← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Hidden Wisdom or Heresy? The Enigma of the Gospel of Thomas
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Megan Lewis
Start talking about the Gospels and most people will have a rough idea of what you're talking about. A narrative account of Jesus life. Today, however, we throw all of that familiarity out of the window and talk about one of the most non gospel gospels I've ever read. Dr. Bart Ehrman is with me to discuss the enigmatic Gospel of Thomas. Stay tuned to find out more about this fascinating gnostic text.
- [01:27]
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.
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Bart, Hello. How are you doing today?
- [01:50]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, I'm doing well. We're Christmasing in England this year and staying through. Yes, I know. You wouldn't be jealous of the weather, I don't think.
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Megan Lewis
No, maybe, maybe not.
- [02:01]
Bart Ehrman
No. It's great. So we're, we're here through New Year's. It's great to be in London, seeing Sarah's family and hanging out. And though you're English, you're obviously not in London for the holiday.
- [02:11]
Megan Lewis
I'm not, no. I'm home in Maryland surrounded by many children who are just very excited about everything. They either very excited or fighting. So it's a bit of a toss up as to what each day will bring. But generally speaking, I think they're having a good time.
- [02:24]
Bart Ehrman
They tend to be two Sides of a coin during holidays, in my experience.
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Megan Lewis
Yes, very much.
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Bart Ehrman
Not a lot of calm, either terrible excitement or, like, people going at each other.
- [02:33]
Megan Lewis
We've been doing a lot of, like, let's go and play outside stuff because then if there is altercations, they can separate and retreat to separate corners of the garden, which is. Is a good thing, I think. And now today we're going to be talking about the very enigmatic Gospel of Thomas. We'll get into that in a minute. I also want to let everyone know we have some news coming up on some really great events that will be happening in the Biblical Studies Academy community, as well as some student testimonials, because we've talked an awful lot about the BSA and how wonderful it is and why you should consider joining it. But we've got some student testimonials for you to hear so you can decide if it's something that you actually would like to be a part of and that you would get something out of. And then finally we will be taking, or Bart at least will be taking some listeners questions, which again, always fantastic, love listeners questions. So stick around for all of that. But before all of that, we have the Gospel of Thomas. Bart, what was your first experience with the Gospel of Thomas?
- [03:31]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you know, weirdly, the first time I encountered the Gospel of Thomas was when I was about like, seven.
- [03:38]
Megan Lewis
Wow, okay. That's the answer I was expecting.
- [03:41]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, I know. It's just that, you know, when it came out, it first got published in English in 1959. In addition, they had Coptic on one side of the page and English on the other. And it was kind of one of these things where, like, people who were kind of interested in anything kind of bought it. And so, like, people had no idea what it was or anything, but they'd heard there's this new gospel out there. So my parents just happened to buy it. I had no idea what it was when it was seven, but years later, when I was probably a teenager or something, look in the shelves. Remind. Oh, yeah, there's this thing and I read it. Wow, that's weird. That was long before I became a scholar or had any clue what it was about. But, you know, know, it's because it was right at that period in the 60s when people started realizing there are other Gospels. It started creating a stir. And it didn't create a huge stir really, until some years later in the late 70s. And now people are really interested in the other gospels. But back then, this was just news that there were such Things.
- [04:35]
Megan Lewis
So when then and where was it discovered and when do biblical scholars think it might have been composed?
- [04:42]
Bart Ehrman
Right. So it's a difficult question to answer about when it was discovered because it turns out that parts of it were discovered before anybody knew what it was. And so the first very serious excavations in Egypt that were conducted in order to find ancient manuscripts happened in the 1890s. And there were these two British scholars who had decided to dig in Egypt at a city that had been covered up, that nobody had excavated, called Oxyrinkus. They decided to go to the trash dumps because that's where you go to deposit things you don't need anymore. And like used manuscripts that are worn out, you throw them in the trash dump. And so they, they were digging in a trash dump and they find the first day they find some fragments of a papyrus and it turns out to be a saying of Jesus that they knew was not in the New Testament, but you know, here it was. And they actually published it as an unknown saying of Jesus. It wasn't until about 50 years later that anybody knew what this unknown saying was from. It's from the Gospel of Thomas. That became clear in 1945. There was an accidental discovery of a jar in the wilderness in Egypt outside of a little village called Nag Hammadi. It's not too far from Luxor. It's kind of in that part of Egypt. This jar contained 12 books, remains of a 13th book that were leather bound books that contained collections of texts. And in one of these books there was this gospel along with a number of other texts. So this is in 1945. Scholars didn't find out about it for a few years. And that was also kind of by serendipity, it ended up in a library. All these books did these Nag Hammadi library they're called, sometimes known as the Gnostic Gospels. They're not all gospels, but they were all discovered in this jar. Once it got discovered, then scholars started working on it. And as I said, the first kind of public edition of this thing was put out in 1959. So it was still about 14 years after it had been discovered.
- [06:41]
Megan Lewis
Why did it take so long, not just for the Gospel of Thomas, but for the existence of apocryphal gospels in general to filter down into public knowledge.
- [06:50]
Bart Ehrman
You know, the thing is that in early Christianity, everybody knew there were other gospels. There were debates about which gospels should be in the New Testament. And there were people who said, you know, this gospel is scripture or that gospel is scripture. And those Debates led to kind of heresy hunting where people would say, oh, no, that's a heretical gospel. That's giving a false view of Christ. And. And so there were debates about what to include, what not to include, what you could read, what you could not read. Some gospels were okay to read, but they weren't, you know, part of the Scriptures. And so that's going on back in the second century. We have a record of this Gospel of Thomas going back to a church father named Hippolytus who's writing around the year 200, who. Who mentions the Gospel of Thomas and actually quotes a line from it. And so we're pretty sure that the thing that was known then, but in the modern period, you know, because throughout the centuries after that, century after century after century, virtually the only thing people read was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, if they read anything at all. It just kind of, you know, hadn't taken very seriously the fact there were these other gospels. And they weren't even much of an item of scholarship until they started making modern discoveries and they started discovering a whole bunch of things. And that's when scholars got interested. And lay folk, regular old folk, didn't know about it really into the 70s. And once they found out that, then they got all excited.
- [08:10]
Megan Lewis
Hippolytus mentions this gospel in around 200. Do we know when it might have been composed? Or is that kind of the earliest date we have for it?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, if it's right, as it seems to be that he was quoting it, then it was certainly written before him. And so before 200, there have been long debates among scholars about when to date the Gospel of Thomas. I think everybody dates it at least to the second century. There have been some scholars who have wanted to argue that it actually is as early as our New Testament Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That has never been a view that's caught on very much, largely because some of the views expressed in this Gospel of Thomas are very similar to views that we have in documents we can date to the second century and not at all like documents we find in the first century. And so probably it's second century. Another issue is, did this gospel rely on the gospels that made it into the New Testament? That's another disputed issue. If it did, if it is reliant on, say, Matthew, Mark and Luke, then it obviously is written after them. The scholars range in dates, but I would say that probably most scholars today date the Gospel of Thomas in the first part of the second century. So, like, around the year 120 140, 130. Somewhere in there, probably.
- [09:28]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Now, I mentioned in my little intro that the Gospel of Thomas is very, very different to the canonical gospels. It's not a narrative account that we might anticipate. Could you just describe it maybe for audience members who aren't familiar with it?
- [09:41]
Bart Ehrman
So the, the startling thing for most people is that there are no stories in this Gospel. There's no narratives of things. Jesus, what he did, you know, so there's no action, there's no birth, he's not doing any miracles, he's not confronting any Pharisees, he's not going off and getting crucified. There's. There are no stories. It's a list of sayings of Jesus, most of which just begin with Jesus said. Then there'll be a saying. They'll say, and Jesus said another thing. And every now and then you get a dialogue where the disciples ask, and Jesus said, and. And that's kind of the extent of anything like a narrative is that discussion that shows up sometimes. Scholars number these sayings as 114 sayings. That 114 is not found in the manuscript we have. I guess I should have pointed out this manuscript we have is actually written in Coptic, which is the ancient Egyptian language that developed long after hieroglyphics and stuff. But Coptic was the language in Egypt. But it appears that this Gospel of Thomas that we now have a complete copy in Coptic, was originally written in Greek. And so this is a Coptic translation. And that's why, you know, we found fragments Starting in the 1890s, as I said, of this gospel in Greek. So the fragments are in Greek. They're earlier. This thing is in. In a later Coptic translation. But the striking thing for most people, it's just saying boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. Without any kind of sensible ordering, some sayings will be kind of make sense that one comes after the other. But a lot of they're just like random sayings. They seem to like random sayings to most people.
- [11:17]
Megan Lewis
Now, are these sayings drawn from sources that scholars can identify, or do they seem to be kind of divorced from. From the Christian tradition that we're more familiar with?
- [11:26]
Bart Ehrman
Yes and no. This is this one of the other very striking things about this gospel. It's got these 114 sayings as we number them, and about half or over half are very much like sayings that you can find in Matthew, Mark and Luke, especially Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke have a lot more sayings of Jesus than Mark. And so, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, for example, or the sermon on the plain in Luke, a lot of the things in the Gospel of Thomas are very similar. So if you don't mind, I'll read you a couple of examples so people can just kind of get a sense of this.
- [11:59]
Megan Lewis
Please.
- [12:00]
Bart Ehrman
Saying number 20, the disciples here, you have a little conversation. The disciples said to Jesus, tell us what is the King of Heaven like? And Jesus said to them, it's like a mustard seed. It's the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls untiled ground, it puts forth a great branch and becomes a shelter for the birds of the sky. Okay, well that's, you know, the parable, the mustard seed. You can get that in, in, you know, mark chapter four, or Matthew, chapter 13, or later in saying 26, Jesus said, you see the speck that's in your brother's eye, but you don't see the log that's in your eye. When you take the log out of your eye, then you'll see well enough to take the speck out of your brother's eye. Okay, once again, you know, it's very similar to what you can get in the Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes these sayings are in a slightly different form and are in fact somewhat more pithy. For example, saying 34, Jesus said, if a blind person leads a blind person, they both fall into a pit. So the blind leading the blind. So the deal is that since you have these similar sayings to what you get in Matthew, Mark and Luke, then scholars have taken just about every position you can imagine about how to explain that. The most common explanation is that this author knew Matthew and Luke and so he took some of its sayings. Other people point out that some of these sayings that are like Matthew and Luke seem to be more kind of terse and pointed. And wouldn't that be like the more original form? Maybe they're earlier than Matthew and Luke, or maybe they had similar sources. Matthew and Luke had a source and Thomas had a similar kind of source. So you have, you have that situation where you've got to figure out which is probably the earlier. And how do you go about deciding that? It's a tricky issue. But the other problem is that about half the sayings are completely unlike anything in the Gospels. And these other sayings, clearly this author didn't get from the Gospels. I'll just see if I can give you a quick example of one. Jesus said, when you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will all understand that you are the children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, you are in poverty and it is you who are the poverty. Whoa. Okay. That's kind of mystical and interesting and it ain't in the New Testament. I mean, it's kind of like things in the New Testament, but it's, it's different and some things are like really different, different. So what do you do? You know, you got to figure out what the source or sources are and scholars have big debates about this.
- [14:28]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you. We'll be getting into this a little bit more after our break. The break is a little bit longer than normal, as I said in the beginning. We've got some testimonials for you from current members of the Biblical Studies Academy. And we're kind of pushing this now because the 14 day, I think free trial and the introductory pricing offer are going away at the end of this month. So this is really your last chance to take a look and see for yourself what it's like, see if you will benefit from it and then to get on board with that early bird discounted pricing. So take a look, listen to the testimonials and see if you think it would be right for you.
- [15:05]
BSA Member 1
The BSA is a constant source of inspiration and motivation compared to studying on my own.
- [15:11]
Bart Ehrman
Once I heard that this was starting, I knew I had to be a part of it. It's been phenomenal.
- [15:17]
BSA Member 2
I really wasn't sure what I was getting into because I'm not a biblical scholar and I am so glad I did.
- [15:24]
BSA Narrator
It's called the Biblical Studies Academy or bsa. It's an online learning platform that offers comprehensive biblical scholarship training inside of a members only community. In the Biblical Studies Academy you'll get access to access to interactive courses and a vibrant online community where you can discuss with others, ask questions and get feedback from experts.
- [15:52]
BSA Member 1
A surprising thing about BSA is how much I love the community aspect.
- [15:58]
BSA Member 3
The courses are great and there's a lot of things included, but what really amazed me is how great the community is. They've got sort of a social media type thing but. But it doesn't feel like social media.
- [16:10]
BSA Narrator
Within the BSA we'll be including a new kind of course that we've never done before. We're going to start providing semester long university level courses led by prominent professors of biblical studies, teaching the sorts of things they teach in their day jobs, with syllabi, suggested readings and quizzes.
- [16:34]
BSA Member 2
I've so much enjoyed the first course on the synoptic Gospels taught by Mark Goodacre and I'm looking forward to the next course on the New Testament. In January I heard that they had
- [16:46]
BSA Member 3
these classes taught by great professors that would be much more in depth than the sort of things I'm used to really equivalent to college courses. So I joined up just to see what it was like and I was not disappointed in the quality. These are some great classes.
- [17:02]
BSA Narrator
Let me highlight the value of the bsa. Everyone who is a member will receive three university length courses every year, along with all of our courses in How Scholars Read the Bible series that we've already recorded, plus two new ones every year along with a monthly webinar with me called Bart's Spotlight Series. Everyone in the BSA will get all of that, plus possibly most important, they'll be members of a community. You, if you join, will be in this community where you can join in with challenges such as fun quizzes. We'll give group studies and you'll be able to engage in long live events and discussions with others who are like you, interested in these topics.
- [17:55]
BSA Member 1
The questions that I want to engage with about the Bible, about history, are generally not good topics for acquaintances at cocktail parties or often even friends and family. So it's great to know that everybody that's there shares my curiosity even when they don't share my exact background and beliefs.
- [18:16]
Bart Ehrman
The BASA has been the best opportunity I have discovered for engaging in profound biblical philosophical meaning of life conversations with people from all walks of life from all over the world.
- [18:28]
BSA Member 2
And the other bonus is the book club. I love the book club and it is very interactive and again, I'm just enjoying the people I joined mainly because
- [18:39]
Bart Ehrman
of the great deal that they had on on the courses, but it was the discussion with the other members that I found that I like the best.
- [18:48]
BSA Host
What I really appreciate is your genuine and respectful engagement.
- [18:53]
Megan Lewis
There is no condescension, just thoughtful and meaningful dialogues.
- [18:58]
BSA Narrator
The value of this entire package would be $2,700, but we're not going to charge that. We are offering it for $39.95 a month. This will give you access to the Synoptics course and everything else inside bsa, including all its other courses, community features and live events.
- [19:19]
Bart Ehrman
It's really quite fantastic and it's not going to be matched.
- [19:23]
BSA Member 1
I finally have the right space for these discussions in my life that nowhere else serves.
- [19:31]
BSA Member 2
I'm loving it.
- [19:32]
Bart Ehrman
It's a wonderful opportunity both to learn from others and to learn from scholars.
- [19:38]
BSA Member 3
It's just great that we have such a Wide variety of voices of people who are all passionately interested in biblical studies. It's just a lot of fun.
- [19:48]
Megan Lewis
If you sign up before January 27th, that's only for $39.95 a month. The price will go up after January 27th, so be sure to sign up before then to get that lower rate. You can also sign up for a 14 day free trial at bart erman.com BSA. So we are talking about the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which is composed of sayings of Jesus, which some of them are kind of found in or very similar to those found in the canonical Gospels, and a selection that are absolutely not found in the canonical gospels, but gave us some examples before we went our break and I wanted to just pause briefly and ask. This sounds very similar to the hypothesized Q source that longtime listeners are going to be familiar with. Obviously, if Q was used as a source for the canonical gospels and the Gospel of Thomas seems to be later than those, Thomas is probably not an inspiration or like a source for Q itself. But do scholars think there's any connection between the two or are they just composed in the same manner?
- [20:56]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So this is where we get into circles within circles, because Q itself is an issue, as you know. And people who've been in the Biblical Studies Academy have had this course with Mark Goodacre on the Synoptic Gospels. Know that he doesn't believe there was a Q. For those who don't know, I should just say what the, what the Q source is. It's a hypothetical source. We don't have it. We don't have a Q source. It has to do with how Matthew, Mark and Luke relate to each other. And how do you explain their similarities? Almost everybody agrees that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as one of their sources of information. They copied many of Mark's stories into their own gospels and often, often changing them a little bit, sometimes changing them a lot. Most of Mark can be found in Matthew and a lot of Mark can be found in Luke. But Matthew and Luke also have a bunch of sayings that are not in Mark. And there are reasons that scholars have for thinking that Luke didn't get his these sayings from Matthew and Matthew didn't get them from Luke, which means they both must have gotten them from another source. And scholars call this other source Q, which stands for the German word kavela, which Q U, E, L, L E, which means source. It's the sayings source for Matthew and Luke. So it's A hypothetical source, because we don't have it. And since it's hypothetical, people can say, yeah, actually it didn't exist, and come up with some other explanation for why Matthew and Luke have these sayings in common. But if it did exist, which I personally think it, I think there was a Q, I think it was a source written in Greek. It too apparently was virtually entirely a list of sayings of Jesus. There might have been some episodes in Q, but certainly most of it is sayings material. And so every time I give a lecture on the Gospel of Thomas to an audience that has people in it who know about Q, the question I always get is, is Thomas Q, you know, or is Q Thomas? And the answer to that has to be no. I think there are a lot of sayings in the Gospel of Thomas that are not found in Matthew and Luke at all. There are a lot of sayings in Matthew and Luke that the Q material that are not in the Gospel of Thomas. So they're different things. And even when they have a similar saying, they're worded differently in places they can't be the same document. And I don't know, we'll be getting into this too much, but the, the kind of theological outlook of the Gospel of Thomas is different from the. The outlook you get of Q. But that being said, it may well be that they were the same kind of document. As opposed to our narrative gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, where you've got actions of Jesus and sayings of Jesus and the death and resurrection of Jesus. It appears that there were gospels that were just the sayings of Jesus, and that is what this Gospel is. And unlike Q, in this Gospel we have a clear statement about why this author is interested in giving only the sayings of Jesus. In fact, maybe I'll just read this because he says it. It's. It's the very first thing the author says. He says that these are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus, Judas, Thomas wrote down. And he said, whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death. That's saying number one. What it's saying is that if you want eternal life, you will interpret these sayings correctly. That's how you have eternal life. And they're sayings of the living Jesus, the Jesus who gives life. Well, that makes it very interesting, for one thing, because it's not the death and resurrection of Jesus that brings eternal life, it's interpreting his sayings. And these are hidden sayings. They're secret sayings. They're hard to understand in places. And to have eternal life, you got to know how to interpret them. And so this gospel is saying, you better understand what I'm saying here because your eternal life depends upon it.
- [24:49]
Megan Lewis
This leads quite nicely into my next question you gave us before the break. Some examples of the sayings from Thomas, some of them echo what we would find in the canonical Gospels and some are entirely different. Would you say that the Gospel aligns more with the teachings of Jesus that we're familiar with or with Gnostic teachings and this kind of hidden meaning that we see in other Gnostic texts?
- [25:11]
Bart Ehrman
Ah, well, this is a difficult question that would take an entire semester seminar to unpack because two minutes go. Okay. Yeah. So some of the sayings obviously align with the things Jesus says in the gospels. But the thing is that if you take a saying and you put it into a different context, it's probably going to mean something quite different. You can take the same words as somebody says, stick them in a different context, and it'll have different implications. And so the fact that you get the similar saying doesn't mean it's going to be interpreted the same way depending on the context. So there's that. The other thing, though, is that you get all these other sayings, that which scholars originally, and as you just said, have originally thought were Gnostic sayings. And so is this gospel more like a Gnostic gospel or is it more like a New Testament gospel? That too requires some unpacking. I think this answer is going to come in multiple stages. But I do need to explain what, what you and I mean when we're talking about Gnostic. So gnostic spelled with a G, G, N O S, I S. I often get asked why gnostic is not pronounced gnostic. And my answer is that it's the same reason that we don't call it K knowledge. It's a silent, silent consonant to begin with. And as it turned out, gnosis means knowledge. In Greek, Gnosticism refers to a group of religions, not a single religion, but many religions. In early Christianity, they had many differences among them. But some of their similarities were the idea that people have to escape this material world that they're in, that this material world is not a good place, and that the goal of salvation is for the spirit within you to escape from your material trappings, from your body. And that comes by having the true secret knowledge that Jesus provides. And so the goal of the Gnostic religion is to explain the secret teachings of Jesus so that your spirit can escape your material trappings and return to its original heavenly home. The Gospel of Thomas has a lot of sayings that appear to reflect that teaching. Scholars over the last 20, even 30 years have become a little bit reluctant to call the Gospel of Thomas a Gnostic gospel because the Gnostic teachings that you find in other kinds of Gnostic writings, the Gnostic teachings are not as in your face as they are in other places. But when you look carefully at this gospel, it seems to be all about the material world being a problem, the Spirit being the thing that really matters, the need the Spirit to escape the body, Jesus coming from a divine realm above in order order to reveal the secret truth, interpreting this truth so that you can have salvation by your understanding of this true knowledge. And so all of that is basically Gnostic. Whether you want to call this a Gnostic text in the sense that some others are is another question. But my view is that this either was written by somebody who had a Gnostic view of things, or is really open to Gnostic interpretations.
- [28:17]
Megan Lewis
Do we see any texts kind of interacting with this gospel, trying to explain it or uncover the hidden meaning, or. Or is it just kind of a standalone text that we're lucky to have?
- [28:28]
Bart Ehrman
Unfortunately, the only quotations we have of this gospel are by church fathers who think it's awful. I mean, just about some church fathers will appear to quote some of these sayings in ways that they interpret in a perfectly orthodox way. We don't have a lot of engagement between other early Christian writings and this text, but we do have other writings that are attributed to the same authority. I mentioned that his name is Judas Didymus Thomas, and I think we've run across him before in the, in the podcast. The name Didymus is a Greek word that means twin, and the name Thomas is an Aramaic word that means twin. And so the person's name is Judas or Jude. In early Christian circles in the area of Syria, ancient Syria, there was an idea that Judith Jude, the brother of Jesus, was actually a twin, and in fact he was Jesus twin brother. And so that is the person who's claiming, whoever's writing this is claiming to be that person. We have other writings also by this person. It's not really by this person, it's not really by Jude, and it's. These aren't all written by the same person, but they do appear to be written within some area, some community, possibly in. In the land of Syria, where Christians revere Judas Didymus Thomas as. Since he's Jesus twin, he's one who has unique insights into Jesus teachings and that he is. He's an authority. So that in some ways you can read some of these other Thomas writings and come to a clearer idea of what this group of people, if it was a coherent group, it may not have been. But if it was a coherent group, well, see things that are in common among these various Thomasine writings from early Christianity, which might be Thomasine Christians, might have been a form of Gnosticism.
- [30:21]
Megan Lewis
Can we, bearing in mind that it's a text with hidden meanings and kind of a bit of mysticism going on, can we talk about the Gospel of Thomas, whether it teaches a specific theology or worldview?
- [30:34]
Bart Ehrman
I think you can, because there are some consistent themes throughout it. The easiest way to explain some of those for me, just to read a couple of the verses and, and explain these are verses that I think are not terribly hard to unpack. If you know something about how people were thinking in the second century, the early second century with Gnostic leanings, they're pretty easy to unpack these things. And so maybe I'll just read a couple of these and can comment on them. Again, they're scattered throughout because they. There's not a coherent collection of these things. But as I point out, it starts off, the author begins by saying, if you find the interpretation of these secret sayings, then you'll have eternal life. Later, he, you know, talks about how you have to know yourself, and if you don't know yourself, then you're living in poverty. Well, knowing yourself means that you realize you're both a spiritual and a physical human being. And if you emphasize what is physical, you're emphasizing your lesser part. And you're not going to get eternal life like that. Your eternal life is going to come to your spirit. And so you've got to emphasize the spiritual side of you, or else you're living in poverty. Or another way. He puts this in kind of a pithy way, saying 56, which, which is another short one. Jesus said, the one who has come to know the world has found a corpse. And the one who has found the corpse, the world is not worthy of that person. And so, you know, you think this world is full of significance and meaning and life. Now this world is a corpse. It's a dead entity. The material world is dead. And once you realize that you are superior to the world and the world's not worthy of you anymore, that means having the required gnosis, the knowledge that you need in order to escape your material trappings.
- [32:22]
Megan Lewis
Do you have another favorite saying? That kind of illustrates what the Gospel of Thomas is doing.
- [32:27]
Bart Ehrman
Well, yeah, my favorite saying is probably saying 37, which seems a little bit weird at first, but it ties into the saying theme that I've been laying out. So the disciples asked Jesus, when will you appear to us, and when shall we see you? Okay, so this is like in the Gospels when they say, when are you coming back? You know, when's all this going to happen? But in this place, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, when you strip naked without being ashamed and take your clothes and place them under your feet like little children and stamp on them, then you will see the son of the living One and you will not be afraid.
- [33:01]
Megan Lewis
Well, that makes perfect sense.
- [33:03]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you're probably used to kids stamping on clothes, but you probably didn't realize that it's a sign of salvation. So what is this all about? Well, if you understand that the world is a corpse and your body is a corpse, that you're just indwelling for a while, taking your clothes off and stamping on them is an image of escaping your body and treating it as of no significance. If you realize that your body is not what matters, but your spirit within is what matters, Just like little children take off their clothes and stamp on them because they want nothing to do with them, then that's when you will see the living one. Then you will realize the truth that Jesus brings from above. And so it's about escaping this material world.
- [33:48]
Megan Lewis
Is that kind of consistent with what we see in the rest of the Gospel?
- [33:52]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I think it is, pretty much. There are several sayings like this, and there are several sayings about why Jesus said came into the world in order to kind of deal with the problem that there are people here who are trapped in their physical bodies. So another one of my favorite sayings is saying 28. Here Jesus says, I stood in the midst of the world and appeared to them in the flesh. So I appeared in the flesh. Jesus himself is not a real bodily being in most gnostic circles because he. He appears to be flesh. But because the material world is evil, he can't actually participate in the material world. And so he appears his flesh. But then he says, I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. And my soul was anguished for the children of humankind, for they are blind in their hearts and they do not see, for they came into the world empty and empty again. They seek to depart from the world, yet now they are drunk. When they have shaken off their wine, then they will repent. So this is actually not blasting away at people who drink too much on New Year's Eve or whenever this is actually, it's a metaphor. People are drunk, meaning, you know, they're just not thinking straight. Jesus came down here and he's going to reveal the truth. And people are drunk, they can't understand the thing he's saying. They're completely drunk and they're blind. They can't see the truth. And so he says, but they're drunk now, but once they sober up, then they'll understand and then they'll repent. And so his teachings are meant to make us realize that what we think of as the world and what we think is good, you know, and the bodily pleasures and things, that is not it. What is it is seeking the spiritual realm and understanding the ways that we can escape physical realm in order to return to our heavenly home.
- [35:49]
Megan Lewis
Given that a lot of these teachings seem to be espousing a worldview that Jesus doesn't seem to have followed himself, is it possible to use the Gospel of Thomas to kind of fill in any gaps in our knowledge about the historical Jesus and his teachings?
- [36:05]
Bart Ehrman
Here again, a much debated question among scholars. One of the reasons this one is fun, this gospel is fun, is because there's so many debates about it and so many little crannies and nooks and good to go into. But kind of an obvious question is, you know, are there any of these sayings that actually go back to Jesus that not otherwise in the New Testament and scholars divide on this issue some years ago, there still is a group called the Jesus Seminar, which is a group of scholars who originally came together twice a year in order to try and decide definitively what are the sayings that we have that Jesus really said. And so they went through the Gospels and they. They debated each and every line that Jesus is alleged to have said to decide if it's something, something that actually goes back to the historical Jesus. That general process is one that virtually all critical scholars would agree with. Yes, we have to do that. But when they published their edition of the Sayings of Jesus, it was called the Five Gospels. The five Gospels which people could still purchase are Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Thomas, because they thought that some of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas also go back to Jesus. And sometimes they argue that when you have the same saying in, say, Matthew and in Thomas, but they're worded differently, that the wording in Thomas is probably the more original form, and then Matthew recording a later form of it and sometimes they'll identify as saying that not just them, but other scholars that don't identify as saying not in the New Testament. They say, well, Jesus said this even though it's not in our Gospel. Why not? I mean, the Gospel of Thomas is getting his sayings from sources of information. The Gospels got theirs from sources of information. They might be earlier, but it doesn't mean they got everything. Thomas could include other things. These are heavily debated things. My personal view of this, based on, you know, studying this thing since I was in graduate school back in the Pleistocene age, is that the sayings that overlap between Matthew and Luke especially and Thomas, my view continues to be that I don't think Thomas got it from Matthew and Luke. I think he got a bunch of these things from some other sources that are floating around. He may have known Matthew, Luke. It's possible, but this isn't a hill I'm willing to die on really, but I just don't really think so. But some scholars very much think so. These other sayings of Jesus that have these other twists that condemn the material world, that celebrate Jesus coming down to deliver the truth, the importance of knowledge for salvation, escaping the trappings of your body, the spiritual realm, these more kind of mystical sayings, I absolutely don't think Jesus said. I don't think you can situate those sayings in a first century context of the twenties, of the common era in Galilee. I don't think there's any teaching like that going on there then among Jews. So I think that that does make this a later gospel in its final compilation. Even though some of the sayings, especially the ones like the synoptics, could go back to Jesus.
- [38:55]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. We are out of time, but this has been wonderful. I hope the audience has enjoyed it as much as I have. We are going to now go to some news on upcoming events and please stay tuned for this week's bonus segment, which is listeners questions.
- [39:10]
BSA Host
Welcome to our upcoming highlights and events segment where we catch up on bart's courses, community updates and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.
- [39:26]
Megan Lewis
So as I said in the beginning of this week's show, we've got two really fun events coming up in the Biblical Scholars Academy over the next couple of weeks. On Thursday, that's the 16th of January, we're going to be hosting a Bible trivia game with questions focused on the Gospels. So come test your knowledge against other listeners and other students and see how you do. Next Friday, which is the 24th of January, we've got author and scholar Pete Enns doing a live Q and A in the community about his book Bible Tells Me. So if you don't know Pete, he's a very popular progressive Christian scholar and the host of the Bible for Normal people. This is a great opportunity to engage with him. And once again, we've got Hugo's course coming up on January 27th. If you want to attend any of these, you can sign up for a 14 day trial of BSA over@bartleman.com BSA and now Bart is going to be inundated with listeners questions.
- [40:27]
BSA Host
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, Please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart
- [40:44]
Megan Lewis
all right, Bart, first up, what evidence do we have for the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea? Was he a member of the Sandrine? Could he have taken Jesus to a grave? And if he was a real person, what would this mean for the movement of Christianity during the Roman Empire?
- [41:01]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we don't have any evidence for him outside the Gospels. So he's mentioned in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the one who buried Jesus. He got a special favor from Pilate to remove the body on the day of the crucifixion and then buried him in a tomb. The Gospels have different accounts of what the tomb was and its relationship to Joseph, but yes, we don't have any other outside evidence. A lot of scholars, including me, have doubted whether there really was such a person. It's very important in the Gospel stories for Jesus to be buried that day because the early emphasis was that Jesus was raised on the third day. And for that to happen, he had to be buried. And so he had to be buried by somebody. And it had to be exceptional, an exceptional circumstance. And so the Gospels portray this exceptional circumstance. One reason that I doubt it is that it was absolutely against Roman policy to allow people to bury a person on the day of their crucifixion. The policy was to allow people to leave people on their crosses for days so that they would begin to decompose and be attacked by scavengers as part of the punishment for whatever crime they've committed, especially insurrection. And so I don't think there's really good evidence to suggest that people that Pilot would make an exception in the case of Jesus. You know, we tend to think he would because Jesus was the son of God. But Pilot didn't know that. And, you know, unless you think the other two were also buried that day and six the day after and five the day before. And like, you know, the people were just burying. If that was the case, you would expect evidence of it. And I don't think so. So I think Joseph of Arimathe is probably a figure that's made up by storytellers of the early Christians in order to explain how Jesus could be buried so that he could rise on the third day.
- [42:48]
Megan Lewis
Excellent, thank you. Since Jesus did not speak Greek and most of the people listening to him were illiterate and couldn't take notes, how could the written text of the Gospels be what Jesus actually said? Scholars debate over specific Greek words in the manuscripts. But the Greek words used may not be anything close to the Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke and only what someone would remember or imagine that he had said.
- [43:12]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's right. And you know, and scholars of course know that. And so when scholars are debating about the Greek of the manuscripts, they're not actually debating about what words Jesus spoke at that point, they're debating about what words did the authors write. Once you have a good idea of what say Matthew wrote in his Sermon on the Mount, then in order to know whether Jesus said it, you have to go through a number of historical criteria to determine whether this is something Jesus likely said or not. If he did say it, he didn't say it in Greek, he said it, would have said it in Aramaic. This becomes significant because there are sometimes saying of Jesus that really cannot be translated into Aramaic. The Greek has a meaning that you just, you can't get out of Aramaic words. And so that, that would suggest Jesus didn't say that one. But there are other places where you'll have sayings of Jesus where the saying actually makes better sense when you put it into Aramaic. And that doesn't mean Jesus really said it, but it does mean that, you know, it could have been something he said. And if he didn't say it, somebody came up with this saying who was an Aramaic speaking follower of Jesus. In other words, somebody in the early years, the Jesus movement. So scholars absolutely take this into account when they're debating words. It's about the Greek. They know you've got to figure out what Jesus would have said in Aramaic. And so many scholars, you know, of course, studying Aramaic as well as Greek.
- [44:36]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. For some time I have been wanting to hear your thoughts on Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart's New Testament translation. This seems especially pertinent to the Gospel of Mark, one of Hart's guiding principles. In translating was to capture the style or the quality of the original Greek. So when early manuscripts are in rough or awkward Greek, like Mark, he tried to capture that style in his translation. Do you have thoughts on this and is his a translation you would recommend or warn to avoid?
- [45:05]
Bart Ehrman
Well, probably neither. I think that some people really liked it. He's a very fine scholar. He's a theologian who knows a lot about a lot of things. Translating a text is a very difficult issue, especially in ancient text and especially a text that's been translated a lot already. The questioner is identifying one of the really tricky things that people don't think about much, which is that if the original is in rough form, does your English translation, is it to reflect the rough form? I had to deal with this not with the New Testament originally, but with, with some of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. I did a two volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers. These writers after the New Testament and in some places, for example, in the writings of Ignatius, there'll be passages that don't make grammatical sense. There'll be a subject that'll go out and there'll be a sentence that goes on along and there's no main verb, you know. So do you translate it like that, you know, do you put it in English where he just cuts off and goes to something else, providing the verb, you know? And so, well, what do you do? Because you want it to sound like him. But on the other hand, you don't want your readers to think you're an idiot and don't know English and you want them to understand what they're saying, you know, and so what do you do? I think it's fine for Hart to go ahead and translate. In principle, it's fine for him to translate lower quality Greek and lower quality English. You know, the devil's always in the details, like in this particular passage, is he actually capturing the sense or not? Final thing I'll say is this is why most people, most scholars prefer translations that are done by committee, so that the idiosyncrasies of a particular translator, they don't creep into the text as easily. Because if you're just doing it yourself, then you can put in your own kind of slant on things. And it may not be a shared slant, it's always a problem. But what I suggest people do is, you know, if you've got several translations, compare them to each other. You don't know the Greek, compare them with each other and kind of see, you know, which ones you think, would you like the Best.
- [47:06]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Final question for the day in Matthew, when Herod hears that Jesus was born, he was upset and all of Jerusalem with him. I understand why Herod would be upset, but why all of Jerusalem?
- [47:19]
Bart Ehrman
Good question. Who knows? It doesn't make much sense. I mean, lots of this story that, that are hard to make sense of Matthew's account of Jesus birth. This was the topic of my course that I did recently called the Dark side of Christmas that people can still purchase. It's all over on my, you know, my website@barturm.com under courses. I dealt with some of these problems in Matthew's account that just some of them just don't make sense. I mean, Herod hears about Jesus being born from the wise men, the magi who are following a star that somehow stops over Jerusalem and then starts up again and ends up taking them to Bethlehem and stops over the house. So, so for one thing, how does a house stop over a city? And how does it then reappear and then start again and then stop over a house? I mean, how's that? And over which house is it? If it's a real star, it says it's a star. The other thing is, why are the wise men following this star? Because they want to worship the king of the Jews. Well, Herod was the king of the Jews. Did they worship Herod when he was born? I mean, they can worship the next king of the Jews. It's like, you know, when the president, the next president is born, do people go worship him? Why would you worship a king? And so that doesn't make any sense. And also, like, if you're following a star, you know, stars don't go in straight directions because of the rotation of the earth. And so they're going all over the map. Okay, you can understand Herod being upset. Oh my God, my competition's just been born. But, you know, Herod's kind of getting on in years at this point. This is an infant. Like, he's in danger. So why is he upset? Why would all Jerusalem be upset? We got a new king. I mean, we're upset. And so, yeah, no, it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't make sense historically. If you're taking this as like something that really happened, it makes sense. If you're treating it as a story that is trying to convey a lesson about Jesus and the theological truths about Jesus evident already at the birth, that this birth is causing cosmic disruptions. You can see it in the stars and that people from far off recognize that something big is happening in Israel and that this thing that's happening that's big in Israel is going to spell trouble for the ruling authorities who are there now.
- [49:23]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for your questions. If you have a question for Bart, you can submit it@bartiman.com questions we have quite the backlog, so it might be a little bit before your question makes it to the top of the pile, but we are trying to answer everything that we get. But before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [49:43]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about one of the most interesting and best known of the Gospels, not in the New Testament, the Gospel of Thomas. It's a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, some of which are in the New Testament Gospels, but a number of them are not in the New Testament Gospels and are very different from the kinds of sayings you get in the Gospels. One question is whether this represents a different form of Christianity that many scholars have called Gnostic Christianity. Does it depend on the Gospels of the New Testament? Is it older than them? Is it younger than them? And all sorts of questions about the Gospel of Thomas. And we've really just scratched the surface. So we'll be talking more about this on various episodes about the Gospel of Thomas on the podcast.
- [50:24]
Megan Lewis
Bart. Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember, you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [50:44]
Bart Ehrman
We've talked a lot just today about things in gospels that go back to Jesus and things in gospels that don't go back to Jesus. And we're going to deal with the kind of the general problem. How do you separate history from myth in any of our texts about Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas, but also the Gospel of Matthew or any any of our texts? How do scholars go about deciding what's historical and what is legendary or mythical?
- [51:06]
Megan Lewis
It'll be fun. So please join us then. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [51:13]
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.