← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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- [01:01]
Megan Lewis
The question of how much of the Bible is historically accurate and how much is myth or legend is both interesting and important to a lot of people, believer and atheist alike. Some insist it's accurate down to the last detail, while others label it as fairy tales from beginning to end. Today I'll be talking to Dr. Bart Ehrman about how scholars distinguish history from myth within the gospels of the New Testament, why it's important to do so, and exactly what a myth is. Anyway,
- [01:33]
Podcast Host Megan Lewis
welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
- [01:55]
Megan Lewis
Good morning, Bart. How are you today?
- [01:57]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, I'm doing well. So we're recording this on January 1st, I had a reasonably sober evening and so I'm doing pretty well this morning. How about you? How are you doing?
- [02:09]
Megan Lewis
Similarly and similarly sober. I was lamenting about the fact that we're very boring people in this household. We eat well, neither Josh nor I drink an awful lot and we go to bed early because, well, everyone will know we have many small children and they wake up so early in the morning.
- [02:26]
Bart Ehrman
The deal is it doesn't matter if you're boring to other people. The matter is whether you're happy and content.
- [02:31]
Megan Lewis
That is true and I will say we are both things.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So, you know, there you go. I mean, the Greek philosopher said, that's the whole point. Eudaimonia, Be well contented with your life. That's the key.
- [02:41]
Megan Lewis
Perfect. Well, Josh spent a lot of the evening building a fort in our living room for the children. So I was Cooking, which is rare normally. He does the cooking. I was cooking. He built a fort. We all sat down and watched a movie. Children ran around. It was a really lovely evening actually.
- [02:54]
Bart Ehrman
That sounds great.
- [02:55]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, it was good. And I know we're a little bit late given that this is airing a couple of weeks after, but happy belated New Year to everyone. And we are going to be talking today, as I said, about how to distinguish myth from history in the Gospels. Before we get to that, I have a couple of reminders. Our bonus segment today is listeners questions. We're trying to get through as many of those as we can. We are also going to be talking briefly about the the course that is coming up taught by Hugo Mendez. This will be your last chance to join it live, which is an introduction to the New Testament. And Hugo, you and he collaborated on the most recent introduction to the New Testament book. Am I right on that?
- [03:35]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I wrote this textbook in the 90s and it's in its eighth edition now. And I got fed up with doing new editions. It's like, oh God, I just can't do another edit. Hugo is a fantastic New Testament scholar who teaches at unc. We hired him at UNC a long time ago and he's a really, really top level New Testament scholar and he's a fantastic teacher. And so I asked him to co author the 8th edition with me and I asked him to teach this course for us. It's going to be a spectacular course on exploring the New Testament.
- [04:07]
Megan Lewis
I did an interview with Hugo a couple of weeks ago. So if people are interested in like who he is and his presenting style, that would be a great place to start. But this is a 27 lesson course mimicking a university level semester long introduction. So it's going to be fantastic. I'll have more details and links further on in the show. We also have a live AMA with author Paul Ends coming up. And then I'm going to be giving you information about the Biblical Studies Academy's special pricing which is coming to an end very, very soon. So if you're interested in checking that out, now is definitely the time to be doing that. But before all of that, we're going to talk about myth and history and the Gospels. And I wanted to start by asking, when you were a Christian, did you view the Gospels as historical? And when did you really start to consider that they may actually be something else?
- [04:57]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I suppose like everyone else who grew up in a Christian household, I just assumed the Gospels were historical. From the time I heard the term Gospel. I continued with that view through high school, had my born again experience, went to Moody Bible Institute. I certainly thought they were completely historical then and through my entire undergraduate career and the beginning of my master's degree at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so I had always assumed that they were historical. And I was one of these conservative evangelicals who wanted to prove that everything about the faith was true. And so I was interested in Christian apologetics. And so I spent a good bit of time trying to prove that the New Testament had no mistakes of any kind, including historical mistakes in the Gospels. I suppose I held that view until probably my third year in my master's program when I started realizing that it was a problematic view.
- [05:46]
Megan Lewis
Was there a particular turning point or conversation or class that you experienced that made you make that switch, or was it more of a gradual transition?
- [05:55]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it was kind of both. I mean, I'd taken Greek in college, and by the time I was in graduate school, I was decently prepared in Greek. And I was reading the New Testament in Greek, and I was just reading it very, very carefully. When you read a book in the ancient language, especially if you're not like, completely fluent, you got to go slowly. You look at every word, trying to figure out what it means.
- [06:15]
Megan Lewis
And.
- [06:15]
Bart Ehrman
And I was kind of at that stage. And when you. When you read the New Testament slowly and especially when you take gospels in comparison with one another, like you read a line in Matthew, then the line in Mark in Greek, like there's a quotation of the Old Testament in Mark, you look at what was said in the Old Testament, you look at very carefully. When you start doing it with that kind of care, you just start noticing things. And I got to a point, the kind of crashing point was I realized that in Mark, Chapter two, when Jesus says that David went into the temple when Abiathar was the high priest, that in fact, if you read the book of Samuel, it's not true. His father Ahimelech was the high priest. And once I realized that, well, you know, that is a mistake. It's just a mistake. You know, I tried to get around it. So once I started finding tiny little mistakes, then I started finding bigger mistakes and bigger. Then pretty soon I realized, oh, my God, these things are. They're not just historically accurate documents, and there's historical accurate material in them, but there's also historically inaccurate material.
- [07:14]
Megan Lewis
Now, before we get too deep into the conversation, we should probably take a moment to define our terms so everyone listening, and we are all on the same page. So could you just talk a little bit about the differences between history, myth and legend?
- [07:29]
Bart Ehrman
You know, it's really important to understand what these terms are and in part because scholars use them differently. Many scholars do. Many scholars use them differently from the way normal people would. This became especially clear to me when I started teaching at Rutgers. Actually, I started teaching Rutgers in 1984 and I inherited somebody else's class. The woman who'd been teaching the class had to take an emergency medical leave. And so they asked me to come and fill in. And she was using a textbook on the New Testament written by a University of Chicago scholar named Norman Perrin, who is a very famous and well known New Testament scholar who had written a textbook. And in his textbook he would frequently refer to the myth of Jesus, death and resurrection. I thought that is not the right term to be using here because these students are not going to understand what you're talking about. Because he meant something specific about myth. And the students, of course, you know, when we use myth today, we just mean it's something that's not true and that's problematic. And so we can talk more about the precise definition of myth in a moment. But what I would say is that usually when scholars use the term mythology, they're referring to stories that did not happen historically, but that involved the actions of the gods. And so you get Greek and Roman myths, for example. And so these are usually referring to non historical figures who involved with the gods in one way or another, or just the gods themselves. The term legend typically gets used of historically incorrect information. So fictional information about a historical person. And so you can have legends with those definitions. You could have legends about George Washington or Julius Caesar, but there wouldn't be myths if they're fictional accounts. Whereas if you've got accounts of Zeus or Jupiter or something, those would be myths. That is kind of the basic definition. But when it comes to biblical studies, it turns out that there's kind of a different definition of myth.
- [09:30]
Megan Lewis
So when we're talking about biblical studies, then what is that definition and how does it shift how you think about things?
- [09:37]
Bart Ehrman
So it's kind of similar in some ways. The term myth became important in biblical studies a long time ago, nearly 200 years ago, when David Friedrich Strauss wrote his book Das Leben Jesu the Life of Jesus. The full title was the Life of Jesus Critically Examined. What Strauss argued was that people who had been studying the gospels, scholars who had been studying the gospels before him, had had all made a categorical error. They had thought that the things described in the Gospels were historical. Some scholars, most scholars, the vast majority of scholars thought they were historical because they recounted miracles that God really did. And if you'd been there, you would have seen these miracles happen. But other scholars by this time in the 1830s had come to think that, well, it's describing things that happened, but they were mistaken as miracles because miracles don't happen. And so Jesus really did something like when he's walking on the water, he just knows where the stones are. So he's stepping on the stones and it looks like he's walking on the water. And so in that case, it's a historical event, but it's like misunderstood by the disciples as being a miracle. But everybody had to understand things as a miracle, I mean, as historical. And Strauss came along and he wrote his book where he argued that these stories in the Gospels are not historical either in the literal or the metaphorical sense. They're actually myths. And by that he meant something specific. He has a kind of a technical, specific philosophical understanding of this. He was very closely related to the philosophy of Hegel and influenced by Hegelian philosophy. But to put it in kind of a simple terms, what he meant by myth was a story that looks like history that in fact did not happen, but that conveys an important message. So a history like story that conveys a message and he thought that the stories in the Gospels were like that, that Jesus didn't really walk on the water in either sen. That it's a story that is fabricated in order to elevate some important teaching about who Jesus was. So he called that a myth. I think for our discussion, we don't need to get into the technicalities of it, but if you just keep in mind that a legend is typically like about a historical figure and a myth is about a supernatural event, then that's usually the bifurcation. But the problem with Jesus is that he's a historical figure doing supernatural events. We're kind of in the in between land where it gets a little bit murky. But I'm happy to call it these things, myths, as long as people understand that we're not saying that necessarily, that these are things that are not true. In this weird understanding of Strauss that people still use today, the term myth is something that's true, but it's a true story that didn't happen.
- [12:24]
Megan Lewis
That is obviously quite a specialized meaning.
- [12:28]
Bart Ehrman
Yes.
- [12:29]
Megan Lewis
Have you run into problems with this when you talk to people?
- [12:33]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, like every time I mention it, my kids got used to it. When they were watching movies with me, we'd watch a movie and they'd say, is this a true story? And I'd say, yeah, yeah, it's a true story. Then they'd squint their eyes, they'd say, oh, no, no, no. Did it happen? Yeah. No, it didn't happen, but it's a true story. The way I illustrate this with my undergraduate students is told the story. You probably didn't in England, but in America we tell the story. George Washington and the cherry tree, right? That George Washington, and it's given this axes for his birthday or something, hatchet. And he cuts down the cherry tree. His dad comes home and says, who cut down my cherry tree? And George Washington said, Little George said, well, I cannot tell a lie. I did it. We know that didn't happen. The guy who made up the story later told us that it didn't happen. A guy named Weems, Parson Weems made it up. And we know it didn't happen. We still tell it to our children. Why? Because it conveys the truth. You shouldn't lie. You mess up. Don't tell a lie. It's more important to tell the truth. So there are actually multiple reasons we tell the story, but we tell it even though it didn't happen because we think it's true in a sense. And the idea is that the gospel stories could be like that. They could be conveying a truth about Jesus without necessarily having happened.
- [13:45]
Megan Lewis
Could you give us an example of a story in the New Testament that conveys a truth that scholars think probably is not historically factual?
- [13:54]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah, I could give you like a million of them. I guess there aren't a million stories in the New Testament, but I mean, you know, the story of the virgin birth. Birth in Luke, I don't think Jesus mother was really a virgin. And I think that the story evolved at some point in order to show that Jesus was quite special. We have lots of Greek and Roman stories of gods who impregnate women. And the child born is a divine being. So how do you show that somebody is superior to the rest of us? Wiser than the rest of us, more powerful than the rest of us, more holy than the rest of us, closer to the gods than the rest of us. You haven't borne in a unique way. And so the virgin birth is a story of God. And Luke is God making Mary pregnant so that her child will be called the Son of God. So I don't think it really happened, but I think Luke is less interested in what really happened. In this case, I suppose he thinks that Jesus really was born of a virgin. But for him, the point is not a historical datum. The point is this makes him the Son of God. In other words, he's trying to say something significant, that Jesus is not like the rest of us. So I would say that that would be comparable to a kind of a myth.
- [15:07]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. We'll be getting into a little bit more of that in the second half of the interview. We're going to take a very brief break now. The break is a little longer than normal because it's going to be sharing some testimonials from students in the Biblical Studies Academy. We've been talking a lot about this recently. It's a fantastic initiative and Bart and Chris and all of the other people have been working incredibly hard on launching it and getting it out there. And it's a community for people who are interested in the study of the Bible and wants to take that study from kind of maybe self directed to the next level. Really, it's amazing. The testimonials will really illustrate that. But one of the really important bonus things for me is that you get access to university level courses taught by university professors. So you can pay it's $39.95 a month and get university level like the Introduction to the New Testament which Hugo Mendez is teaching. Mark Goodacre just did a whole lecture series on the Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels, and these are really, really great lectures. And if you're interested in the study of the New Testament, I highly, highly recommend it. And if you're kind of on the fence and you're not sure this is why we're sharing these testimonials so you can and see what actual students have to say about it and kind of gauge for yourself whether it's something you'd find interesting. And the reason we're kind of pushing this now is because the special pricing is coming to an end on January 28 at the moment as kind of a launch offer. You can get a 14 day free trial and then pay $39.95 every month thereafter for as long as you want to keep taking these courses and having access to the community, that pricing is going to be changing. So this is definitely the time to take a look at that.
- [16:55]
Bart Ehrman
Megan, can I just say that, you know, you get all of our biblical, all these courses that I've done on Biblical studies, you get them all, you pay this amount monthly thing and you have this community where you get to talk with people and chat and do events. As you'll see from these testimonies, it really is a good thing.
- [17:10]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 1
The BSA is a constant source of inspiration and motivation compared to studying on my own.
- [17:17]
Bart Ehrman
Once I heard that this was starting, I knew I had to be a part of it. It's been phenomenal.
- [17:22]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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.
- [17:29]
Biblical Studies Academy 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 Journey, you'll get access to interactive courses and a vibrant online community where you can discuss with others, ask questions and get feedback from experts.
- [17:57]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 1
A surprising thing about BSA is how much I love the community aspect.
- [18:03]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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 it doesn't feel like social media.
- [18:15]
Biblical Studies Academy 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 reading and quizzes.
- [18:39]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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.
- [18:50]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 3
I heard that they had 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.
- [19:07]
Biblical Studies Academy 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 and you'll be able to engage in live events and discussions with others who are like you, interested in these topics.
- [20:00]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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.
- [20:21]
Bart Ehrman
The BASA has been the best opportunity I've discovered for engaging in profound biblical, philosophical, meaning of life conversations with people from all walks of life from all over the world.
- [20:34]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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
- [20:44]
Bart Ehrman
of the great deal that they had on the courses, but it was the discussion with the other members that I found that I liked the best.
- [20:53]
Megan Lewis
But what I really appreciate is your genuine and respectful engagement. There is no condescension, just thoughtful and meaningful dialogues.
- [21:03]
Biblical Studies Academy 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.
- [21:25]
Bart Ehrman
It's really quite fantastic and is not going to be matched.
- [21:28]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 1
I finally have the right space for these discussions in my life that nowhere else serves.
- [21:37]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 2
I'm loving it.
- [21:38]
Bart Ehrman
It's a wonderful opportunity both to learn from others and to learn from scholars.
- [21:43]
Biblical Studies Academy Student 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.
- [21:53]
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 bartehrman.com BSA so before our break, Barthes very kindly defined exactly what legend and myth is, the differences between them, and then went into some detail about how biblical scholars define myth, which is a little bit different to how the rest of us might do so. That was really helpful given that we're talking about the study of the Bible. I wanted to start this second section by asking really, when Christians began to view the Gospels as something other than historical, did this start with Strauss or is this something that goes back a little way?
- [22:47]
Bart Ehrman
It goes back before Strauss, but it doesn't go way back. So I think throughout history Christians read the Gospels and simply assumed that what they described is what happened. Starting from the earliest readers of the Gospels. I imagine the Gospel writers themselves thought These things actually happened and on all the way through the Middle Ages. It's really only in the Enlightenment, starting in the 1770s. It begins actually with English deists in the 18th century who started questioning the historical veracity of the Gospels. And then it hit New Testament scholarship in the 1770s. People just are realizing there are contradictions between the accounts so they can't all be true, and that they're all conveying lessons. And it looks like that the authors are trying to say things that may not be historically accurate.
- [23:32]
Megan Lewis
What did these early attempts to try and separate historical fact from stories that are true but not historical really look like?
- [23:43]
Bart Ehrman
There was a lot of assertion and a lot of kind of inference taken from the readings, so that there hadn't yet been developed any kind of serious historical criteria to differentiate between fact and fiction in the Gospels or most anyplace else. I mean, this. This is all going on when the sciences are starting to develop methods where you don't presuppose your conclusions. You actually do experimentation in order to find what actually is reality in the natural world. And that then hits the historians, not just biblical historians, but historians generally, when you're trying to figure out what actually happened, given sources that have discrepancies between them and that have other problems. And so while history is developing as a discipline, you have biblical sciences developing as a discipline. And this is an age unlike ours. This is an age when biblical studies was a major part of university curriculums. It wasn't like a marginalized little thing within a small group of religious studies scholars like it is now. It was like one of the major things in universities. And so the developments in biblical studies affected other fields as well. So basically we're talking about end of the 18th century into the 19th.
- [24:56]
Megan Lewis
So what then are the criteria for deciding whether a story is historical or not?
- [25:01]
Bart Ehrman
Ah, right, yeah.
- [25:02]
Megan Lewis
Is there a checklist you can just go down and say, oh, yes, well, there's a.
- [25:06]
Bart Ehrman
There's a checklist that everybody uses. But I mean, it's really, It's. It's a lot more complicated than the checklist would indicate. And part of the problem is for the last, I don't know, 60 or 70 years, we've had this checklist. And now people are really kind of rolling their eyeballs at the checklist as if the checklist is the thing. I'm sorry if that sounds confusing, but the way biblical scholars approach the Gospels, if they're being critical scholars, so they're bracketing any religious beliefs they have, they might think that the Bible is inspired by God, they might think, you know, that it's like it's completely nonsense. Whatever they think, personally, when they approach the gospels of the New Testament as historical sources, they have to approach them the way they approach any historical source. This is something that a lot of my colleagues who now are objecting to using the Gospels as historical sources. A lot of my colleagues don't realize this because those of us who use the Gospels as historical sources are doing what historians do. So what do historians do when they want to? Suppose you got a bunch of books about Socrates, for example, or about Julius Caesar, or about Charlemagne. Pick your figure. What do you do if you're trying to figure out what actually happened? If you know that the sources are problematic? The sources tend to be problematic because most of the time, these people are not being talked about by eyewitnesses who had seen things happen. They're based on stories that they heard. And that's certainly true of the Gospels. They're written decades after the fact by people who weren't there, who were living in different parts of the world. And so what do historians do with sources like that? They see how many sources they've got. They use every source imaginable. They throw everything in the pile. They don't presuppose that anything is better than another. And so you don't say, well, the Gospel of Matthew is obviously accurate, but the Gospel of Thomas is obviously not accurate. Why would you say that? You take all of the sources, you put them together, and then you try to figure out which ones are the earliest. Where do you get stories about Jesus that are found independently in various sources? So they didn't copy from one another, but they're variously reported that corroborate one another's views without having collaborated with one another. So you want corroboration without collaboration. Where do you get stories that seem to be contrary to what the storytellers wanted to say? You know, if you had a story about Abraham Lincoln, that he was a real thief by somebody who's one of his main followers, you know, you'd probably say, wow, why would he be telling a story that's contrary to what he actually thinks? Well, it's probably because he knew that was right. You look for things. You look for multiple sources. You look for them to independently attest things that happen that confirm one another. You look for statements that are contrary to what the authors wanted to say. You look for things that don't fit in the historical context. If you have a story about, you know, Thomas Jefferson being Upset about his microwave not working. It can't be accurate. And so you look for. Those are called anachronisms. You look for anachronism. So there's a whole range of things that scholars do, whomever they're studying. And that's what scholars do with the historical Jesus. It's just that scholars have come up with a checklist of three items, and people don't like the checklist.
- [28:10]
Megan Lewis
Has this methodology changed a lot over time or has it been relatively consistent?
- [28:14]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's changed over time. What's happened with the historical Jesus is that in the early 20th century, especially after Albert Schweitzer wrote his Quest to the Historical Jesus, many scholars thought that it's really going to be impossible to get back to the historical Jesus because our sources are decades later, based on oral stories told about Jesus that had been circulating for years. And the authors didn't know him, and they contradict each other, and they finally said, look, it's just going to be impossible. And so for about, I don't know, like 30 years, more than 40 years, 50 years, scholars basically weren't that interested in knowing what Jesus himself said and did. But in the 1950s, people started saying, well, you know, actually it's a little bit extreme to say that we do have these sources. And, you know, it's a little bit crazy to say you're not going to use your sources. So they developed ways of doing it in the 50s and into the 60s, and they came up with several criteria. I might as well just tell you the checklist. But sometimes people say that the major criteria are, first, you look for multiple independent attestation. So you want many sources independently reporting something that Jesus said or did. They're independent of one another, and that shows that no one of them made it up. And so the story has to go earlier than that. And so that's better to have. You've got five sources that all say that Jesus told parables about seeds. That's good because, you know, it suggests, well, independently, they all know this, okay? You look for things in the Gospels that seem contrary to what Gospel writers or people telling stories of Jesus would have wanted to say about him. And so, for example, if you have a story about Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist, would the early Christians make up a story about Jesus having a spiritual authority over him, that he was inferior to John the Baptist who baptized him? Of course they wouldn't make up a story like that. That's the reasoning. And so that's called the criterion of dissimilarity. If you've got sayings or deeds of Jesus that are dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted him to say or do, then those at least are probably historical. It doesn't mean that if something's similar, it's not historical, but it does mean that you've got some stuff in there that it's really hard to imagine Christians making that stuff up. So you got those two things. You also looked for anachronisms. And so like if something can be fit in a first century situation in early first century Galilee, sayings of Jesus. If you have sayings of Jesus that don't fit into that context, like later sayings in Gnostic gospels, for example, they're probably not original. You kind of go through all, you go through these criteria and then you
- [30:49]
Megan Lewis
make your judgments when you're going through these criteria. And I'm thinking if you've got multiple texts and you're trying to work out what actually happened, how do you tell if sources are independent of one another or if there's some relationship and reliance?
- [31:04]
Bart Ehrman
This is a prior question that many people don't kind of grasp. But even before you start talking about whether the sources are reliable, you have to determine when they were written, where they were written roughly, and were they reliant upon each other. One of the things that Mark Goodacre talked about a lot in his recent course for the Biblical Studies Academy thing, that semester long course was called the Synoptic Problem Problem. It's the problem of you've got Matthew, Mark and Luke that all have so many of the same stories, usually in the same order, the same sequence, and a lot of times in the same words. So how do you figure out that without somebody copying somebody? Well, it couldn't have happened unless somebody's copying somebody. And so the synoptic problem is figuring out who copied whom. And with that. So apart from what happened or historical or anything else, on other grounds, you try to establish which sources are independent. And for most scholars, there are debates about all of these things all the time. The majority view continues to be that Mark was the first gospel to be written and that Matthew and Luke both use Mark. So that if there's a story in Matthew, Mark and Luke, those are not three witnesses to the story. That's one witness to the story. It comes from Mark. If you've got a kind of story in Mark that is not in Luke and Matthew, you don't have that story in Mark, but you have similar story in Matthew and Luke. Well, they didn't get it from Mark. If they've got it in common, like if they got a saying of Jesus in common, not in Mark, well, they didn't get it from Mark. So wherever they got it from is independent of Mark. So that would be two independent sources. And so the Q source, which people continue to think is a source for Matthew and Luke, that'd be an independent of Mark. The Gospel of John, did it use the synoptics for its materials? Well, most of the synoptics isn't in John, and most of John isn't in the synoptics. And when they do share stuff, it's almost never word for word, except for like. Like a rare couple phrases here and there. And so John looks like it's independent. Maybe Thomas is independent. Matthew has his own materials that they call the M source that aren't in any of the other Gospels. So that's a different source that's independent. Luke, we call it M. Luke has his own sources. We call those L for stories that he has and nobody else. So you start adding them up and you've got. You actually have a good number of sources. You won't have the exact same story in any of these sources, because if you had the same exact story, like we're for Word, you'd suspect copying. But it looks like they're getting these from various traditions. And so what you do is you line up these kind of things as trajectories and you try and trace them back. And if you get a bunch of different trajectories all going to the same place, then that tells you something.
- [33:41]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you very much. Could you give us an example of something from the Gospels that scholars agree is likely to be historical or mostly historical, and then something that is likely a myth?
- [33:54]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, there's a lot of stuff in the Gospels that is almost certainly historical. There are, of course, people who are called mythicists who think the whole thing's made up. And that is an implausible view, in my view. And in view of like 99% of us who do this for a living. You know, obviously I don't think Jesus existed because I've got some religious commitment to the Christian faith because I'm not a Christian, but just on historical grounds. I mean, look, at some point you guys say, man, that's a lot of evidence. So he certainly existed. So if he existed, can you say about him? And most scholars have a. You know, it's not like a checklist, but most people agree with a lot of things. But I'LL just give you one example. Okay. Yeah. The baptism of Jesus. I mentioned that already. We have references to Jesus connecting with John the Baptist with some reference of John baptizing and Jesus being baptized. And you get it in Mark, of course, but you have special material that's found in Matthew that's not in Mark, that he's got from some other source. Some slight changes in Luke, you have sayings of John the Baptist. In Kew, you've got an account in the Gospel of John. So it looks like you've got at least four sources that independently report Jesus connection with John the Baptist early. And you might be able to count other sources as well. So that's independent attestate, multiple independent attestation. It doesn't look like the kind of tradition Christians would have made up. You could imagine some scenario where Christians would make it up, but I mean, lots of people are making it up or something, I don't know. But because in Christianity, the person who's doing the baptizing is spiritually superior to the one being baptized, and Christians wouldn't want to make that one up. So that adds up. It perfectly coheres with an ancient context, the baptism ritual that John is doing. And so it fits in its historical context. So all the indications are that it happened. And I'm pretty sure it happened. That'd be one instance. The thing is, you have to make an argument, and the argument you really make is much fuller than the one I gave you, but that at least gives you the idea.
- [35:53]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Do you have an example of an event that is likely mythological and why it doesn't fit the criteria for classifying it as historical.
- [36:03]
Bart Ehrman
I think what I'll do is I'll talk about one that I think is legendary and one that's mythical, just to confuse things, but like the account of Pilate handing over Barabbas, or wanting to hand over, well, handing over Barabbas instead of Jesus at the trial of Jesus. I don't think there's any way that could be historical. It is independently attested in both Mark and John. So that's true. It's independently attested, so that would be in its favor. But the very notion that a Roman governor is giving up somebody to a crowd just displeased them, is completely implausible. If you know anything about how Romans ruled the subjected people, especially if you know how Pilate was ruling Judea at the time, this Barabbas figure, whom we don't hear of otherwise anywhere else apart from in this story, is said to be an Insurrectionist who committed murder. That means that he led an uprising against Rome. What do Romans do to people like that? They crucified them. Of course they did. And he was a murderer. That means almost certainly, must mean he murdered a Roman soldier. You think Pilate is going to give up an insurrectionist and murderer, you know, to appease the crowd? Just read Josephus about Pilate sometime. The Jewish historian Josephus, man, he was ruthless, brutal. According to Philo, all these sources that talk about him, I don't think there's any way that that happened. Then why do you have the story? The story is meant to show that the Jewish people rejected their own Messiah. They didn't want somebody who was going to serve others and die for the sins of the world. They wanted somebody who wanted a political overthrow of the enemy. They wanted a military solution. That's what the Jews wanted. And so it's kind of Christian polemic against Jews for rejecting their own Messiah. And it heightens the significance of what they did, heightens in part by the fact that his name is Barabbas. The name bar in Aramaic means son. Abba means father. This is the son of the Father. Which son of God do you want? Do you want the one who's willing to die for the sins of the world, or you want the one who wants a military overthrow? So the name itself, so that would be something I think is legendary, because it's not that there's a supernatural event happening, but it's something that I don't think can be historical, but is trying to convey a point.
- [38:21]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. How about a supernatural event?
- [38:24]
Bart Ehrman
Well, okay, so Jesus walking on the water. I don't think it's very plausible that he's walking on the stones or that he's just wading through the shore or something. You know, these other explanations, people have, their reason for thinking, yeah, that doesn't work too well. But why do you have the story then? Strauss himself dealt with every miracle in the Gospels. I mentioned David Friedrich Strauss, who came up with this term myth for the Gospels. He dealt with every one of these stories to try to show its mythological background. And in this one, he has a pretty good argument. Early Christians understood that the life we lead is turbulent and it is rough out there. And like, we're in danger threat all the time. It's like being in a boat on the sea, you know, where there's a huge storm that's come up and we're threatened and we're terrified. How can we possibly rise above it all? How can we survive? This storm at sea. Is there anybody who can rise above the trials and tribulations of this life in order to bring salvation to us in our trouble? And, yes, Jesus can. Jesus walks out. The disciples are in a boat in the middle of the lake, and the storm is driving them nuts. They can't even make any progress against the wind. Jesus walks out to them, and they're terrified. They think it's a ghost. And Jesus says, it is I. And he calms the sea and he gets in the boat, and they arrive on the other side. And so Jesus can rise above it all. He can control the trials and tribulations that we face. He can bring us salvation if we trust in him. It's not a story about something that happened for Strauss. It's a story that happens for people who have their faith in Jesus. It's a story that didn't happen that conveys a truth.
- [40:02]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Now, my last question before we finish up is why do you think it's important to look at the New Testament like this and to try and detangle the different strands and different relationships and whether something is myth, legend, or history?
- [40:19]
Bart Ehrman
You know, I think that a lot of people who don't like critical scholars, like me, don't like us because they think that all we're trying to do is destroy the Bible. You're just talking contradictions all the time. You know, why are you going after the Bible like this? And it really is not about finding contradictions or finding historical mistakes or geographical errors, all of which are there. That's not the end of the story. That's kind of sort of a pathway to something else. And people don't realize this, but once you realize that these are not simply descriptive accounts of what actually happened, then it makes the stories come alive in ways that you wouldn't expect otherwise, because you realize that these stories are really trying to convey important points that the authors have about Jesus. And if you try to reconcile the accounts so that, like, if you have a contradictory account and you try to reconcile it so that both authors are, like, kind of true, you put them together and you get the full truth. When you do that, you're ignoring what each author's trying to say, because he's not trying to give you a descriptive account of what actually happened. He's trying to make a point. So recognizing these kinds of problems, not just contradictions, but just historical errors, drives you then to appreciate the literary character of these stories, and it explodes their interpretation. It makes them so much more meaningful. So it does two things. Finding things that are mythological or legendary in the accounts does two things for us. Number one, it makes us take very seriously what each author is trying to say and trying to read what this author is saying and what the point is this author is trying to make. Secondly, it leads us to develop historical criteria for those of us who are interested in also in knowing what really happened. Those are two separate fields of study. The literary study of trying to the Gospels, trying to understand what they're trying to mean, what they're trying to say, how we're supposed to understand them, the literary question and the historical question, how can we use them to know what Jesus really said and did? Those are two separate things that you only realize are two separate things when you realize these are not objective descriptions of the past.
- [42:31]
Megan Lewis
Bart, thank you so much. That is all the time we have for our conversation today, but we have some upcoming events to tell tell you about and then we have our listeners questions. So please stick with us.
- [42:43]
Podcast Announcer
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.
- [42:58]
Megan Lewis
So I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that we have several things going on in the recent or upcoming weeks. This is the last chance to join Hugo Mendez introduction to the New Testament course the live Version. If you want to attend classes live, it starts on Monday, January 27, so absolutely go register so that you can take part in that. Now as I have said again at several points during this episode we've been running a special launch pricing for the Biblical Studies Academy. That's the 14 day free trial and then $39.95 afterwards. That's been going since September sometime. The pricing and the free trial is ending on January 28th and at that point the price is going to go up to $49 a month. So if you are interested then definitely take a look. Join up now. Check it out. With the free trial you'll get a couple of Hugo's lectures so you can kind of of see if that's something you're interested in. As Bart says, you get all of his stuff and access to Mark Goodacre's Synoptic Gospels course. So you can take two weeks, browse through all of that, take some lectures, see what you think before you start being charged. And if you do that then you lock in the $39.95 per month rate. And final reminder, Paul Ends Author will be live this Friday on the 24th of January doing a video AMA that's Ask Me anything about his book. The Bible tells me so. And that is also a BSA event. So as well as getting access to all of the courses and everything, you get a lot of community events going on in the BSA that you get access to also.
- [44:45]
Podcast Announcer
Now it's time for questions from listeners where bartender 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
- [45:03]
Megan Lewis
okay, we have four excellent listeners questions. Are you ready?
- [45:08]
Bart Ehrman
Yep. I hope.
- [45:10]
Megan Lewis
First up, in Matthew 28:19, part of the famous Greek Great Commission, Jesus says, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. When we read the Acts of the Apostles, where accounts of baptisms are found, no one baptizes in the way that Matthew records how people should be baptized. Why did no one follow this baptismal instruction? Was Matthew just a knucklehead and got it wrong? Or did the apostles and early Christians goof? Thank you.
- [45:44]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, well, this is one of those either ors that I think needs more ors. I don't think it's just two choices. You know, did Matthew mess it up or did the apostles not know what they were doing? I think there are other options. It is very interesting and often noted that Matthew's Great Commission does say that you're to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it's also noted that that doesn't happen in the Book of Acts. And so what's going on? Well, one thing that's going on is that the author of Acts doesn't know the Gospel of Matthew. His account of Jesus comes from a different source from the one that provided Matthew with a Great Commission in the Book of Acts. It's a different way of doing it that's comparable to today. You think, well, why would that be? Wouldn't they all agree? Well, look at baptism practices today. There are huge varieties in both how baptism is done, for example, sprinkling infants or dunking adults or, you know, various ways of doing it. And they're completely different theologies from one denomination to the other, from the Presbyterians to the Roman Catholics to the Baptists, et cetera, et cetera. I think that was true in early Christianity, that the authors are living in different places, different times, with slightly different variations on how the rituals were performed. That explains the difference.
- [47:03]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. Next question, sticking with Matthew. What is the meaning of Matthew 11 ESV has the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence and the violent take it by force. Most translations seem to agree with this. The nwt, however, reads, the kingdom of heavens is the goal toward which men press and those pressing forward are seizing it. According to the Jesus Seminar, there's no firm scholarly consensus on what it means, and the original form of this saying is lost. So which is it? Is the kingdom seized by Jesus enemies or by his followers?
- [47:40]
Bart Ehrman
Right. Yeah. No, this is a tricky one. It's a Q saying. It's also in the Gospel of Luke, and so it comes from Q, and it's hard to know what it means. It's one of these difficult sayings. I think the intention of the saying is that the kingdom of God is almost here, and some people are trying to force God's hand to allow them into it. This may be an attack, for example, on the Pharisees who are developing various rules and regulations that think if they do this, then God will have to let us in. Or maybe Sadducees, who are interested in, like, you know, I'm going to multiply my worship practices in the temple, because then God will surely let me in. The idea that Jesus is having is that it can't be taken by force. You can't compel God to allow you into the kingdom. For Jesus, the way you get into the kingdom isn't by trying to twist God's arm. The way you get in the kingdom is by treating one another really, really well. And it's not just to get into the kingdom. It' you should take care of your neighbor. You should love your neighbor as yourself and take care of those who are in need. And those who do that are the ones who will enter in the kingdom, not those who are kind of elevating the religiosity so that God will have to favor them.
- [48:49]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. Next question. If the Christian thought is that the soul is eternal and when we die, the soul goes to heaven or hell, why the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment? Hasn't the judgment already been made when we die?
- [49:05]
Bart Ehrman
This is the topic of my book, Heaven and Hell, where I try to explain how it is Christians came to this idea that the soul would exist outside of the body, that when you die, your soul would go to heaven or hell. The thesis of my book is that it's not taught anywhere in the Old Testament, and it's not what Jesus taught. So why is it the Christian view? And it's dried directly to what this person's asking. How does that relate to the idea of a resurrection, the idea of a resurrection of the dead, where bodies are brought back to life at the end of time, either to be rewarded with paradise or to be ruthlessly destroyed for all time. That idea is an early Jewish view related to the rise of Jewish apocalypticism. A couple of hundred years before Jesus, Jews broadly did not think that the soul and the body were distinct entities that could exist independently of one another, that when one died, the other died as well. It is like the breath. When the person dies, the breath doesn't continue, the breath doesn't go somewhere, it's gone. And that's what the soul was for most ancient Jews. So they thought the only way to exist in an afterlife was if the soul went back into the body. And that's the doctrine of the resurrection. After Jesus death, decades afterwards, more people converting to believe in him were not raised in Jewish circles, but in Gentile circles. In Gentile circles based mainly in Greek philosophical understandings going back before Plato, but popularized in Plato, the soul is an independent thing from the body and can exist independently of the body. And so what the early Christians did is they took the teachings of Jesus and they conflated them or combined them with the teachings of Plato and ended up with the doctrines of heaven and hell. So that's a kind of a 45 second summary of my book. But if you want the evidence, you need to read the book. So it's the Heaven and Hell book. But it's a very good question and it's a key question for understanding modern Christian understandings of the afterlife.
- [51:06]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. Thank you. Final question for the day. I understand that it's a strong consensus amongst scholars that Mark was the first Gospel account. How was that determined? Is it that the oldest manuscripts found are those of Mark, or is it based on grammar or writing style or something else?
- [51:24]
Bart Ehrman
Again, it's a great question and it would take an entire episode to explain. I know people who teach like weeks on this thing in their undergraduate classes, but it's not because of the manuscripts. So it's a good guess, but it's not because the earliest manuscripts have marked. The date of a manuscript has almost no bearing on the date of the composition. If two books are written at the same time, you might have one of them might be represented in a manuscript from the 4th century, another might not be to the 12th century, but it has no bearing on just when the manuscripts were made. So it's not that it's not so much writing style, although it does figure into it. There are complicated arguments that try to figure out who copied whom between Matthew, Mark and Luke. And there are several arguments that are known as arguments for Mark and priority. They're kind of complicated arguments. I'll just give you one just to kind of show you the level of complication it can be. One argument has to do with which are agreements in the wording between the three stories. And so sometimes you'll have a story that Matthew, Mark and Luke all have. And sometimes those stories, they'll have a verse that's worded just the same. Same. Sometimes you'll have a verse that's worded completely differently, like maybe a minor difference between Matthew, Mark and Luke. Sometimes you'll have a verse that is the same in Matthew and Mark but different in Luke. Other times you have places where it's the same between Mark and Luke, but it's different in Matthew. Almost never do you get things shared between this verse, shared between the three where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark. Okay, so that's weird. Why is that? Why don't you get that kind of agreement? Well, if you map it all out and you figure out how to explain it, the best explanation is that Matthew and Luke both use Mark. If they both use Mark, sometimes they copied in the same. So they all three have the same. Sometimes one of them will differ. Well, sometimes they're all different. That's because both Matthew and Luke changed it in different ways. Sometimes Matthew and Mark will agree, but Luke will be different because Luke changed it, but Matthew did not. Sometimes Mark and Luke agree, but Matthew does not. But God, because Matthew changed, Mark didn't. The reason Matthew and Luke don't agree is because they don't have the common source for their changes. If Matthew had been the original one, you wouldn't have that kind of sequence. You'd have instead a case where Mark and Luke would agree against Matthew and Matthew and Luke would agree against Mark. But you don't have that. That's one of the simpler arguments.
- [53:43]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. We'll have to do just a whole episode on that one day, I think.
- [53:47]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, we'll just confuse the daylights out of everybody.
- [53:50]
Megan Lewis
It's fine. It's fine. Everyone will love it.
- [53:53]
Bart Ehrman
There are people. You know. Mark Goodacre spent his entire career working on this one. It's like. This is like. It's a really complicated thing, you guys. Decades. But yeah, it can be explained to those of us who are mortals, but it does take some explaining. And so it was a view that was developed principally in the middle of the 19th century, and it continues to be by far the dominant view today because when you actually look at the evidence, it is really pretty compelling.
- [54:18]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much. Audience thank you all for your questions. If you have a question you would like to ask Bart, you can go to Bart. Bart ehrman.com Ask Bart. Please be patient with us. We will get to it, but we have a long backlog of questions to get through now. Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [54:38]
Bart Ehrman
So today we're talking about the difference between historically accurate narratives in the Gospels and Gospels that have legendary and or mythical features, features that are not historically accurate but are trying to convey certain lessons that the Gospel writers and the those telling stories about Jesus wanted to convey about him. We talked about how you detect these things when this kind of detection started and what the value of it is. I tried to argue that, in fact, it's extremely important to be able to do this. And so what critical scholars are doing is not simply trying to wreak havoc with the gospels, they're trying to understand them better.
- [55:14]
Megan Lewis
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. Episodes Remember, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [55:34]
Bart Ehrman
Next time we're talking about one of the really interesting and puzzling features of the Gospel of Mark, where the disciples of Jesus, whom you might expect to be heroes of the story, are not portrayed in a very positive light for the most part. But so why would that be? Does Mark have something against the disciples? Why does he betray him like this, you know? Or is it historically accurate? Or how do we explain this? So that's what we're talking about.
- [55:58]
Megan Lewis
Make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [56:04]
Podcast Host Megan Lewis
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite 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.