Finding Jesus in Genesis

Summary

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

Episode: Finding Jesus in Genesis

Air Date: March 5, 2024
Hosts: Bart Ehrman (Bible scholar & author), Megan Lewis

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the pervasive belief, especially among certain Christian traditions, that Jesus is present within the pages of Genesis and the wider Old Testament. Dr. Bart Ehrman and Megan Lewis delve into when, how, and why early Christians—and many modern believers—read Jesus into ancient Hebrew scriptures, analyze scholarly perspectives, and address the implications for biblical interpretation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Do Some Christians See Jesus in the Old Testament?

• Christian Tradition's View:
  • From earliest times, Christians viewed the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as anticipating or predicting Jesus. (04:16)
  • "In the Christian tradition, as it developed from the earliest of Christian times, the idea was that the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures, were anticipating Jesus and... looking forward to Jesus." — Bart Ehrman [04:16]
• Personal Anecdotes:
  • Bart shares his experience with paraphrased Bibles explicitly inserting Jesus’ name into Old Testament passages when he was a young born-again Christian. (03:43)

2. Biblical Evidence for Jesus' Presence in the Old Testament

• The Gospels & Paul:
  • The Gospels claim Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecy, but don't explicitly state Jesus was present in Genesis. (05:09)
  • Paul (before the Gospels were written) suggests a more explicit presence, notably in 1 Corinthians 10:4:

    “Paul says, ‘and the rock was Christ.’ Whoa. Christ is the one who saves people by providing them with what they need so they don’t perish.” — Bart Ehrman [07:35]

• Theological Development:
  • Early Christians initially viewed Jesus as a human exalted to divinity at resurrection. The belief in Jesus’ pre-existence emerges later (in Paul, most strongly in John), leading to the idea Jesus could have been present “back then” in Genesis. (05:30–06:09)
  • This theological evolution sets the stage for doctrines like the Trinity, with early Christians identifying appearances of God in the Old Testament as appearances of Jesus. (06:09)

3. Apocryphal and Patristic Interpretations

• Epistle of Barnabas (2nd Century):
  • Barnabas “Christianizes” the Jewish Bible, proposing, for example, that Abraham's circumcision of 318 men (Genesis) is a hidden reference to Jesus and the cross.

  • "The [Greek] letters would be a tau, like a T, an iota, like an I, and an eta... the iota and the eta add up to 18 and the Tau is 300. So... iota, eta—those are the first two letters of the name Jesus. And the tau looks like a T, it’s in the shape of a cross. Salvation comes by the cross of Jesus. And it's already in the book of Genesis." — Bart Ehrman [10:40]

• Problematic Linguistics:
  • Megan points out Genesis was originally in Hebrew, not Greek, highlighting the strained nature of these typological readings. (11:17)

4. The Trinity in Genesis

• Reading Genesis 1 with Trinitarian Lenses:
  • Christians often cite Genesis 1 (“Let us make man in our image”) as the Trinity.
  • Bart reconstructs the logic: God (Father), God’s Word (“the Word,” cf. John 1), and God's Spirit (Genesis 1) present in creation as foreshadowing the later doctrine of the Trinity. (12:07–13:41)
• Scholarly Interpretation of Plural Language ('Us', 'Elohim'):
  • Scholars usually see “us” as the “royal we” or “plural of majesty.”
  • “Elohim is... a plural noun... but the conception is very much singular. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, when they use the word Elohim and then they use a verb with it, they use the singular form of the verb.” — Bart Ehrman [18:00]

5. Early Christian Identification of Jesus with Bodily 'God' in Genesis

• God Appearing Anthropomorphically:
  • Whenever God appears in bodily form in Genesis (e.g., walking in the garden), early Christians—especially post-Trinity—identify the figure as Jesus, the “incarnate” member of the Trinity.

  • “If you have God in the Old Testament appearing incarnate as a human being... then it has to be the Son, because the Son is the incarnate one of the Trinity.” — Bart Ehrman [19:28]

6. Typological and Foreshadowing Readings

• Adam and Eve, Animal Skins, and Sacrifice:

  • Adam and Eve’s shame—covered by animal skins—was interpreted as prefiguring Christ’s sacrifice: the covering of their sin required animal sacrifice, which foreshadows Jesus' perfect sacrifice. (21:01–22:24)

• Genesis 3:15 (“He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel”):

  • Christians see serpent as Satan/the devil; Jesus’ crucifixion as fulfilling this protoevangelium.

  • “This is referring to what happened to Jesus... the devil will bring about pain for Jesus and suffering, but Christ will destroy the devil...” — Bart Ehrman [25:01]

  • Illustrated with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ snake scene (26:08).

• Joseph as a Type of Christ:

  • Joseph's betrayal/salvation story interpreted as a prefiguration of Jesus:

    “Betrayed by his own people... for silver, and is then exalted by God... brings salvation to those who rejected him.” — Bart Ehrman [27:35]

7. Modern and Scholarly Approaches

• Can Christians Read Genesis without ‘Finding’ Jesus?

  • Many Christians—particularly historical scholars—read Genesis in its ancient context, apart from Christological foreshadowing. (28:28)
  • The practice of reading the Old in light of the New (intertextuality) especially flourished from the Protestant Reformation. Some Christians find it hard not to see Jesus in, e.g., Isaiah 53, due to these entrenched interpretive traditions. (29:54–31:20)

  • “If somebody doesn’t believe me on this, read Isaiah 53 and try not to think about Jesus. Good luck.” — Bart Ehrman [31:06]

• Is Genesis (or the Old Testament) Christian Scripture?

  • From scholarly/historical perspectives, Genesis predates Jesus and isn’t about him. But Christians can and do find theological meaning by reading Genesis as part of a Christian canonical whole.

• Debates among Theologians and Scholars:

  • There is ongoing tension in seminaries and scholarship: does the Old Testament need the New Testament to be understood? Bart shares a story from his PhD oral exams where professors debated this fiercely. (34:00–35:08)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trinitarian Readings:

  • “If you say something like, well, in the Old Testament, the first person plural gets used for a singular... you can say those things, but it doesn't make sense because of course it’s the Trinity. It does sound convoluted. I know.” — Bart Ehrman [16:20]

• On Intertextuality Challenges:

  • “If somebody doesn’t believe me on this, read Isaiah 53 and try not to think about Jesus. Good luck.” — Bart Ehrman [31:06]

• Scholarly Friction in Real Time:

  • “I got the two sides arguing with each other... and I just sat back smiling.” — Bart Ehrman (on his exam defense about the Old Testament) [35:03]

• On Reading Genesis as Science:

  • “You could read Genesis as a science textbook. I don’t recommend it.” — Bart Ehrman [32:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|---------------------| | Why do some see Jesus in Genesis/OT? | 03:31 – 05:29 | | Earliest Christian/Pauline “Jesus in OT” | 05:29 – 08:04 | | Apocryphal readings: Epistle of Barnabas | 08:10 – 11:17 | | Trinity in Genesis (Genesis 1 ‘us’) | 12:05 – 13:49, 15:19 – 16:38 | | Scholarly analysis of Elohim & plural language| 17:17 – 18:56 | | God in bodily form = Jesus (the Son) | 19:16 – 20:26 | | Adam & Eve, sin covering, sacrifice typology | 21:01 – 22:24 | | Genesis 3:15, the serpent & proto-evangelium | 23:45 – 26:08 | | Joseph as type of Christ, typology | 26:28 – 28:10 | | Scholarly/historical Christian readings | 28:28 – 31:35 | | Is Genesis “Christian scripture”? | 31:50 – 33:55 | | Theological debates: OT vs. NT interpretation | 33:55 – 35:21 |

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Takeaway Summary

• Christians have long found Jesus “in” Genesis and the Old Testament, often reading the text through christological or Trinitarian lenses.
• However, historical and scholarly readings understand Genesis as an ancient text, far pre-dating Jesus and not referring to him.
• Early Christian writings (e.g., Barnabas, Justin Martyr) and eventually doctrinal developments (Trinity) furthered Christological interpretation of Hebrew scriptures.
• Even today, especially due to intertextual habits, it can be difficult for Christians to read key Old Testament texts without reference to Jesus, but historically and linguistically, such readings are often problematic.
• There’s a robust scholarly and intra-Christian debate about how Genesis and the Old Testament should relate to Christian faith and doctrine.

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For Further Thought

Bart Ehrman wraps up with the reminder:

“Historically, [finding Jesus in Genesis] is not true. … If you’re reading it historically, the answer is no. There are ways, though, if you’re a Christian, you can read Genesis in ways that can inform your Christian faith, and that’s perfectly fine. But it’s not historically trying to put Jesus back there.” — Bart Ehrman [47:29]

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Next Week’s Topic

Do fundamentalist Christians actually follow Jesus or not? Bart promises a direct opinion.

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For questions, discounts on Bart’s courses, or to listen to past episodes, visit bartehrman.com.

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This summary preserves the lively conversational tone of Dr. Ehrman and Megan Lewis while capturing the intellectual richness of their discussion. Listeners and non-listeners alike should find it a thorough and engaging guide to the episode’s contents.

Transcript

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[Megan Lewis]

Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis.

Let's begin. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we're talking about where is Jesus in Genesis? If you listen to some evangelical preachers, you get the very definite impression that Jesus is just walking all over the pages of the Old Testament. But is he actually present at all? Is this belief that Jesus is in the Old Testament original to modern Christianity? And how do academics deal with evidence provided by believers before that? Bart, good morning. How are you doing today?

[Bart Ehrman]

Good morning. Yep, Doing pretty well. It's nice being on sabbatical leave for the semester.

[Megan Lewis]

It's a beautiful thing. Are you able to do any traveling while you're, while you're on leave or are you just solidly writing most of

[Bart Ehrman]

the time I'm writing, I'm going to

be doing some trips. Yeah. I've got a lot of travel lined up for the summer and so I'm hoping that I'll be done with the book by then. One of the trips I'm doing is, I think it's pretty interesting. I'm going to be doing this cruise that's sponsored by a group called Thalassa Journeys, which is a, it tends to have educational trips and so they have an expert giving lectures on things. And we're going to do, we're doing this cruise down the west coast of Europe, going to western cities of Europe and last summer I happened to go to Bruges and we're going to Bruges. So we're going to start in Amsterdam, then go to Bruges and we go

all the way down and end up

in Lisbon, but on this like ecologically really cool boat.

You know, when I do travel, I

really like traveling in lots of places. Obviously I go to lots of places, but Western Europe Is is one of the places I really like a lot

and if people, I should say if

people are interested in that thing. I don't think you knew I was going to talk about the cruise area

when, when you raised that question.

But now that you mentioned it, if they're interested, just look up, follow us journeys and give them a call and see if they can join up. So how about you?

Are you, you got travel plans?

[Megan Lewis]

I have a couple. Josh and I will be going down to Austin. We've been invited to do a presentational workshop on digital media for the Middle Eastern studies department at University of Texas at Austin. So I haven't actually been to Texas before.

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, well, when you go to Austin,

it's not exactly like Texas.

[Megan Lewis]

I have also heard that. And we'll only be there for I think a couple of days, but that's exciting. And then my parents silver wedding anniversary is coming up in June or July, I never remember which. So I'll be going home for a week or two to celebrate that with them. Yeah, it'll be fun.

[Bart Ehrman]

Austin is a great city. The restaurant scene is fantastic. Music obviously. Unbelievable. There are a lot of great places in Texas, but Austin is one of them.

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, I have a couple of friends who live around Austin, so I'm going to be asking them for recommendations of things we can do quickly while we're there.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, right. Good.

[Megan Lewis]

Okay. Jesus in Genesis, which is not honestly a topic I've thought an awful lot about before now. Why do some modern Christians want to read Jesus into the books of the Old Testament?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, well, they certainly do that. And you know, so much so that just as kind of a little anecdote,

when I was first became a born again Christian in high school, the Bible I couldn't really understand the King James Version and so I got a paraphrase Bible. They used to call it the living Bible, but they have other ones like that today, like they call it the way and stuff. I didn't realize the problem with places

where they actually use Jesus name. In the Old Testament Jesus said, so what? I didn't know. Yeah, so it's pretty common.

And it's because in the Christian tradition, as it developed from the earliest of Christian times, the idea was that the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures were anticipating Jesus and they were predicting Jesus and they were looking forward to Jesus. And even in the New Testament we're told that the prophets of old were anticipating Jesus. And so the idea is that Jesus is there already in the first book and far back in Christianity into the early Centuries of Christianity, people started finding Jesus throughout the Old Testament, including Genesis, which you wouldn't expect, but there it is. And they had some very interesting interpretations of things that would show that, yep, Jesus is there already.

[Megan Lewis]

Well, I said in the question in the opening, modern Christianity, but you've just said it happens back in Christianity's earliest days. And we see that in the Gospels, don't we?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh yeah, the Gospels are pretty clear

that the Old Testament was expecting Jesus and predicting Jesus and prophesying Jesus and that it's not quite the same as saying that. You know, they don't ever say that Jesus was in Genesis. They use a lot of biblical passages to show that these passages were at least thinking about Jesus.

And I think part of the deal

is that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus had been made a divine being when he got raised from the dead. The very earliest Christians thought Jesus was a human, that God had made divine to reward him for what he had done, for dying for the sake of others. And so they didn't think that he preexisted. Once you start getting to the idea that he pre existed, which you get some indication of in Paul and then certainly in the Gospel of John, then if he pre existed, you know, in what sense is he connected with, you know, the promises of God in the

Hebrew Bible and in what sense does

he connect with the Hebrew Bible?

And so that develops, eventually develops into

the doctrine of the Trinity. And some, some people start saying, yeah, well, it wasn't just God who's showing up in the Old Testament, but Jesus himself as well.

[Megan Lewis]

So outside of the Gospels, do other books of the New Testament identify Jesus in the Old Testament?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And in fact, some do it more

explicitly than the Gospels.

The Gospels talk a lot about Jesus

fulfilling prophecy that was made looking forward to him.

But already by Paul writing before the

Gospels, Paul thinks about Jesus as actually being in the Old Testament. I mean, there's this really interesting and peculiar passage that I think will.

Most people maybe haven't really paid attention

to or like can't make sense of. It's a complicated passage. In 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, Paul is saying that the children of Israel were baptized and were followers of Jesus, even

though they may not have known about it.

They're wandering around in the wilderness. And in this passage that he's referring to, It's Exodus, chapter 17. The children of Israel have gone through the Dead Sea and they're marching in the wilderness, going to Mount Zion where they're going to get the ten Commandments. And the rest of the law, and there's no water.

Part of the these episodes in Exodus

are about there's no food, there's no water.

You know, why did you bring us out here?

We were doing fine in Egypt and

they're complaining because there's no water. And Moses saying, look, what are you complaining to me for? You know, and then God says, okay, strike this rock and water will come

out and they'll be able to drink. So Moses goes up to the rock and he strikes it and water comes out and they drink. Paul talks about them drinking water from the rock. And then Paul says, this is First Corinthians 10, verse 4. Paul says, and the rock was Christ. Whoa. Christ is the one who saves people by providing them with what they need so that they don't perish. So Christ is the rock, the one who provides the water. So he's there already in Paul.

[Megan Lewis]

That's really interesting. Do we see this in other non New Testament writings? The Apocrypha?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, yeah.

It becomes a major theme for many of the writers.

There's this writing.

I mentioned it in our previous episode. A couple weeks ago there was a book called the Epistle of Barnabas.

It's a letter that is anonymous, but

in the early church they said that it was written by this person, Barnabas, who in the New Testament is one of Paul's companions. And this letter of Barnabas is very interesting. And some people thought it belonged in the New Testament. It's in some New Testaments from the ancient world.

It's a letter that tries to show

that Jews misunderstand their own religion and that their Bible, the Jewish Bible, is actually not a Jewish Bible, it's a Christian Bible and that it's thoroughly Christian in every way. And that's really about Christ. It's not about whatever they think the Mosaic Law is supposed to be.

He has example after example after example.

And some of them are really kind of interesting. One of my favorite ones is he's trying to show that Jesus is already present in the mind of God and Abraham, the father of the Jews, and that the rite of circumcision, that Jewish boys have to be circumcised on the eighth day. That's the agreement that God makes with Abraham that he'll be the God of the Jewish people, but the Jewish people, boys have to be circumcised. And Barnabas wants to know, what's that really mean? And Barnabas, this author, whoever he really was, doesn't think that the law of Moses really was Meant to be taken literally. God doesn't really mean you can't eat pork, you know, he doesn't mean you really can't do anything on the Sabbath. I mean, these are all symbolic things. And circumcision also is symbolic, he says. And he comes up with this great explanation. He says that Abraham, the father of the Jews, the father of circumcision, at one point in Genesis, went off to rescue his nephew Lot, who had been taken captive by some foreign kings. And Abraham rouses an army of his own slaves, and he has them circumcised

before they go in to rescue Lot.

And he circumcised 318 of them.

[Megan Lewis]

Okay.

[Bart Ehrman]

Barnabas says, why 318? Well, in ancient languages, the way you do numbers is you take letters of the Alphabet. And so each letter of the Alphabet has a numerical equivalent. So in Greek, alpha, the first letter is 1, beta is 2, gamma's 3. And when you get to 10, iota, then the next letter, kappa, is 20, then 20, 30, 40, up to, and so on you go. When you get to 90, the next one's 100, then 200, 300, etc. So 318, you do it with letters. And the letters would be a tau,

like a T, an iota, like an

I and an eta, which is like a long E. They have numerical values. Iota and the eta add up to 18, and the Tau is 300.

So the way you make a 300

is with a iota, eta and a tau. And he points out that iota, eta, those first two letters are the first two letters of the name Jesus. And the tau looks like a T. It's in the shape of a cross. Salvation comes by the cross of Jesus. And it's already in the book of Genesis. It's in the Old Testament.

[Megan Lewis]

I don't want to throw a massive spanner in the works here, but it is my understanding that Genesis was not originally written in Greek.

[Bart Ehrman]

I know it's a problem, but part of us, I don't know, these readers, like, aren't even paying attention to that. They're saying, oh, my God, the cross of Jesus. It's right there.

[Megan Lewis]

He solved the problem. Circumcision is not a thing.

[Bart Ehrman]

And. Yeah, and it's not. Yeah, you don't have to be cutting

into your baby boy's penises. You need to be following the cross of Jesus. That's what Abraham teaches us.

And so, yeah, it's linguistically, it's problematic,

but, you know, a lot of interpretations are linguistically problematic.

[Megan Lewis]

This is True. Once the Trinity becomes a doctrine or a theological concept, do we see early Christians also reading the Trinity back into the Old Testament?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you get it right off the bat.

I mean, go to Genesis, right?

So in Genesis, when God creates the

heavens and the earth in chapter one,

you know, and he creates it in

a sequence, you know, first let there be light, and, you know, then there's the first day, and then there's the second day, and you have things created in different days. And the sixth day, God creates humans. But in this case, instead of God just saying something, God says, let us make the human in our own image. He uses the word us. Well, why is it us? He's talking to somebody.

And in other passages of the Old

Testament, it talks about how God created the world by speaking His Word. The Word of God is what created the world. And so, like Psalm 33 or something says this. And then when you get to the New Testament, John Chapter 1 says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was

God, and all things came into being by him.

[Megan Lewis]

Okay?

[Bart Ehrman]

The Word of God.

But in John, John 1:14 says, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And then it identifies as Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ is the Word that God speaks in Genesis 1.

And that's why he says, let us

create humans in our own image. But it's not only Jesus, because right at the beginning of Genesis, even before he creates light, we're told that the earth was formless and void and the Spirit of Go was hovering over the water.

So you got the Spirit of God

hovering over the water.

Then you got God the Father talking

to God the Son. You've got the Trinity, and it's in Genesis chapter one. You know, this is one of the ways you read these things.

[Megan Lewis]

Fantastic. We're going to get into that a little bit more, but we're going to take a very brief AD break. Please stick with us because we're going to go back into this example of the Trinity in Genesis. And I've also scoured the Internet and found a couple of other examples of Jesus in Genesis that I would like to get Bart's take on. So please come back for that.

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So, before the break, I asked you about the Trinity in Genesis. Well, I asked about the Trinity in the Old Testament specifically, and you said right there from the very beginning, we have God, we have the Word, and we have the Spirit. Seems a little convoluted to the uninitiated. What are your thoughts?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I mean, I think theology of

any kind of theology is convoluted to the outsider, not just Christian theology, but just in any religion. The intricacies of the theology make sense mainly to those who are buying into it. And so if you buy into the premises, then it makes perfect sense.

And in fact, it not only makes

perfect sense, it's like anything else would be nonsense. If you come up with an alternative explanation for why God says, let us make the human in our own image, people say, well, that isn't what it says. It's us. It's got to be plural. It's got to be God talking to somebody. The only one else he could be talking to is another divine being, and so it's Jesus. So it just makes sense to them.

And if you say something like, well, yeah, but you know, in the Old

Testament, the first person plural gets used for like a singular. Just like when the queen says, or the king now says, we are not amused. It means me.

And so you can say those things,

but it doesn't make sense because, of course, it's the Trinity. It does sound convoluted. I know.

[Megan Lewis]

That actually is leading very nicely into the next example that I found everywhere, which is this use of the first person plural. And it happens a lot. God says, let us make man our image. And in Hebrew, the words often used to refer to Yahweh as Elohim, which is a plural noun which, like you've said, people take and say, well, this means that clearly God is part of a plurality and that this is the Trinity. In the Old Testament. So therefore Jesus is here. How do biblical scholars usually understand all of this plural language?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, well, Elohim is an interesting case. It's a plural noun. When you add I am in English im to the end of a Hebrew word, it makes it plural, a masculine plural. And so Elohim is plural of the word El, which is also a name for the divinity. El was actually a divinity in the Canaanite pantheon. And so they're taking the word for God from the. From a name of a God. In the Canaanite and the Canaanite religion, the word Elohim is actually not a name. It's a description. Just like word, God is not a name. You know, if God had a name in the Old Testament, it's Yahweh, that's his name. But you call him God. That's Elohim.

So why is it plural? It's usually thought that it's some kind

of plural of majesty, meaning that, well, like, you know, we are not amused. It's kind of a royal we, and Elohim is used in the plural.

It's important to point out, though, that

the conception was very much singular. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, when they use the word Elohim and then they use a verb with it, they use the singular form of the verb. They don't use the plural form of the verb. So the subject is singular, even though the word itself is plural.

And you also get things like Elohim

saying, I alone am God, and there is no other I.

And so it's not we alone are

gods, it's I alone am God. So they're using the word plural, probably to elevate the status of majesty for Elohim. But the conception is there's only one of them.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Also in Genesis, another argument that I found was that when Adam and Eve hid in shame from God when they heard him walking in the garden, they were actually hiding from Jesus. I didn't understand this particular example, and I was wondering if you had come across it before, and if you had, could you explain it to me?

[Bart Ehrman]

I not only came across it, I

used to believe it.

[Megan Lewis]

Perfect for me to ask that question, too.

[Bart Ehrman]

When I was a fundamentalist man, we

saw this stuff all over the place.

So there's a logic to it.

And again, if you're inside the system, the logic makes perfect sense. In the doctrine of the Trinity, you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the Almighty, who is thought of as being the transcendent One. The Spirit is The one who's here with us now, guiding our lives and our actions and being involved with us on a kind of a daily basis. The Son is the one who becomes incarnate to bring about salvation. So if you talk about which member of the Trinity is portrayed as a human being, who is incarnate, who takes on human characteristics, it's the Son, not the Father. And so if you have God in the Old Testament appearing incarnate as a human being or in human likeness, then it has to be the Son, because the Son is the incarnate one of the Trinity.

And so you play that out throughout

the Old Testament, wherever God shows up, like when Moses is at the burning bush, the Lord speaks to him from the burning bush. That's actually Jesus.

And you get that interpretation goes all

the way back to already in the writings of Justin, this mid second century, around 150, church father living in Rome, a philosopher, he talked about the incarnate Christ in the Old Testament. And so that's an old one.

[Megan Lewis]

Is there anything else about the garden scene that kind of points some people towards viewing this as Jesus rather than Yahweh?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, well, there's another aspect of this

that I think is even more interesting in some ways that again, gets used in early Christianity a bit.

So, you know, when Adam and Eve

eat the fruit, which is not called an apple, they eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

And God finds out that they did it.

He doesn't know at first.

He's walking through the garden in the

cool of the evening.

We're told, Adam, where are you?

And Adam's hiding, because they know they've messed up because they've been enlightened about good and evil and they know they're naked. And so Adam said, well, you know, we're sorry.

And then that's how God finds out. So it's very anthropomorphic understanding of God in this passage. But Adam, they're embarrassed by their nakedness.

And so Adam makes kind of coverings for their genitals out of fig leaves.

And then God, when God realizes what's

happened, he curses them. But then he makes them better coverings. He makes coverings out of animal skins to cover themselves up. And early Christian exegetes found this really interesting because the way their sin was covered was apparently by the sacrifice of an animal. How else do you get animal skins? And the sacrifice of animals in the Old Testament is prefiguring the perfect sacrifice of Jesus. So it's Jesus himself whose death covers the sin of Adam and Eve.

[Megan Lewis]

That's interesting. I have another question. If Jesus is always present when God is doing bodily human things, when he's walking and talking, and why does Yahweh say, let us make man in our image if he doesn't personally have a body, would it not be, let us make him in your image?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, that's a good.

Yeah, that'd be a good counter argument.

That's right.

Let's make him in your image? I think the idea is that Jesus

has become fully incarnate yet.

And so that's, that's why he's not. He's not a human yet.

He's not a human until he becomes incarnate. He's the one who, who's capable of incarnation. So he is the one who has, like, the capacity of incarnation. And so they're made in that. The image of that capacity, I guess, is how they'd answer it.

[Megan Lewis]

Okay, thank you. That was just bothering me slightly.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, yeah, me too. I know.

[Megan Lewis]

So one of the other examples I found was Genesis 3:15, which reads, and I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head and you will strike his heel. I found multiple places, multiple websites saying that this is evidence of Jesus. And again, I didn't understand it. And would you please explain it to me like I'm five?

[Bart Ehrman]

I will indeed.

So the serpent in Genesis 3 is an actual serpent. It's not an evil force. It's not the devil or Satan. It's a serpent who is the craftiest of all creatures, depending how you translate it. And so the serpent can talk, and it convinces Eve to eat the fruit, and then she convinces Adam. And so ultimately, the serpent is the problem. And God punishes Adam for listening to his wife. Now he's got to work for to earn his bread. He can't just pick fruit trees. And Eve is punished for what she's done. Now she's going to experience labor pains when she gives birth. Apparently the original plan was for her not to have labor pains somehow, but then the serpent is punished, and God makes it crawl on its belly and eat dirt. And so this is explaining why snakes don't have legs. And it presupposes the snakes originally did have legs.

And so in the book, that's it, that's the serpent.

What ends up happening in the Christian tradition is that the serpent in the garden comes to be interpreted as the devil who is tempting Adam and Eve.

And you get this in the final

book of the New Testament, final Book of the Bible. So you get the serpent in the

beginning in Genesis, and you get this

identification in the final book, Revelation, where the devil is identified as the serpent of old. The devil, Satan and the serpent of old are the same figure. That means the devil is the one who's in the garden. So the snake is actually kind of an incarnation of the devil. So he will bite your heel and you will crush his head. This is referring to what happened to Jesus. Crucifixion. The devil will bring about pain for Jesus and suffering, but Christ will destroy the devil. He will kill the devil with his crucifixion. And so this is foreshadowing the crucifixion of Jesus, who will conquer the devil.

Which, by the way, is portrayed in

a graphic way in a movie that

a lot of my students like that I do not.

Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which begins with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. And there's a snake there, and nothing is said about it but the snakes cry. And Jesus just. All you see is his foot coming down and stamping it, killing it, stomping on it.

And first time I saw this movie

in a theater, people started applauding and cheering because it's Jesus defeating Satan the way that he's said to do in Genesis for them.

[Megan Lewis]

Interesting. Thank you. Are there other apparent references to Jesus in the book of Genesis that people have pointed out to you?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, there are a lot of them.

I mean, you can find Jesus in a lot of places. And the flood story with Noah was often taken to be a foreshadowing of salvation to be brought by Jesus where the world's going to be destroyed and only a few people will be saved. The ark, actually the ark of Noah has come to see as the church that Jesus brought people into to save them from the coming destruction. One of the key very long passages is the narrative about Joseph, which takes up huge chunk of the. It takes up the end of Genesis, chapter after chapter about Joseph. Joseph is one of the twelve sons of Israel, and his brothers get jealous of him and they sell him for silver into slavery. And he goes down into Egypt and he then is exalted and he brings salvation. His brothers don't know this has happened. They think he's just dead or something. But he goes down to Egypt and he becomes the right hand man of Pharaoh. And when they get in trouble from a famine, they go down to Egypt and he saves them. And early in Christianity, Joseph was thought to be a type of Christ. In other words, that he's a foreshadowing of Christ as one who is betrayed by his own people, by his own brothers for silver, and is then exalted by God to be his right hand man and then brings salvation to those who rejected him. And so Joseph was thought to be a kind of a typological interpretation of Jesus. And so there he is again in Genesis. And so you get him all the way from the creation to the Garden of Eden to Noah and in other places too, but then ending up in Joseph.

[Megan Lewis]

So it seems like this has clearly been going on since the start of Christianity as a religion. Do you think it's possible for Christians to interpret the Old Testament, and Genesis in particular it, without viewing it through this lens of this is all Jesus?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, well, absolutely.

I mean, there are a lot of

Christians who are historical scholars or who are, a lot of historical scholars are Christians and, and a lot of Christians read the Bible historically and they realize that Genesis was centuries before Jesus. And so they don't think Jesus is in there. They might think that Jesus, you know, maybe there's some kind of relevance, but it's not that Jesus is actually in there.

And one of the big issues, I

think for Bible readers, maybe the most complicated one, is this one about historically reading the Bible, because people who read the Bible tend to be believers and they're taught that it's all one book. And if it's all one book, it's all unified. And if it's all written by God, there's no incoherence and one part of it can interpret another part of it. And so that's an old view of Christianity, that one part of Scripture needs to interpret another part. And then we get that, but we get it especially pronounced during the Reformation. And so Protestants in particular have stressed this, that it's all interrelated. But that means that if you're going to read the Gospels on one hand, of course, I mean, you've got to

know what the Old Testament is saying

to make sense of what the New Testament says about the Old Testament scholars, whether they're involved with religious studies or biblical studies or just literary studies generally talk about a phenomenon called intervention textuality. Intertextuality is the idea that meaning moves between texts, intertexts.

And one way it works is kind of obvious. I mean, if the Gospel of Matthew

quotes a passage from, say, Exodus, then you can understand Matthew better if you

know what Exodus is talking about.

So then you know what he's referring to. But intertextuality doesn't just affect when Somebody quotes or alludes to an other passage. If you believe in full intertextuality, then that other passage can be interpreted in light of the one that interprets it because it's all intertextual. They both interpret each other.

So you get this, for example, I

mean, just to pick an example, not in the, in Genesis, but when the book of Matthew says, out of Egypt have I called my son. That's a quotation from Hosea, who's referring to the Exodus.

And so to understand what Matthew's saying, you have to know what Hosea is talking about.

But then when a Christian who knows about all that reads Hosea, he thinks that it's about Jesus or she thinks it's about Jesus, because the intertextuality. And sometimes it's really hard for Christians not to do that, even if they want to.

If somebody doesn't believe me on this,

read Isaiah 53 and try not to think about Jesus.

Good luck. Isaiah 53 is not talking about Jesus, but Christians cannot read it.

Most people can't read it without thinking it's talking about Jesus because they're used to seeing how the suffering servant is applied in the case of Jesus in the New Testament.

So they think that Isaiah must be

talking about the suffering Messiah, Jesus in Isaiah, which he isn't.

[Megan Lewis]

So if Genesis and obviously the rest of the Old Testament just don't talk about Jesus, because they don't. They were written a long time before Jesus existed as a person, in what sense should they be seen as Christian books or Christian scriptures?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, you know, it's one thing to

read it as a historical document, which, you know, historians do, scholars do, and many Christians do, where you read Genesis just to try to understand Genesis in its own context text. You know, we historical scholars insist that's

a very good way to read the book of Genesis.

It's how we should read most books. But there are other ways to read it, right? You can read Genesis for all sorts of reasons just to stick with Genesis. For example, you could read Genesis as a science textbook.

I don't recommend it, but people do.

The six day creation, six 24 hour days, that's how God created the world. The world is X number of years old.

Old.

It's, you know, created by God in six days. You could read it that way. You could read it as a kind of a metaphor for how we ought to live our lives. It's giving us instruction, you know, be obedient to God and be good to one another.

And you know, you can come up

with like lessons so you're reading it for that kind of. For moral instruction, whether or not it's historically correct.

You could read it as a literary

work trying to understand what its themes are, what its motifs are, how its character development works. You can read it as a piece of literature. So you can read it in all these different ways. If you're a Christian, you can read it as a Christian book. You can read it as a Christian book without saying, yes, the author meant to be talking about Jesus here. You can read it as a Christian book, for example, by saying, look, I'm a Christian, and in my view this is Scripture, and it's authoritative for me in some way. You could say, I don't think it's literally true, but it's in some way trying to convey an understanding of God that I think I can subscribe to. And so you can read it that way. And there's no reason not to read it that way. If you're a Christian, you can read it in a Jewish way. You can read it in a humanist way. So you can certainly do that. If you're a Christian, you understand that the Bible is a canon of authoritative writings, then you probably do want to read it that way. That doesn't preclude the option of reading it historically, though, to understanding it in its own context, as well as understanding it how it might relate to your Christian faith.

[Megan Lewis]

Have there been any debates about this?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, boy.

Have there been. Still are.

So, yeah. Okay. So when I was doing my PhD

exams at Princeton Theological Seminary, I had exams like you have to take PhD exams before you write your dissertation. You take courses for a couple years, seminars, and you take your exams and you take your. Do your dissertation. And the exams are in a range of things.

So I had, like, an exam on

the history of early Christianity, and I had an exam on, you know, interpreting the New Testament, the theology of the New Testament.

But I had an exam on the

Old Testament Hebrew Bible, and I had some question or other about the relationship with the Old Testament and the New Testament. And I insisted in my answer that you can understand the Old Testament perfectly

well without a New Testament.

You don't need the New Testament to interpret the Old. And a couple of the faculty members who were kind of more theologically oriented than I was at that stage, got really upset.

Look, it's in the canon, and it's all part of the. And these.

And then the other faculty members started, like, getting upset with them. And so this was a great defense for my. Like, this is My oral defense, when they're, they're questioning me, it was great

because I got the two sides arguing

with each other and I just sat back smiling.

I didn't have to say anything because they were going at it.

[Megan Lewis]

You just nod and look wise.

[Bart Ehrman]

It's like, is this going to end soon? Because like my exam be over and they'll be arguing.

That's great.

So yeah, people do argue about this,

especially theologians, of course, I mean, you know, non theologians don't argue about it.

You know, you don't read Jesus in Genesis.

Of course, not many theologians of course agree with that, but they still say that. Of course you can understand it for, for understanding me, Christian meaning in your Christian life without assuming that the author is trying to, you know, write about Jesus here.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much. We're going to take a very quick break and we will be right back.

[Podcast Announcer]

This is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.

[Megan Lewis]

And we are back now, but we have just had Jodi Magness recording of her course Archaeology in the Time of Jesus. That was the live recording was this weekend. For those who missed it, you can still watch the recordings. They'll be available in perpetuity. How did the event go? How was it?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I told everybody it was going to be great and I challenged anybody

to say it wasn't.

Jody's a piece of dynamite.

She is like, she is very vibrant.

You know, people saw that when we

did this Bible conference, you know, last year. We're going to do another one this year, but we did one last year with Jodi was one of the speakers and man, is she enthusiastic. And people just loved it then. And this thing was four of her lectures on things directly related to the stuff I do, but I'm not an archaeologist and she is. And she covered such, such a range of interesting things from, you know, what life would have been like for Jesus growing up and what was like to live up there in Galilee and to, you know, what did he find when he came to Jerusalem and what about those Dead Sea Scrolls and then, you

know, like his death and burial.

A lot of controversies about that.

And she and I actually have disagreements

about the death and burial of Jesus, not the archaeology of it. She knows his archaeology really well. And for all of these things, the thing is that what people need to realize is that the life of Jesus happened in a time and place. If you don't know that time and place, you're not going to understand it.

You're not going to understand his life.

I mean, you can't talk about George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln if you don't know their time and place.

And archaeology is one of the best

ways to figure out their time and place. And so she went through all that and it's great. And people, people can still buy this course, you know, get all the stuff. And if you're interested in the historical Jesus or ancient Israel or this is a good course to do it from.

[Megan Lewis]

And she, you're right, she is an incredibly engaging speaker. And I have to say that watching someone who is so enthusiastically passionate about what they do is always a huge pleasure. And it makes the material so much more engaging as well. It's wonderful.

[Bart Ehrman]

It's amazing what you can make boring

if you want to, if you try really hard.

Well, I tell you, a lot of university professors have mastered that art, but

there are a lot who are really, really good. Yeah.

So archeology, you can make that pretty boring. Just a bunch of little rocks, right? No, no, no, I'm telling you, this is really interesting.

[Megan Lewis]

Well, if that sounds interesting to you, then like Bart said, that's four lectures. You can buy access to the recordings through the website, which is bart ehrman.com timeofjesus the cost is $39.95 and as always, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on that price. And we're going to go over to some listeners questions now.

[Podcast Announcer]

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.

[Megan Lewis]

Erm.

All right. Matthew's infancy narrative with its magi and star seems to have been invented out of whole cloth. Today. Many believers think it is literally true. Do you think Matthew's original audience also thought it was true or would it have been understood as symbolism?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, we don't really know.

We don't have any kind of reader's

reports or any indication. When we do start finding people talking about it, church fathers who refer to it, they appear to think it really happened. I would say that most people today still think it really happened. And so it isn't just that, like, we moderns know that kind of thing could not have happened. Most moderns, 2 billion Christians in the world, most of them who know Matthew would say, yeah, yeah, that happened. So there are really good reasons for thinking it did not happen that I've talked about, in other words, settings, including in my recent course on Matthew. But I think. I suppose they probably thought it happened, but we don't really know for sure.

[Megan Lewis]

You've mentioned that the literal or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible emerged out of the 19th century and scientific developments that threatened people's faith. What was the interpretation before this if it wasn't a literal one?

[Bart Ehrman]

That's a good question. And I didn't mean that the literal interpretation was invented in the 19th century. Literal interpretations go all the way back. Our first Christian authors who talk about how to interpret texts have a variety of ways. They interpret the Bible, the New Testament. So, for example, the church, Father Origen in the third century has various ways.

One of the ways that he calls

it is katharema, which is there are two words in Greek which means according to the word. By that, he means what we pretty much mean literally, word for word. He realized that sometimes if you interpret a text literally, it contradicts another text or it makes no sense. So he's very good at finding these contradictions and things. And he said, when that happens, it means you can't interpret it literally. You have to interpret it figuratively or spiritually. It's not meant literally.

So that goes way back. And then he developed that.

And then over the centuries, this became the big deal. And by a few centuries later, there were four ways of interpreting a text. And the literal was considered to be the weakest of the four. You know, yeah, he got interpreted literally.

That's not really where the action is. The real action is what's going on

underneath the literal reading. And that continued all the way up to the Reformation. So there always was a literal reading. When the Reformation hit, Martin Luther insisted that it's only the literal reading that matters. And so he developed a stress on the literal meaning. But even then, through the Reformation and onward, most interpreters recognized that there were other senses in which you could interpret the text. And even interpreting it literally didn't mean insisting necessarily that every single word has to be directly from God. That idea is a later development. And it had to develop because you had people saying that when God creates the world in six days, they believe that that is literally true.

But they'd say, but a day, you

know, it could be like a geological period. And so God created the world over six geological periods. And that would open up the possibilities then for evolution. And people said, no, no, no, no. It says day. It means day.

Day. It's 24 hours.

It's a day. And so it's that kind of literalism where it has to be strictly exactly what the word says is something when it started appearing, mainly when people were doubling down on Scripture.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Some experts theorize that the quality, or lack thereof, of the Greek in the New Testament had an impact on the social status of early pagan converts. The idea is that as educated Romans were taught to regard poor language as an indicator of poor intelligence, Christianity ended up being a religion for the uneducated, like women and slaves, which I know we've spoken about before. Given the importance of oral transmission and the timeline for the development of Christian literature, how significant is this issue likely to have been?

[Bart Ehrman]

That's a complicated question.

I would say that it may be

not putting things quite in the right chronological order.

I don't think that Christianity was condemned for being like lower class, uneducated people who don't know any children, you know, women who've never been to school. That charge didn't come about after pagans started realizing that the New Testament was in a less adequate form of Greek. What happened is Christianity first was attractive to lower classes. Jesus himself was a manual laborer and probably had a farm plot of some kind of peasant in a rural area. His followers were peasants. Their followers were peasants and Christianity. Early on, Paul himself says that not many people are rich or educated. And so that's before the New Testament was written. After the New Testament got written, people started pointing out, yeah, it's not great literature, but they don't start pointing that out until the end of the second century or so, when pagans start recognizing that Christians have these books that they say are from God. And pagans start saying, you say these books are from God.

God doesn't write very well.

And so that did become an issue, but it's not why I think that the social level of Christians was considered to be rather low by comparison. I think the two go together because you didn't have high level educated elite, by and large, producing Christian literature until later on, at the end of the second century, into the third, fourth century, you start getting it.

So I don't think it's what led

to the lower classes. I think it's what is kind of a result of the lower classes being the ones that converted.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. And we have one final question that is somewhat related to our topic for next week. If Jesus came back today, would he look at what is being done in his name and say, you guys nailed it.

[Bart Ehrman]

Be more likely to say, you people are nailing me. This is like, man, you're crucifying me all over again.

This is not what I was teaching.

So I think we'll be talking about

that with respect to very conservative Protestant Christianity fundamentalism in our next episode. But the kinds of things Jesus was teaching, I think changed once they started changing. As soon as his followers believed he got raised from the dead. This is part of what my next book is going to be about, is how Jesus ethical teachings got transformed by his followers once they came to think he was raised from the dead. It changed everything for that, because his own teaching that a kingdom of God was soon to come and people needed to repent and prepare for this kingdom that was soon to arrive. They needed to be forgiven of their sins so they could enter into the kingdom. That got radically changed when they started thinking that Jesus death is what brings us into the kingdom, not repentance. That started the change of Jesus teachings.

And, you know, in these days, I

don't know of any Christians who actually doing what Jesus was telling them to do. There may be some out there, but I've never met any, which comes as a shock. And, you know, people think it's arrogant of me, but I'm not. I mean, I generally think that Jesus is teaching things that people don't do. And so I don't think he would think that people are following what he was teaching. I think he would think they're following some other religion that's based on what they're saying about my death and resurrection, but they're not following what I was teaching.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much, audience, as ever. Thank you all so much for your questions. But before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. So we're talking about this interesting topic, you know, some people think a lot about and some people never thought about. Is Jesus in Genesis something you. You're saying, Megan, that hadn't occurred to you? And it's something that I used to

think about when I was a conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, because for us, the Bible is a coherent unit. God wrote the entire thing, and Jesus is the point. And so you can find Jesus in Genesis, from the creation story through the Garden of Eden, through the flood, through Joseph being sold into slavery, it's really all about Jesus. And so many Christian interpreters still will say, if you just look up on the Internet, look up, is Jesus in Genesis? I'm sure you'll find I haven't done

it, but I'm sure you'll find lots. I have lots of people talking. Okay, there you go.

And so.

And I was just talking about how,

you know, historically that's not true. The book of Genesis, like the rest of the Pentateuch, was put together from a number of sources who were not thinking about Jesus. So if you're reading it historically, the answer is no. There are ways, though, if you're a Christian, you can read Genesis in ways that can inform your Christian faith, and that's perfectly fine. But it's not historically trying to put Jesus back there.

[Megan Lewis]

Audience, thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Barth's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, yeah, it relates to this last question. The issue we'll be dealing with is do do fundamentalist Christians actually follow Jesus or not? You'll get my my opinion on it. I have one.

[Megan Lewis]

That's a good question. Join us then. Thank you all and goodbye.

This has been an episode of Misquoting the Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.