← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Actually Prove the Bible Never Changed?
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- [00:02]
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Megan Lewis
Visit your nearby Lowes. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shook the field of biblical studies to its core. But did they actually change how we view the Old Testament? Today? We're talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls, what they are, what they can tell us about the editorial history of the Old Testament and whether they really show the perfect error free transmission of the Hebrew Bible. At the end we have our bonus segment, which this week is audience Q and A where I'll be asking Bart what happened to the children of Jesus apostles. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. Bart, before we dive into the scholarly side of this question, I would like to ask you, when you were an evangelical Christian, how important was it to you that the original biblical text had been perfectly preserved?
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Bart Ehrman
Oh, well, when I was a conservative evangelical, that was everything, you know, because we believed that the Bible was inerrant, but we also knew that scribes had copied it. And especially with the New Testament, we thought that the scribes had changed it in places. So it was really, really important to know what the original words were before you could, before you had to know what the words were, to know what they meant and know what they meant, understand what God wanted you to know. And so it was hugely important. But we thought that the original text was there someplace. And so it's kind of a detective story to figure out where it is for the New Testament. That's why I got interested in studying Greek Manual for that precise reason, because I wanted to know the original words. We all thought though that the Hebrew Bible didn't have these problems because the Hebrew Bible had been accurately copied by Jews over the centuries. So that when you get the book of Isaiah, you've got the words he wrote. We were pretty convinced of that.
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Megan Lewis
That's fascinating. So the only text that had these kind of transmission errors was the New Testament.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it didn't strike us as weird. It should have struck us as weird. Like if Jews could keep their manuscripts from having changes, why didn't the Christians? And if God preserved the Hebrew Bible without changes, why didn't he preserve the New Testament without change by scribes? And the question never even occurred to me or to anyone else I talked to that I can remember. But it was very important, and that's the way it was.
- [02:48]
Megan Lewis
Now, today, we're looking at how the Dead Sea Scrolls kind of helps us understand this question of transmission, specifically with the Old Testament. We've referred to them, I think, in passing before, but haven't spent an awful lot of time on them. Could you just start by telling us exactly what the Dead Sea Scrolls are?
- [03:06]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So they, by all accounts, are the most important archaeological find connected with the Bible probably ever. The find was first made in 1947, when either a single Bedouin or several Bedouin near the northwest coast of the Dead Sea discovered in a cave, a jar that. And in this jar were some carefully preserved scrolls. And this. You know, they thought these might be worth something. And word got out that these things had been discovered. And then other Bedouins started looking for other caves. And eventually scholars found out about archaeologists and they went in to look at other caves. And this is. This is in an area that scholars call Kumran. There's a. There's a wadi that goes through there, the Wadi Kumran. And so it's a. So it looked. It's nearby an old settlement that was in ruins. And they started realizing that probably what happened is that this was a Jewish settlement from around the time of the turn of the era, so around the time of Jesus, that had been inhabited by Jews that had hidden their books, probably when the Romans attacked this land in the. Around the year 66, and they had hidden them in caves. They ended up finding. They found 11 caves that had scrolls in them. Most of these scrolls were just tiny fragments of scrolls. Some of them were larger fragments. Some of them were entire, entire scrolls. And those are the. That. That is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- [04:43]
Megan Lewis
So you've mentioned that some of them were really fragmentary, and some are not so much. Do we have, like, whole books of the Old Testament preserved in these scrolls?
- [04:53]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we have one Old Testament book, Isaiah, preserved in these scrolls. And the. And writings, writings of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible are some of the most important aspects of these Dead Sea Scrolls. But there are lots of other books in there, too, which. Which are. Make them. The most important discovery is that you have books that are collections of rules for this community. And so we can find out what this community was, a very ascetic community that we think now is the Jewish group called the Essenes. And we have books that are psalms, some of them that the community has used in their worship services. And we have books that are eschatological in nature, that are describing the coming battle that's going to end all battles at the end of time. And we have commentaries on scripture. And so there's a whole range of things in here. But for Hebrew Bible scholars, the most important thing are these are the, are the scrolls that contain portions or a complete, in the case of Isaiah, a copy of the Hebrew, Hebrew Bible.
- [05:59]
Megan Lewis
Now, why is it so surprising or unusual maybe to have this level of textuality. That's the wrong word. But this level of, of quantity, not level, this quantity of textual material discovered in a settlement. Because this was a huge thing. Why was it so amazing?
- [06:21]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, right. Well, it was a huge thing, this discovery. And when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, the reason it was so amazing requires a little bit of background. People today, when they read their Old Testament, they're reading a. In English, they're reading the English translation of the Hebrew. Well, the question is, where did the Hebrew come from? And for, since the time of printing, all of the Hebrew Bible, the copies of the Hebrew Bible that are being then done by printing, they're all based on a single manuscript. And the single Hebrew manuscript is the basis for all the English translations. This single manuscript is not connected with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The single manuscript is called Codex Leningradensis. It's called that because it was kept in Leningrad in, you know, what is now Russia. And it could be dated to the year 1000 of the Common Era. So 1000, the Common Era was our oldest Hebrew Bible up until they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls were written a thousand years earlier. And now you had copies of the, of the Old Testament, of almost all the books of the Old Testament, with the exception of Esther, are represented among the scrolls that were discovered. Again, most of them are fragments, but some of them are larger. And we have this Isaiah scroll. It meant that you could compare what, what was written a thousand years earlier by a scribe, by what a scribe wrote a thousand years later to see what. Whether they made changes or not. So like, it provided absolute evidence one way or the other. We're scribes copying it completely accurately for a thousand years or not.
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Megan Lewis
It's wild to me that we had something the Leningrad Codex and then we found so many. I say we, like I was personally involved, but then like a thousand years prior to that, that's incredible.
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Bart Ehrman
It's kaboom. And the thing is that I need to emphasize there are some of the books of the Old Testament, they're represented in just tiny fragments. You know, the Size of a credit card, like that's it, that's all. But they came from entire scrolls originally. And with the book of Isaiah you actually have a scroll. You can, if you go to Israel to, in Jerusalem they have a museum that has a dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can actually see this Isaiah scroll there. And it's really quite stunning.
- [08:58]
Megan Lewis
Why are these so important for understanding the editorial history of the Old Testament?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so the books of the Old Testament were written over a long period of time. The oldest ones we know for sure would be the prophets of the 8th century, Isaiah and Amos. They can confidently be dated as these, these authors writing in the 8th century BCE. And when we before the discover the Dead Sea Scrolls, our first full manuscript of these things was from 1700 years later. And so we wanted to know is, do we have the accurate text or not? You know, do we know what Isaiah wrote? Do we know what Amos wrote? And we had no way of knowing because we thought, you know, we thought, well, Jews kept it quite regularly, they didn't change anything. But we didn't have any real evidence of it. And then you get the scrolls and so you have the evidence for it. So, so it does tell us at least how accurate or not accurate the copying was over the last thousand years. At least it gives us one, one piece of evidence when we had no evidence before.
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Megan Lewis
That one is definitely better than zero in this instance.
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Bart Ehrman
That's right. That is right.
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Megan Lewis
Now we have a, an announcement to make in a moment, but I wanted to ask, do you know where this idea that the Hebrew Bible was transmitted so infallibly, where did that come from? Because you, you don't expect it, as you were saying, for the New Testament. You don't really expect it for other ancient texts.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's because we have later manuscripts, Jewish manuscripts after Lenin Gradensis, and they don't have any mistakes in them. I mean, and, and we knew why. Yeah, yeah, that's a good reason. And we know why. It's because again, it's kind of a complicated story. But they're around the year 500 of the common era, there was a group of Jewish scholars who decided to standardize the Hebrew Bible text, that they wanted to have it like consistent. And they came up with rules for how to copy these texts for Jewish scribes, where they're very strict rules about how to copy just how you copy this page. And they had these rules with all sorts of backup measures to make sure that not a single letter got changed. That would involve things like counting the number of letters until you get to the middle letter of the page.
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Megan Lewis
Page.
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Bart Ehrman
And if you produce a page and the middle letters in the wrong place, sorry, that one goes out. And so they made sure. And this group of Jewish scholars were called the Masoretes, and from a Hebrew word that means tradition. And these are people who are preserving the tradition accurately. They were active from about the year 500 to about the year. About the year 1000 of the. Of the Common Era. And because of that, we knew that there were these accurate copying practices. And then the question was, when did they start? Is it possible they just started then? Or were these copying practices already in place before the Masoretes took over? So that was the big question that the Dead Sea Scrolls helped us answer.
- [12:10]
Megan Lewis
And we will get to the answer to that question in a moment. But before we continue, I wanted to give you a quick reminder about the course that we've been talking about over the past few weeks, which is Judaism before Jesus with Dr. John J. Collins. In this course, John looks at the centuries leading up to Jesus, how Judaism developed during that time, and the different groups that emerged and the new ideas that took shape about things like the Messiah and the afterlife. Now, we're talking today, obviously, about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and. But it's my understanding that they're quite critical in helping us understand what was going on in Judaism during this period, given they are Jewish texts. Could you explain that connection for us?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, I can. And I'll just say about this course that John Collins is doing. He is one of the world's expert on this period of Judaism and is one of the world's experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so people who take this course, they're going to get a lot, a lot from this. But the. I think a lot of people, when they think of Judaism in the ancient world, they tend to think of a single thing. You know, they think Judaism is a thing. And I constantly get asked questions, what was the Jewish view of the Messiah? What was the Jewish view of abortion? What was the Jewish view of X, Y or Z? As if there's a Jewish view, you know, it's kind of like asking, what's the American view of. Pick something, you know. And so it depends which American you're talking to. Right. And so it was like that within. It was in Judaism, there's a lot of diversity. And we know from Jewish authors that there were actually several specific sects of Judaism that had different perspectives on what really mattered before God. And so Pharisees and Sadduce and Zealots. And, you know, you have these various groups. We know of four groups from authors such as the Jewish historian Josephus, and they included those three I just mentioned, but also a group called the Essenes. The other three groups are all mentioned in the New Testament, by the way. The Essenes are not. But now we know far more about the Essenes than we know about any of the other groups, because as it turns out, the Dead Sea Scrolls were almost certainly produced by a community of Essenes. And since these scrolls tell us what their views are, what their community rules were, what they, what their interpretations of the Bible were, what their commitments were, I mean, it tells us a lot about these Essenes. And so it has helped us understand this community. And one of the really important things about these scrolls is that they embrace an apocalyptic point of view, a view that the world is controlled by evil forces and that God is going to intervene and wipe them out and bring in a paradise. We knew about this view from other Jewish texts, and eventually it gets taken over by Jesus and John the Baptist before him and others. But now we know. Wow, okay, now we've got a whole bunch of texts that either talk about this explicitly or that presuppose it.
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Megan Lewis
It's incredible to me that such an absolute chance discovery completely blows open an entire group of people's, like, framework of belief.
- [15:24]
Bart Ehrman
I know. And it's, it's interesting because it confirmed some things and it, and it disproved some things, including on whether the Bible was accurately copied or not, as it turns out.
- [15:39]
Megan Lewis
So as a reminder, this course begins live, right? The recording is going to be live on May 14th. And if you join, you can watch the sessions as they happen and take part in a live Q And a with Dr. John Collins. You can learn more or register@bartehrman.com JudaismBeforeJesus and as always, be sure to use the code MJ podcast for a discount. And we're going to get back to the Dead Sea Scrolls and how they elucidate our understanding of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible. So to what extent, Bart, do the fragments that we have agree with the Masoretic text, the Leningrad Codex?
- [16:17]
Bart Ehrman
So this is the key point of what we're, we're getting at. And again, let me stress that we don't have complete texts of most of the books of the Hebrew Bible from, from the, from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So many Christians and Jews have told me that the Dead Sea Scrolls show that these practices of keeping the text unchanged go all the way back and that for all these centuries, since the first century, that they were copied accurately. And it is absolutely true that these Isaiah scroll, which is the one that's a complete scroll, is very much like the text of Isaiah in Leningradensis. And so that shows that Isaiah was copied accurately. And so people base on that basis say, so they're copying it accurately the whole time. The problem is they're looking only at that scroll. We have fragments of, you know, virtually all the other books. And the story changes once you start looking at some of the other books. I'll just give you one example, one that's always kind of struck me as really significant. You know, after Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible is Jeremiah. And Jeremiah is another major prophet long book. And we have a portion of Jeremiah preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the things that had struck scholars for a very long time is that the Greek edition of Jeremiah that we knew about, that had been around for a very long time from even before the Christian era. There had been a Greek version of, of Jeremiah floating around. This Greek version that scholars call the Septuagint version was much shorter than Jeremiah is in the Hebrew Bible. So the Greek translation is much shorter. It's 15% shorter. So it has 15% fewer words. So it's leaving out verses and words and things, and so it's much shorter. And the theory had been that it must be that the Greek translators had a different version of Jeremiah than we have in the Hebrew Bible. When they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, they got this fragment of Jeremiah and it more closely agrees with the Septuagint version, 15% shorter. So the Isaiah scroll might suggest they never changed anything. The Jeremiah scroll shows they absolutely changed things 15%. That's significant. And there are other books as well, like first and Second Samuel are very different. I'm not talking about like, they, you know, it's not like two different novels or something. But I'm saying the copies, the copies made made significant changes that affect the meaning in places. So that scholars today who are translators of the Hebrew Bible, they typically follow Codex Leningradensis, but they have to look at the Dead Sea scroll versions of these things, too, because they're often different. And they have to decide which one is probably the older form of the text
- [19:23]
Megan Lewis
when they're trying to make those decisions. Is it as simple as saying, oh, well, the books, the scrolls from Qumran are so much older than the Leningrad Codex. They, they must be the originals. And the, the, the Masoretic text show is the more recent version. And so that Must have been the changed one, or is there a bit more to it?
- [19:43]
Bart Ehrman
There's a lot more to it, actually. It, it's in both New Testament and Hebrew Bible. You really want the oldest manuscripts. You absolutely, you know, in some, on some level, you give them priority. They're the oldest manuscripts. But there are other considerations that you have to take into account for, for kind of complicated reasons. I don't think we've had a podcast on, we probably should do a podcast on, on how this kind of textual criticism stuff works. But there are places where a manuscript that is only, you know, a thousand years old is less accurate than a manuscript that's 1700 years old. And you can show it, you can demonstrate it. And so age is important, but it's not the decisive factor. Otherwise you would just go with the oldest manuscript and say, that's it. But often the oldest manuscripts also have mistakes in them. Especially in a period with the Hebrew Bible when there weren't set controls that had been set by the Masoretes, if there's no control or very limited control over the copying, then lots of changes can be made.
- [20:53]
Megan Lewis
And when we're thinking about something like Jeremiah, which is that 15% shorter, do scholars think that what we're looking at is actually two different textual traditions? So we've got the 15% shorter one, and then we've got the longer one that we're more familiar with that exists in the Masoretic edition. Is that two different strains of the same story, or is someone just along the way chopped some bits off?
- [21:20]
Bart Ehrman
Well, that's it. That's, that's, that is one of the leading questions, and there are a number of complications connected with that question. When I said that it's closer to the Septuagint version, that presupposes that we have the original Septuagint version with the Greek.
- [21:36]
Megan Lewis
You mean we don't.
- [21:37]
Bart Ehrman
We do not. We have several. We have different Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, and we only have a few of the ones that probably were in circulation. So we don't even know how widespread the differences were among the Greek manuscripts to begin with. And the problem with saying there were, you know, some people will say this, you know, there were two forms of the taxes, this form and that form. And, you know, if, if what we had was everything and among that everything, there are only two forms of the text, we could say that, but we have, like, very little. And so there could have been 20 forms of the text or 50 forms of the text. There could have been textual streams of tradition. Where like, say, just say, for example, suppose in, in Jerusalem they had this form of Jeremiah that like, it was worded this way in all the verses, you know, and that was their form. But say, you know, up somewhere in Galilee, they had a form that was 10% different in these verses. Right. And you could say that he had like that, but you could say that maybe what happened is each scribe is changing it somewhat. And so there's not different streams of tradition. They're just different manuscripts with differences in them. And maybe we just have two different manuscripts rather than two different streams of tradition. So the result of this is that scholars who have spent their lives studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hebrew Bible text in the Dead Sea Scrolls disagree about how to explain it. But what they all agree on is that at the time of Qumran, at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, this community was destroyed in probably in the year 70 of the common era. That for the last hundred years before that, 150 years before that, the copying practices were quite variable, that the texts were not being kept word for word the same. That they're various copying practices. And the scrolls seem to seem to support that view.
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Megan Lewis
So even if you're not reading two different novels, you're reading minor variations on the same one, it's still not this incredibly careful identical copying practice that people say exists because we can see it in later texts.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, a good analogy is if you think about, like, if you, if some of our listeners were English majors in college and they studied Shakespeare, they'll know that there's big differences between, between the different versions. The Folio version, you know, is, is one thing and it's, you know, so you've got two different, you got two different forms of Hamlet, and anybody who, you know, who directs him has to decide what lines to put in there based on which so and so. Which and so. Yeah, so you have that with Shakespeare and you have it with every writing going back, and you certainly have it with the Bible, which is why people should not say that we now we know that was accurately copied all these years. We know in fact, that it was not.
- [24:38]
Megan Lewis
As an historian, it seems a little odd, and we've alluded to this earlier, that to be talking about proving that millennial texts have in fact changed over time. Normally that's the assumption that you come to the work with. Why is it so important for some branches of Christianity that the Old Testament is unchanged?
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Bart Ehrman
Conservative evangelicals insist that the Bible is the word of God. And it isn't just the word of God in the sense that it communicates God's will or what he wants from the text, but that the actual words come from God. Not necessarily that God dictated the words, although there are fundamentalists who would say that, but that the words are the words that God wanted in there. And that if God inspired these words, he certainly wanted us to have them. And so if he did the miracle of inspiring these authors, it would be no more difficult to do the miracle of making sure the scribes kept them. And it provides assurance that you really have the very words that God wanted you to have. And so that is comforting for people who see the Bible as containing the very words of God. And as a result of like, you know, thinking theologically that it kind of needs to be that way, then it leads to the idea, well, it must be that way. So people make, you know, and they try and find evidence for it. And so like this Isaiah scroll is, is the kind of evidence that they look for, but they're not looking at the wide range of evidence which absolutely shows. Shows otherwise.
- [26:17]
Megan Lewis
So if we ignore this entire conversation and assume that in fact the Dead Sea Scrolls do show an unbroken stream of transmission, perfectly copied, no errors, no changes, would that then mean that we do in fact have the original, like, copies of the original texts of the Hebrew Bible?
- [26:38]
Bart Ehrman
This is a very big problem that for some reason people don't think about, or at least don't talk about. If they want to show that the copying practice has been consistent over all these years. Suppose you can show that, that the text of whatever, you know, pick any biblical book, the book of Genesis, the fragments in Genesis say it found it in the Qumran community, the Dead Sea Scrolls, that they, that they show that the text in Leningrad Denses a thousand years later is an exact replica of what was in the year when the Dead Sea Scrolls were made. And they say, therefore we know that we have the original text. That is so blindingly wrong. And for a reason they, like, for some reason people don't notice. I mean, if Genesis, Suppose, suppose Genesis. Suppose let's say Genesis was written in the year 1000. Okay, I don't think it was. It's written later. But suppose it's written in the year 1000. I'm just using even numbers here. And we have a copy of it from a thousand years later that is exactly like a copy that's a thousand years after that. Okay, so the copy from the year one is just like the copy in the year 20, 26, say, okay, does that show that it was copied accurately before the copy made in year one?
- [27:56]
Megan Lewis
Yes.
- [27:57]
Bart Ehrman
No. But the answer is no. So if you, you know, so the book of Isaiah was probably written in the 8th century, as I said. So say written around the year 750. Okay, so we have a copy from 700 years after that that is like our copy from the year 1000. But how much was it changed over the 700 years before our first copy? We have no way to know. I mean, and so you shouldn't say, oh, therefore we have the original word. Well, we may have. Seems unlikely, but maybe we do. But how would you. There's no way to demonstrate it. And given the fact that the Septuagint has differences in wording here and there from the Hebrew Bible, etcetera, there's pretty good indications that they were not preserved accurately. But you still have a 700 year gap here that's unaccounted for for. So it does not prove that we have the originals.
- [28:53]
Megan Lewis
700 years is, is quite substantial.
- [28:55]
Bart Ehrman
It's pretty substantial. I mean, if, you know. Yeah, you just think of, you know, like. Yeah, I mean, it's 700 years. So something written in the year 1400. The first manuscript we have was written last year. We don't have anything before that. Wow. Okay.
- [29:15]
Megan Lewis
Well, those are all of my questions. Bart, is there anything that you wanted to add before we move on to our listeners questions?
- [29:21]
Bart Ehrman
I just want to emphasize that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the most important discovery of modern times for the Bible. And I don't want to, don't want to deny that or lessen that. It absolutely is fantastic for both because it does give us some evidence for how well the copying practices worked. But even more than that, I would say that most people would say that the Dead Sea Scrolls are significant because they show us some. They give us much clearer insight to what Judaism was in the years before Jesus. The topic that John Collins will be talking about in his course, but also for those who are interested in early Christianity, they show with clarity what a particular group of Jews was saying and thinking in the days of Jesus. And it's not that Jesus said and thought the same things, but it is one of the striking things. When people found the scroll, when they found the scrolls, people would say that, wow, you know, the teachings of Jesus are really similar to these in many ways. It's not that he was a member of the Essene community or anything, or that he wrote one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and he's not in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the, but the worldview is very similar and we don't have writings from Pharisees or Sadducees or Zealots from the period. These are the only writings we have from people from that period. And so it's fantastic, fantastic find and really, really important and so much more
- [30:43]
Megan Lewis
important than just proving that the, the Hebrew Bible wasn't changed it. They gives us so much more information. That is all for today's interview. So we're going to move on to this week's bonus segment, which, as I have said, is listeners questions. Are you ready, bud?
- [30:59]
Bart Ehrman
We will see. Last week you stumped me, by the way.
- [31:04]
Megan Lewis
It's a solid maybe for those who
- [31:07]
Bart Ehrman
are listening to this. Last week Megan asked me a question I couldn't answer and then we said, oh God, should we cut that out? Edit it out? No, no, leave it, man. I didn't know the answer, so go for it.
- [31:17]
Megan Lewis
Admitting fallibility is important. Okay, first up, we are looking at the destruction of the Temple. I've encountered an argument on evangelical blogs and websites for an early dating of the Gospels before 70 CE based on the ending of the book of Acts. The argument goes that Acts ended before Paul's martyrdom. Therefore the Synoptic Gospels were written before his death in the 50s-60s. What do scholars think of this argument? And why does Luke and the Book of Acts. And why does Luke end the Book of Acts where he does? Is it possible that Jesus in the Gospel of Mark made a prediction about the temple's destruction before 70 CE?
- [31:58]
Bart Ehrman
I think Jesus did make a prediction. I think Jesus did predict the destruction of the temple, as did other Jews of his day. Just as today you can predict, people might predict what's going to happen in the war in Ukraine, for example, or the war going on now with Iran. People all the time are predicting what's going to happen, and some of them will be right, some will be wrong. And I think there are people, including the Essenes, there are indications among the Essenes that the temple is going to be destroyed. And so I think Jesus might have made that prediction. I think it's well attested that he did, but it doesn't mean, you know, so, you know, just he's making a prediction. So the question is, since the book of Acts doesn't mention the destruction of the temple and ends when Paul is in prison in the early 60s, doesn't that show that Acts was written before the early 60s and that the Gospel of Luke, which was written by the same author as the first Volume was also written even earlier than that. That's the question. And that's an argument that I used to use when I was an evangelical. But I've come to see it's not a very. It doesn't work very well, I think, because the Gospel of Luke not only has Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple, it does so in significant enough detail to suggest that it's somebody who knows what actually happened when the temple was destroyed. Moreover, there clearly is a reason for Luke ending Acts when he did. It's not because he didn't know Paul died. He hints that Paul's going to die in the Book of Acts. There are two chapters in Acts where in fact, Paul's told he's going to die. Pretty much he's going to die. And so the author knows that Paul's dead. Why does he end before his execution? Well, because one of his major points in the Book of Acts is that Paul is empowered by the spirit of God to spread the gospel and nothing can stop him. His persecutors cannot stop him. They beat him and he just keeps preaching anyway. They kick him out of town. He goes to the next town. In one place, they stone him to death. And then he gets up and goes into the next town. The spirit empowers him not to be stopped. And when he got executed, he got stopped. Luke ends his story before that happens because it would be contrary to his. The contrary to his theme, I think. But he clearly knows Paul has died and he knows that Jerusalem has been sacked.
- [34:22]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. Why did the authorities need Judas to betray Jesus in the Gospels? It seems that the authorities needed someone to point. To point Jesus out to them. But why? It's not like the Romans would have been shy about apprehending a person out in the open. And if Jesus was in Jerusalem and preaching to crowds in public, one would think it wouldn't be difficult to have him pointed out.
- [34:44]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, so the Gospels make one good point about this, is that according to the Gospels, they don't want to arrest him in front of a crowd because they don't want an uprising. And they don't want people ticked off that they've arrested this person, you know, this Jew in their midst. And so that kind of makes sense. I agree with the questioner. It doesn't really make sense that Judas had to betray. Pray where Jesus was, that, you know, that, you know, when. When the crowds weren't around. I mean, maybe I've watched too many bad detective detective movies, but, you know, you can just Trail the guy. It's not that hard to figure out when he's not nobody's around and then just nab him. But that's why I don't think actually that's what Judas betrayed. In my book on Judas, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, I talk about the historical situation with Judas. And I argue in that book that actually what Judas betrayed was the inside information that only the disciples had that would allow the leaders to have Jesus arrested. Judas is the one who betrayed that. Jesus was calling himself the King of the Jews. In other words, he was calling himself the Messiah. He wasn't publicly proclaiming that even in the gospels, but he told his disciples that He. I think he told his disciples he was going to be the Messiah and they were going to be rulers with him in this future kingdom. And I think Judas betrayed that insider information. And the reason, one of the reasons I think that is because those are the grounds that Jesus got killed on. That was the charge Pilate asked him at his trial, are you the King of the Jews when he gets crucified? King of the Jews is written over his head. He's being crucified for calling himself the King of the Jews, even though he never calls him that some himself that in public. Well, an insider. Let's let the cat out of the bag. And so that's, that's why I think the deal is.
- [36:30]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. What do we know historically about James's Jerusalem church, such as its relationship to the churches founded by Paul and do we know what eventually became of this church?
- [36:43]
Bart Ehrman
So the church in Jerusalem originally was headed after Jesus death, after people began to believe in the resurrection, was originally headed by Jesus disciple Peter. And eventually apparently Peter decided to go on missionary journeys to convert Jews elsewhere in Judea and up in Antioch in Syria and so forth. And so the new head of the church was Jesus brother James, who had not been one of his followers during his lifetime. James, according to Paul, also had a vision of Jesus and came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead. We don't have a lot of direct information about James's church in Jerusalem or his views. We have a lot of indirect information. The oldest information, Paul mentions him a couple times, but doesn't give us much information except to indicate that James thought that it was not appropriate for gentiles in the church to have to have their meals with Jews, that Jews had to. Had to eat separately, separate meals, which means they had to celebrate the Lord's Supper separately. And so James argued for a distinction so that Jews could continue keeping kosher the way they had been growing up. They can't have meals with gentiles. Paul disagreed with that rather vehemently. This is in Galatians, chapter two. And so it appears that James was more of a follower of Jesus who understood that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. But Jews have to remain Jewish. It's not a new religion. This is Judaism and Jews have to remain Jewish. Whereas Paul was saying, I think Paul agreed, Jews can stay Jewish. But Paul said Gentiles can also be members of the church without becoming Jewish. And this is portrayed in the Galatians book of Galatians as a conflict. In the book of Acts written later, it's completely smoothed over where James and Paul are completely on the same side. That seems unlikely given what Paul himself says. And we have later literature written by, outside of the New Testament that show James and James and Peter on one side and Paul on the opposite side and at each other's throats. And so it's, it's not clear if either if those are the two extreme views and it's something in the middle or if, if in fact they, they really didn't agree on this issue about whether, about Gentiles being having communion with Jews.
- [39:11]
Megan Lewis
Thank you.
- [39:11]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, oh, oh. They asked what happened to the church. Yeah. Oh, we don't know. But the, the tradition that we find in Eusebius is that when the Roman armies attacked, attacked the uprising, the uprisings in, in Israel and they marched on Jerusalem, that the Christian community there in the year 66 or around maybe after 66, somebody had a vision there, a revelation from God that the Christians had to get out, the Jewish followers of Jesus. And the tradition is they escaped and they went to Pella, a city elsewhere, and they continued their community there in the city called Pella.
- [39:48]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Last question for the day. Were Jesus apostles married when he selected them? And if so, did they have children? Did that mean that they had to leave their families behind to follow Jesus? And if they did, what happened to the kids?
- [40:02]
Bart Ehrman
Right. We don't have full records of the disciples. We have some hints about the families of, especially of Peter, but also of James and John and Peter's brother Andrew. But the others, we don't, we don't have much information on the passage that is probably most important for this question is the one where Jesus has told this rich man that he has to sell everything to, to follow him. And Peter says to Jesus right after this, you know, we've left everything to follow you ourselves. And it's like Peter wants reassurance that, you know, they've done the right thing. And Jesus replies to him that they are blessed. The disciples are blessed because anyone who leaves their home, their, their family, their children, their, their job, their whatevers, and to follow him, they are the ones who will. They'll receive a hundredfold in this life of what they've left behind of, you know, mothers and other family members, and they'll receive eternal life. This suggests that the disciples were principally married. We're pretty sure Peter was married because even in the Gospels, Jesus heals his mother in law in his house. And so their reason for thinking Peter was married, this saying suggests that they had children. And it suggests that Jesus is praising them for leaving them all behind to follow him. That is, for me, that's one of the most troubling passages in the New Testament. If you know something about the demographics of the ancient world and how the economy worked. The man was the head of the household. He was the sole breadwinner. And so if the man abandoned the family, they had no way to have an income, they had no way to eat. And the only way they could get revenue is by doing something very unpleasant to think about or, you know, to beg off of, beg or to get, you know, maybe family members who had access could help possibly. But Jesus had this view, I think, because he expected the end to come very soon and he wasn't expecting it to lead to hardship. But did it lead to hardship? Well, if it really happened, yeah, that would have led, led to hardship. The only off the top of my head, the only family traditions that we know about later are from Jesus, Brother Jude, who two generations later, his grandchildren are allegedly brought before the emperor as potential insurrectionists. And he finds him not guilty. And he finds him not guilty because he has them hold out their hands and you see their hands are thoroughly calloused, which means they're farm labor. And he's not too worried about farm laborers overthrowing the empire. And so he lets them go.
- [42:53]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all for your questions. Now, before we finish for the week, could you just remind us what we spoke about today?
- [43:01]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we've been talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls and just one specific aspect of the scrolls. The fact that they contain parts of virtually all the books of the Hebrew Bible except for Esther. And the question is, do these show us that scribes kept the words of the Hebrew Bible as they had originally been written over the centuries so that we can be sure we still have the right words today? The, the original words and I tried to show the answer to that is no.
- [43:27]
Megan Lewis
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 MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over@w www.bartehrman.com and that does include Dr. John J. Collins course Judaism Before Jesus, which you can find@bartimon.com Judaism before Jesus Misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [43:55]
Bart Ehrman
Well, one of the central doctrines of Christianity is the Trinity, and we're going to be talking about whether the doctrine of the Trinity can be found in the New Testament or not.
- [44:07]
Megan Lewis
Join us then to find the answer. 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.