← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
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B
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]
C
Christianity's style started out with a handful of followers in about 30 CE, Jesus disciples and some female supporters. It was essentially a small offshoot of Judaism viewed with suspicion and hostility. In under 300 years, that number exploded to around 2 to 3 million people and included the emperor of the Roman Empire among its members. What was it about Christianity that made conversion such a compelling choice for so many polytheistic people? Before we get to the topic at hand, but hello, how are you doing today?
- [01:26]
D
Yeah, I'm doing fine. When this episode plays, I will be two days away from leaving England. I've been here all summer. I'm going back because classes are starting and you know, they like me to be there for that since it's my day job and so I'm getting prepped to teach and getting back into that rhythm. It's a very different rhythm, but it's, you know, it's the perk of the job, being able to teach undergraduates. It's a really great privilege and I just, I just like it. I really like it.
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C
Is it hard to change gears from a summer of research and writing to going back into teaching?
- [02:02]
D
Yeah, it is for all sorts of reasons because the day job, you know, involves more than just kind of showing up in a classroom and teaching because it's just, there's all, there's lots of stuff that's, you know, it's kind of hard to lay it all out, but it's, you know, it's a lot of administrative stuff and it's doing grunt work. But it's also, it is trying, you know, it's getting excited again about topics and meeting new students and getting involved. It's just a whole different kind of thing than, than reading and Writing, which is what I, you know, reading, writing and speaking, that's kind of what I do otherwise. And for the teaching I just, I have to do some reading, but it's courses I've taught a million times and it's a lot of, lot of interaction, so it's different. And how are you doing when this goes out?
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C
I will still be in the middle of kids summer holidays. So they're all having fun, probably making a lot of noise, making a lot of mess as children should do during the summer holidays. I remember lots of noise and mess when I was a kid, so certainly carrying on a tradition. And right at the end of August, I'll be going to Canada with my husband. He's speaking at a conference on atheism. So he'll be, I think talking about slavery in the Bible. So we'll be getting ready to head out. It'll be fun.
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D
We're in Canada. Is it?
- [03:12]
C
I'm honestly, I think it's Ontario, but I'm not 100% sure. This is one of the trips where I just will get in the car and end up somewhere it's north of
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D
you, not on the other side of the country.
- [03:23]
C
Yes. No, because we're driving. Yeah. No, it's not like going to Vancouver. No, we'll be, we'll be driving upstairs, like I think a 10 hour drive.
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D
Love it. No, Canada is great. I really, I love Canada, so. Okay, good. Have fun.
- [03:36]
C
Yeah, it'll be good, it'll be good. But before I get to Canada and before you start teaching again, we need to talk about Christianity taking over the Roman Empire. So we've spoken about the religious norms of the Roman Empire during Christianity's early days, before most people were pagan, they worshiped a variety of gods and participated in the cultic life of their community. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember you saying that religion was more a set of practices than theological doctrines for the pagan community. And prior to Christians really the only religious group that demanded any kind of exclusivity from their followers with the, the Jewish community. So. So Christians were really the new kids and their insistence that their God was the only God wasn't normal. Is that right?
- [04:21]
D
Yeah. Oh boy. Is that right? Yeah. Most Jews were not insistent that their God was the only God. It was more that this is our God and we're his people. And you know, they thought that he was superior. But there were Jews who were complete monotheists who said, you know, there is only one God. But a lot of Jews, you know, Even those who said that weren't interested in anybody else joining them in the worship of this God. This was their God. And so it was different with the Christians.
- [04:49]
C
And we'll definitely get to that missionary aspect of Christianity earlier. But having kind of pointed out a couple of the major differences between Christianity and what was the norm at the time, there was a way of thinking that again, I think you mentioned in the last episode that helped to pave the way for some pagans to convert to Christianity. So would you mind just explaining what henotheism is and how it could have helped ease some pagans into this. This monotheistic worldview?
- [05:16]
D
Yeah. So henotheism, it's a kind of religiosity that is similar to monotheism, but with a distinctive difference. So polytheism, of course, is the belief in many gods or the worship of many gods. Monotheism is the insistence there's only one God. And henotheism says there are other gods, but there's one God that I'm going to worship. And it was not very broad. Within the Roman world, the Greek and the Roman worlds, it was found in parts of Judaism. Judaism starts out as henotheistic, even in the Ten Commandments. Commandments. You know, depending on how you number the ten Commandments, the first commandment in some numerations is, you shall have no other gods before me. So the commandment is not that you shall believe in only one God. The commandment is, you shall not worship any gods ahead of me. So there are other gods, but none of them are superior or to be worshiped instead of Yahweh, the God of Israel. So within Judaism, you get henotheism. You do get henotheism within parts of the pagan world as well, though. There's a kind of a religion that was floating around the Roman Empire about the time of the beginning of Christianity. In the first several years centuries of Christianity, that was a worship of a God that was sometimes didn't have a name. Sometimes this God was just called the Hypsistos Theos, which means in Greek, means the highest God. And the worshipers of this highest God believed that this was the most powerful, most all knowing, the most everything God, and that who was superior to all the other gods. And since this one was superior, that's the one that they would worship. And so when Christians came along and said, you know, there is one God, this resonated with people who knew about these others who thought there was only one God.
- [07:01]
C
So it's not completely out of the ordinary for there to be a supreme God thought of in the ancient world and with different ancient cults. We mentioned very briefly earlier that early Christianity was very much a missionary religion. And I think a lot of modern Christianity still is. Was this drive to convert people also something that would have been familiar to pagans in the Roman world, or was it peculiar to Christianity?
- [07:26]
D
Well, so I would say that the henotheism was something that, you know, some people knew about. The idea of evangelism was something like, whoa, what? That was not what happens. Evangelizing for your God is kind of like trying to convince people to leave their hometown and come to your city. I know some New Yorkers who believe that this is the place and, you know, you really need to move to New York. But basically this isn't even on our radar that you favor one city and say it's the only place to be and mean it seriously. But it's because the pagan religions were polytheistic and they supported the worship of many gods and didn't insist on the worship of just one God. The only place in the Roman and Greek worlds where you really get something like conversion, where people insist this is the right way and you need to be like, this is not in the realm of religion or traditional religions. It's in the realm of philosophy. Philosophers in antiquity took various stands and they were in different schools of thought. So in the. About the time of the. Of early Christianity, there were followers of Plato, Platonists, and they're followers of. Of Aristotle still, even though this is centuries earlier. But you have groups like the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Cynics. And there, there are these various groups of philosophers and their followers who believe that they have the right understanding of what it means to live a good life and to live well and to enjoy life. And they had different views about that. And they were at each other's throats sometimes, and they maligned each other and attacked each other and they tried to get converts because they thought, if you don't understand how to live well, you're going to be miserable. And so they're trying to urge people to follow their philosophical views. And so these philosophical groups were missionary in that sense. It. It wasn't related to their worship of the gods is related to their understanding of how you ought to live. But the Christians are kind of like that because they're insisting, you've got to live a Christian life unlike the philosophers. It's not so that you'll have a contented life. It's so that you'll have an afterlife, a good afterlife.
- [09:35]
C
I see. Thank you. Now, in pagan religions, we've already said if you decided to worship another God, there wasn't a requirement to stop worshiping one that you were already worshiping. And obviously Christianity was different. How important was this kind of exclusivity clause in the growth of Christianity? In one of your books, you mentioned that obviously for each convert to Christianity, there was one more Christian and one less pagan, which must have had an impact.
- [10:02]
D
Hit boy, did it. Yeah. I want to be clear. These things that we're talking about now, these are not my ideas. I wrote a book on it. In my book the Triumph of Christianity. This issue of exclusivity I got from a very important scholar of early Christianity, Ramsay McMullen, who was a professor at Yale University in the Classics department. But he argued that this business of Christian exclusivity was really important because, as we've said in the pagan religions, there was nothing like that. If you were worshiping Zeus, that didn't preclude you from worshiping Ares or Apollo or Artemis. You worship the gods that you feel would be most useful for you. You worship your household gods and you worsh. Your city gods, and you. And so you're worshiping a lot of gods, and nobody insisted that you worship their God. So, you know, if you decide not to worship Zeus, that's. That's fine. If you've got your own gods. They did want you to worship the city gods or the state gods, but they weren't particularly fussy about it. And there was no idea there was one God you had to worship. Jews did worship their own God, but again, they weren't out trying to make converts. And so it didn't really make much of an impact. But when you have a religion that believes in trying to converting people to their view and insists that their view is the only right view, that combination of evangelism and exclusivity has a very powerful effect. There was nothing like it in the empire. But, you know, it meant that over time, as people did come to the Christian faith, they were leaving all the other faiths. Unlike the other faiths where the other religions, if a lot more people start worshiping Apollo, it doesn't stop people from worshiping Zeus. But if you become Christian, you stop being pagan. And it has this interesting effect that most people wouldn't have thought of that. MacMullen makes a deal of that. I think he's absolutely right. And so just as an analogy, he doesn't quite Put it this way. But as an analogy, suppose you and I are both gung ho for our particular religion and you are a Christian who believe that Christ is the only way, that the God of Jesus is the only God. And I'm a worshiper of Apollo, and I think Apollo's great Apollo. People ought to worship Apollo. And suppose this would never happen because pagans were not missionaries. But suppose you and I go into a town and we get a group of about 100 people and all of them are pagan. They worship various gods, but none of them worships Apollo, and none of them worships Jesus or the God of Jesus. And so suppose we both give a presentation and suppose we're equally convincing. Okay, we're equally convincing. If we are equally convincing, then out of that hundred people, Christians gain 50 converts and lose no one. Paganism loses 50 people and gains no one. And so Christianity can't lose. And like that, you don't. And the reality, as we're going to see the reality, you don't have to convince half of them, you have to convince a couple of them. And you do that for a few hundred years and it takes off.
- [13:07]
C
Suddenly there are, there are no pagans left. Would this exclusivity of, I mean, it must have seemed very strange to a pagan audience. Did it not act as a deterrent for potential converts?
- [13:18]
D
I think it did for some and maybe for a lot. We have a number of pagan opponents of Christianity who ridicule this idea even into the time when, in the, in the fourth century, for example, when you start getting lots of people converting. Because if you have a rate of growth, suppose you've got 5% of the you talk to every year convert, or even 1%. Well, you know, after, after a number of years, those start adding those number. Because if you've got 10 people you talk to and you convert, you know, 10% of them, that means, you know, you got one. But if you're talking to 100 people, then you got 10. If you got a thousand people, you got 100. So the more you get, the more the, the rate, you know, the numbers keep growing. So what happens is when the numbers are taken off, you get these intellectuals who are pagan who are really find Christianity offensive. And their line is very much what you're suggesting, where they say, look, what's this exclusivity? There are lots of ways to the divine. You know, they're not one way to the divine. There are lots of paths and you all are just, you know, you're nuts. What do you mean? There's only one way. Why would that be? And so, yeah, it was an issue for the opponents.
- [14:27]
C
What then were the mechanics of the spread of Christianity? Do we have like lots of full time missionaries going out from churches or does it work in a different way?
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D
Right, this is something that's interesting and again, that people probably wouldn't expect, I think probably people would expect, is that you have all these missionaries being sent out. You know, that the apostles go out and they preach the gospel, they convert people and they commission them to become missionaries and they go out and they become missionaries and, and so forth. The reality is we don't know very many missionaries in Christianity in the first 400 years. We, we hardly know. Paul was one and Paul mentions some others, Cephas and so on. But between Paul and the Emperor Constantine, you can count the number of people that we know of who are missionaries on one hand in the entire Roman Empire. And so there may have been missionaries, but they were, they're not really talked about much. When we try to imagine, like how do you convert masses of people, we tend to think, well, you got to have a lot of conversions at once. And so, you know, you must have Billy Graham rallies or something, and you must have like a thousand people at once. I mean, how do you get from 20 people to 3 million people in 300 years without converting the masses? That would require evangelistic rallies. But there were no evangelistic rallies. It turns out that probably there weren't even people getting up on their soapbox and preaching in a public forum. That's the other thing you'd expect. Like, you know, somebody goes into town and gets up and starts preaching to the crowd. That doesn't seem to be what happened either. The mechanics is really pretty interesting. It's one person tells another and converts them over time. It's personal connections in conversation. That appears to be how it happened. And what scholars have done is they've devised this understanding of how that can work by network theory. This is a theory within theoretical discourse, within sociology and such, that you and I have a lot of contacts with people. You know, we have friends, we have family, we have neighbors, we have work associates, and we have these webs of connections. And if you are trying to convince somebody of something, you're not just convincing one person. You have these webs and these webs. If you start converting different people in different parts of the web, they convert other people in different parts of the web and it spreads like that. And so it appears like that it's word of mouth, one person Converting a number over a long time, and then that person converting other people converts other people.
- [16:52]
C
Do we also have instances where maybe one person in a family was converted, and they go on to bring their entire family through as well. So that one conversion, maybe not instantly, but quite quickly, nets another five, six, seven people.
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D
That absolutely did happen. And it happened in a way that wouldn't happen today very much, at least in American culture. And it has to do with the structure of the family in the Roman world. In the Roman world, families tended to be extended. It wasn't just a nuclear family, but you lived with. You lived with your parents and grandparents and children and servants and slaves. And the household would be, you know, it would be a unit. And the city was organized as kind of a big family, a big organizational unit. And as in the city, you've got. You've got administrator, you've got a head honcho in the family, the father of the. The breadwinner winner, The. The father, the pater familiars, he's called the pater familiar, the father of the family. He made decisions about the family's social life and religious life. And so the potter familiars would decide what kind of religious practices the family would engage in. That means if, for example, just early on, if the apostle Paul converted a man in Corinth who had a family, so he'd have a wife and say he'd have a couple kids and a couple slaves maybe. And so, I mean, might be eight people in there, nine people. If you convert this man, he puts Christianity onto his family and the family becomes Christian. Even in the New Testament, it says, you know, she converted and all her household. He converted and all his household. It's because the. The head of the family, whoever it is. So people might object to that and say, look, you got a guy who converts and then his wife, she's not really converting. She's doing what he tells her to do. And that would be right. But over time, she's going to join in, too, because this is the worship she gets to know and she. Then the kids and then. And so the family. You convert one person, you convert seven or eight people, if you convert them. And so part of that is how it's spreading.
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C
What was so attractive about Christianity that over time, so many people were willing to forego all of their prior religious commitments and practices?
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D
This is one of the leading questions that scholars have wrestled with for a very long time. What was it about Christianity that made it succeed? And there are a lot of theories about that that have been floated around among scholars and in the general population. The old view that was pretty common 100 years ago or so was that paganism was obviously a bankrupt set of religions. You've got all these gods, they're doing all sorts of crazy things. They got these myths, these gods having adultery and committing murder and just doing nasty things. And nobody could believe that stuff. Come on. And so the idea there was that the pagan religions were failing and that Christianity then came to fill the void. There's a vacuum created by the failure of paganism. One variation of that that you hear frequently today is that Christianity was just obviously superior. It's obviously better to have one God instead of a bunch of gods. And it's better to have a Bible than not to have a Bible. And so those are theories that many people have, but they don't appear to be right at all. Paganism, we know now from, we know from the archaeological record, among other things, was thriving in the period. And most people had no problem with their religion. And religiosity was going along just fine when Christianity came along. So that wasn't it. And most people didn't look at Christianity and say, oh, there's something superior. They thought it was crazy. And so we might have an episode or two on how crazy they thought it was and why and how that got manifested, but so that wasn't it. So what was it? As I said, there are a lot of theories about that and it's something things scholars have to decide.
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C
Was Christianity more or less appealing depending on what social group you were coming from?
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D
Yes and no. I mean, it kind of. It has to do. It actually that question has to do with what it was that Christianity, what probably did make it appeal. Here's a common theory too, that you'll hear a lot, which is that Christianity provided a way for lower class people to come together on occasion and to celebrate their lives together and provided help for those who are in need in the community. So the idea is that, you know, rich folk, they get along fine just by themselves. And in the ancient world, rich folk mainly stuck to themselves. We don't have a lot of public charity or governmental support for the poor or even concern for the poor among the rich in the ancient world, they had a different way of doing things. And so the theory here is that since, you know, the vast majority of the world is poor, in the Christian communities they come together and the Christians believe in helping the poor and taking care of those who are defenseless and providing what people need for the homeless and for the hungry and The Christians did that. And so this theory is that Christianity provided kind of social safety network that wasn't available within the society at large. And outsiders realized that, and they realized they could have their needs met if they would join the church. And so they joined the church. And so that's a theory that a lot of people have, and some scholars have suggested it as well. But there's a problem with it. There are lots of problems with it, actually. I mean, it seems appealing and, you know, maybe that happens sometime. But in my book, the Triumph of Christianity, I try to explain why that probably isn't it. That's probably not why Christianity succeeded. For one thing, whenever converts on record talk about why they converted, that's never the reason that's given. They don't talk about that. They don't talk about the benefits within the community. And before Constantine, most of the Christian communities were closed. It wasn't like having the Methodist church on the, on the corner that you could just go to on Sunday morning. Christians were worshiping with Christians and outsiders, you know, weren't. We're kind of left out in the dark in terms of what was happening on the inside. I don't think there's a lot of that going on. And so I'm not sure that that's the explanation.
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C
So what other explanations have people come up with in there? Are there any that seem to more fully account for the, the data that, that exist from the ancient world?
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D
Well, I'll tell you one that's really interesting that I think doesn't work at all. And then I'll tell you the one that I think works, the one that I don't think works at all was there was a book some years ago that was called the Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. It's a very interesting book. He's a sociologist of modern religion, so he's not an expert in antiquity, but he applied his sociological knowledge to early Christianity. And one of the things, the things he argued is that Christianity succeeded because they had superior health care.
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C
That's not one I've heard before.
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D
No, I know. And his argument was that studies have shown that simple nursing, even apart from modern medicine, simple nursing increases survival rates when people are ill, deathly ill. And he points out that in the early Christian sources we're told that when a big plague would come along, I mean, there were some plagues, and at the end of the third century, there was a plague during the reign of Marcus Aurelius that makes Covid look like kindergarten play. I mean, it killed. Oh, my God, it killed a huge percentage of the population. We have people who are writing at the period. And Christians said, you know, these pagans, they know that if they get in contact with an ill person, that they'll get it. And so the pagans were leaving their families to die and not taking care of them, whereas Christians are going in to help. And so Rodney Stark says, so they probably survived more. So by the end of the plague, there were more Christians, you know, and that. That was his theory. And it's a great. It's a great theory. I really like the theory, but there's no way it works because what happens is when the Christians go in to take care of the sick people, they get the disease. And so the Christians are dying off more, they were dying off less. And in fact, the sources say precisely that. They don't say what he said. The Christian sources said, yeah, well, you know, you know, we're so dedicated, we'll go in and nurse, you know, somebody we love and then they carry us out next. Oh, God, yeah. So there are all sorts of explanations like that that don't work, I think.
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C
So which is the one that you think does work?
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D
Right. This, again, is a view that Ramsay McMullen developed, and I think is absolutely right. It has to do with why people worship the gods in the first place. Christians were not simply inventing a new religion. That was nothing like anything anybody had heard before. There were similarities between Christianity and other religions and the Bible. Biggest similarity is, why are you worshiping the gods? Well, why do pagans worship the gods? Because the gods can provide things for them that they cannot provide for themselves. They can't make sure it rains. You know, I can't make sure it rains. I can't make sure my crop grow. I have no way to make corn grow, per se. I mean, I can watch it grow and I can do what it would take, but I can't make it grow. I can't make my livestock reproduce. I can't make sure my wife doesn't die in childbirth. I can't make sure the infant doesn't die. I can't make sure I win this war. I mean, the things that keep us alive, we can't control. Only the gods can control. So the pagans worship the gods because the gods could control things that the people couldn't control themselves. It was all about divine power. Not in a cynical way at all. Not in a cynical way at all. But that's, you know, you worship God because God is superior and can help you in the pagan World. There was this kind of. There's this Latin phrase, just three words, do ut, des. And the idea is that you would worship the gods by, like, sacrificing to them, giving them offerings. You would do that to them so that they would do something for you. Do means I give ut in order that des you might give. So I'm doing this sacrifice for you, to honor you, so that you might help me in my situation here. Okay, so pagans are worshiping because they believe that the gods are powerful and able to help them. What if you have a new religion that comes along that argues that their God is far more powerful than your gods, and then all gods put together, well, if they convince you of that, then of course you'll worship that God. That's why you're worshiping the gods. And so what Christians are doing by word of mouth, you know, not in evangelistic rallies or probably not on soapboxes, but one family member to the neighbor who talks to her neighbor, is telling stories about how powerful the Christian God is and that the Christian God can heal people, that the Christian God can control the weather. That last week my daughter had a very serious illness, and my Christian friend came in and prayed over her, and she got better just like that. You know, we had this drought. The reason this drought ended, these Christians over here were praying. They. They're the ones who ended this drought. And, you know, you come out and you say, look, our religion is based on God raising somebody from the dead. That's how powerful he is.
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C
What's more powerful than that?
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D
What is more powerful than that? Moreover, our. Our apostles can do that. They've raised people from the dead. So what you do is you convince them that your God is more powerful. You don't have to convince a lot of people. You convince a couple people, and over time, those couple people convert. A couple people convert, and every time somebody converts, they leave paganism. And it's the only religion doing that that's taking people out of one set of religious traditions into their own.
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C
Slightly related to the idea of the power of God, I think, is the Christian beliefs in the afterlife, which are very different to what had been the norm at the time. Did those beliefs also play a role in the growth of Christianity?
- [28:36]
D
They certainly appear to. The modern idea of fire and brimstone sermon goes all the way back. You find it, in fact, interestingly, in a number of accounts of people converting from the ancient world. One of the things I did in working on my book on the triumph of Christianity is I looked up Every ancient conversion account that exists, so far as I know, and tried to figure out why, you know, why are people converting? And in almost every case, it's because they believe the Christians can do miracles or that their God does miracles better than the pagan miracles. But the other reason is because these Christians will do a miracle and they'll say, okay, our God is more powerful, but he's not only more powerful in this life, he's powerful in the life to come. And if you don't believe in him, you're going to face torment. And so Christians start preaching heaven and hell. It's an interesting strategy because pagans, by and large, didn't believe in an afterlife. And so how do you convince somebody about heaven and hell if they don't? That isn't even within their categories. Well, the way you do it is it's like somebody, a salesman who has a new product doing something that nobody's ever seen done before. You know, like you invent a dishwasher, for example, and nobody's heard of a dishwasher or dishwasher. It's your husband, you know, or something, you know, but now you've got a dishwasher, and you create the need for the thing so that somebody feels they need it, even though they didn't know they needed it. And so you create the sense that you've got to escape heaven and hell, even among people who've never even heard of heaven and hell. So you create the need, and then you feel you're the one who fills the need. And so that's how they did it. And so, yeah, preaching of heaven and hell was a big deal.
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C
That's remarkable. And the last question I had before we moved on, how many conversion accounts do we have from antiquity?
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D
Well, you know, we don't have millions of them, but we have some. And in a variety of texts going back to the New Testament, the first. Well, the first conversion account we hear of is Paul. Our first Christian author says that. That he saw Jesus alive after his death. Okay, so that's a miracle. And that's. That's what converts him. When Paul writes his letters, he himself says to his congregations that he needs them to remember that he did signs and miracles among them. So he's converting people by doing miracles. Boy, we wish we knew what that was all about. But when you get to the Book of Acts, first account of the spread of Christianity. Now, this is not a letter, it's a narrative, and a lot of it is legendary. But whenever people convert in the Book of Acts, when the apostles convert somebody. It's always by doing a miracle. Starting on the day of Pentecost, in Acts chapter two, a miracle happens and thousands of people convert. A few days later, Peter heals somebody in the temple, somebody who's always been lame, unable to walk, and he heals him and everybody realizes that he's healed this person through the power of Jesus. And thousands of people convert. And throughout Acts, all of these people are converting. It's always because of miracles. And when you get outside of the New Testament, it's the same thing. You have all these stories about the apostles that are legendary, but in every case, they're converting people through miracles. And even in writers who are very intelligent, highly educated, sensible writers, they tell us it's because of miracles. St. Augustine in the fifth century has a long section in his book the City of God that explains all of these miracles that are happening that are converting people. So I think there are conversion accounts, there are very few that are historical in nature. There are a lot of legendary ones and there are lots of ones that people talk about, but in most cases it has to do with the power of God.
- [32:15]
C
That's really, really interesting. Thank you so much. We're going to take a brief break and then we will be back with some more information about the upcoming conference, new insights into the New Testament. And then Barth is getting on his soapbox.
- [32:28]
B
Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historic historical truth, then you won't want to miss Bart Ehrman's free webinar. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such as, why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John John? @Barterman.com Authors thank you.
- [33:48]
C
And we are back talking about the conference, but we've got two more presenters to talk about today. First up is Dale Allison, who will be talking on Echoes of Antiquity, Old Testament threads woven into the Gospels.
- [34:03]
D
Yeah. So this, this conference is going to be great. This is a Bible conference by scholars given to non scholars. These are the top scholars, some of the top scholars anywhere in the known cosmos. And they know how to communicate to regular old folk. And so all of the talks will be on the Gospels and Jesus and the Gospels and Dale Allison. Dale Allison is emeritus now from Princeton Theological Seminary. He's my age. We're absolute contemporaries. If I had to pick somebody that I would say is probably the most highly respected scholar of Jesus in the Gospels in the country, if he's not number one, he's right up there. I don't know who else would be above him. He is the real deal. So his lecture, he's given this thing on echoes of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Matthew. I don't know exactly what he's going to say, but it's a very rich topic. He and his mentor in graduate school wrote the authoritative multi volume, three volume commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. A very learned, erudite thing. And he wrote a book, one of his early books was about how Jesus is being portrayed by Old Testament illusions in Matthew as somebody like Moses, he knows this stuff inside out. So this is, this is going to be a good lecture by somebody who is absolutely as good as you can get.
- [35:18]
C
One of my favorite things actually about studying ancient literature is looking at the interplay between old texts and new texts and how motifs and themes are kind of taken and woven through a new piece of literature is really interesting.
- [35:31]
D
Well, these early Christian authors, they of course knew the, the Hebrew Bible when they knew it well, man, they could use it in ways that some ways you don't even notice. Like you wouldn't notice unless you really know the Old Testament yourself. And Dale, Dale is going to show some of that intertextuality. Really good. Yeah.
- [35:46]
C
Robin Walsh is also going to be doing a presentation and she, I interviewed her a couple of weeks ago for the podcast, but the title of her presentation is From Illiteracy to Instant Inspiration. Unveiling the Minds behind the Gospels.
- [35:59]
D
Yeah. So Robin, Dale, Alice and I are a couple of the old geezers in the field. And Robin is this rising star. She's written this book on understanding the Gospels as literature within the Greek and Roman worlds that came out a few years ago. I think it's a revision of her dissertation that she did at Brown University. And people are talking about this book more than anything book on the New Testament I've heard in years, because people think this is really interesting. It's going an entirely new direction on how to deal with what we know about the authors of the New Testament based on inference. And she argues that the inferences we've drawn that people like me have drawn are wrong. And so her lecture will be, I think is going to be related to that, that issue that you find in her book on early Christian literature that came out a few years ago. She's very sharp, as people will know if they watched your podcast. And she's very interesting and she knows a lot. That's one that I'm really, really looking forward to.
- [36:59]
C
Yeah, me too. And for those who are interested in what we're talking about, this is New Insights into the New Testament, which is a conference, an online conference aimed exclusively and explicitly at non academics. So you do not need to have even an undergraduate degree in New Testament scholarship or the history of religion or anything to attend and to understand and enjoy yourselves. All these presentations are aimed at lay people with no prior understanding or knowledge. And it will run from the 23rd to the 24th of September. There are a total of 10 scholars who will be presenting and each week we're going through a couple of them to give you a bit of a taste of what you can expect. The cost is $59.95. The early bird pricing is $49.95. And that's available until Saturday, August 26th. And you can read more or sign up at www.ntconference.org. and now Bart is going to get on his soapbox.
- [37:56]
D
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [38:10]
C
Bart, but what are you soapboxing about this week?
- [38:14]
D
Right, so I did a, we called it a course on July 23rd that was a four lecture course, was largely autobiographical. I called it why I'm Not a Christian. How Leaving the Faith Led to a Life of More Purpose and Meaning. This was about, you know, how I left the Christian faith and I dealt with how I got into the faith and then by converting to be a born again Christian when I was a teenager and then, and then end up leaving the faith. I deal with my scholarship in these talks, but I also talk about how the scholarship didn't lead me away from the faith. What led me away from the faith was my trying to wrestle with why there's so much pain and misery in the world. So about 30 years ago, I left the faith. And one of the things I talked about there, like, it's still irritating me now that I brought it up again to my, my audience then and started thinking about it. I'm still irritated about it. I thought I'd talk about this on my soapbox here, which is, you know, so I was this. I was a really committed evangelical Christian, very committed conservative evangelical Christian. And eventually then I became a agnostic atheist. And so that's what I am now. The thing that I'm. I get upset about is people telling me why I left the faith, people who don't know me. I get this all the time. I get emails from people who wouldn't, they wouldn't know me from Adam. I mean, I'm a little bit younger than Adam, but it's like they know nothing about me. One of the things I'm always told is that, you know, you just, you know, you, you over intellectualize the faith. You didn't have any kind of spiritual relationship with God. You were, you know, you're just one of these intellectual geeks. And so, you know, when you found some contradictions, you left the faith. What? That's not even true. I mean, it's just like even. It's not true. When I started finding contradictions in things, I changed my understanding of the Bible. But I was a Christian for years and years after that. There are scholars who've mentioned in their books about why I left the faith that are just completely wrong, including friends of Min. I have an academic friend of mine, evangelical, who wrote a book claiming that I left Christianity, became an atheist when I realized that the manuscripts of the New Testament had differences among them. What? Are you crazy? I knew that when I was at Moody Bible Institute. Are you kidding? And so people have. But the other, the big one that people always say, the one most common is people say, look, the reason you left the faith is because you started out as a fundamentalist. And when your fundamentalist assumptions were undermined, then you thought you had to leave the faith. If you had been a Christian like me, where I don't have fundamentalist assumptions, then you never would have left the faith because you wouldn't. You'd realize that these problems aren't really the big problems. And again, I was raised in a church. I was active in the church for all my life until I was 15, when I wasn't a fundamentalist. As a fundamentalist, for I don't know, seven, nine years. Then I was a. I was a moderate mainline Christian who wasn't a fundamentalist at all. The very liberal Christian for years and years. I don't know. There's no real reason they should get under my skin, but it really does, because I think what it does is people try to explain why someone who knows about the faith would leave it, and they can't believe they'd actually have reasons. It must be because something's weird about them. You know, they're too fundamentalist or they're too intellectual or something. Something. So I am not, you know, I don't, in this course, I don't at all encourage anybody to leave the faith or, you know, or to convert or to deconvert to anything. I was just telling my own story. But, you know, if somebody wants to kind of attack my story, they ought to at least get the story right. That's what I'd suggest. All right, so I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't. It's all about me, obviously, but I
- [41:49]
C
think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to get irate about. Josh gets similar accusations leveled at him quite regularly. And you've left because you just want to sin. And I'm like, I. I think I get more irate about it than. Than he does. It's just the level of arrogance. I think you have to. Have to assume that you know someone else's mind and religious journey better than they possibly could is quite breathtaking.
- [42:11]
D
It is. I do not frequently get. You just left so you could sin. I think people know that I'm just, you know, as moral or immoral as I was before.
- [42:24]
C
Well, thank you very much for sharing that, Bart. And before we finish for the week, could you just summarize what we spoke about and again give people the name of the book where they can find out some more?
- [42:33]
D
The book is called the Triumph of Christianity. It's written for general audience. It's not written for scholars. It's written to explain how it worked. Because if the New Testament's right, which I think it has to be in this case, it. The followers of Jesus started out as a small group of maybe 20 people after his death who thought he had been raised from the dead. That's the first group within 300 years. It's something like 3 million people. Then it keeps growing, and by the end of the 4th century, it's 30 million people. And how do you explain that? Is it a miracle? That's what some people would say. Or are there explanations for it on the historical realm. And I try to explain historically in the book and here on the podcast, what how it happened. People were convinced that the Christian God was more powerful than the pagan gods. They convinced a few people here and there, and over time the number started avalanching and it ended up taking over the Western world, in part because these Christians, unlike virtually everybody else in the ancient world, were evangelistic, trying to convert people to their faith. And they insisted that they had the only right answer. And so if you combine those two things, if you convince anybody as you're trying to do, then they leave their other religions and they become a Christian. And over time, that leads to the triumph of Christianity.
- [43:50]
C
Bart, thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge. Audience, thank you 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 also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. and if you are interested in signing up for the New Insights into the New Testament Conference, that is over at www.ntconference.org. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [44:22]
D
We are getting to the heart of what I do next time. I've been a New Testament scholar for a very long time and many people don't understand what that actually means. What is New Testament scholarship and like, how's it different from just reading the Bible? You know, where did it come from? How did it start? And it's a very, very interesting story how scholarship in the New Testament began and developed and what it, what it has led to. And it's not a widely known story. And so that's, that's what we'll be talking about.
- [44:48]
B
Thank you all and goodbye. 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 Herman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.