Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:00]
Bart Ehrman
Start the spring season off right with a new pair of Tokovas Western boots. Handcrafted in over 200 steps from genuine leather, they're built to last and feel broken in the moment you put them on. From cowhide to exotic leathers, Tekovas blends timeless style with all day comfort. Pair them with premium denim Western shirts and accessories for an effortless polished look. Shop quality Western goods in store or online@decovas.com
- [00:30]
Megan Lewis
Fear of the state of one's immortal soul is a very real and present concern for a lot of Christians. Given the choice between eternal paradise in heaven or eternal torment in hell, I certainly know which I'd pick. But is this understanding of the soul as an eternal immortal part of a person original to the Bible? Would it be a belief that early Christians even recognized? And was there a similar belief in the rest of the Greco Roman world? Join us this week on Misquoting Jesus to find out. Welcome to Misquoting 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. Lets begin the fear of one's immortal soul Spending eternity in hell has been a compelling force behind personal conversion, converting other people and staying within Christianity for a very long time. As with many other things, belief around the soul has changed over the millennia. So this week we're going to find out what the Bible actually says about the soul. But before we get to that, Bart, good morning. How are you doing today?
- [01:45]
Bart Ehrman
I'm doing well. My body and my soul are just fine.
- [01:49]
Megan Lewis
That's always good to know.
- [01:51]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. And how you how's your soul today?
- [01:53]
Megan Lewis
Seems pretty good. Yeah. Body and soul doing pretty well all present and correct as far as I know.
- [01:59]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Well you know you look like you're you're good chipper self. So. Okay. Inside and outside.
- [02:06]
Megan Lewis
Now you told me before we started that you are currently getting your AC fixed or you will be getting your AC fixed today. And we had ours replaced last fall because it suddenly just stopped working. And this is possibly going to seem like a weird question to many people, but as a British person it's always at the forefront of my mind. So I wanted to ask what is your ideal climate?
- [02:28]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, so the AC is the issue in this. I've got the small recording studio. Luckily it's not the whole house. That would be a problem because my wife is also British and when it comes to air conditioning. When we first got together, I had this little cabin. I'd been separated from my wife for a while and I had this little cabin which I kind of love, but had no air conditioning in it. And it gets hot in North Carolina, I didn't mind at all. I grew up in Kansas. I mean, in Kansas we'd have 100 degree days and I like sports when I was a kid and so I'd play tennis in 100 degrees weather and then play baseball and like all day long be outside playing in 100 degree weather. Where Sarah grew up in London and you know, we were starting to see each other, I'd be home working, riding, you know, I'd just be sitting there in my, my jogging shorts, you know, that was it. And just. I happily had. Typing away, oh my God, it's hot in here. But, you know, I've become more of a wimp as I've gotten older. I actually though I prefer heat to cold. A lot of people don't mind the cold because you can put on more things, which is fair enough, but I don't like working when it's cold. And so when it's warmer is fine. But I assume you don't, you probably don't do heat either, right?
- [03:34]
Megan Lewis
No. And Maryland's I don't think gets as hot as where you are, but it is still very like Maryland. Summers are deeply unpleasant for me. I try very hard not to get outside and I honestly miss the rain, which I never thought I'd say wow. But. Yeah, I know. But growing up in a country where I think statistically it rains every other day, you get used to a certain amount of gray, overcast, rainy days and we don't have very many. But yes, I'm not a massive fan of, of extreme heat.
- [04:04]
Bart Ehrman
I've done a lot of hiking in England and one summer it was where I was hiking was 40 degrees centigrade. And so for people from here, that's, that's like 104 and like it's this freak day. Like they've never had this before, you know. The thing is the humidity is what kills you down here, though, with the heat, you know, because dry heat's fine for me, but the humid stuff, oh my God, yeah, that can be rugged.
- [04:26]
Megan Lewis
Not so fun. Not so fun. I could again, being British, talk about the weather for a long time, but I suspect we would lose viewers if we kept going on this line of inquiry. So we should dive into the topic at hand. And I wanted to open with a bit of a Personal question, when you were a Christian, what were your beliefs about a person's soul?
- [04:44]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, I had pretty standard beliefs that most people in America probably have, which is that you, you die and your soul goes someplace. So the body and the soul are separable things, you know, they came into existence at the same time, but the soul lives on. And so the soul is a part of you that can't die or that won't die, you know. And so the Christian teachings of heaven and hell just were common sense. Anything else to me was nonsense. I think that's fairly typical for most people.
- [05:13]
Megan Lewis
And what passages from the Bible were used to support these beliefs?
- [05:18]
Bart Ehrman
You know, as you know, you can use the Bible for just about everything. And you can find the soul coming in, existing outside the body in all sorts of places, technically, from Genesis to Revelation. But we thought about verses like in John 14 where Jesus tells his disciples he's going to go prepare a place for them. In the King James, it says in my father's house are many mansions, which can't be right by the way, because mansions cannot be inside a house. It's a mistranslation. But in my father's house there are many dwelling places, you know, and so obviously your body doesn't go there, that's buried, you know, it's where your soul goes. So you know about the whole Bible, you can read the soul into it.
- [05:57]
Megan Lewis
And I assume that now, being an agnostic academic researcher of the Bible, you understand these passages very differently now.
- [06:06]
Bart Ehrman
I understand the passages differently and I understand the ancient understanding of things differently. You know, it wasn't really connected to my becoming an agnostic. I don't believe in an afterlife now. But that wasn't what prompted me. What prompted me was actually reading ancient sources to figure out what they, what they think about body and soul and their relationship to each other. It's a non problematic relationship for most people today because it just seems kind of obvious. But in fact, what seems to us obvious has not seemed obvious to most human beings have been around for the last, you know, 300,000 years that the soul lives on.
- [06:45]
Megan Lewis
So how then do modern Christian beliefs compare to those of maybe Jesus and early Christians in terms of the existence of the soul and what happens to it.
- [06:55]
Bart Ehrman
So the most important thing is to try to get our mind around what ancient Jews thought about the soul in relationship to the body. Because in Judaism the understanding was different from what you would get, for example, in Greek culture and the American view about, just not the American view, kind of the typical Christian view. Today is actually a view that would be more compatible with Plato than it is. What would be compatible with the Old Testament, say, or with the teachings of Jesus in the Hebrew Bible. There's no sense that the soul lives on after death as this entity that survives death. The soul and the body in Jewish thinking are integrated. In a sense they're two parts of the same thing, but they're not independently existent. The way I try to explain this often to my students is with a well known story of the creation of Adam, the first human. In, in the Bible, when God makes Adam, he makes a human being. And how does he do it? Well, he's got the dirt of the earth and so it's like making a humanoid shape out of the clay or the mud. And it's a human being, but it's just lying dormant on the ground. And when God breathes into the body, then Adam comes to life. What enlivens the body is the breath. And in both Hebrew and in Greek, the word for breath is the same word as air, and it can also be the word for soul. And so the person is animated, made alive by having this breath, this soul, the spirit within him. And then when Eve is created within her, when the soul leaves them, they're dead. The analogy is today, if we think about the soul as breath, the way that ancient Hebrews did, when somebody dies today and they stop breathing, where does their breath go? It doesn't go anywhere. It's just there's no more breathing. And so the breath doesn't exist outside the body. And without the breath, the body can't exist. And that's the ancient Jewish view, is that the breath is what animates the body. And when it goes, they're both dead, they don't exist. That's the standard Jewish view. It's the view you find throughout most of the Hebrew Bible and the view that Jesus had and the view of the earliest followers of Jesus. And it's only later that they started adopting this other view that the soul is an independent entity.
- [09:24]
Megan Lewis
So how did the differentiation between the soul and the body come into play?
- [09:29]
Bart Ehrman
You know, so what I was just describing was an ancient view that you get in ancient Israelites and Jewish culture and in other cultures they had other views, especially most famously in Greece because of Plato. Plato didn't make up this idea, but he's the one who's probably popularized it the most for Western civilization. Plato believed that the, or at least he said in his dialogues that the body dies, obviously, but you can't kill the spirit or the soul, it lives on afterwards. And so Plato had the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and he was quite emphatic about it, that the soul exists outside and apart from the body. So that when a person dies, their soul lives on and you can't destroy it, it's going to live forever. That's why for Plato, this had very serious philosophical implications for Plato, because it meant that what really mattered was the thing that's eternal, not the thing that's temporal. And Plato argued that people are focusing on precisely the wrong thing. They're concerned about giving them, enjoying their bodily pleasure. And this leads to all sorts of problems, not just addictions and things, but also it's. Your focus is away from your soul. Philosophers, those who love knowledge, philosophy means the, you know, the love of wisdom, understand that what really matters is working on your soul, not working on your body. And so that means engaging in thought and in discourse and in understanding truth and trying to cultivate your soul rather than cultivating your body, because the soul lives on. And this is the view then, that leads to the idea of an afterlife where your soul goes someplace or other, which you find, you also find in Plato, in some of the myths of Plato, that the soul is rewarded or punished depending on how well it's, you know, been cultivated during life.
- [11:19]
Megan Lewis
How well, what then does the rest of the wider Greco Roman world think about in terms of souls? Did they have similar beliefs to ancient Israelites or were they more in line with Plato's thinking?
- [11:30]
Bart Ehrman
They're almost entirely in line with Plato's thinking. In the time of Jesus, there were, you know, there were various views, of course. I mean, the Roman Empire was a big place and there are lots of local cultures and all that. But the two main views in the Roman world, in the Greek and Roman worlds, the two main views were either that you die and your soul lives on and has some kind of existence after death. Some people thought, believed in rewards and punishment after death. Some thought that there was just an alternative form of existence for the soul after death. But it lives on in some sense because it can't be destroyed. So there was that view. The other view is the view that people are increasingly thinking today, which is that you die and that's it. There's no separate thing. I mean, the soul might be a separate thing, but it dies with the body. And so it's interesting when you, when you look at, for example, ancient tomb inscriptions in the Roman world, I talk about this about a bit and, you know, I have this book Called Heaven and Hell. And I talk about this a little bit in there because it's pretty interesting, these tomb inscriptions today. If you go to an old cemetery, you'll sometimes see a, you know, in a cemetery you'll see the tombstone with RIP and you know, rest in peace. And in the Roman world, they didn't have rest in peace. They had this seven letter designation. So instead of three letters RIP their seven letters were N, F, F, N, S, N, C. And those stood for the Latin phrase non fui, fui non sum, non kuro, which is I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. You don't exist anymore, so it doesn't bother you anymore. It bothered you from before. So certainly that, that's a fairly common tomb inscription in the Latin, ancient Latin world. And so, you know, obviously people like that didn't think that they lived on. But then other tomb inscriptions talk about, you know, the spirit leaving the body and going up someplace.
- [13:25]
Megan Lewis
When do we start to see early Christians buying into this idea of an immortal soul and the fate of that soul being dependent on your personal activities during life.
- [13:37]
Bart Ehrman
So, you know, the earliest followers of Jesus, of course, were Jewish, and their views were the same as Jesus, which is that there will be an eternal life for people, but it will be a bodily eternal life. That's what the doctrine of the resurrection is all about. It's an apocalyptic idea that had become popular in the days of Jesus that at the end of time, God is going to make right everything that's wrong so that people now who suffer injustice, who do the right thing, but are penalized for it, or suffer for it, or miserable for doing the right thing, they'll be rewarded if they've sided with God, they'll be rewarded in the afterlife by having their bodies brought back from the dead with the spirit being breathed back into it. God will breathe life back into the bodies of the righteous. The unrighteous will be raised as well. God will breathe their soul back into them too. But they'll be raised from the dead to be shown the error of their ways and how they've sinned against God, and then they'll be ruthlessly annihilated for all time. And so, so that's a resurrection of the dead. And that's why in early Christianity, Jesus is thought to have been raised bodily from the dead, because it's a resurrection and so it has to be bodily. And so that was the Jewish idea. What ends up happening is that Jesus followers who start out as Jews, they start converting people. And by the end of the first century. The vast majority of people converting are not Jews. They're Gentiles who were raised in Greek culture, even though it was the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was mainly influenced by their Greek predecessors, and people had this Greek understanding of the soul. Now, the people who are coming into Christianity believe your soul lives forever, and they transport that common sense view into their Christianity and it becomes Christianity. So it's not the view of Jesus or the Old Testament, but it's the view of people who converted later, who themselves were raised in Greek context, who simply understand the soul that way.
- [15:45]
Megan Lewis
Do we see any variety in beliefs about souls among early Christian sects? Are there any schisms around this kind of thing, or is this one of the areas where people are generally in agreement?
- [15:56]
Bart Ehrman
No, there are schisms already in the New Testament period. One of the kind of notable ones is one that people don't notice, I think, when they read letters of Paul. But the letter of first Corinthians is in some ways focused around this issue, and as are, by the way, some Gospel passages that I'll talk about in a minute. But Paul's letter to 1 Corinthians is one of the earliest writings of Christianity we have. And Paul is writing against a group of Christians in Corinth who believe that they have already experienced the full benefits of salvation because their spirits, when they became followers of Jesus and when they were baptized, their spirits were given the kind of the rewards of heaven here on earth. And so they're already experiencing a heavenly existence. And for these people, the idea of a resurrection is not a future bodily event like Jesus taught. And like Paul, who was also a Jewish apocalypticist before he followed Jesus and then still after he followed Jesus, they believed in a future bodily resurrection. Jesus and Paul. But these people are saying that, no, you're just not some kind of. You're not going to live forever in your body. Most people in the Greek world thought that was really gross. Are you kidding me? Your body's the problem. Why would God make you live in your body? Nobody likes their body. Even the people, the most gorgeous human beings on the planet really don't like their body. And plus, you know, and you get sick and you get injured, and it's like, you get. It's like, oh, my God, who would want to live in their body? And so Greeks thought this was a repulsive idea. And Christians are saying, oh, no, you're going to be raised in your body. Are you nuts? And so, so the idea that it's a Spiritual resurrection, that your spirit is already enjoying the benefits of heaven, was appealing to many people. Paul writes 1 Corinthians largely to attack that view. So you find it most clearly in chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, which is often called the Resurrection chapter. It is arguably the most misunderstood chapter in the New Testament in many ways, because many people think that this First Corinthians 15 is a chapter meant to demonstrate that Jesus was raised from the dead. And that's completely wrong. Just read it. It's not about whether Jesus was raised from the dead. Paul presupposes Jesus was raised from the dead. And this assumption is one that his Corinthian readers have as well, that Jesus was raised from the dead. And Paul's whole point in the chapter is that when Jesus was raised from the dead, it wasn't that his spirit came back to life, his body came back to life. He was physically raised from the dead. Now, the body he rose in was absolutely not the same body because it was transformed, it was transfigured, it was made an immortal body, a body that couldn't be hurt, couldn't get sick, couldn't die. It's an immortal body. Since Jesus was raised that way into an immortal body, that's how it's going to be for Christians. They'll be raised in immortal bodies. It's not a spiritual thing, it's a bodily thing. And once you understand that that's Paul's emphasis in 1 Corinthians 15, you can read the entire book where the Corinthians have problem after problem after problem, and Paul has to deal with each problem one by one. But all of it's rooted in this idea. They don't understand the importance of the body. The body's going to be raised from the dead. This is kind of a shortcut way of understanding it. For Paul, God's going to raise the body from the dead, just as he raised Jesus bodily from the dead. That shows to God the body matters. And if the body matters, then it matters what you do with your body. And so that's the kind of logic of many of his ethics in 1 Corinthians.
- [19:40]
Megan Lewis
So if that's Paul's view and how he addresses it, what do the Gospels say about this kind of thing? Do they say anything?
- [19:48]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, for one thing, they all insist that Jesus body was raised from the dead. Part of the reason they're insisting that is not just because of non believers, but also because some believers are saying he wasn't raised physically from the dead. And in the Gospels, they want to emphasize, no, there was an empty tomb, and he appeared to people, and they could touch him and talk with him. And so it's pretty clear that they're trying to emphasize the bodily nature of this. But in addition, there do appear to be some passages that are trying to counter the opposite view, really, seriously counter the opposite view. In both Luke and John, when Jesus is raised, when he appears to his disciples, there's some doubt about whether it's really him. Is this really him? And to prove that he is not just a ghost, that it's actually him in the flesh, in the body, he says, well, give me something to eat. You know, give some broiled fish, and they'll eat it. I mean, so he's proving or with. With Thomas, you know, Thomas doesn't believe, I've got the wounds here. Put your hand in my side, in my hands. And you'll see, you know, and you'll. You'll see that it's me, this is my body. Now, in this case, for Luke and John, it's not quite the same view as Paul, because for Paul, Jesus has this glorified body that is immortal and perfect. Now, but for Luke and John, it appears that it's more like a resuscitation of the corpse, apparently with a digestive system because he can eat. So they don't have exactly the same way of understanding the body, but for all of them, it is absolutely the body. The spirit doesn't live on without the body.
- [21:30]
Megan Lewis
So if the overall view seems to be that the spirit needs the body, that the two don't exist separately, what does the Bible have to say, if anything, about the soul prior to conception, prior to birth? Is there even a soul before you have, like, a bodily existence?
- [21:49]
Bart Ehrman
Right. Well, that's the thing. I mean, if the soul is immortal, if it can't die, if it can't die, how can it be born? You see what I mean? It's like, this is not a very big problem in the New Testament itself, because most of the authors of the New Testament haven't gotten that far yet. But it ends up being a problem in later Christian theology, where there are theologians who insist not only that the soul will live forever, but that always has lived forever, or at least since God created the universe. So you do get on the margins, not in central Christian teachings, that's come down to us, but you do get some people arguing that the souls existed, and so they develop a doctrine of reincarnation. Reincarnation literally means coming into the flesh Again, the main proponent of this from early Christianity was a very famous theologian. So for a while, it wasn't just on the margins, it was teaching of Origen, who is a third century philosopher theologian. Probably the most, certainly the most important theologian of Christianity before the Council of Nicaea, before the conversion of Constantine, was Origen. And he believed that souls had existed before and they would get reincarnated. In Origen's way of doing it, the reason for reincarnation is because some people just don't get it the first time around and they continue to sin. So God gives them another chance so they don't get it. And it goes on for age after age after age. So like you have these ages that go on forever and ever and then you have another one going on until everybody finally gets it. And in the end, everybody finally gets it. So God is giving souls a chance to repent over and over and over, like Groundhog Day or something. But like, finally something happens for every soul. This is a doctrine he's picking up from Plato and becomes a important doctrine within Christianity. It ends up being rejected for a very interesting reason, because the logic of it leads Origin to say that everyone will eventually be saved, including the devil. And once he said that that was a step too far. That was like, you know, people today saying, yeah, well, everybody, you know, possibly everybody, not Hitler, he ain't going to be saved. You know, it's like that, that kind of emotional sense, but he's saying, the devil's going to be saved. So about a century and a half later, they end up declaring, actually longer than that. They declared Origin a heretic and they rejected that view. And then reincarnation and these other things went completely to the margins and they never were the dominant view, but they, they ended up being very marginal.
- [24:20]
Megan Lewis
Interesting, thank you. So how far then does the Bible, the New Testament, the Gospels, even other early Christian writings, how far do they support what we would consider to be a modern Christian understanding of the soul and its immortality and fate after death?
- [24:37]
Bart Ehrman
So again, it's an interesting development that I try to trace in my book Heaven and Hell, because it's a little bit complicated, but it looks like even Paul himself, toward the end of his life, started thinking something kind of along those lines. Paul was definitely committed to the idea that there'd be a future bodily resurrection of the dead, where the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked would be punished. He firmly believed it would happen during his lifetime. And so when you read 1 Corinthians 15, there's a passage there where it's quite clear, he says that he's one of the ones who will be alive when Jesus returns. And you get the same thing in First Thessalonians, chapters 4 and 5, where Paul indicates when Jesus returns and there's a resurrection of the dead, he'll be one of the ones alive at the time these letters were written relatively early in his letter writing career. Of the letters we have now, as time went on, Paul got arrested and he was in jail. And some of his writings come from jail and some of them are from later in his life when he really thought, you know, I might get executed before it happens. And he tried to get to his mind around the idea that he would die before Jesus comes back. And he felt so close to Christ and he felt like he was almost one with Christ. And how can he possibly be abandoned even for a short period of time, you know, between the time he died and the time Jesus came back. And Paul appears to have started thinking that, well, there could be a short interim period, it may be that I'll die. Christ isn't going to abandon me during that interim period. I'll be with him. And so in 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, Paul indicates that if we die here, we have a tent built in the heavens and that we'll dwell there. And then when Christ returns, we'll come back into our bodies and live forever here on earth. So you start finding that in Paul and you get some hints of it. You get one hint of it possibly in the Gospel of Luke, and you get a hint of it in that passage of John that I mentioned earlier about. In my Father's house are many dwelling places. And so you start getting it first in Paul is Jewish, but Luke, who's certainly a Gentile. John seems to be replicating kind of a Gentile view, a Greek view of this. And then that becomes the dominant view.
- [26:46]
Megan Lewis
When do you think that this majority Christian view that most people in the Christian faith now hold, when do you think that kind of became mainstream within Christian history?
- [26:56]
Bart Ehrman
It looks like it's mainstream pretty early already in the second century, where you have Apostolic Fathers, for example, who seem to think that when you die, you become an angel, for example, but the idea is that your soul lives on. And then you start finding these really interesting texts that are where in the second century, the first one of which is the Apocalypse of Peter, where people are given a guided tour of heaven and hell. And so they're taken to see how souls are being punished in hell and how they're Being rewarded in heaven. And it's an ironic genre because the people writing this don't believe the bodies live on. They believe souls live on, but what's being tormented are bodies. And so how exactly does a soul get tormented? By having red hot iron stuck into its eyes? What eyes? You know, or how does it feel? Pain. There are no nerve endings, you know, and so, so it's that problem. And people think, well, so that doesn't make sense. But of course it makes sense to most people. Most people think when they die, their soul go to heaven and they'll see their grandmother. What are they going to see exactly? They imagine they'll see her body, but her body's dead. And so this kind of issue has to be resolved in early Christianity and then still today by people to try and figure out if your body dies and your soul alone lives on, how does your soul have a body?
- [28:20]
Megan Lewis
Do we see any people trying to work on this resolution in early Christian writings, or is it just kind of left alone?
- [28:28]
Bart Ehrman
No, no, they try and work it out. And especially as you, as you get on, they try to figure out how it works exactly. And how you keep both the doctrine of a future resurrection and the soul going to heaven. And part of the problem is that both of those things stay Christian teachings. So today, when somebody says the creed, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, most people don't realize what they're saying. They're saying your body is going to come back to life, but they don't think that. They think their soul is going to go to heaven. So how do you have both? And how do you work that out? And in early Christianity, there's some really kind of interesting ways where later theologians tried to deal with it.
- [29:08]
Megan Lewis
It.
- [29:08]
Bart Ehrman
And they include some very, very interesting reflections, I mean, so that they start asking kind of possibilities, so what, what if, for example, you die at sea and your body gets thrown overboard and fish eat your body, and then somebody catches the fish and they eat the fish. At the resurrection, the fish has ingested your body and it's become part of its body, but then somebody else has eaten the fish and has ingested the fish and ingested parts of your body. So at the resurrection, who gets those parts? Which of you? There are all these reflections of, like, how the resurrection, how the soul, and how those two interact. And it's a complicated discussion, in part because even people who thought the soul was eternal did not think, for the most part, most of them did not think that that meant that it was not made up of something. It was still made up of a substance, but the substance is different from the kind of gross stuff that makes up our bodies now. It's a much more refined substance. And so the soul or the spirit is actually it is stuff. It's just a different kind of stuff. And so a lot of the debates are what kind of stuff is it?
- [30:22]
Megan Lewis
That's really fascinating and we're unfortunately going to have to leave it there, but quite the conundrum. Thank you for sharing all of that. We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with bart's weekly Update.
- [30:34]
Bart Ehrman
I'm Bart Ehrman and I'm happy to announce a new online course titled the Bible and the Comparing Their Historical Problems. The course will take place over two days and will consist of eight lectures. It'll happen on Saturday, May 4 and Sunday, May 5. This is going to be an unusually exciting, interesting and informative course. I don't think there's ever been anything like it. I'll be speaking about the historical problems that scholars have had in studying the Christian Bible, and a scholar of Islam, Javad Hashmi, will be addressing the same problems with respect to the Quran. Javad is an unusual scholar. He engages in historical criticism on the Muslim scriptures much as I do on the Christian Bible. Javad's currently finishing his PhD in Islamic Studies at Harvard, where he specializes in Quranic studies, Islamic origins, the historical Muhammad, and the question of religion and violence, especially in relation to the Quran. For this course, we've chosen four critical areas of historical concern and will discuss each of these areas in relationship to the Bible and the Quran. These are the four areas. First, getting back to the originals, knowing what the authors actually wrote. Can we know the original words of the New Testament? Can we know the original words of the Quran? Two, the reliability of the accounts, the problem of contradictions and errors, how much history, how much story is in the New Testament and in the Quran? Number three, the quests for the historical Jesus and the historical Muhammad. How do we know what Jesus really said and did? How do we know what Muhammad really said and did? And four Scripture and violence, A history of hatred, intolerance and violence. Is the Bible to blame? Is the Quran to blame? Javad and I will be taking turns giving our lectures. I'll discuss the topic with respect to the New Testament, then Javad and the Quran, and then we'll discuss the similarities and the differences we find. So there'll be four lectures a day and each day will be followed by a live Q and A with those who attend. I've done a lot of controversial things before, but I'm not sure I've done one that's this important. And now I'd like to introduce Javad himself so he can tell you what he's going to be talking about.
- [33:22]
Javad Hashmi
Thank you so much, Bart. I'm super excited to be teaching this course with you. I think it's going to be something really quite special. It might be the first publicly available academic course that takes a comparative approach to Islamic origins. So if you're interested in that topic, this is the course for you. My part is going to consist of four lectures. In the first lecture, we'll be taking a look at the transmission history of the Quranic text, basically to ask ourselves, do we have with us today the original Quranic text and does it really go back to the Prophet Muhammad? In lecture number two, we'll be looking at the content of the Quranic text, looking at certain influences or texts that the Quran interacts with and scholars think influence the Quranic stories and accounts. We'll also be asking ourselves whether we should take these stories and accounts to be historically and scientifically accurate, or do we think that there are certain mythical or legendary aspects to them, just as many biblical scholars think in regards to biblical stories. In lecture three, we'll be shifting to the quest for the historical Muhammad, just like there's a quest for the historical Jesus. Did the Prophet Muhammad even exist? And if he did exist, what can we know about him? Can we trust the traditional Islamic sources? And what does the Quran, or what can the Quran tell us about the historical Muhammad? In lecture number four, we'll shift to the question of scripture and violence. Many people think Islam is inherently violent and link that all back to the Quran. So we'll be exploring that question. In our final lecture. We'll round all this off with life. A discussion between Bart and I about whether or not we think faithful Christians and faithful Muslims can engage with their text in an academically rigorous manner, in an academically honest manner. So that'll be a good discussion that we'll have. I'm super excited about this course. Like I said, it might even get banned in certain countries. We might get a fatwa on our head. So make sure you sign up because this is going to be an interesting course. Thanks so much.
- [35:22]
Bart Ehrman
Thanks, Javad. This is going to be a great course. I don't think it's ever been done before. It'll be interesting not just to Christians and Muslims, but to anyone in our world that deals with either of the two largest religious traditions in the history of the human race. Pretty important stuff. Again, this will be on May 4th and 5th. In terms of price pricing, the regular price for the course will be $59.95, but we have an early bird pricing of 49.95. And if you buy the course, if you come to it, you'll be given lifetime access to the recording. To learn more and to register for the course, Simply go to barturman.com Bibleand Quran Again, this will be an amazing course and I hope you'll be able to come. This is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings, and online course launches.
- [36:35]
Megan Lewis
Welcome back. So we are going to be talking very briefly about an upcoming event on Saturday the 4th of May, and then Sunday the 5th of May. The Saturday portion starts at 12pm EDT and the Sunday starts at 1pm EDT. And this is an event called the Bible and the Quran. So, Bart, can you tell us a little bit about exactly what this is and what people can expect?
- [36:58]
Bart Ehrman
You know, we do these courses for. I do these courses and they're always great. I always look forward to them. But man, this one, wow, this one is something. So as people know, I mean, a lot of my career has been involved with trying to understand the New Testament from a historical point of view. Do we actually have the authors wrote, are there contradictions? Are there errors? How do you know what Jesus really said and did, so forth and so on. And I get a lot of emails from people who are, who are Muslim who will say, yeah, man, you're right, the New Testament's really messed up. You know, you need to think about reading the Quran because it's perfect. You know, there are no problems like this in the Quran. So this event is with me and a scholar of the Quran, a critical scholar of the Quran who does the kinds of things with the Quran that I do with the New Testament. And his name is Javad Hashmi. He's finishing his PhD at Harvard in this area. He's written about it, he's been on YouTube about it. He and I are going to be giving four lectures each on the same topic. And so we've picked four topics involving the Bible and the Quran. And I'll talk about the New Testament historical issues, and he'll talk about the Quran historical issues. Then he and I will compare notes live. And then there'll be Q and A so this will take place over two days and the issues are things like do we have the original writings of the New Testament? Do we have the original Quran? People think, well, yes, obviously we do, right? Yeah. Oh really? Okay, stay tuned. Are there errors? Are there contradictions in the New Testament? Are there errors, contradictions in the Quran? How can we possibly know about the historical Jesus? How can you possibly know about the historical Muhammad? Is the Bible responsible for violence in the world? Is the Quran responsible for violence in the world? These are our four topics and I don't know of anything like this that's ever been done before, especially in some kind of public forum like this. And so this is, this is it. This is the course. It's going to be a two day course with eight lectures with two Q&As and four exchanges between Javad and me trying to deal with the differences and the similarities in historical scholarship on the New Testament and the Quran. So it's not a debate. I'm not going to be trying to convince him the New Testament is better than the Quran. He's not going to be trying to convince me, I don't think. But he's an expert on that. I'm an expert on this and we're going to compare notes.
- [39:16]
Megan Lewis
That sounds absolutely fascinating. And we on digital Hammurabi occasionally will get questions about the Quran. And I have to say, look, I, I'm not the person to ask. I don't have the training so I'm going to be really fascinated to sit and kind of listen to this and, and interact and find out what's going on. And the topics sound really, really fantastic.
- [39:37]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, we, we hammered them out and you know, Javad's an expert on all of this stuff. I mean he's a Quran expert, you know, and he's Muslim and he's not, but he, he has a critical view of all of this from a historical point of view and it's rare that you see that kind of thing publicly.
- [39:51]
Megan Lewis
It sounds absolutely wonderful. If people are interested they can go to www.bartehrman.com BibleAndKoran. The early bird price is $49.95. The regular price is $59.95. So if you are interested in that, go book your tickets, make sure you can join us and listen to these fantastic lectures and then ask your own questions. And I have to say I think the having a Q A portion is, is really, really valuable because people have lots of questions about this and so often don't know who to ask.
- [40:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well that's right. And, and let me just emphasize, neither one of us is interested in trashing the scriptures or Islam or attacking Christianity or Islam. We really, we're interested in historical issues and it's the kind of thing people why they are interested in but don't have much access to information about. So that's, that's what it'll be about.
- [40:43]
Megan Lewis
Thank you for sharing that information. We are now going to go over to our listeners questions portion of the show.
- [40:53]
Bart Ehrman
Now it's time for questions from listeners listeners where BART answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart
- [41:11]
Megan Lewis
okay, we have a variety of excellent questions, as always. Question 1 Did different Christian communities produce writings like the Gospels, or were these produced by authors writing for an elite literary community? If it's the latter, an elite community, can we say that these works were meant to build ideal Christian communities instead of preserving them?
- [41:34]
Bart Ehrman
I don't think it's an either or. The authors obviously were elites because they could write. They may not have been economically elite or, you know, socially elite, but they were in terms of education, they were elites. I don't think there's any way that they were writing just for elites. In the ancient world, most people wouldn't be able to read these writings themselves, but these books were being read in churches, and the vast majority of people who were Christian were not elite. And so the audience is almost certainly the communities for which these authors are writing. I think that doesn't eliminate the option that they were elites and that other elites would appreciate what they had to say. And my sense is that these authors are both incorporating views that they've inherited through their communities about who Jesus is and what he said and what he did. But they're also trying to mold people's understandings of Jesus. And so they're not just giving kind of descriptive narratives of what really happened. They're shaping them for their own theological reasons. And ultimately those are their personal theological reasons. But you always develop your views of things within community. You might change things. You might have different perspectives. But we think what we think because of communities around us. And so I don't think just an either or.
- [42:50]
Megan Lewis
With Mark's emphasis on secrecy, the messianic secret, and the reader being left with a sense of having the secret knowledge that the women at the tomb failed to reveal, could Mark be considered a Gnostic gospel?
- [43:03]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I would say Gnostics later probably considered it a Gnostic gospel. But if you're asking, was Mark a Gnostic? So Mark has almost always dated to around the year 70, probably a little bit after the year 70, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. We don't have evidence, firm evidence of anything like what we called Gnosticism for many decades after that, until the 50, 60 years later is when you first start finding some kind of solid evidence of there actually being groups of people who might identify as Gnostics. Gnostic. You know, obviously it would take a very long time to define Gnosticism, but there are these various groups of people that emphasize the importance of knowledge. Greek is Gnosis, knowledge for salvation. And that it's knowledge only available to those who are insiders to the group group. And that those who have this knowledge provided by Jesus, the secret knowledge, can have salvation. And so one can understand, you know, why you might think that, you know, Mark is like that because he has this secret knowledge and such. He also has the crucifixion of Jesus leading to the, leading to salvation. That Jesus death and resurrection are what bring salvation. That would not be a typical Gnostic view. I don't think Mark was a Gnostic, but you could see why Gnostics would appreciate his book as they also, by the way, appreciated John, John's Gospel.
- [44:23]
Megan Lewis
And actually we do now have a question about John. So fantastically done, well done. Compared to the Synoptics. It seems that the writer of John frequently changed history to support their theology. This is especially true regarding the day which Jesus died. The Synoptic gospels have him dying after the Passover meal while John moves it back to before Passover. Did John move it back a day to emphasize theologically Jesus being declared the Lamb of God at the beginning of his minist ministry and then at the end of the ministry dying at the same time as the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the temple? And can this historical contradiction be reconciled?
- [44:59]
Bart Ehrman
I think that's exactly why John did it. I don't know that John knew the Synoptics. Some people think he did. A lot of people starting to think that now, and I really don't think so. But it doesn't much matter for this question because the idea that Jesus celebrated a Passover meal with his disciples as his last supper and that he took the bread and he took the wine of the Passover meal and said they represented his body and blood, that was firmly entrenched in the Christian tradition. John can't have a Passover meal in John. Jesus doesn't take the bread and cup and call it his body and blood. He can't do that because it's not a Passover meal. In John, Jesus dies on the day that the Passover meal is being prepared for that evening. And I think it's exactly right. John has changed the date of when Jesus died in order to make his theological point. Because only in John is Jesus identified as the Lamb of God, which is the Passover lamb. And Jesus dies exactly when the Passover lamb is being sacrificed on the day of preparation at the hands of the same people, the chief priests. So I think that is the change. I would not say that John is the only one changing facts to make theological points. I think that that's what all the gospels are doing. But I will agree that it's more obvious in places in John, which is why John has always been understood to be the most. People use the phrases like most theological gospel or most spiritual gospel because it's more obvious in his case. But I think they're all doing something like that.
- [46:26]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Final question. Could you please provide some information on the Greek word pneumaea, which seems crucial to the understanding of early Christianity and appears frequently in early gospels and the letters of Paul? Sometimes it's translated as the breath of life, the Holy Spirit, an evil spirit, and so on. And seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for just one word.
- [46:47]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so the Greek word is pneuma. It's spelled P N E U M A in English. And it's a word we get. Well, we get all sorts of words from that. Pneumatic. Do we have pneumatic as an English word? So it is a word, as I said in our discussion earlier, that it's word that does, does mean different things. It means air, it means breath, it means spirit. And that ambiguity is used to good effect in the Bible because when God breathes the pneuma, the breath into Adam in the Greek Old Testament now Adam has a penuma, a spirit or a breath. And so it also means wind. When in Genesis 1 in the Greek Bible and you get the same thing in Hebrew, the same wordplay. But in the Greek Bible, the panuma of God is when God creates the heavens and the earth. The earth is formless and void, and the spirit of God is hovering over the water or the breath of God or the wind, or, you know, it could mean any of those things. And it may be that for some of these authors that are playing with the words, it's meant to be ambiguous and to have all of these resonances kind of going on at the Same time. So it does use a lot of things, but then you have the holy pneuma in the New Testament, which is God's Holy Spirit, which ends up becoming a part of the Trinity. And so really, it is doing a lot of work. That's true. But it doesn't mean a single thing. It has a range of meanings. And it's not that you can just like pick a single meaning for any place. It kind of means all these things at once in most places.
- [48:26]
Megan Lewis
You have to have the context to do it accurately.
- [48:29]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, right.
- [48:30]
Megan Lewis
Well, Bart, thank you so much. Now, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about today? Today?
- [48:36]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So today we're talking about this very interesting thing about the soul. Many people have a. Today have just a common sense understanding that your soul is kind of an internal part of you, that. That lives on after your body dies. So it's not part of the body, but it's something else in you. And that comes to people from the Christian tradition, which got it from the Greek tradition, but did not get it from the Old Testament or from the teachings of Jesus. And so we were reflecting on different understandings of the relationship of the body and the soul and how that was understood in antiquity as a way to help people think about it today. You know, when you die, does your soul live on, or does it die with your body or something else? And that's. That's a question, of course, everybody answers differently. But. But it's worth reflecting on how it is that Christianity originally didn't have the view that most Christians today have.
- [49:28]
Megan Lewis
But thank you so much, 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 mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [49:49]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, next time. We're taking a leap. We're going into one of the most interesting books of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the Book of Job, which is a book that people rarely read all the way through, but they think they know what it's about. The suffering of Job. And we're going to talk about why nobody really understands the Book of Job. I don't mean nobody, because there are people who understand this book, but it's not what most people think. And so we'll talk about that next week.
- [50:15]
Megan Lewis
And why almost no one understands the Book of Job isn't quite as catchy of a title.
- [50:19]
Bart Ehrman
No, it's not as catchy. So it's better to have a catchy title. Most listeners will not. They won't know in advance what scholars have said long said about Job that really explains the book much better than can be done otherwise.
- [50:32]
Megan Lewis
Please remember to 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.