← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
Bart Ehrman
Hey, he's here again.
- [00:02]
Bart Ehrman's Wife
Oh, who hun?
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Bart Ehrman
Sammy, the puppy I had when I was a kid.
- [00:06]
Bart Ehrman's Wife
This is the second time he's seen Sammy. Could this be related to his Parkinson's? I don't see him hon, but I know you do. About 50% of people with Parkinson's may experience hallucinations and or delusions over the course of the disease. Seeing things that aren't real and believing things that aren't true. Symptoms generally worsen but are treatable. Learn more@mortaparkinson's.com and take the screener to see if it's time to start a conversation with your doctor.
- [00:34]
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.
- [00:55]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'd like to welcome you to a special edition of the Misquoting Jesus Bible podcast. Today we're going to be talking about an area that I am really interested in and have been for a long time. Some of the non canonical gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament. And as you can tell, Megan is not introducing this. I am. And I'm introducing it because I'll be interviewing somebody other than myself to talk about these. Somebody who's a real expert in two of the gospels that I think are the most interesting outside the New Testament. These are two gospels that are collectively sometimes called the Infancy Gospels, which means that they're about Jesus birth and young life. Both of these books were influential in Christianity historically. One of them is about the life of Jesus as a boy. Jesus starts out as a five year old and we have stories going up to when he's 12. This one is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And it is very interesting because as you're going to see, this portrays Jesus and most readers who see it today think, wow, that's a mischievous kid and he has power as the Son of God. What would the Son of God be like as a 5 year old? And so that's what this account is about. The other account is called the Proto Gospel of James. And it's not about Jesus as a young boy so much, it's really about his mother Mary and how she came into the world in a spectacular miraculous way with the story continuing on through her, her giving of birth to Jesus and legendary accounts of all of that. And so these are two really interesting books and I've got a special guest to talk about them because Christopher Freilingus has written about these books in a very interesting book of his own that is called Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Family Trouble in the Infancy Gospels. So I've known Chris for a long time. Chris was actually my graduate student here at Chapel Hill. He did his PhD here at UNC Chapel Hill. He now teaches at Michigan State University, where he's been teaching for a very long time. He teaches their biblical literature and early Christianity. He actually came to Chapel Hill into our PhD program after doing a master's degree at St. Andrews University in Scotland. And he had done his undergraduate degree here in North Carolina at Greensboro College. And so he has a wide educational background and a lengthy teaching career. His first book is a really interesting one that we won't be talking about today, but it's about the Book of Revelation, and it's a book I depended on a good bit when writing my recent book on Armageddon. His book is called Spectacles of Empire, Monsters, Martyrs and the Book of Revelation. It was published by University of Pennsylvania Press, as is his more recent book, which came out a few years ago. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Chris, welcome. I'm glad you're with us here on the program.
- [04:05]
Christopher Freilingus
I'm really excited to be here, Bart. Thank you for inviting me. I guess I thought we were going to do some ACC basketball preview, but maybe we should talk about the Infancy Gospels instead.
- [04:18]
Bart Ehrman
Well, yeah, it might take a miracle for us to talk the rebirth of UNC basketball. You know, we didn't even make the tournament last year. You know, the big news around here now is, is football. I mean, usually it's the opposite, right? Michigan State's the football. Although you got both. You get both there, right? You get a double whammy. I don't know.
- [04:37]
Christopher Freilingus
I had some success. Yeah.
- [04:38]
Bart Ehrman
How's your football team doing this year? I don't even know.
- [04:40]
Christopher Freilingus
Not so great this year, but we're looking forward to basketball season. Okay.
- [04:43]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's. That's the way to think about it. Usually that football season goes downhill and we're 6.0this year. It's unbelievable. And we're hopeful, but this is basketball country around. Chris, how long have you been in Michigan State?
- [04:56]
Christopher Freilingus
So I started in 2001. More than 20 years now. It's been incredible journey. I know that means something different to you than it means to me.
- [05:05]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it means a lot to me because, I mean.
- [05:07]
Christopher Freilingus
Wow.
- [05:09]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Huh. 22 years ago, huh? Okay.
- [05:12]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah. I don't remember. How long were you At UNC when I, when I joined you. Well, you've been there a few years, maybe.
- [05:18]
Bart Ehrman
What, what year did you come?
- [05:20]
Christopher Freilingus
93.
- [05:21]
Bart Ehrman
Good God. Yeah. No, I've been here five years already. I. Some of your colleagues in the program, when you came into the program, have now retired. Yes, I've got several students who retire. They. Oh, my God. How has this happened? So, so your wife Amy was also in the program at the time, and you. You met here, and now you're both at Michigan State. And she, she does American religion.
- [05:46]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right. American religious history. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we try not to talk about work, but we are always talking about work.
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Bart Ehrman
Exactly. Yeah.
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Christopher Freilingus
Yeah.
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Bart Ehrman
When I got married the second time for this era, I thought, you know, I don't know this about marrying an academic. It's like, you know, don't you do that during the day and in the evening you want to do something, but, oh, it's actually great being married to an academic if you're an actor, if the person is somebody you like, which works in my case.
- [06:12]
Christopher Freilingus
Yes, me too.
- [06:13]
Bart Ehrman
Me too. Well, okay, so, Chris, we're here to talk about these two books that I mentioned. We're going to focus in this episode on one of the books, and we're going to do a second episode on the other one, and we're going to start for this one with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And then in the next episode, we'll do the Proto Gospel. But we originally thought we would do like two of these at once. But there's just so much to talk about here that we thought, okay, let's. Let's do this over two episodes. I just want to start kind of on the basic level for people. Most people won't have read these things or maybe even heard of them. They're called infancy Gospels. Can you just tell us something about that term, infancy Gospels?
- [06:52]
Christopher Freilingus
That's a really great question. It's a good place to start, because when you start reading through these Gospels, it's not infancy in the way we think of. I mean, we break up childhood into these different stages. But what we're talking about with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is, as you said, stories about Jesus between the ages of 5 and 12. In other infancy gospels, like the one featuring Mary, we reach back to the time before her birth and then see her as a toddler. So, Right. As a category, it's a modern category. It's one that scholars have come up with to kind of describe the contents of these gospels. But they probably weren't known by these names in the ancient world. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas probably was better known by a term that means from a Greek term that means childhood deeds of Jesus. And that attribution to Thomas came much later. And then I think the best guess right now with the Infancy Gospel about Mary, which is sometimes known as the Infancy Gospel of James, is that it was called the Birth of Mary. So that the titles can be a little bit misleading, but just because of the way we kind of use these terms. But yeah, they're about childhood stories mostly.
- [08:06]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So what can you say briefly, Thomas? I mean, there's a Thomas in the New Testament who's the doubting Thomas? Is that who the alleged author of this or some other Thomas.
- [08:16]
Christopher Freilingus
So. Right. That's a little mysterious because the name Thomas gets attached to a bunch of different non canonical or apocryphal writings from the ancient world. And sometimes there seems to be a connection with the New Testament character. I'm not sure in this case. So the first chapter of many of the manuscripts that we have of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas attribute it to a person named Thomas the Israelite. Whereas the more, I guess the more famous Nag Hammadi Gospel, Gospel of Thomas is attributed to somebody named Judas Didymus Thomas. I don't think we're talking about the same character there, really.
- [08:56]
Bart Ehrman
All right, so the Gospel of Thomas people probably a little more familiar. I think we've done a podcast on that. So Judas Didymus Thomas, that's supposedly Jesus brother, right?
- [09:06]
Christopher Freilingus
The twin, right? Yeah. So both Didymus and Thomas both refer in different languages to the twin. I don't know if that's what's going on with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. If this attribution was added later to connect some kind of sibling insight. What I would say is that by comparison with the Infancy Gospel of James, where a brother makes an appearance in that story and pulls the donkey that pregnant Mary is on, in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Thomas doesn't. Doesn't appear. James does, you know, which is kind of interesting. So there is a brother in the story, but it's not Thomas.
- [09:44]
Bart Ehrman
But you're saying that originally it didn't have this title of Thomas. Somebody added that at a later stage.
- [09:50]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right. I think that's the best, the conclusion that most scholars have reached about it. There are mentions across early Christian writings by people who are basically antagonistic to a writing attributed to Thomas. So there are these mentions, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a Reference to what we now know as the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas or to this collection of childhood stories. Yeah, right. But mostly the people who are mentioning these writings when they mention the word Thomas, this is a way of indicating that they don't like it. So. Yeah, right, that's right.
- [10:24]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. That gets trashed. And I guess if weren't my Jesus twin brother, he'd be a good one to know about his childhood. But. Okay, yeah, but you're right, he doesn't say it. Let's talk about the childhood of Jesus. And many people have noticed that in like the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John, there's no, there's nothing about his birth or his young life or anything like that. It's really just Matthew and Luke and the only two books in the entire New Testament that say anything. But could you just tell us something about like, do they tell us anything about Jesus as a boy? In both accounts he gets born to a virgin named Mary in Bethlehem and he's raised in Nazareth. So are there stories about him as a young person?
- [11:04]
Christopher Freilingus
Right, yeah. So there is one story about Jesus as a 12 year old in the Gospel of Luke and it comes kind of at the end of Luke's version of the story of Jesus's birth. You know, I think you probably do this with your students as well. One of the questions that I tend to ask my students when we start talking about the New Testament gospels are are you surprised by how much information is missing? Like what do you expect there to be more here about Jesus? But right, if you read Mark and John, there's no mention at all of Jesus's birth. And then when you look at Matthew and Luke, they kind of home in on the birth of Jesus. But then there's a big gap and all of a sudden Jesus appears as an adult. It seems conspicuous. Luke is the only one of the two that mentions anything about the childhood of Jesus.
- [11:56]
Bart Ehrman
This is the 12 year old thing where he gets left in Jerusalem, the caravan goes home and his parents don't notice he's not there and they go back and they find him in the temple.
- [12:04]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, that's right. It's not the story you send in to nominate parent of the year award for either Mary or Joseph. We learn in the story that they've gone up to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, they've got Jesus with them, they spend some time there, they come back home. And on their way home, three days into the journey, they look around and Jesus isn't with them. Now for context, the story says that they assumed he was with the group somewhere, but yet, you know, students ask, well, how could they, how could they lose track of Jesus? I mean, Jesus is pretty important, so. Right. And then once they realize that he's gone, they, they go back to Jerusalem. They find him there, Jesus, this 12 year old in the temple. And they're astonished because he's sitting there and people are showing him a great deal of respect. He's teaching there in the temple. Mary confronts Jesus and says, you know, why, why have you done this to us? You've made us sick with worry. And Jesus's response, I mean, I think can be read in different ways, but he basically says, you know, you should have known, you should have known what's going on. Didn't you know who I am? That I should be here doing the things of my father or the business of my father is the way it gets translated sometimes. And there he's not talking about Joseph, who's standing right there. I know, yeah, he's, he's talking about his heavenly father. So it's a painful moment, I think, in my reading of it at any rate. And I, I think there's something here in this kind of family drama that helps to explain something of the later childhood stories that are told.
- [13:43]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so I want to get to, obviously we want to get to this infancy Gospel of Thomas. I frequently have people ask me though about these. You've got the birth story in Matthew and Luke, then you got him as a 12 year old, so you've got nothing between those two. Then you've got him as a 12 year old and he doesn't show up again till he's 30 or whatever in Luke and, and so the so called missing years. And I often have people ask me, you know, did he go off to India to stay with the Brahmins, you know, or did he go to, did he go down to Egypt? Is that where he learned his wisdom? And so I usually just tell them that, look, yeah, you get stories like that and most of them are in 19th century gospels that were forged. So am I right about that? Because that's what I always tell them.
- [14:22]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it sounds like a kind of contemporary tradition of storytelling and a way to fill in the gaps. I don't have any doubt that people throughout the history of Christianity have wondered, you know, what's going on. But as far as I'm aware, we don't have any source material that fills in those blocks of time.
- [14:41]
Bart Ehrman
I get emails, I Got an email yesterday from somebody telling me that, you know, that this monastery in where in India had preserved these things and it's just complete forge material. Okay. So we can, we can bypass all that.
- [14:53]
Christopher Freilingus
Okay.
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Bart Ehrman
To get back to the early world world. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Can you tell us about when it was written and was this person just making stuff up or were there stories circulating or do we know?
- [15:07]
Christopher Freilingus
So first, on the date, I think most scholars are going to date it to the second century. So sometime between 100 and 200 of the common era. We have reasons for thinking this. We don't have any copies of the Infancy Gospel that goes back to the second century. But we do have references in some of these antagonistic Christian writers, figures like Irenaeus, who know some of the stories that we also find in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. So we think at least that some of these stories were circulating by then and that leads scholars to kind of to date it to that century. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas illustrates what I like to think of as a kind of spin offs. You know, I belong to a kind of an earlier era of television shows, but we used to see this, right, where characters would get their own kind of TV series and we call them spinoffs. And that seems to be what's happening here. There's a lot of interest in the second and third century of developing more storytelling around the heroes of the Christian faith as they, you know, emerge in the Christian New Testament. And I think the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is something like that. It has a story in its conclusion that many people would know. It's another version of that 12 year old story about Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. And it builds up to that account with earlier stories about Jesus at the age of eight, Jesus at the age of five. So it's a kind of spin off. My students sometimes say this is like fan fiction, taking, you know, a character that you love from like Harry Potter or something like that, and telling unauthorized stories just because you love the characters so much, you want to think about them. What would it have been like when they were this age or in this scenario? And yeah, I think that may be what's going on here.
- [17:01]
Bart Ehrman
In a sec, I'm going to ask you to tell us some of these, kind of summarize some of these stories and then give your evaluation because in your book you give a very interesting and different interpretation of these from what a lot of us heard when we were in graduate school. But I want to remind people that the book is, it's this Jesus Mary and Joseph and Chris. We're going to say this again at the end of the podcast, but could you people can get this book, right?
- [17:24]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So the publisher of the book is offering a discount on the book right now with a promotion code. So it's my last name 33 0, all one word. But to use the promotion you have to go to the publisher's page. So it was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and their main page, their catalog is penpress.org so that's how you can find it. And then you can order, order the book there and get a discount on it. Thanks, Mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:58]
Bart Ehrman
So if you're all interested in what's in all this, this is the book to look at and we're just. Trilingus 30 is the code. And.
- [18:04]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right, that's right.
- [18:06]
Bart Ehrman
Great with that. So tell us about this infancy gospel and in a minute we're going to find out you actually don't like calling it an infancy gospel as much as you like calling it a family gospel.
- [18:16]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right.
- [18:16]
Bart Ehrman
Okay.
- [18:17]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right. Thanks. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And in fact that's what, that's what I wanted to call the book, the Family Gospels, but my editor talked me out of it. It was a good idea, I think.
- [18:29]
Bart Ehrman
Nobody know what you're talking about.
- [18:31]
Christopher Freilingus
That's, that's back what his point was. So yeah, so I listened to his advice. These childhood stories. Let me just talk briefly about some of the contents and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the way some scholars have interpreted them.
- [18:44]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:45]
Christopher Freilingus
They start off innocently, I think. So the very first story portrays Jesus at the age of five and he's at a stream and he's kind of playing in the stream the way you might expect a five year old to do. And he starts playing with the dirt and he makes some toy birds out of the dirt, so clay sparrows. And he's doing it seems perfectly innocent. But then we learn that he's doing this on the Sabbath and witness to what Jesus is doing goes and tattles on him and says, you shouldn't be doing this on the Sabbath. Now I, I don't think that we need to explore whether or not it was okay for children to like make toys on the Sabbath. We're going to set that question aside. I don't think that this, that there's a kind of historical element that needs to be explored here. But what happens is that this creates a kind of Controversy. And so the person goes and tattles on Jesus to Joseph. And Joseph the father confronts Jesus and says, you know, why are you doing this? You're not, you're not supposed to be doing this. And then Jesus does what every five year old throughout history was wishes that they could have done when they were caught doing something wrong. And that is Jesus performs a miracle and turns these toy birds, these clay birds into real birds and they fly away. So the evidence is gone. So of course he didn't do anything wrong. It's a terrific story. Now there are ways of thinking about this story that point to some kind of interesting elements. And listeners might be thinking already of the creation accounts in Genesis where the biblical God is portrayed making human beings out of the dirt of the ground. And I think that there's something deliberate happening in this story around Jesus as a child. Later on in the infancy gospel, the stories get darker. In one story, another child, five or six year old, bumps into Jesus's shoulder. Jesus gets angry and curses the child and the child falls over dead. I mean when the five or six year old Jesus says something, it happens.
- [20:49]
Bart Ehrman
So this kid runs into Jesus and Jesus zaps him on the spot.
- [20:53]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, that's right.
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Bart Ehrman
That first story sounds kind of like, you know, got the young Jesus breaking the Sabbath but getting away with it kind of, you know, and so you got that too as well the creed, but this one is seeming to break the Sabbath and then like having a kind of getting away with it could be seen as something kind of like before, you know, the adult Jesus, but Jesus like cursing somebody to die. Okay, that's, that's a little different, right?
- [21:16]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right, that's right. Yeah. No, and again, so like some of these stories, I mean that's a really, that's on one end of the spectrum here in this infancy gospel. We'll get to some happier stories in just a moment. So this has always puzzled scholars. And early on, I mean when modern scholars started looking at these gospels, they just dismissed them, just thought they were ridiculous and showed, you know, just prurian interest, curiosity. But then other scholars came along and said, well, you know what, some of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, they do some cursing there too. And some of the things that happen there aren't so great. So one of the, a really great story involves a prophet named Elisha, Elijah's successor. And some boys make fun of him for being bald, which is a story I particularly like. And Elisha curses the boys and bears come out of the woods and maul These boys for making fun of him. So you can find this story in Second Kings, chapter two. It's a biblical story and it's there. So maybe the framers of these childhood stories about Jesus were thinking about the biblical prophets as maybe exemplars. What happens when supernatural power, you know, possesses a person? I'm not sure.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, this is Jesus here, though. This is the Son.
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Christopher Freilingus
No, no, you're right, you're right. There's no explaining.
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Bart Ehrman
So are there, are there other stories kind of like this? I mean, like.
- [22:38]
Christopher Freilingus
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a set of stories that I really like involving Jesus in the schoolhouse. And here we see Jesus going to school. And this is exactly the kind of thing you can imagine early Christians wondering about. Did Jesus go to school? What was it like? He tangles with teachers. In one occasion, a teacher tells him, you gotta repeat the Alphabet. Jesus refuses to do so. The teacher gets angry about it. In one version of the story, even beats Jesus for not saying the Alphabet. And Jesus curses the teacher. And in one story, the teacher falls over dead. In another story, Jesus reveals the beautiful esoteric knowledge around one of the letters of the Alphabet, the Greek letter alpha. Finally, in the third story, a different teacher seems to have kind of figured out what's going on here and really flatters Jesus for all the wisdom that he's speaking. And Jesus approves of what the teacher has done. And out of gratitude, Jesus heals everybody who's been hurt earlier in the gospel. So there is a kind of moment at which maybe more than one, where Jesus reverses the curse, which doesn't erase entirely what's happened before. But Jesus can do, you know, good and evil and has the power to do both. And then at the end of the gospel, we end with this final story. Jesus, the twelve year old in the temple, teaching the elders there, Pharisees in the infancy Gospel of Thomas, in fact, who praise him for his wisdom. Right.
- [24:15]
Bart Ehrman
I mean, this shows at least that he's. This author knows the Gospel of Luke, I think, probably. But there are other stories that are troubling. Right. So the teacher story happened there. So there are three teacher stories and none of them go well for the teacher. Are there other cases where he, like, zaps playmates who are just kind of getting in the way?
- [24:33]
Christopher Freilingus
One of the most intriguing stories for me is this story where Jesus is playing with some friends and they go up to the roof of a house and one of the kids falls off the roof and die, dies. And so Jesus, by this point in the Story has built a kind of bad reputation. And so the entire village accuses Jesus of pushing this kid off the roof. Jesus says, no, I didn't do that. The accusations persist. And so Jesus raises the boy from the dead, Zeno resurrects him and questions him on the spot. And Zeno says, no, Lord, you didn't push me off the roof. So here's a case where Jesus didn't do anything wrong, evidently, but he's accused of doing something wrong because of the reputation he's built over these chapters. So I don't want to minimize things. I mean, the stories that get told about Jesus, I mean, they're shocking if you are familiar with the kind of pious traditions about Jesus.
- [25:32]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah. All right. And there are some episodes where he actually does something good that's not reversing something bad he's done. Is that right?
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Christopher Freilingus
That's right.
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Bart Ehrman
So it's not just that he does a lot of bad things that we would cons that people today would say, wow, no, that's. That's not good.
- [25:49]
Christopher Freilingus
No, that's right. Yeah.
- [25:50]
Bart Ehrman
Rehearsing it and. And other times, like with the teachers or people falling off roofs or things. But also there are some things where he does something good for someone.
- [25:59]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, yeah. So one. I mean, one of the most affecting stories for me, one of the most charming stories, involves his father Joseph, who's depicted as a carpenter in this. In the infancy gospel, he's making plows, and he's got some wood. Joseph's working on it, and the wood pieces aren't the right length, and Jesus shows up and miraculously extends the wood so that they're the right lengths, and then Joseph can make the plows. And it's just this kind of beautiful moment, kind of unexpected joy, where you see, you know, you get this picture of somebody working really hard and. But the materials aren't working, and all of a sudden, you know, this beloved son of his does something wonderful for him. So I think there are some pretty moving stories in here. Unfortunately, they get swallowed up, understandably, by this other stuff that gets attributed to Jesus.
- [26:52]
Bart Ehrman
So you were saying that the early church fathers who didn't like this gospel kind of. They trashed it. They didn't like it. And what about, like, in the modern period, when people started studying these gospels, what did they make of them? Scholars who were looking at this stuff and trying to figure it out.
- [27:07]
Christopher Freilingus
So mostly with derision, in some collections of New Testament apocrypha, translations would show up, and the introduction would invariably say, well, this Is this is just garbage. I mean, who can explain why people would come up with these stories? This is just early Christians letting their imagination run away with them. Other scholars took them a little bit more seriously. One avenue would be to say these were prophecies of future greatness. So if you have these stories about Jesus as an adult and the canonical gospels and these gospels are circulating even though there's not a New Testament yet, then the writers of the infancy gospels are trying to say, right, well, the power that you see in Jesus as an adult, it was there from the beginning. And they might be talking about. I mean, different scholars had different ideas. Maybe this was a way of demonstrating some kind of consistent Christology, some type of belief about Jesus as God incarnate all along and maybe combating the views of others who said, well, no, Jesus kind of progressed into perfection.
- [28:20]
Bart Ehrman
There were some Christians who said that Jesus became the son of God at the baptism.
- [28:23]
Christopher Freilingus
Yes, exactly.
- [28:25]
Bart Ehrman
That the divine power came upon him at that point. And so you're saying one way scholars have read this is to show. No, actually, from the outset, he had these. Okay, okay. So that's.
- [28:34]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, that might be one. One. One way of explaining what's going on in these stories. Another way that's related is to compare these stories to ancient biographies, which I know is an interest of yours. And in these ancient biographies, they're different from modern biographies. Like, we would expect a modern biography to kind of show some character development. Like, these are the things that this great person learned along the way that made them into who they are. But ancient biographies didn't do that. They just said, you know, this person was always this way. They were always great. There's a story about the Roman emperor Augustus who as a child gets fed up listening to croaking frogs and orders them to be silent. And they are. I mean, he just was authoritative, a commanding presence from the crib. So. Right. So maybe that's what's happening here. Jesus, in the same way, he was just powerful from the very beginning.
- [29:33]
Bart Ehrman
I guess I wouldn't explain him zapping his playmates because he didn't really do that. Is there a way to kind of fit that in that.
- [29:39]
Christopher Freilingus
Right. Yeah. So the kind of. The emotions of Jesus are. What on are. It's the consequences that get our attention, but it's the emotions that have attracted the eyes of some scholars. Like, how do we explain this? Wasn't it the case that ancient philosophers thought that, you know, getting angry was a sign of an inferior character? And here's Jesus just lashing out all over the place. And so some scholars have latched onto that and have suggested that maybe these stories were somehow preempting attacks against Jesus. They're complex. It's a complex argument that is meant to respond to ways that critics of Christianity, Trinity, we're telling stories about Jesus. But yeah, it's probably too complex to go into here.
- [30:28]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:29]
Christopher Freilingus
As I think I already mentioned, I mean, one of the most compelling suggestions has been to look at biblical characters who similarly kind of lash out. And maybe that's what's going on. Or is this a preview of Jesus's anger management issues? In the canonical Gospels, there are some stories where Jesus lashes out. Probably the best one, the best known one, has to do with Jesus in the temple overturning tables, maybe making a whip out of cords. I mean, Jesus isn't always pacifist in the Gospels, and maybe we're seeing a glimpse of that in some of his behavior as a child. I don't know any scholar who takes these childhood stories seriously as a historical source.
- [31:13]
Bart Ehrman
Right, yeah, good point.
- [31:14]
Christopher Freilingus
And I probably should have said that from the beginning, but scholarship scholars aren't reading this to say, oh, this is what Jesus was like.
- [31:19]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, yeah, no, that's true. Yeah, I guess you could say that. You know, even in the Gospels and, well, in the book of Revelation about which you're an expert, Jesus is thought of in early Christian theology as a future wrathful being. In the Gospels, he predicts that God's going to be destroying his enemies. And in Revelation, Jesus himself participates in the destruction of his enemies. So you could say that, that, you know, there are early Christians who just who think that Jesus has enemies and that this is what happens to them.
- [31:52]
Christopher Freilingus
I think that's right. And right Christian tradition will teaches its followers that that kind of rage, that kind of wrath is justified. Right. I think what stands out to readers like you and me with these childhood stories is what. I mean, the kid just bumped into him.
- [32:09]
Bart Ehrman
I know, I know, I know. Right. Okay, so let's get on with your interpretation of this. Because infancy Gospels isn't really the way you like to think of these. You think of these as family gospels. And so could you explain what that means and how you're reading these?
- [32:23]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, yeah. And I got to give credit to a mutual friend of ours, Andrew Jacobs, who came up with the formulation. I had started out reading the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and my approach was I want to put it in its kind of cultural context. So I wrote a technical article doing that. But the More I read the Gospel, the more I came to think that what's on display here is not just Jesus's behavior. It's really the relations between Jesus and his parents, and even more broadly speaking, Jesus and the neighbors of his parents. So what we often see in the stories is not just Jesus doing something wrong or what we might think of as wrong. It's also Joseph, like trying to correct Jesus for this bad behavior and doing so because the neighbors have noticed what Jesus has done and they want Joseph to do something about it. In one of the schoolhouse stories, Joseph brings Jesus back from the schoolhouse after Jesus has cursed one of his teachers and says to Mary, look, you ought to do something about him because he's killing his teachers. So there's a family dynamic going on here. And this is when I came to think of this gospel is not an infancy gospel or a childhood gospel, but as a family gospel. That this may be what's driving the interest in these stories. Not just what was Jesus like as a child, but how did this family hang together through what must have been a challenging set of circumstances? He's the son of God. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary knows he's the son of God. It's announced to her. So you have this powerful being who is your child. How are you going to deal with situations that parents have to deal with? So that's kind of what got me thinking in that direction. And the book that I wrote is the result of that kind of thinking through these issues.
- [34:22]
Bart Ehrman
So how does it work? So Jesus, Jesus, parents have to figure out how to deal with this person who's the son of God in their midst. I think a lot of people would imagine that Jesus is the son of God as a young boy would not be mischievous. He would be. He wouldn't be zapping his playmates. He would be like, when there's a famine in Nazareth, he would feed them, you know, or something like that. Is that.
- [34:42]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah. No.
- [34:43]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. How do you explain the kind of. The negative side of Jesus and this with your. Your family gospel thing?
- [34:49]
Christopher Freilingus
Right. So, again, I'm not sure how satisfying this is for readers, but my sense is, is that these episodes are precisely the episodes where parental authority needs to swing into view. So if Jesus does something wrong, then we're going to expect the parents to do something about it. And so depicting Jesus as perfectly obedient, following societal norms, there's no drama there. There are echoes of this kind of thing, not with childhood stories specifically, but family dramas in the Hebrew Bible. And I think that this may be the framework that makes the most sense for some of these stories, that we have people who belong to the same family, the most intimate relations that human beings can have, and yet there are these things that they don't know about each other, they don't fully understand about each other, and that's where the drama of family life unfolds. And I think something similar is going on in the childhood gospel.
- [35:49]
Bart Ehrman
What kind of Hebrew Bible parallels are you thinking of here?
- [35:52]
Christopher Freilingus
One that's fairly well known to people would involve the story of Abraham and Isaac. So in this really terrifying story, the biblical God tells Abraham, take your son, your only son, Isaac, and I want you to go sacrifice him on this mountain. And along the way, on more than one occasion, Abraham is given the opportunity to disclose to Isaac exactly what he's planning to do. At one point, Isaac looks around and says to his father, look, we're supposed to be going to sacrifice, but where is the animal for the sacrifice? And Abraham at that moment withholds information and says, God's going to provide so he doesn't tell his son exactly what's going to happen. So it's not a perfect parallel to the stories in the childhood gospels, but it is a parallel to the kind of family drama that biblical writers were interested in exploring. And I, I think we're seeing some echoes of that in these childhood gospels. What kind of conversations do parents and children have with one another?
- [36:55]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, and they're horrible because it's, it's caused by God. I mean, God tells Abraham to slaughter his own son. And Jesus is a divine being. He's the son of God and he's the one doing these things. I mean, every parent has real difficulties knowing how to raise a child and the child off. You know, child. Children do things that are really, really bad, and you have to know how to do. But in this case, like, it's, it's almost like it's the extreme version of it in, in the infancy gospel of Thomas, the very extreme thing, because both. It's divinely inspired, but he's the one doing it. And so Joseph has to figure out how to deal with this, right?
- [37:32]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right. Joseph. Except when he's blaming Mary, you take care of it. That's right. I know that's right.
- [37:41]
Bart Ehrman
That's typical.
- [37:43]
Christopher Freilingus
Some of my friends who have read the book say to me, you know, it's. It seems that you've got the most sympathy for Joseph, and that's probably not an accident. I'm a father. I have my own family. And I think that that's. I mean, I think what I like about Joseph in these stories. And again, this is something that just other scholars don't pick up on for. For totally legitimate reasons. They're looking at different things. But Joseph takes Jesus to school in the first story, and things do not go well. And yet he knows that the best thing for Jesus is to get educated, and he keeps taking him back. Now, the writers of these stories don't spend a lot of time explaining why or defending Joseph's actions, but it's just the persistence there that I find really, really meaningful. Like, that's. That's what parents are supposed to be doing in this story, and Joseph is dramatizing it. I'm going to take Jesus back no matter what happens.
- [38:35]
Bart Ehrman
No, it's very interesting because the storyteller himself and the reader realize that Jesus doesn't need this education. Right? That one story where the. The teacher starts off saying, you know, giving the Greek Alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma, and Jesus won't repeat it. And finally, Jesus just doesn't zap him physically, but zaps him mentally by saying, well, you know, you're the teacher. You tell me the power of alpha, and I'll tell you the power of beta. And then, you know, Jesus, like, he know. He doesn't just know the Alphabet. And so. But Joseph isn't in on that. It doesn't seem to, because he has to keep taking him back. And so it's this situation where a parent just doesn't know what. Really what. What to do, but it's just doing his best, right, to deal with this difficult situation.
- [39:19]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, that's her.
- [39:20]
Bart Ehrman
What's the author trying to achieve with this? Is it doesn't sound like he's trying to teach a history lesson about Jesus and Joseph. Or is he. Or. Or is it like something else?
- [39:27]
Christopher Freilingus
What.
- [39:28]
Bart Ehrman
What's he doing?
- [39:29]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, I don't think so. I try to contextualize things in my book, in the broader debates going on among ancient Christians over family life. Should Christians have families? And if they do, what should those families look like?
- [39:46]
Bart Ehrman
Should Christians have families? What?
- [39:47]
Christopher Freilingus
What? Right, right, right. So I think that people watching your podcast are probably familiar with New Testament passages that seem to really approve of family life and then others that maybe call in to question whether people should have families. Jesus sometimes is telling people, you've got to leave your family behind if you want to be a disciple of me. But then if you read letters attributed to Paul, like First and Second Timothy and Titus, it seems there that the household is really important. Important that the qualifications for leading a Christian community, at least one of them is, is being able to manage your own household. So these New Testament passages get caught up in larger debates in the second and third century among early Christians. Some of these debates were played out in kind of, you know, essay form, apologies, that's this kind of thing. But in storytelling was another way of exploring these debates. And so this set of stories that we call the Apocryphal Acts that tell stories about the apostles that go well beyond the book of Acts in the New Testament, one of the themes of these stories is breaking up marriages before children can be conceived. And this seems to be right in line with at least one form of Christian teaching.
- [41:10]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so yeah, so that, so the infancy Gospel of Tom is kind of taking a stand on issues about family then.
- [41:16]
Christopher Freilingus
And I'm not, I'm thinking that it's entering this broader conversation that this is a gospel that affirms the value of family life, affirms the value of human families. Even if this family is really unusual, it's not kind of a biological family, it's a household, it's a human family. And that's a good set of relationships. That's I think what this, what the infancy gospel, the message overall is from these stories.
- [41:45]
Bart Ehrman
So an ancient reader of this, an ancient Christian reading, this comes away then with some better understanding of how they're supposed to conduct their own family. Or is it, or is there something
- [41:55]
Christopher Freilingus
else with this that I'm not so sure of? I don't think it's a kind of guide to parentina or, or how, how to live as a family. I mean if there's a message, overarching message, it's just hang together. I think that despite all of the problems that Jesus creates for the parents at the end of the Gospel, there's this affirming conclusion that Mary, Joseph and Jesus return from Jerusalem, they go back home to Nazareth together. And that seems to me to be expressing something about the value of family
- [42:33]
Bart Ehrman
life, the value of family. Very interesting. I think most people, you know, expect literature to be self help manuals about, you know, 12 steps to being a good father.
- [42:43]
Christopher Freilingus
Right, right.
- [42:44]
Bart Ehrman
Joseph. Joseph is searching, but he doesn't have the 12 steps.
- [42:48]
Christopher Freilingus
No, but he's trying. He's trying.
- [42:50]
Bart Ehrman
He's doing his best. And you know, it turns out, you know, it brings about the salvation of the world. So I guess he did an okay job. I don't know. So. Okay, well, Chris, this is really great, really appreciate this. And it's a really, it's a very, very interesting book. And for those of you who want to know, again, it's, it's Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
- [43:08]
Christopher Freilingus
And you can get it from penpress.org is where you'd go.
- [43:13]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, there's a coupon if you just write Fry Lingus 30.
- [43:17]
Christopher Freilingus
That's right.
- [43:18]
Bart Ehrman
Which I think is probably not your age. Fryling is 30. You'll get a, you'll get a discount.
- [43:24]
Christopher Freilingus
Yeah, I'm much, I'm much younger. I at least look much younger.
- [43:28]
Bart Ehrman
Don't we all? So. Well, okay, thanks, Chris. We're going to do it. We'll be doing a second episode on the other one, which is a very different gospel on the proto Gospel of James, which is more about Jesus, Mother Mary. So I'm looking forward to that.
- [43:39]
Christopher Freilingus
Oh, well, thank you, Bart. This has been delightful. I really, really appreciate you taking the time.
- [43:43]
Bart Ehrman
So thanks, thank you all for coming for this special podcast of Misquoting Jesus. And we will be, we'll be having another one with Chris and I hope you can join us for that one as well.
- [43:58]
Megan Lewis
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel, so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.