← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Megan Lewis
this week's Misquoting Jesus. We're turning the metaphorical tables and Bart is interviewing me. Everyone watching is familiar with Dr. Bart Ehrman, renowned New Testament scholar and New York Times best selling author. But who on earth am I? How did I make my way from the study of ancient Mesopotamia to host a New Testament and early Christianity podcast? If I'm an academic, why don't I work in a university somewhere? And where do I get all of my glasses? Stay tuned for all of that and so much more. Welcome to Ms.
- [01:02]
Podcast Announcer
Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only
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Megan Lewis
show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little
- [01:12]
Podcast Announcer
known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity.
- [01:17]
Megan Lewis
I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. I will admit to being slightly nervous. I am not used to being on this end of the interview. Today Bart is going to take the lead and interview me on whatever he feels like talking about. Except first. Bart, how are you doing?
- [01:36]
Bart Ehrman
I'm fine. I'm not nervous at all.
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Megan Lewis
This is, I think you and I are having questions.
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Bart Ehrman
I'm not having any questions, but I think I gave up on nervousness a long time ago. I just like when it comes to stuff like this. This is going to be great. So you're on your edge of your seat and so are the rest of us.
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Megan Lewis
I am. So I wanted to ask you before we got started, how are your grandchildren enjoying their summer? Because mine are running wild and chaotic absolutely everywhere.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, it's great for kids, isn't it? I mean, the thing was, you know, when I was a kid, I loved school. I just love when the summer's over, I go back to school sometimes. I'm just pumped about it and kind of weirdly that way. But the summertime, man, that was great. And today the kids have so much more stuff than we ever had. You know, we basically just played around the neighborhood or, you know, I played sports and played stuff in tennis and baseball and stuff in the summer. But. But now, man, it's all organized. And so my stepson is running a summer camp. This is his job. It's like this summer camp in New England. It's a year round job. Even though it's a summer camp, one of the granddaughters is there just having. Having a time of her life. Another granddaughter has a driver's license. She's having a good time. And the others are all toddlers who are just finding out how exciting summer is. So it's a good time of year for kids. And when I grew up, we didn't worry about the heat at all. And I think, I don't know if these kids do or not, but we never even worried about it then. But your kids are running around and
- [03:01]
Megan Lewis
yeah, they're very happy to just go outside and run and race and chase and I'm like running after them with hats and sunscreen. Yeah.
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Bart Ehrman
When I was a kid, sunscreen was water. We'd rub water on us. That should do it. It's amazing. We're all still alive.
- [03:18]
Megan Lewis
That'll work. Absolutely. Well, several of the older members of Josh's family have had skin cancer scares and. And so we possibly a little. I'm not going to say too zealous with the sunscreen because I think that actually that's not a bad thing. But yeah, we do, we do sunscreen. Definitely more than I had when I was a kid. Like when we went to the beach and stuff. Absolutely. Put your sunscreen on, but just running around outside during the summer, not so much. I was actually talking to Josh a couple of days ago. We were driving past a field that was full of hay bales, which triggered some memories for me of my summers, like racing around local fields. And one summer we found a barn that one of our neighbors had stacked with hay bales because, you know, farmers have barns with hay bales. And we spent several weeks just climbing these things and jumping off them and climbing up again. And then my mother found out. She was horrified because obviously it's very easy to tip a group of hay bales over and then you're buried and no one knew where we were. So. Yeah. Stuff you do when you're a kid.
- [04:19]
Bart Ehrman
Was it itchy?
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Megan Lewis
A little bit. But that didn't bother us very much.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, Yeah. I grew up in Kansas, so we had hay bales. Oh, yeah. Never got caught under one, though. Well, okay, so I guess I start from here, right?
- [04:31]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. Go for it.
- [04:33]
Bart Ehrman
Megan's. You know, this has been great doing this with you and people know some things about you, but you know this podcast is on the New Testament and early Christianity. And you know, some of these questions I don't have answers to. Did you have any training in this in New Testament, early Christianity?
- [04:48]
Megan Lewis
No, I did some classics as an undergraduate. My undergraduate degree was in ancient history. So we had a little bit of early Christianity kind of rolled into that. So we learned about Constantine, I think that was about it. The rest of it was Egypt and archaeology and assyriology and the other side of ancient history. And I just kept going with that. So this has really been my biggest exposure to New Testament and early Christianity studies.
- [05:16]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. My sense is, at least from my nieces and nephews, that in, in England it's a little bit weird because very few people actually are actively religious these days in England, but the schools actually have religious studies as a discipline like in what we would call like junior high and high school and stuff. You take religion. And so my nieces and nephews ended up learning a lot more about religion than my students at Chapel Hill who were all committed Christians. So was that the case in, in your world when.
- [05:44]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, we did, we did religious studies through high school. It's mandatory or it was when I was in high school. From age 13 up until you start selecting your own classes, which is like 16, 15, 16 I think. So I did a couple of years of religious studies and a lot of it was this is Christianity and then here's Buddhism, here's Islam, here's Hinduism, here's Judaism. So I had exposure to a fair amount of religions but my memory is that most of the detail was given in Christianity and everything else was kind of this exists, this is like the core belief structure but we don't really know anything else about it. So we're going to move on.
- [06:22]
Bart Ehrman
Now when you went to university then you were, you went and you started out in classics. Is that at university or is it.
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Megan Lewis
Well, so when I left high school, I'd done classics in high school for three, four years. And when I went to college I actually did what's called an art foundation degree, which is a one year arts diploma that, that is required for all fine arts degrees. And I had wanted to go into fashion design. So I did this one year art diploma. Changed my mind about what I wanted to do halfway through, didn't apply to a fashion design course. Ended up doing a year of jewellery school which was another like full degree program. A year into that really loved it, but decided I actually, I can't do this full time. I need something a bit more cerebral and around that Time. I was spending a lot of time with my younger sister because she was going around all the universities, kind of looking around them and taking introductory, like the classes that they will give students, high school students, to help them decide what degree they want to do. Because for those who don't know degrees in the uk, college experience in the UK is very different to the us. You don't go and kind of take a bunch of general education classes and then declare a major and a minor. You go, you apply to a specific degree program. So that's why I say, say I was going to apply to a fashion degree. I wasn't going to just go to university and then eventually major in fashion. All of my classes would have been fashion degrees, fashion classes. So my sister Erin was going to explore these universities and work out what program she wanted to apply to and in what university. And one of the universities she was interested in was in the same city that I was studying in. So I went and spent the day with her looking around Birmingham University and sitting in on lectures with her. And I sat through an introduction to the Ancient History degree program given by Dr. Ken Dowden, who is a classicist, and just completely fell in love with it. I had very much enjoyed my classics time as high school student and the introduction and the examples that were given as the classes that I could take as an ancient history student were absolutely fascinating and really just sounded like something I would enjoy very much. So I finished up my year in jewelry school, switched to Birmingham as a history engine history student and actually managed to stay and graduate. I think my parents were very relieved.
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Bart Ehrman
Okay, well, so the fashion design, I didn't know about that. Jewelry, I didn't know it is explaining a few things. So.
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Megan Lewis
Okay, it does, doesn't it? Yeah.
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Bart Ehrman
In some ways you're still interested in that. You moved into classics. So the undergraduate degree was classics, is that what you're saying?
- [09:02]
Megan Lewis
No, it was called Ancient history and it involved taking classes from various different departments. So I took classes in the classics department, the Archaeology department, the Egyptology department. I say department, really it was just one or two professors and then also the assyriology professor there. So that's where that one started.
- [09:20]
Bart Ehrman
I think before you've mentioned that, this was the assyriology professor who told you when you said it last time, it sounded like it was the kind of thing where, well, yeah, you could do classics. A lot of people do classics, but, you know, there's nobody doing assyriology. And I'm telling you this needs to be done. Is it Was it that kind of thing?
- [09:37]
Megan Lewis
Yes, he was absolutely wonderful. And he was the advisor for my undergraduate dissertation, which was an investigation into similarities between Mesopotamian and classical Greek mythology, and he was supervising it. So I would have weekly meetings with him to talk about what I'd read and what I was writing, and he'd give me feedback on everything I was doing. And as part of those meetings, there was a good amount of mentorship. He asked me what I was planning on doing after I graduated, and I said, well, I want to be a classicist. I want to go and get a master's degree and then do a PhD. And he said, I think you could do that and you'd probably do a fantastic job. But as you say, there are so many people doing classics. All of the texts have been read and translated and analyzed so many times. Have you considered a serology? We have all of this material and not enough people to work through it all. I'd really enjoyed the classes I had taken with him. I'd enjoyed the texts that I'd read. So that kind of was a very interesting alternative to me. And at the end of my undergraduate degree, I did apply to do a master's degree with him and stayed on for another year.
- [10:42]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so we've been saying assyriology, and I'm not sure people know what that is. So to begin with, it's not Syria, it's Assyria. What's a seriology? And you said something about Mesopotamia. Give us the brief on what this actually entails.
- [11:00]
Megan Lewis
So the study of assyriology is the study of the cultures and languages of ancient Mesopotamia, which is the geographical region that's currently mostly made up of Iraq, some bits of Syria and maybe Turkey, if we consider Anatolia as well. So that kind of Middle Eastern area. I've spent a long time looking at the history of the region and learning the languages that were spoken and written, which is primarily Sumerian and Akkadian, which were written in the cuneiform script, which is the kind of triangular wedge shaped script that you might have seen in museums and things.
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Bart Ehrman
What time period are we talking about really?
- [11:40]
Megan Lewis
The study of Mesopotamia kind of goes from the first writing, which is like late 4th, early 3rd millennium BCE up until the last cuneiform texts we have are early hellenistic, so maybe 100 BCE. My personal area is much earlier than that, though. Once you hit the first millennium, for me, I'm a little bit not quite at sea, but it's not what I do.
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Bart Ehrman
In terms of dates, what dates do you work in then?
- [12:07]
Megan Lewis
When I was in grad school. It was primarily the Bronze Age. So second millennium, looking at that kind of time period.
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Bart Ehrman
So between 2000 and 1000 kind of thing.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah.
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Bart Ehrman
Bronze Age goes back earlier.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah. So Bronze Age probably isn't precise enough. Like middle of the third. Third millennium. So, like 2500 onwards.
- [12:26]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. I think a lot of people have trouble doing kind of the ancient. The BCE stuff because, like, you're going back with that. So 2500 to, like, whatever. So you're talking about stuff 5000 years ago, the languages. Did you say Akkadian and Sumerian? Is that what you said?
- [12:40]
Megan Lewis
I did, yeah.
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Bart Ehrman
So why isn't one of them called Assyrian?
- [12:46]
Megan Lewis
So there is a dialect of Akkadian called Assyrian. Why the field is called Assyriology is a little complex and is to do with the development of the field as almost an offshoot of biblical studies, an offshoot of Old Testament history. Because a lot of the foundation of the field was trying to explore and discover this world that produced the Hebrew Bible. And a lot of very early Assyriologists were kind of trying to find the things, find the places that are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible kind of on the ground and like, kind of ground truth it. So go and find these places and. And say, hey, look, the Bible is accurate, essentially.
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Bart Ehrman
Yes.
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Megan Lewis
And because the bad guys in the Bible are the Neo Assyrians, that's where we get assyriology as a field of study.
- [13:36]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, we're going to take a break for an announcement and we'll come right back.
- [13:41]
Podcast Announcer
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- [14:53]
Bart Ehrman
So I'm just trying to get my mind about what you're saying about why you call it assyriology. Because it's relevant for the podcast. Because we, you know, we're doing New Testament, early Christianity, but we talk about the Hebrew Bible a good bit as well. And Assyria is a major figure in the Hebrew Bible. People don't know what we think of as ancient Israel after King Solomon, after the third king was divided into two kingdoms, and Israel up in the north and Judah in the south, and Israel, the northern kingdom, gets wiped out by the Assyrians after your time period in the 8th century. And so Assyria figures prominently in the historical books of the Old Testament. And what you're saying is that this field developed because people were interested in the Bible and Assyria is in the Bible. And so you want to know about Assyria because that'll help confirm what the Bible says.
- [15:43]
Megan Lewis
Yes, absolutely.
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Bart Ehrman
Huh. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. And so they just kept the term assyriology, although I assume that now people studying this, you know, certainly there are biblical scholars interested in assyriology. I know a number of them as you do, too. But I would think that the agenda is not so much to prove the Bible anymore.
- [16:03]
Megan Lewis
Not so much. And the. The field more widely is usually known in universities as Ancient Near Eastern Studies. And in departments like that, you'll find Biblicists, so Old Testament specialists, as well as Egyptologists, archaeologists that work in that specific geographical region, and Assyriologists. And the distinguishing factor in all of that is that the Assyriologists will typically concentrate on written sources. So we spend a lot more of our time considering or looking at texts, translating them, maybe looking at some of the material culture as well. But then you've got archaeologists who kind of actually go and do the digging and then the analysis of the sites and the material that they find there. But no, very few Assyriologists are working to prove the Bible. Right. It's more grown into a field of exploration and discovery of the very varied, different cultures that inhabited those regions in this kind of very broad chronological area.
- [17:02]
Bart Ehrman
So it is. It's a wide area, and there's a lot of time, and so there's a lot of difference. Even people who aren't trying to prove the Bible. One of the things that's always sparked interest is the thing sounds like you did your thesis on, which is comparative mythology, where, like, you get mythological tales. Was your. A comparative thing?
- [17:20]
Megan Lewis
Yes, that was for my undergraduate degree. And it, like, it wasn't original research. Right. Your Undergrad is really the first piece of research that you do kind of by yourself. So I was looking at similarities in themes, mainly between Mesopotamian and Greek mythologies. So looking at theogonies, the development of families of gods and then the creation of the world and that kind of thing, which was fun. And one of the things I really enjoyed as a grad student is then being able to go and have the ability to read the texts in the original Akkadian and or Sumerian that I'd read in English as an undergraduate student.
- [17:59]
Bart Ehrman
Did you have to learn Hebrew as well?
- [18:01]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, I took a few years of Hebrew. I wouldn't say I'm good at it, but I know enough to kind of be able to muddle my way through a passage if I need to. I try not to. That's one of the reasons why I married someone with so much Hebrew background. He can do the Hebrew for me.
- [18:18]
Bart Ehrman
So the point is that languages that involve alphabets are a problem for you, is that it?
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Megan Lewis
Yes, yes, absolutely.
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Bart Ehrman
So we're not going to stay on languages the whole time, but I'm interested. People talk about Sumer as being the place where written language was invented. Is that still true?
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Megan Lewis
Yep. You'll have Egyptologists argue about that. There's kind of a bit of jockeying for position there. The earliest forms of writing appear at roughly the same time in Egypt and in Mesopotamia. But, yeah, we try and claim to be the first.
- [18:49]
Bart Ehrman
What are our oldest texts in Sumerian?
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Megan Lewis
They're mostly receipts. Taxation receipts.
- [18:54]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Okay.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
All right.
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Bart Ehrman
How about literary texts?
- [18:59]
Megan Lewis
So there's one that is argued to be a possible literary text, but it's very difficult to read. And it. It doesn't have the same kind of fully developed grammatical representation that we would expect from literature. But some of the earliest full Sumerian literary texts would be things like the early Gilgamesh stories. So the stories that the Epic of Gilgamesh was kind of shaped around, which includes, like, the death of Enkidu and Gilgamesh and Huara, and then Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, in which he insults the goddess Inanna, which is just generally a bad idea, and she unleashes the Bull of Heaven to try and kill him. There are various stories about gods copulating in unconsensual manners. Let's say that, sadly, do seem to be common across a lot of cultures. So those kinds of things. There's also a selection of. And these aren't early, but it's earlyish literature. A selection of debates between things like a Debate between a fish and a bird where they're like insulting each other and trying to decide who is superior. And a selection of semi pornographic literature called Love literature between the goddess Inanna and her spouse Dumuzi. So we have, we have quite the variety.
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Bart Ehrman
I got a little bit interested in. I, I can't read those languages obviously, but these old stories, I mean, Gilgamesh is one that people should be familiar with if they're not. But even these others that you're talking about, you can get these in English translations. Do you have a preferred English translation?
- [20:35]
Megan Lewis
So for the Sumerian stuff, I will normally direct people to a website which is called the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. If you just searched etcsl and then put Sumerian just to make sure you get the right one, that's a huge repository of translations done by experts of all of these different texts. And you can kind of go through and select do I want to read narratives? Do I want to read royal inscriptions? You can select by genre or by main character. So if you're looking specifically for texts about the God Enki, you can select that and it'll give you everything that he appears in. As well as being just fantastic translations, they also have transliterations along with it, which is the representation of the cuneiform in Roman characters. So you can go back and see like what the actual language looks like and kind of sound it out for yourself and see where word divisions and things like that are and then click over and see what the English translation would be for that.
- [21:34]
Bart Ehrman
You know, Megan, you're such an academic, you want people to learn the language.
- [21:39]
Megan Lewis
You don't have to learn it, but sometimes it's nice to.
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Bart Ehrman
So I'm thinking about like, you know, I'm an old geezer who likes paper like paperbacks.
- [21:48]
Megan Lewis
Treasures of Darkness by Thorkel Jacobsen is an excellent and very accessible translation of a lot of it. If you're looking for Gilgamesh, anything by Andrew George is fantastic. There was another one put out recently, I think by Mark Foster, also a very great academic. And if people are interested in Acadian literature, because academics do tend to segregate them. If you're interested in Acadian literature, really the standard work on most things is Mark Foster before the Muses, which is a huge two volume set. It's a little pricey, but if you want to be able to sit down and really explore this stuff, it's probably the best bet.
- [22:24]
Bart Ehrman
Even though they're not trying to prove the Bible, a lot of Old Testament scholars they have to learn this material. Why? Why do Old Testament people learn this material from the ancient Near East?
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Megan Lewis
Because it really informs your understanding of, of the Old Testament, what the different books are doing and kind of the background in which they were written. So it gives you a better understanding of the history of the region in general. Rather than looking at this very, very focused area of Israel or Judah, you've got the broader picture, which gives you, in terms of politics and history, it gives you a better understanding of what's going on and kind of the interplay between the different kingdoms there. It allows you to do things like identify in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible what might be kind of propaganda. But it also, if you're coming at it from the assyriological standpoint, having an understanding of the Hebrew Bible kind of gives you an understanding of what is Assyrian propaganda. So you can read the two in conjunction and kind of not necessarily come to the truth, but come to a better understanding of what events led up to the conflicts that you read about. My husband, for those who are unaware, my husband is Dr. Joshua Bowen. He's also an Assyriologist. He does a lot of counter apologetics work online with the Hebrew Bible. He really appreciates being able to look at specific genres of texts. So he's currently working on a commentary on the book of Leviticus and being able to look at comparable material from Mesopotamia because the cultures are so closely connected. Looking at all of that additional material gives you additional insight into what specific laws in the Hebrew Bible are actually doing, what they're reacting against or in conversation with. So you get a much rich, a fuller understanding than you would have if you just were looking at the Hebrew Bible by itself, because it is a finite resource. It's not like there are additional texts from ancient Israel that you can look at to help you understand what's going on.
- [24:25]
Bart Ehrman
Right. In my department at Chapel Hill, the field that I'm in is called Ancient Mediterranean Religions. And the way it basically lines up is we have people like me doing Judaism, Christianity and Greek and Roman religions all like as one thing. And the idea is the Greek and Roman religions are the context within which Judaism and Christianity formed. If you don't know this context, you're not going to understand Judaism and Christianity, but the other half of it is Ancient Near East Hebrew Bible. And it's the same, same sort of thing. And I guess probably the study of Ancient Near Eastern stuff really was especially prompted in the 19th century when they're finding things like the Epic of Gilgamesh and, you know, the Enuma Elish and Canaanite stuff. And, And I don't know when. Well, Hammurabi's law code, right. You know, same laws. And it got people interested. They realized, oh, my God, this is the same. You find a flood story and it's like, it sounds just like Noah. I'm like, and in the Gilgamesh epic, it was like, oh, my God. And it got people interested. But you can't really understand these texts without the broader content. But it must work both ways, right? Because you. If you're going to understand something in, like, in a Sumerian culture, Assyrian, you've got to understand the Hebrew culture as well on some level, I would think.
- [25:37]
Megan Lewis
Right. And that's why, if people are watching the podcast, that's why I try and bring up, okay, this was happening in early Christianity. What else was happening in the rest of the culture that this religion was kind of emerging from? Because really, you can't understand that emergence and how people are behaving without understanding the broader context. It. It really is essential to know what's going on.
- [26:02]
Bart Ehrman
It sounds really complicated because you've got to learn these languages, and you're doing it with a cuneiform, so script. But then, you know, it isn't just about learning languages. You've got to learn how to read these texts, but the texts themselves are valuable as literature. But then also you've got the history of what's going on in the period, and the texts help us with that. But then you also have archaeology, and it's all of that. So everybody has to specialize. What. What did you end up focusing on in your graduate work?
- [26:26]
Megan Lewis
Before I left, my graduate. My PhD dissertation was on. Was on royal inscriptions from that time period. I mentioned the third to the second millennium.
- [26:39]
Bart Ehrman
You may need to explain both. Inscription. What's an inscription? What's royal inscription?
- [26:45]
Megan Lewis
So a royal inscription, it's commissioned by a royal person, usually a king, sometimes a queen or a prince or princess. They're not sitting and writing these things themselves. They're having scribes write out, usually propaganda. And they are inscribed. They are carved into different objects, inscribed or stamped. So you find a lot of them on bricks that were used to build temples. You find them on votive offerings. So objects that were offered to the gods as an act of devotion, really, Those are honestly the main ones. You do also find things like cylinder seals, which are small cylindrical stone seals that had seams carved on them, and sometimes names or sentences. And these were rolled across clay tablets almost like a Signature to indicate either ownership or that someone had written something specific. But I was looking at these inscriptions and trying to better understand what they were doing. I put together a huge database of 600 odd objects that all had some kind of writing on them commissioned by a royal figure, and then looked at things like where these objects were found. Were they found in what's known as a primary location? So were they found where they were originally used? So if it was a brick inscription, was that brick found in a building, like part of a wall? Or was it found in a trash pile? Had it been removed and cast aside? What were these objects made of? Was there any correlation between any of this information and what else were they found with? So something that can be quite difficult as a text person is to remember that the texts you're looking at are written on things, and those things are found both in places but with other things as well. What they're found with can really help inform our understanding of their purpose and why they were made.
- [28:41]
Bart Ehrman
How long are these inscriptions? Are they various lengths?
- [28:45]
Megan Lewis
Yeah. The shortest are just either a name or a name in a titular. So when Nebuchadnezzar, king of Assyria, actually, he was Babylonian, king of Babylon, but we have several that are substantially longer. There was a king known as Gudea who had these huge cylinders carved with a very long account of his activities. So you get kings recording all of their building activities, all of their military activities, and most often recording them as, like, an act of devotion for the gods. It was a pious act. And most of the building activities they record were building new temples for the gods or renovating existing structures.
- [29:25]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. You know, I just got back from Greece, and you have these inscriptions on temples everywhere, just lying on the ground half the time. But they're not on brick, on, like, building. Do they always use brick or do they have, like.
- [29:36]
Megan Lewis
Yes. So Mesopotamia is not particularly rich in either stone or timber. So the vast majority of the building was done using mud brick. So you would shape a brick out of clay, out of mud, leave it to dry in the sun. It would be stamped while it was still wet with a clay stamp that had been fired in a kiln. Sometimes bricks were glazed and fired. That was a much later technology. Usually they're just baked in the sun and then used as construction materials. And cedar or other timber would be used for roofing.
- [30:07]
Bart Ehrman
So with this dissertation, did you have a goal in mind, or are you kind of waiting to see what turned up or how did it. Did you go in with a thesis about something you wanted to demonstrate, was it. What were you doing?
- [30:19]
Megan Lewis
It was very much just kind of looking and seeing what there was because there are so many royal inscriptions that have all been studied in isolation, but not kind of put back together as a whole. So my purpose was really to gather as much together as I could in this database and then try and find points of correlation or points of difference. I didn't finish the dissertation. One of the most interesting things that I found was a lot of the bricks that were stamped, were stamped commemorating the construction of a specific temple, but they were then used to build a different temple entirely. I didn't get as far as forming thoughts as to why that would happen, but it was interesting to note it.
- [30:59]
Bart Ehrman
How do you know that?
- [31:01]
Megan Lewis
Because you obviously have the name of the temple on the brick, so you know what the inscription itself was commemorating. But then archaeologists identify what temple is being constructed or has been constructed based on a variety of other things. And a lot of the time, you will find bricks in the right temple with another wrong brick next to them. So you can kind of.
- [31:27]
Bart Ehrman
How do you date bricks? You know, I was wondering this actually in. Because when this Greece thing, we're doing all this archaeological. Then they have some temple and they're talking about dating the stones. And I'm thinking, well, you know, you don't date it with carbon 14, because these things are not organic. How do you date these things?
- [31:43]
Megan Lewis
Partly by stratigraphy. So whereabouts in how deep down an object is found in an archaeological excavation, but a lot of the time by king name, we have very secure chronologies for most of Mesopotamia. So if you have the name of the king, you know roughly where in history that object, or at least when in history that object was inscribed and used. Obviously, it could have been an old object that had an inscription placed on it. And Mesopotamians had a very elaborate dating system. So a lot of the time, year names would be given based on the activities of a king. So the year that Gudea built the temple of Ningirsu, like, we know what year that is. We know where it falls in Gudea's reign. So if you find an object that talks about the construction of that temple, you know pretty well exactly where it's from.
- [32:34]
Bart Ehrman
Do you mind saying why? Why didn't you finish your dissertation? How far along were you and what. What happened?
- [32:40]
Megan Lewis
I was probably a year or two from graduation. And children is the answer. Josh and I got married, and then he got primary custody of his two eldest daughters. They came to live with us. Josh had just graduated and was doing the whole looking for a job thing. So he was kind of supporting us financially. We couldn't afford childcare, so we kind of went along for a year with me looking after the kids and working like in evenings and weekends and when they were napping and stuff like that. And then we had our oldest son and grad students with a newborn and no actual help. I don't have family over here. We had moved out of Baltimore. I didn't have any friends in the area. And frankly, institutional support for new parents is non existent. It's changing slowly, but at that point it was non existent. So we couldn't afford for me to keep doing it. And my mental health was suffering quite significantly because I was, I was not being the best student I could be and I was not being the best parent I could be.
- [33:44]
Bart Ehrman
It's a real problem. It continues to be a problem. It's gotten somewhat better, but it's. And especially the burden, you know, almost always falls on the women and people are recognizing it more and it is getting better, but it's really, really too bad. So even though you're not trying to finish a degree, you're still, you're still active, you're still doing things. And for one thing, you've got this thing, digital. Hammurabi, we've mentioned this before. What is that?
- [34:13]
Megan Lewis
It is a YouTube channel primarily. We do podcasting and various other bits and pieces. There's several books that we've self published. We've done a workshop for the University of Texas in Austin on teaching their grad students how to make the transition to digital presentation of their materials and yeah, primarily a YouTube channel. And it started actually while I was still a student because it became quite obvious to us that a traditional, conventional academic career wasn't going to be possible in our field. In order to get that, you have to do at least one postdoctoral program, which usually means moving sometimes overseas, sometimes more than once. And doing that for both of us with children. And the custody agreement that Josh has with the girl's mother just wasn't possible. And it seems like going on YouTube and kind of sharing the information that we feel very privileged to have been exposed to was a good way to kind of keep our foot in a seriology without following this traditional career path. And that's kind of morphed into a decent, I think, YouTube channel. I do interviews with academics and help them to like share the information that they have and the research that they, they are doing with an audience who's not made up of their, their peers and their colleagues. It's a lot of fun.
- [35:42]
Bart Ehrman
So is it kind of like what we're doing? I mean, is it trying to reach out to people who have some interest in you call it Hammurabi. He wasn't really from Assyria.
- [35:52]
Megan Lewis
No, but so the, the, the Hammurabi thing was chosen because he's probably one of the most famous names from the area and from the time. So, yeah, I try and do something very similar to what you and I are doing, which is why I'm so unused to being on this end of the interview. Because I interview you and then I interview other people about Mesopotamian things.
- [36:12]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay. Do you have a time period that you cover in digital Hammurabi?
- [36:17]
Megan Lewis
No, actually. Which is really, really freeing. And I don't restrict myself just to Mesopotamia. We have Egyptologists on, we have Hebrew Bible scholars on. If it's kind of tangentially related to the ancient near east, then I'll try and talk to people about it.
- [36:35]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay. Does digital Hammurabi do other things besides the podcast?
- [36:39]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, so we've got YouTube and the podcast. I mentioned the books that we've done. The first one we did was a Learn to read ancient Sumerian. That's now a two volume set. Volume three will come in a couple of years when we finished writing it.
- [36:54]
Bart Ehrman
Wait, it's like a Teach yourself Sumerian based on this book? What? Can people do this?
- [37:00]
Megan Lewis
I mean, yeah, we wrote it because there is a lot of interest in Sumerian, a lot of interest from ancient aliens, people who are told or have been told by various authors that this is how you translate a specific passage in Sumerian. And we wanted to give them and other people the tools to actually go and evaluate the translations themselves and come up with maybe a more accurate translation. And in combination with that, there are lots of books about teach yourself ancient Greek, teach yourself ancient Hebrew. There are some like, teach yourself ancient Egyptian books. But all of the Sumerian grammar books are written for an academic audience, by academics, for academics, which makes it very, very difficult for people who haven't gone through grad school to really get a grip on this language. So we wanted to try and fill that need. It's been very, very popular.
- [37:53]
Bart Ehrman
Do they get support somehow? You know, so my wife Sarah's very good languages. She's learning ancient Greek now because she wants to read the ancient drama and wants to read, you know, Euripides and stuff. And it's hard. I mean, so I have to kind of help her out with it. Is there Some way people get help with Sumerian or do they just.
- [38:08]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, we have people email us.
- [38:10]
Bart Ehrman
Ah, okay.
- [38:11]
Megan Lewis
It can take a week or two, but we try and get back to them as soon as we can. And we do both. Also teach. I've taught Sumerian through a community college and we're going to be offering Sumerian classes through Digital Hammurabi as well. I think you and I have spoken about. Josh is teaching Hebrew at the moment, and we've got an Egyptian class running, so we'll be adding Sumerian as well.
- [38:33]
Bart Ehrman
I want you to say something more about those. These are online classes that people can take in the languages. And you've got Hebrew going on now in middle Egyptian, whatever that is, somewhere between beginning and end Egypt. What do they call it? Do they call it early middle and late Egyptian?
- [38:53]
Megan Lewis
Yes, I think so. And then you've got Dinoskan, Coptic, which are different things.
- [38:57]
Bart Ehrman
Coptic would be different, but.
- [38:58]
Megan Lewis
Told you more than I know.
- [39:00]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, okay. So is this like hieroglyphics?
- [39:04]
Megan Lewis
Yep. She's, I think. And I haven't sat in on any of Jill's classes, but she's. She's going through the basics of the grammar, but then introducing hieroglyphs as well.
- [39:13]
Bart Ehrman
Wow. Okay. You know, if people are interested in this stuff, they can just. Do they just look up Digital Hammurabi?
- [39:19]
Megan Lewis
Yeah. If people go to digitalhamurabi.com, there is on the landing page a sign up link for our mailing our newsletter. We're not taking registrations right now because I want to see how the trial runs of the classes go first, but I'll be sending out announcements when we do open up registration again through the newsletter. And if you have trouble with that, you can just email me meganigitalhammerabi.com and I'll. Then I'll. I'll sign you up myself.
- [39:44]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'm going to let you off of the hot seat in a second, but I, I do have. What everybody says to me about our podcast is something about either your hair or your glasses. And it's like I was, you know, I'm in Greece. I'm just talking to somebody about our podcast. And like, before I get any word out of my mouth, they want to know about Megan's hair and potty. And I just, you know, what am I, chopped liver?
- [40:04]
Megan Lewis
No one comes to the intellectual content, so.
- [40:08]
Bart Ehrman
All right, so you love glasses. I didn't realize, you know, you were in like, you know, fashion design and then into jewelry and so. Right. You ever design your own Glass frames?
- [40:17]
Megan Lewis
No, I would love to. I don't know how I would do that. I sew clothes, but I've not made it to glasses design yet.
- [40:25]
Bart Ehrman
So explain your glasses. I mean, do you have, like, a place you go or.
- [40:29]
Megan Lewis
There are a couple of different places. When I was actually in high school, I realized that I could order glasses online for far cheaper than I could buy them at the opticians, and that they had this amazing selection of really, really fun and interesting glasses. And a couple of years later, I decided that, you know, I'm going to be wearing glasses every day. I have contact lenses. I hate wearing them, so I'm just going to be wearing glasses. Why not have glasses that make me happy and that I can switch out? Like I switch out my necklaces or my earrings. So I got a couple of different pairs, and each time I get a new prescription, I'll buy one or two more pairs. And my prescription doesn't change quickly enough that the older glasses phase out very fast. So if I'm driving, I wear my most current prescription. But if I'm just pottering around the house, I can go one prescription back. So I have usually between four and six pairs in rotation.
- [41:26]
Bart Ehrman
Really?
- [41:27]
Megan Lewis
Wow.
- [41:27]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. You know, just to cover myself on this, people are going to be upset with me about getting personal with you. I want to point out some of these questions are ones you suggested maybe people would be interested. So it's like, I'm not trying to be, you know, inappropriate or anything, so
- [41:46]
Megan Lewis
not in the slightest.
- [41:47]
Bart Ehrman
And, you know, people have their favorites and people. So well done you.
- [41:52]
Megan Lewis
The ones that are like a wavy S line get that. The strongest reaction I've noticed. People either love them or they make them motion sick, which is unfortunate.
- [42:02]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so. Yeah, but your. Your optometer starts salivating anytime you come near. Right. Another two more pair of classes coming up here. Yeah. So do you have other projects on the horizon for academic stuff or you'll be developing the digital Hammurabi stuff more? Are you gonna. What do you have lined up in the future?
- [42:21]
Megan Lewis
I have things that I want to do, and I've had to be very intentional about putting them aside until the kids are a little bigger. My two youngest are three, and even though they're in daycare, I don't have a lot of time to really focus on the things that I want to focus on because running a family is just. It's quite intense. So at the moment, I'm really working on expanding the language classes through digital Hammurabi and working out, like, what we do in terms of marketing and kind of going back and doing everything to run a business that I should have done. When we first started digital Hammurabi it was. When it started, it was a hobby and it's morphed into really a business and a full time job. So we're kind of like going back and retroactively applying for everything that we need. Not that we need, but that is useful to have so that we can run a business. So I'm doing a lot of that. One thing I would really love to do, and I've been talking to various friends about this for ages, is a digital project called why should We Care? Or why should I Care? I kind of vacillate between that really advocating for the importance of history as a field of study because I. I do think it's really important and I don't think that the case is made very convincingly beyond. Oh, it's just interesting. And actually I think a lot of what you and I talk about is very relevant for modern life and I think that a lot of people have very interesting things to say to say about it. So I want to get a project together kind of exploring that and getting lots of different academics from different fields kind of giving their pitch as to why ancient history is important and relevant to modern life. And I have a bunch of people who have said they'd be really happy to contribute. I just need like 40 more hours a week to set it up. So that's a long term goal. But in the immediate future I have next March I run with another project called the Ozymandias Project. We've run an archaeo gaming conference. So that's coming up next March. We've started planning for that a couple of weeks ago. So we're looking at who we want to invite to speak and what we want to change from last year. So that is always a lot of fun. And I feel like there's something else. The other podcast I do. Yeah, no, I do a podcast called the Reading Party Podcast, which is a media review podcast. So we watch and listen and read books and TV shows set in the ancient world. And my co host is a classicist. So we get together and talk about what it is we've watched and evaluate it in terms of is this historically reasonable? Why did they change this particular thing? What are the writers or the filmmakers really trying to create here? Because it's not historically accurate. So they're doing something else. So that's a lot of fun. We're recording our third season, which is actually on Rome at the moment.
- [45:26]
Bart Ehrman
So what's it called again?
- [45:27]
Megan Lewis
The Reading Party Podcast.
- [45:29]
Bart Ehrman
The Reading Party Podcast. Okay, so people can go to that, too?
- [45:33]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, yeah. It's on YouTube and all the podcasting places.
- [45:36]
Bart Ehrman
All right, Well, I think you need some more things to do in your life. And so it's just my personal opinion. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, this has been great. It's really, really interesting stuff. And it's the kind of thing people don't really know about very much, most people. But it's hugely interesting and it's important. It is important for understanding our civilization, these kinds of issues that you're dealing with. And so if they're interested, go to Digital Hammurabi. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Megan.
- [46:05]
Megan Lewis
Well, I hope this was interesting for everyone. I enjoyed myself. Bart, you're an excellent interviewer. Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. And 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, but what are we talking about next time?
- [46:30]
Bart Ehrman
We're talking about weaponizing the Bible, about how people use the Bible in order to advance their own social and political agendas. And we're going to talk about the issues involved with that.
- [46:41]
Megan Lewis
See you all then. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [46:46]
Podcast Announcer
This has been an episode of Misquoting
- [46:48]
Megan Lewis
Jesus with Bart Ehrman.
- [46:49]
Podcast Announcer
We'll be back with a new episode
- [46:51]
Megan Lewis
next next Tuesday, so please be sure
- [46:53]
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- [46:55]
Megan Lewis
on your favourite podcast listening app or
- [46:57]
Podcast Announcer
on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.