has been on my mind a lot lately is the prosperity Gospel. And I wanted to ask how that's because it, for me at least, doesn't seem to line up at all with Jesus values and ethics. But how is that kind of intertwined in here?
- [33:45]
C
Well, it's completely intertwined because it's largely a phenomenon among very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist communities. This should be at the top of the list with all of the others I've mentioned. The prosperity gospel is the idea that God wants you to give especially to the church, and in return, God will enrich you. You give of what you have and God will then enrich you. And God wants you to be rich. This is part of kind of a broader Christian idea that's been around for a long time, that if you're on God's side and you do what he wants you to do, he wants what's best for you, and so he will reward you and so you'll have a good life. You want a good life? God will reward you for doing what he wants you to do. That's not Jesus teaching. Weirdly, Jesus idea of life is that if you want to follow Me, you have to be crucified. Take up your cross and follow me. The original Christian teaching was that Jesus shows us how to live. He gives his life for others. He doesn't become rich and famous. And like a ruling king who has everything at his disposal, the prosperity gospel takes this teaching that God wants to make us happy in this life, which Jesus did not teach. He thought, you have to give up your life for the sake of the coming kingdom, which very few people believe, with the heart and core of his message, give up yourself for others so that you can inherit the kingdom. Okay, so that's his teaching. Prosperity gospel is the opposite. Prosperity gospel says that God is going to make you rich. The persons that typically makes rich, of course, are the people who preach it. Because the way you get rich is by giving your money to them. And so it's very shabby in many instances. But apart from being shabby, it is completely contrary to Jesus teaching. The whole idea is that you're not supposed to cherish wealth. When a rich man comes to Jesus says, what do I have to do to inherit the kingdom? Jesus says, sell it all and give to the poor. And of course, everybody says, well, he didn't really mean it. Really? What makes you think he didn't mean it? The guy walks away crestfallen because he won't do it. And Jesus doesn't tell his disciples, I don't really mean it. I'M just playing with his head. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven. And so what people do then, as Jesus next says, is, well, with humans, it's impossible. With God, it's possible. People say, oh, see, rich people can get in. And I'm one of them. They completely misunderstand what Jesus is saying. When it's impossible for humans, he means it's impossible for a rich person to give away their wealth and sell their stuff and give it to the poor. Rich people can't do it, but God can make it possible. And when they do, they're going to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Jesus insisted poverty was the thing, not wealth and man. Does the prosperity gospel ever get that one wrong? But you know, you can twist anything, Jesus said, to satisfy your own longings and to desires. And people do that all the time. They make Jesus say what they want to think. And, you know, okay, fine, anybody can do that. But how about seeing what Jesus really said and then trying to follow that?
- [36:56]
B
Maybe my final question before we move on is, do you think that Jesus would have approved of modern fundamentalism?
- [37:04]
C
No, not at all. Jesus said what? This is not what I was talking about. Modern fundamentalism is so unrelated to what Jesus himself was preaching. Jesus thought that God was fed up with the powers of evil and was soon going to destroy them and bring in a paradise on earth. And people should give up everything in anticipation of that coming kingdom. It was not about life in this world. It was about giving up for the sake of others. Moreover, you know, it wasn't about, you know, believing the right doctrines. Jesus did not go around preaching doctrines. Read this Sermon on the Mount. There aren't doctrines there. There are teachings about how you ought to live. And people, they skim over and they say, oh, that's nice, but they don't bother to try and implement it. You know, if you're not a Christian, that's fine. But if you are a Christian, why aren't you trying to do what Jesus told you to do? I don't know. Because you just don't believe in at it, I guess. Okay, I just think you shouldn't call yourself a Christian then.
- [38:08]
B
Thank you, Bart. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
- [38:14]
A
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Irman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [38:29]
B
So but we spent the past couple of weeks talking about Jody's course. Obviously that was a huge success. I was wondering what other things you have planned for this year.
- [38:38]
C
Well, you know, so I've got this thing, the Bart Ehrman courses online. And as I've said before, we try to do four kind of major events a year. One of them this year will be another Bible conference, new insights into the New Testament, be on a completely different topic from the Gospels, with a different set of speakers, some of them the same. But, but in addition to that, the one that we're doing next, we actually haven't even announced this yet, but I'll just tell you, I think this is the one we're doing next. We're going to have a eight lecture course with me and a scholar of Islam who knows the historical critical understanding of the Quran the way I know the historical critical understanding of the New Testament. We're going to each give lectures on the same topic, one on the New Testament, one on the Quran. Like, you know, historical reliability, contradictions. How do you find the historical Muhammad? How do you find the historical Jesus? It's like we'll each do it, then we'll talk to each other. It's like, oh, this is going to be so much fun. So I think that's the one that's going to be next probably in a couple months, but we'll be announcing it later. But that's something at least to be looking forward to.
- [39:40]
B
That sounds really, really great. And we have had a few questions through the misquoting Jesus email form about the Quran and they're never ones that I'm going to bring up because it's not, you're not a Quran specialist. So this is perfect for all of those people who listen and want to know.
- [39:56]
C
Yeah, it will be.
- [39:57]
B
Oh, fantastic. Okay, well, we will have more details for the audience as and when that's all finalized. So yeah, keep listening to find out more. And now we're going to go to Barthes soapbox
- [40:12]
A
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [40:28]
B
We are back. Bart, what are you soapboxing about this week?
- [40:33]
C
Yeah, this is kind of an academic soapbox. I really love doing research and I spend most of my life doing research. And my soapbox is about people who really want to know a lot about some topic but aren't willing to learn a lot. And they kind of think it Just kind of comes easily, or it comes naturally, or they can. And so this happens on just about every level. Lots of weeks, I get an email from somebody who's a layperson, not a scholar, who says that they're interested in writing. They said, I'm writing a book on. And it's something to do with the New Testament. Like, I'm writing a book on whether Jesus thought he was God. You know, I'm writing a book about, what did the Book of Job say about suffering? You know, I'm writing a book on that. So they'll tell me that. Then they'll say, what should I read? Where do I start? And think, you haven't started doing research and, you know, you want to write a book on it. Why would you want to write a book on something you don't know about? I think it's just the strangest thing. Or they'll be. They'll say they're in the middle of a book and they'll ask me for, like, bibliography on something that's, like, completely central to what they're doing, and they don't know anything about it yet. I don't understand. I mean, I'm all for people writing books. And these days, everybody can write a book. You publish it yourself, publish it online. But, I mean, you write a book because you know about something, not because you don't know about it. So the thing that really gets under my skin is that scholars can be guilty of this, too. I'll give you an example. There are a lot of scholars who have, especially evangelical scholars, as it turns out, who have written about oral traditions and eyewitness testimony and memory issues. And it drives me nuts because I look at these people's books and I see what's in their bibliography and think they've hardly read anything. I mean, I was reading a book this week about a different topic about the Greek and Roman economy, where it looks like the guy got his information about the Greek and Roman economy at the time of the New Testament, which is an important topic. How many people were rich, how many poor, how poor were they? You know, that kind of thing. And it looked like he read one collection of essays and a couple of articles, and this is a book that people quote all the time. Why doesn't he read more? But, you know, like this memory thing. Oh, my God. And I know a couple people, really big books on the importance of Jesus and memory, and they haven't read the literature on what we know about eyewitness testimony from legal circles, in psychological circles, or about memory from psychological points of view or from sociological or anthropological points. And they just haven't read the literature. I was at a conference once that was kind of dealing with this kind of thing, and one of these guys had just written this big book on memory, and he's going up on how memory is so reliable. And somebody asked him how he knows, and he says, well, I have this next door neighbor. She's 97 years old, and she remembers perfectly well what was happening when she was a child. And I say, what in the world are you even talking about? The very first thing you will learn if you read anything is that a clear memory is not necessarily an accurate memory. And it's been proven time after time after time. So just because your next door neighbor remembers something doesn't mean it happened. Oh, no, it happened because she remembers it. Oh, yeah, yeah. You wrote a book on this. So that's my soapbox. I just. I didn't think, you know, if I am all for people writing books. I like writing books. We all like writing books. But, you know, it seems to me that if you want to know a lot about something, you've got to do the work to learn a lot. And most people don't want to go to that bother. They just want to write the book. Okay, so, yeah, that's my current rant.
- [44:09]
B
That's an excellent rant. And as someone who took psychology in high school several years ago now, I know enough to know that that is not how memory works.
- [44:19]
C
Oh, God, it's so basic. And eyewitnesses, you know, I mean, you know, there is so much research. It's been going on since 1902, basically, research on eyewitnesses and started out in legal circles, and all sorts of things have ended up mattering. But there are so many studies on how eyewitness, how it all works, and studies on oral tradition. There's lot of research. It's just astonishing that people can write about the gospels and eyewitnesses and not have read any of the research or very little. You know, you pick the two books that you think are probably going to agree with your view or something, then you quote them instead of, like, doing the research. Sorry.
- [44:58]
B
Thank you for that. No, that was wonderful. Before we finish for the week, Bart, could you summarize what we spoke about?
- [45:05]
C
Yeah. We're talking about whether the fundamentalist ethical agenda that we find around us today, especially in America, whether it coincides well with the teachings of Jesus. And my view is the answer is roughly no. There are, of course, lots of very, very fine fundamentalist human beings who do good things for one another and for others and who are as good as just any other population group. But when it comes to, like, choosing ethical issues, I think that most of the ethical issues on the fundamentalist agenda are either absent from the teachings of Jesus or contrary to the teachings of Jesus at the very heart. And that I think as a historical scholar that it would be useful for people who claim to be followers of Jesus to look more closely at what he actually taught was important for how we live our lives. And if you decide you want to follow Jesus, then you ought to implement those instructions rather than following what other people tell you is what Jesus said.
- [46:04]
B
Thank you, Bart Audience, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code njpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [46:23]
C
Well, our next topic is obviously one we haven't talked about before. Did Jesus think that he was the Messiah? Now some people are thinking, you talk about this thing, did Jesus think it was God? Right.
- [46:33]
B
Yeah.
- [46:33]
C
You did that. Yeah. If you think that's the same thing, then you need to watch the next episode because it's not the same thing. And it's a very interesting historical question. My answer to it is not one that people probably would expect would be my answer. Did Jesus think he was the Messiah?
- [46:49]
B
Cliffhanger right there. We'll see you all next week. Thank you and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite 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.