← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:00]
Bart Ehrman
When people turn to telehealth for weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderlymeds.com orderlymeds connects you with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like semaglutide and Tirzeptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience and all shipped directly to your door in discreet packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderlymeds.com podcast. Individual results may vary. Not medical advice eligibility required. C Site for details
- [00:32]
Megan Lewis
With Easter fast approaching, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is on the minds of many Christians. While it has been a linchpin in Christian theology since the formation of the religion, Christians both early and modern disagree on how it happened, why it happened, and the implications it has for human life after death. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman elucidates us all on early debates around the Resurrection, why these debates happened, and what pagan authors thought about the whole thing. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Lets begin. Hello everyone and welcome back to Ms. Quoting Jesus. As I said in the introduction, today we are talking about the resurrection of Jesus and different views in early Christian communities about what it was and what it meant. We also have details coming up on a new course and about an AMA with Dan McLellan on his new book. But before all of that, how are you doing today?
- [01:50]
Bart Ehrman
Yep, doing pretty well today. We have gorgeous sunshine here in North Carolina and you know it's, this can be a gorgeous part of the world. It's spring and so I'm very much enjoying it. My people have allergies are not enjoying it nearly as much.
- [02:06]
Megan Lewis
Lovely. It's, it's cold here. Maryland has this weird thing where you have a warm snap for two weeks and then it just goes right back to winter again. So we're in the middle of second winter, but the daffodils are out, which is lovely.
- [02:18]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, very nice. Yeah. No, that's always a good start. And then, you know, it's always fun because the trees bud at different times and it's just, you know, if you're in a place where you've got trees and flowers, it's fantastic.
- [02:28]
Megan Lewis
Oh it's, it's a good thing. It's a very Good thing. Now for today's topic, Like I said, talking about the resurrection, what exactly does resurrection mean in an ancient context?
- [02:39]
Bart Ehrman
Scholars often differentiate between resurrection as a category and what we might call resuscitation. And so when, when Christians and, and Jews before them talked about resurrection, they, they were referring to a phenomenon that would happen after a person dies when they would be brought back to life permanently. And so a resurrection was not a near death experience and then, or a resuscitation where somebody's dead, they seem to be dead, but you bring them back and then, or somebody, or even in the Bible, when somebody is dead and they're brought back, but they're brought back until they die again. And so you have that kind of resuscitation thing. And people might call them resurrections, it's fine to call them resurrections, but it's not what people mean by the resurrection. When Jesus gets resurrected, it means he's not going to die again. And when Christians at the end of the age are resurrected from the dead, it's not for a few years, it's forever. And so resurrection has the idea of being permanently alive again. And resuscitation would mean just being brought back to life for a while.
- [03:57]
Megan Lewis
Is or would an early Christian using this term mean the same thing that a modern Christian using the term would mean?
- [04:05]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's hard to tell, I mean, because Christians, yeah, Christians are Christians and they say weird things and so do people generally. And you never know what a person means by a word today. I think that most Christians today do not have the ancient concept of resurrection. Most they do about Jesus. They think that Jesus is resurrected, by which they mean that his body came back to life and then ascended to heaven, but, and it lives there forever until he returns. But Jesus will be a bodily existence forever. My sense is that most Christians don't think that's what happens to human beings. Most people think that you die and your soul goes to heaven, but your body, you know, it disintegrates and rots away and doesn't, you know, just doesn't exist anymore. And so that's, that's the concept of afterlife that Christians tend to have, that it's not like Jesus who became a bodily being forever, but that it's being a spiritual being forever. And I think that changed. It changed early on in Christianity as soon as most Christians were not from Jewish stock, but from Greek thinking stock. And in Greek thinking circles, there's a differentiation between the body which dies, and the soul that's immortal. And even though that wasn't Jesus idea or Paul's idea or the early Christian idea or the ancient Jewish idea that did become the Christian idea because most people were not from the Jewish heritage.
- [05:32]
Megan Lewis
So modern Christians mean something different to ancient Christians when they talk about resurrection. There are also differences among early Christian groups to exactly what, what this is and what was happening. When did you as an academic start to realize that ancient Christians different understandings of Jesus resurrection?
- [05:51]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, with Jesus resurrection, it's clear that even in the New Testament there are very different understandings. And it took me a long time to see it. I just assumed that everybody thought the same thing and that, you know, Jesus died, his body came back to life and he went up to heaven. So that's that. It turns out that if you look closely, it's pretty clear that there are different conceptions of what it meant for Jesus to be raised from the dead. Different Christians in the New Testament, either themselves or people that they are refuting who are Christian, have different conceptions of Jesus, Jesus own resurrection. And so part of the historian's task is to figure out what these are. And I don't think I, I didn't realize this probably till I was maybe a PhD student or beyond, because it's not obvious at first.
- [06:41]
Megan Lewis
Now, we'll get into these different views of the resurrection in a little bit. I wanted to start asking how common resurrection stories were in the ancient world just to try and get some like, baseline information about what role this might have played in, in the culture of the time.
- [06:59]
Bart Ehrman
So it's, it's somewhat a debated topic because you, because it's, it's hard to know at what point things are completely similar. And when there are slight differences and there are big differences between various stories. There are plenty stories of people being brought back from the dead in the ancient world. And so sometimes they're just, as I said, they're resuscitated. Sometimes you'll have a miracle worker in a Jewish tradition or in a pagan tradition, sort of Greek and Roman thought, where somebody's brought back from the dead and then they live out their lives and they die again. But you do have things comparable to Jesus in some ways in pagan traditions especially. So I guess. Yeah, yeah. In pagan tradition, in Jewish tradition, usually if Elijah is taken up to heaven in the Old Testament as he is, you know, he doesn't die first. So if you think by implication he died, you know, that's one thing, but it's not that he's dead and buried and then brought, taken up to heaven. You do get pagan stories of people who are taken up to heaven at the end of their lives. And so, for example, the founder of Rome, Romulus, he was, before dying, he was taken up to heaven to become a God, and he became one of the principal Roman deities to be worshiped as Quirinus. So you get that with people being alive, being taken up, and you do have people brought back from the dead in order to die. Again, what you. You don't have very much of is somebody actually dying, a human being dying, coming back as a human being, and then being taken up, come back to earth as a human being, and then being taken up into heaven to live forever. You get that with Jesus, but you don't get it in other stories so much, because either they're brought back as a human to die later, or they're taken up to heaven and live forever. But the idea that it'd be both things is not. Is not. That's. That. That's not a story you see floating around much.
- [09:15]
Megan Lewis
So when we're looking at the New Testament and how Christian groups thought about Jesus resurrection, what evidence is there in our New Testament that shows these differences, shows these, these opinions about what happened?
- [09:30]
Bart Ehrman
So there's. There's a couple of kinds of evidence. One is that our earliest author, Paul, writes about the resurrection of Jesus. And probably, like all the authors, part of the point is not only how was Jesus raised, but how does that have implications for humans at the end of time? The idea in Paul is that humans are going to experience the same thing that Jesus experienced. And so that makes it important to know what it is that Jesus experienced, because that's what we're going to experience. And Paul, the evidence for various views is that in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul focuses on this issue of what the resurrection is, Paul is arguing against people in Corinth, Christian teachers in Corinth, who have a different point of view. And so we can infer what that point of view is by how Paul's refuting it. And so one thing, one piece of evidence of different views in the New Testament is somebody arguing against another view. And another one is kind of like that. But it's that there are implicit indications of what somebody's trying to emphasize in relationship to another view. You get that sometimes in the Gospels where Jesus is trying to prove that he is after the resurrection, he's trying to prove that he's the same person who was buried. But look at my wounds. Put your finger in my hands. You know, you'll see that I'm the same person. The reason you have that kind of emphatic statement is to counter the idea that maybe he's just a ghost, for example, or a spirit, or that he's not really the body come out of the grave. So you have those, those sorts of things. And when you, when you look at all the, those kinds of passages, you end up with probably three or four different interpretations of what the resurrection was all about.
- [11:15]
Megan Lewis
Okay, so let's start with Paul. Then. What, what is the view that he holds? And maybe what is the view held in Corinth that he's arguing against?
- [11:24]
Bart Ehrman
Paul's view is widely misunderstood by readers today because the way he phrases things might mislead people if they don't understand how Paul talks about the same things in other places. So in 1st Corinthians 15, Paul is talking. Paul is mainly interested in 1 Corinthians 15 about how people are going to be raised from the dead at the end of time. He is emphasizing that it will be a bodily resurrection. People will, you know, he doesn't say they'll come out of their graves quite in those terms, but they are going to be in their, their bodies are going to be reconstituted. When people are raised from the dead at the end of time, the. This mortal body they have now, this, this body that gets sick and gets hurt and gets injured and eventually dies, is the body that will live forever. But when it, when it, when it does, it'll be made into an immortal body. Mortality will be turned into immortality. There'll be a transformation, a glorification of the body into a different kind of body, but it'll still be the body. And he argues this on the basis of Jesus own resurrection. He begins, 1 Corinthians 15. I always misunderstood the passage, as many people do. It's called the resurrection passage. And what I always used to think, just starting out as, you know, studying the Bible, was that it was the passage where Paul is trying to prove that Jesus was raised from the dead. And that's not right. It's not true at all. Paul presupposes that his readers know that Jesus got raised from the dead. He's not trying to prove it. What he's trying to show is that the nature of Jesus resurrection shows what resurrection will be like for everybody else at the end of time. And so he starts off by saying that when he was with the Corinthians, he reminds them, I taught you that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried, and that he's raised from the dead according to the Scriptures. And he was seen. He appeared to Cephas and to the 12, and he lists the people. And then it says at the end and last, all he appeared to me. So he says this in order to emphasize that Jesus, after his resurrection, the body that was buried is the body that appeared and that it's the same body, except he wants to go on and argue it's a transformed body.
- [13:49]
Megan Lewis
So what would the people in Corinth have been thinking? Would they say it. It wasn't a physical, bodily resurrection?
- [13:57]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, Paul has to. Paul has to explain how it is that a body can be raised if bodies die. And so he comes up with this. This notion of a glorified body. And he has all sorts of analogies for it. But like, the one I like the best is he says, you put a seed in the ground and the seed grows into a plant. And so the. But the idea is, you know, like in. To switch it slightly, you know, if you put an acorn in the ground, what grows out of it is something out of the acorn. It's the acorn developing into something else. What it develops into is an oak tree. Now, what grows out of the ground, it's not a giant acorn. It grows into an oak tree. And that's what the human body will be like, that it will be. It'll be transformed, like Jesus body. It's still a body. What he's arguing against is the idea that Jesus had a resurrection that was not bodily. The opponents in Corinth, these are Christians who are teaching that the resurrection is not a future bodily event, it's a past spiritual event. They appear to be claiming that they have already experienced a resurrection experience by being baptized in the spirit, by becoming a spiritual being. They now have transcended their bodily limits and they are enjoying their spiritual existence. And this is what the resurrection is. You've died with Christ and now you've been raised with Christ. And Paul is trying to show, no, you have not been raised with Christ. You are still in your body, and this world is still a miserable place, and you've not received the full benefits of salvation. And we know that because Christ was not raised in the Spirit alone. He was raised in a new kind of body, but it's still the body. The tricky part of this whole thing is that Paul calls it a spiritual body. And so people read that and they think that he means, oh, just raised in the Spirit. And that's not what he means at all. Paul talks About Christ's body being. So the Greek word is pneumatic, like a pneumatic mattress. Do you call that a pneumatic mattress? One that you blow up, you know, or you get pneumonia? It says problem with your breath. And so the P N E U M a pneuma means spirit. And so people think, well, so it's not really a physical substance, but in ancient Greek and in Paul's thinking, pneuma is a, it's a material, it's a kind of stuff, but it's very refined stuff. Unlike this coarse stuff we're stuck with now, our bodies, this core stuff that could get hurt, they can die. A pneumatic body cannot die. It's still a material body, though. Jesus has a glorified pneumatic body. So it's not that he's a ghost, it's a body, but it's a pneumatic body. And so his opponents think, no, there's no materiality about it.
- [17:06]
Megan Lewis
Okay, so we have the, the past spiritual resurrection of the, the people in Corinth. We've got Paul's kind of upgraded, transcended physical body. What do we see the writers of the Gospels presenting?
- [17:21]
Bart Ehrman
So the Gospel writers are very interesting because they, they give, they give both suggestions about, like, they give suggestions of two older views. So I think the original, I think the original Christian view is, is rooted in a Jewish notion that, that God created this world and he created material existence and material existence itself was created good. It's become corrupt, but God created it and he's going to restore it. He's not going to get rid of it. He's not going to get rid of the material world. Eternal life will be lived in this material world. The earliest belief in Jesus resurrection was that he was dead and he was buried as a human being and that he arose as a human being, a material being. They didn't have Paul's sophisticated philosophical language about it being a pneumatic body. But I think the earliest Christian view was it really was his body that came out of the grave and ascended to heaven. So, so that's, so that's a view. And. But the body that Jesus has, even in the Gospels, is more like Paul's. It's not your usual body. I mean, Jesus body after the resurrection can apparently walk through locked doors, you know, and get out of tombs. And it can, like, it doesn't have the normal features of human body. It can become, he can become invisible. You know, he can. And so, so it's a special kind of body. So. But the other view that it presupposes in the Gospels is the view that doesn't presuppose. The two of the gospel writers are quite emphatic that Jesus body is actually his corpse that is still alive. And that. And so famously in the Gospel of John, when Jesus appears to his disciples, he appears to 10 of them. Judas is not there and he appears to 10 of them, but Thomas is not with them. The other disciples tell Thomas the Lord's appeared to us and Thomas says I won't believe it till I put my finger in his side and check out his wounds in his hands. And he doesn't believe it. And so then Jesus appears later and Thomas is there and Jesus says, okay, here, stick your hand in my side, check out these wounds. And so it's the, it's the whoop. It is the very same body that was buried. And the same thing you get in Luke, which is that Jesus raised from the, they don't believe it and says here, you got something to eat here they give him some fish and he eats the fish. So this is like, this is him saying, I mean this is a body, it apparently has a digestive system. And so this is a kind of a reanimated corpse. And so you get this range of things from people saying it's a reanimated corpse to saying that it's a body that can kind of walk through doors and it's a, or it's a spiritual transformed pneumatic body or it's just pluma. It's not, it's, there's no body at all. It's a spiritual thing. All four of these are early Christian views of what it meant for Jesus to be raised from the dead.
- [20:25]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. We're going to take a very brief, a brief break. Try saying that 10 times fast. When we come back, we'll be looking at beliefs of spirit specific Christian groups. We're looking at the Gnostics and the Marcionites. And then Barth's going to tell us about how pagans responded to this idea of bodily resurrection. It's not every day we announce something this big. Hello, misquoting Jesus fans, it's Megan and I've got some big news to share with you today. After more than three years of creating world class courses on the historical Jesus, the New Testament and early Christianity, we're turning the page, literally. We've officially changed our name from Bart Ehrman Courses to Paths in Biblical Studies. This name change marks a big moment in our growth. What started as a platform centered on BART's expertise, has grown into a collaborative effort now featuring some of the top scholars in the field. It's no longer a one person endeavor, it's a full academic community and the new name reflects that. Just to be clear, the Misquoting Jesus Podcast isn't going anywhere and the name is staying the same. The change is on the course side, where we'll keep pushing to provide high quality, affordable biblical studies courses that are accessible and and understandable to a non academic audience. To celebrate, we're launching a month long April campaign with two major offers. First, every week this month, five of Paths in Biblical Studies best selling courses will be 50% off with new deals released each week. And second, for the entire month of April, we are reducing the price of our Biblical Studies Academy by annual incredible 40% for new subscribers. But that's not all. Everyone who purchases a course of any value, even if it's just one course in April will get instant access to Paul and his Letters, a basic introduction, an online course by Bart Ehrman. Plus you'll be entered into a drawing to win a Mystery prize. We're not saying what it is just yet, but we promise it'll be good. Head over to PBSCourses.com to explore this week's deals and take advantage of the celebration. That's pbs, short for Paths in Biblical Studies courses dot com. Once again, that's pbscourses dot com thank you. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. We are talking about Jesus Resurrection. Before the break we looked at some different views represented in the New Testament, looking at the Gospels and the writings of Mark. Now we're going to turn to specific Christian groups or sects. So how did the Gnostics talk about and view the resurrection?
- [23:32]
Bart Ehrman
So this is a little bit complicated, so I'll try not to get into the weeds at all. I'll simply say that in Gnostic Christian circles there were there are a variety of beliefs about most everything, but one thing that seemed to be fairly constant was the disregard or the sort of the the bad character of matter. The material world. Most Gnostics were dualistic in the sense that the material world is not a good place, spiritual realm is good and the problem is humans comprise both spirit and matter. And the goal of the Gnostic religions is to allow the spiritual element within humans to escape their material bodies with that sense of things they have to figure out like how does it happen? And they're called Gnostic because they generally believed that it is by having the true knowledge of who you really are, and how you got here, how you can get out of here. True knowledge is going to set you free. And in Greek the word for knowledge is gnosis. And so you have to have this knowledge. And so how do you get the knowledge? And if the knowledge is a spiritual knowledge, you can't get it through material means. So you can't look around the world and figure it out or listen to smart teachers. Those are all you know. You can't use your senses. What has to happen is that a divine being has to come down to reveal the truth that can set you free from your material body. In Christian Gnostic systems, that's Christ who comes down to reveal the truth of your identity, how you got here, how you can get out of here. And so Christ is that being. But Christ cannot be a material body if he's here. But Jesus is obviously a human, so how do you do that? Gnostics had a couple ways of doing it, but the most common Gnostic solution was that Jesus was a man. Jesus was a man born to Joseph and Mary Christ, but there was a divine being, call him the Christ, who came into Jesus in order to communicate the gnosis necessary for salvation. And so who came in, say at the baptism, but then once his ministry is done, he left Jesus. So Jesus the man, the physical being, died on the cross, but the divine element can't die and can't suffer. And so it had separated from him at that time. And so the idea in the Gnostic circles, the idea was that Christ, the divine element had not actually died and that Jesus, the material being, did die. But in some Gnostic circles, what happens then is the Christ re enters into Jesus and raises him from the dead so that he can then give the real truth just to the disciples, the real knowledge, as opposed to the kind of public stuff he did during his ministry. And so in those systems you can have a Christ raising Jesus from the dead in order to deliver the secret knowledge. And so in that case, it's not the body of Jesus that lives forever, it's a spiritual element that lives forever and bodies will not live forever.
- [26:37]
Megan Lewis
So for Gnostics, what implications did this kind of half resurrection maybe have for mortal humans?
- [26:49]
Bart Ehrman
So for Gnostics, the humans at the end of time are not going to be bodily raised from the dead. They're going to be those who have a spark of the divine within them, who have a spiritual element within them. Not everybody does. You and I do, Megan, but I mean most, you know, a lot of people don't, but Those of us who do have the goal of existence is for our spark to escape on the basis of this knowledge, they get so the body dies. And so it's like Paul, where Paul's. In the sense that Paul thinks that the resurrection of Jesus is like the resurrection of humans at the end of time. And so too for the Gnostics, the humans are going to escape their entrapment in their body. And Jesus escaped the entrapment of his body. And so the, so the spirit that raises him from the dead is just doing that in order to deliver some knowledge for a while. Then the spiritual element returns to the, to the divine realm.
- [27:40]
Megan Lewis
So how about for followers of Marcion, are they looking at a kind of spiritual resurrection as well, or is this a bodily thing for them?
- [27:49]
Bart Ehrman
It's a lot harder to tell with Marcion. So Marcion was a 2nd century writer, Christian writer, writing at the same time as Gnostics, although he himself was not a Gnostic. He didn't have their kind of complicated understanding of the world, but he did think that there was a dichotomy between matter and spirit. And he thought that the God who created this world, this material world, cannot be the true God because this world is such a mess and creates so many horrible problems that a good God would not create something like this. So he believed that there was another God who was a, a spiritual being that was superior to the creator God. And by the creator God, I mean the God of the Old Testament, the Jewish God is the, the inferior divinity. There's a greater spiritual divinity. And in Marcion's system, salvation does come by faith in Christ. It did not come by knowledge. But he still has to explain how Christ, how Jesus Christ can be the Savior if he's a material being. And so what Marcion argued was a view that was held by, it was also held by some of the Gnostic groups, as opposed to the Jesus coming in the Christ coming into Jesus. Marcion had the view that scholars have called Docetism, a docetic view. It comes from the Greek word dakeo, which means to seem or to appear. And in this system, since Christ did not belong to the Creator God, he couldn't be material. So he couldn't be physically born, he couldn't be part of the material world. He actually was a spiritual being who only looked like he was a human being. He seemed like a human being. You could touch him and hear him and, you know, and all that, but he wasn't really. It was all a bigot appearance. And he thinks he does think that this being died. We not sure how he worked it out logically, because the problem with Marcion is we don't have any of his own writings. We just have attacks on him and a few references to things he said. So we don't really know. But it appears that he thinks Jesus in some way really died, even though he was a spiritual being, and that he was really raised from the dead, but it wasn't as a material being because he didn't have a material body.
- [30:05]
Megan Lewis
So thinking about the views represented within the New Testament, the ones that kind of get carried forwards into what we know as Christianity today, there's a very heavy emphasis on bodily, physical resurrection. Even Paul talking about pneuma, it's still a physical thing going on. Why did, or do we know why proto orthodox Christians rejected the idea of a spiritual resurrection?
- [30:33]
Bart Ehrman
You know, the, it's, it's a complicated question. It ties into a lot of things, including why did Christians keep the Old Testament? You know, most Christians don't think you have to follow the Jewish laws, and yet they consider them scriptural authorities. And so why is that? But there were a variety of reasons that Christians wanted to keep the Old Testament, but because they ended up keeping the Old Testament, they believed in the creation and God created the world good. And Genesis 1, he saw everything he created and declared that it was good. And so they knew that the material world was good, but they also knew that, that it had been corrupted either by demonic forces or by humans or by both. And so it had to be redeemed. So the idea in the proto orthodox tradition, and then the orthodox tradition was that God created this world and he's going to redeem this world. He created your body, he's going to redeem your body. And so they were opposed to this pure spiritualization idea that you get in other kinds of Christianity. It has to be a bodily resurrection at the end of time. And you know, Jesus himself therefore was bodily raised from the dead.
- [31:46]
Megan Lewis
So what kinds of responses did this insistence on a bodily resurrection get from specifically pagan authors?
- [31:57]
Bart Ehrman
Most pagan authors thought it was crazy. Kind of like the Gnostics did that. It's, it's, it's, they, they made fun of it. And, and they had, you know, because we have record, we have records of, of, of pagan intellectuals who attack Christianity starting at the end of the second century, for example, in the writings of a, of a pagan intellectual named Celsus. And going up through the 4th century, we have writing, we have writings and references to writings by pagan authors and One of the things they attacked in Christianity was this crazy idea that your body's going to live forever. Going back to. In Greek thinking a long ways back, Plato popularized the view, but he didn't invent it, that the body's the problem. We have problems in our lives, and they're all related to our bodies. They get hurt, they get injured, they get sick, they get oppressed, they get damaged. I mean, without the body, you don't have these problems. And even the problems you think of as kind of mental, spiritual problems in some ways are tied to your body. And so if you can just liberate your soul from your body, then you don't have a problem anymore. So in the Greek circles, the idea of the body itself was inherently problematic. The idea of the body is going to live forever was risible. Are you kidding me? You mean I got to live in my body forever? Like, I don't like the way I look, you know, and so, like, I got to look like this forever? My knees are hurt. You know, my knees. Are they going to hurt forever? Or I had my arm amputated? How's that going to work? Exactly? And pagans started at, you know, at some point in the second century, they started explaining the problem to Christians that it just doesn't work very well. I'll just give you an example. In the ancient world, they. They had. They didn't have our understandings of how digestion worked. And it was typically thought that if when you eat a food substance, it transforms into part of your body. So your body is sustained in the sense that you're renewing it by. By. By what you consume. Okay? And so that's. That's how digestion works. So whatever you are what you eat, literally. And so some pagans pointed out a problem. Okay, let's suppose that a sailor at sea dies, and they cast him overboard, and his body is eaten by fish. And then a fisherman catches the fish, and the fisherman eats the fish. So the sailor's body became part of the fish, and so the part of the body that was in the fish became part of the body of the person who ate the fish. So at the resurrection, who gets those parts? I can see that being a challenge or cannibalism. Right? Who gets the parts? At the resurrection, you're the person who ate you. And so Christians had to answer these kinds of questions because most people in the Greek world just thought this was ridiculous.
- [34:52]
Megan Lewis
So how did early Christian writers respond to these kinds of criticisms?
- [34:58]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, they had ways of doing it, of course. And we have interesting treatises, including some that I would imagine most of our readers have not heard of or certainly haven't read. My favorite one is by a 2nd century church father who's not well known. I mean, we don't know much about him, scholars don't know much about him because all we have are two treatises from his hand. His name is Athenagoras, allegedly from Athens, hence the name Athenagoras, who wrote two treatises. One of them was on the resurrection where he tries to explain, he tries to justify how it has to be a physical resurrection, but tries to explain it in terms that even pagans can agree with. He thinks. And so like for the cannibal idea or the fish idea, what he says is that. That's right, that is, you know, that of course is how bodies work. But human flesh is not digested the same way other flesh is. Because it's human flesh, it is all eliminated. And so it doesn't become a part of somebody's body. And so there's not a problem with, you know, at the cellular level of you, of your body being eaten by somebody else. And so, so he has, he has explanations for it and then he, he mounts proofs for the resurrection, you know, which would be kind of proofs that you would see in modern apologists proving that Jesus got raised from the dead, for example.
- [36:22]
Megan Lewis
Given that so many early converts to Christianity were coming from a pagan background, why do you think it is that ultimately people settled on or agreed that bodily resurrection was. I know we, we kind of talked about this earlier, but it just struck me that these, all these pagan criticisms, so many people are coming from that same background and from that same mindset. How is it that the, the majority of pagans coming to Christianity didn't kind of sway the resurrection arguments more towards the spiritual side?
- [36:55]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's a really good question and it's very difficult to know for sure, but it looks like what happened was because Christians were so set against Marcion and the Gnostics, they became emphatic on this doctrine of the resurrection, especially the resurrection of Jesus. It really was a physical resurrection. Because if you don't think it was a physical resurrection, then you have to deny so many other things, including God created this world. Good, for example, very basic foundational things. So they, they insisted on retaining this idea of resurrection, the physical resurrection of Jesus and the physical resurrection of Christians at the, of believers at the end of time. But it ended up creating a paradox or even a contradiction that most people, including most Christians, believing Christians have never noticed the difference. The issue is that today most Christians believe that when you die, your soul goes to heaven and your body just disintegrates. But those who say the Christian creed say that I believe in the resurrection of the dead, which is referring to what's going to happen at the end of time. When people are raised from the dead and people don't realize, they believe this, they think my soul is going to be in heaven forever. But what they confess is the future resurrection of the dead. So I think what happened was that this resurrection language was so deeply embedded in the orthodox psyche because of Gnostics and Marcion and other groups that denied it, that it just became a standard part. You've got to believe this, because if you don't believe that, you can't believe in the Creator God. And so, you know, and you can't believe that Jesus was really a human being if you don't believe this. So they kept. They had to keep it. Even though they started thinking human afterlife was different. You end up with having both things at once in traditional Christianity.
- [38:53]
Megan Lewis
Leads me to my last question. If people were believing that it was a physical resurrection, what did they think was happening to the soul while it was waiting for the body to be brought back to life?
- [39:08]
Bart Ehrman
Are you talking about Jesus or us?
- [39:09]
Megan Lewis
Humans?
- [39:11]
Bart Ehrman
Humans. Okay. Because Jesus, that's an interesting question, because where was he? Yeah, so. And that's where you start getting, by the way, the idea. I don't know if we've had an episode on the harrowing of hell, but the idea that Jesus went down to Hades, you know, what happened to his soul? Did he go up to heaven for a couple days, say, hi, or did he not exist for a couple, or what? And how you answer that question is connected with the Christian question, what happens to you between your death and your resurrection? And so in the New Testament, it's a problematic issue. And you see the problem already with our earliest author, Paul. The problem that early Christians had was that they thought Jesus was returning from heaven soon so that their bodies would be glorified, made immortal, in order to have an eternal life in their immortal bodies. So this was the expectation Paul clearly has in his earliest letters, First Corinthians, 1, Thessalonians, when he talks about Jesus coming back to transform the human bodies, he indicates he'll be one of the ones still alive when it happens. Happens when we who are left who are alive, and he talks about himself being one of the living ones. Well, over time, people start realizing, yeah, you know, it might not happen right away because it certainly hasn't yet. And even at the end of Paul's life, Paul is starting to think, wait a second, you know, Paul's writing some of his letters from prison and he's thinking, you know, I may not, I may not be here. And that's when Paul himself in his later letters starts developing the idea that when he dies, he will be with Christ. You get this in Philippians and you get it in 2 Corinthians that he will be with Christ when he dies. So Paul developed the idea that there'll be an interim state that you die and before Jesus returns, you'll be with him up in heaven if you're one of his followers. But you know, it's not going to be long. It might just be a year. He doesn't think it's going to be 2,000 years or anything. It just might be a short time. But it's this interim existence until Jesus returns. And when Jesus doesn't return and people start thinking, yeah, maybe he's not going to return, then that interim existence becomes their understanding of the permanent existence.
- [41:33]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. That's about all we have time for today. We've got some news coming up on some courses and an AMA with Dan McLellan.
- [41:45]
Bart Ehrman
Welcome to our upcoming Highlights and events segment where we catch up on Bart's courses, community updates and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.
- [42:01]
Megan Lewis
So there is a new course coming up Saturday, May 10th and Sunday, May 11th. Bart is going to be teaching an eight part lecture series called Luke's Maverick A Vision of Reversal. So Bart, can you talk a little bit about the name and what, what people are going to be hearing about during this course? Because that's a fascinating name.
- [42:21]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's a fascinating name. I wish I had given the title because it's a good one. Someone else came up with it, but it's perfect because you know, one of the things I've I over the last, it's take me the last 20 years, I've noticed something that I did not learn in graduate school. I never noticed before. And a lot of people have not noticed that the Gospel of Luke actually reverses things, reverses understandings of Jesus that you find in the earlier gospels and some of them are rather important. And so Luke is probably our third gospel. You have Matthew, Mark probably precede to Luke and Luke certainly used the Gospel of Mark for many of his stories. But he changed his stories in ways and in some ways that he changes the stories. Jesus now is teaching things more like the historical Jesus taught than you find in Matthew and Mark, which seems weird that the later gospel does that, but I think it can be shown. So the course, it'll be eight lectures with two Q and A's, and it'll be on the Gospel of Luke generally, where I'll talk about the distinctive elements of Luke, starting with the birth narratives and going through Jesus ministry and his death and resurrection, but focusing on what is distinctive about Luke, including some of these ways where Luke seems to have an older form of Jesus, a portrayal of Jesus that might have been like an older understanding of Jesus before Matthew, Mark's portrayal, that's interesting. And you know, nobody has to agree with any of that, but they'll see the evidence for it. And it's evidence that you don't see a lot. You don't see people talking about this a lot.
- [44:00]
Megan Lewis
That sounds fascinating. So if that sounds fascinating to you audience as well as me, there are two ways you can sign up as well. As always, you can get access to the live recording of the course in the Biblical Studies Academy. But as a reminder, we are in the middle of our month long celebration of the name change to Paths in Biblical Studies. So for this week only, you can get the Luke course for 50% off. You can go to pbscourses.com for that particular discount. We're also going to be hosting a live AMA with TikTok sensation Dan McClellan in May. Not coincidentally, Dan's also going to be joining me on the podcast in a couple of weeks time. He has a new book coming out April 29th called the Bible says so. And he'll be joining us for an exclusive Q A event inside of the Biblical Studies Academy so you can find more information about all of the different Biblical Studies Academy courses and events like Dan McClellan's AMA at Bart ehrman.com forward/bsa and now Bart, we have some audience questions.
- [45:09]
Bart Ehrman
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, Please visit bart erman.com AskBaht.
- [45:28]
Megan Lewis
So we had an audience question last week about the timing, how we know that Mark was the first gospel and when it was written. And this is interestingly connected to that. The questioner says, given that we don't certainly know when the Gospels were written, when is the absolute latest they could have been written, or when do quotations or references to them begin showing up in other literature?
- [45:52]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, it's a very good question. The first time that we know that we've got Matthew, Mark, Luke and John called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and quoted as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is in the writings of Irenaeus in his book against the heresies written around 180 or 185 CE. Some 30, 35 years later, the Gospels are quoted, but they are not named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They're called the memoirs of the apostles and related things by Justin Martyr in the year 150. We have some suggestions that Matthew, Mark and Luke were known to earlier authors who do not quote them as gospels as written texts, but they quote sayings of Jesus, things Jesus said that correspond exactly with what you get for example in Matthew and Luke. And you get, you get some of that already around the year 100 in the Didache and you have references in Ignatius that show that maybe he knows Matthew, for example. And so you start finding things early around the year 100. And then you start getting clear references to the gospels about Name them in 150 and then you get quotations of them by name in 185.
- [47:18]
Megan Lewis
We've got another dating question. Google tells me that the that most biblical scholars date the authorship of the Book of Revelation to the late first century. What are Barth's thoughts on that and are there competing views?
- [47:32]
Bart Ehrman
There are competing views about everything. So with Revelation, the main debate is whether it could have been written earlier during the reign of emperor Nero because there are references to Nero, clear references to Nero in the text, including the number of the beast 666, which almost certainly refers to Nero. But there are very good reasons for thinking it was written during the reign of Domitian. The final form of the text, the text we have today, the Book of Revelation as we have it looks like it must have been produced in the middle of the 90s. So it's usually dated around 95 or so. And that evidence is compelling to I'd say the vast majority of scholars. And there are not the vast. It's. It's. Yeah, I'd say the vast majority of scholars and it's, it's one that it argued about in. You can get. Actually you can get arguments in my book I have an arg. I have a book called Armageddon which is a. My. One of my most recent books which is an explanation of the Book of Revelation and tries to show how you have to put it in its own time. And I explain when that time is. But there are fuller explanations in a variety of books about Revelation, including, including one by Adela Yarbrough Collins, her book on revelation, which actually goes into deep depth. Why, it's probably almost certainly in the 90s.
- [48:53]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. This next question is not a biblical question, but more a Christianity question. If it was proved that space aliens were real, do you think Christianity would collapse?
- [49:05]
Bart Ehrman
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No, of course not. No, no. I mean, C.S. lewis wrote a space trilogy. C.S. lewis, the Christian apologist. He had no trouble imagining other creatures. And if God created this world there, you know, why wouldn't he create other worlds with humans on them? And so, and what would their, you know, what would their favor? So I don't know if they'd be humanoid creatures. If they are humanoid creatures. Well, why not? And if they are. So, no, I don't think it would have. It would. It would certainly, you know, affect how Christians started thinking about the universe, but it wouldn't affect. It would not have it. I, I can't see how it would destroy Christianity.
- [49:44]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Our final question for the day. What does the author of Mark been mean by authority? And I'm going to get this Greek wrong. So I'm very sorry. Exosian in 122 when he writes that they were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.
- [50:05]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, Exousia. And it's a important verse for Mark because Mark wants to show that Jesus was both different from and superior to the other Jewish teachers of his day. And it's often thought that what's being referred to is the Jewish practice that we see especially in later Jewish writings, especially writings by rabbinics, by rabbinic, by rabbis. So rabbinic writings where there'll be an issue that comes forth, like what. What does it mean to tithe all the prudence that you need to tithe. This rabbi says this, this rabbi says that, this other rabbi says this other thing. And you know, and you have like these disp. Disputes among rabbis as opposed to Jesus who says, this is it. And so the idea is that Jesus comes out and just says it, tells the truth instead of kind of trying to say, well, you can say this, you could say that. And so Mark is claiming that Jesus is a superior type of teaching because he teaches with his own authority.
- [51:15]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. Thank you very much. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [51:22]
Bart Ehrman
Well, remarkably, the New Testament talks about the resurrection of Jesus in different ways. And some views the authors find acceptable and some they don't. But it but there's not a single view of what it meant to early Christians that Jesus was raised from the dead. In other words, what actually happened? Did his body come out of the grave? Did his spirit get raised? Was it just a cadaver walking around? What was it? And so we talk about those different views and about how those views were then continued on in various groups of Christians, including Gnostics and the Marcionites, and, and then how pagans responded to it.
- [52:00]
Megan Lewis
Bart thank you so much. Audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make 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 at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but sadly, Bart will not be. I'm going to be talking to Dr. Travis Proctor about angels demons in the New Testament. Thank you everybody. Everymoney. Everymoney isn't a word. Thank you. Thank you everybody and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode of 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.