← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:01]
Aura Advertiser
Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making millions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app you get a vpn, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance. All backed by 24, 7 US based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit, monitoring or just a vpn. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price. Competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today@aura.com hidden protect yourself now@aura.com hidden new discoveries are a
- [01:12]
Megan Lewis
rarity in biblical studies and often they are quickly outed as forgeries. But very rarely authentic discoveries are made. The question is, how do scholars distinguish between fact and fiction, Especially when they only have access to photographs or copies rather than the actual manuscripts in question. Is it possible for a text to pass all authenticity tests and still be a clever forgery? Today we're back with Dr. Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark. Stay tuned for all of that and so much more. Welcome to Misquoting 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 without access to the actual copy of Clement of Alexandria's letter. Morton Smith verified the text as best as he could. The results seem to show an authentic copy of an ancient text. But are these results too good to be true? We're going to be finding out today. But before we get into all of that, Bart, how are you doing today?
- [02:25]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, not too bad. At that stage of life where no matter how well things are going, it's a troubling world we live in sort of nationally, internationally and personally. So as you know, I mean you hit this age where like you, you got the kids and you got the elders and like a lot of people are having problems. So even if you're doing fine, man, there's a lot going on in the world. How about you?
- [02:50]
Megan Lewis
Yes, good. Generally upbeats, positive. Everyone is healthy and as far as I'm aware, happy. So yes, doing well.
- [03:01]
Bart Ehrman
Well look healthy and happy, man.
- [03:02]
Megan Lewis
That's all you can ask for right
- [03:05]
Bart Ehrman
now, I feel don't come easy.
- [03:08]
Megan Lewis
No. Now, you spoke last week during the weekly update about having courses to put out through Bart Ehrman Professional Services. And I wanted to ask kind of off the back of that and given all of the online work that you do, how different it is teaching online as opposed to in person at a university.
- [03:26]
Bart Ehrman
You know, when Covid hit universities, some of us had record courses for our classes because It'd be like 350 students. You just couldn't have a zoom call or something. The university wanted us to, you know, just record courses. I tried doing it just like to a TV screen, like a computer screen, man, I couldn't do it. It's like, ah, I just, I've got to have an audience. I just, I cannot talk. I mean, I just blur my words is like. And so. But the kinds of courses we do online for our professionals, for the Bart Ehrman courses online, the BCO thing, those are great because there is an audience and you can talk and you can get Q and A. And so I think that the technology has developed so much that it's really good. And one of the things that's really good about it is people can have courses now without having to go anywhere. And so you can do it online like that. There are drawbacks, of course there are drawbacks with students especially. It's really hard to teach university students online. As everybody discovered during COVID There are too many distractions and you know, they can turn off their screen and run off and you know, go get coffee or something or something stronger and you wouldn't know. It could be problematic with college kids, but I think for doing online courses it's turned into something really great.
- [04:41]
Megan Lewis
I definitely find that the people who take kind of one off online courses are by and large pretty engaged and interested and more willing, I think, to interact than maybe some Polish students might be. If it's not like their favorite class
- [04:57]
Bart Ehrman
in the world, well, that's it. I mean, because when you're doing a remote course, it's really kind of a self selecting audience with the students. You know, they'll often sign up for a class because they think it will fulfill a requirement of some kind, you know, or they, I mean sometimes, man, I get some students who are really engaged and that's a Lot of fun. But the online courses that I do, people, they know they're going to be interested and so they come and the questions we get are just fantastic. And the engagement is great and I just, I really like it. I wasn't sure I would enjoy doing these online courses, but I really do. We get so much feedback about how people so appreciate it. You know, I bring someone else in, I bring like Jodi Magnus in or Amy Jo Levine in to give a course, and you're dealing with some of the top scholars in the world talking to you and you can ask them questions. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's really good. I think the format now works well. I think we've got that all worked out.
- [05:51]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Now we are talking today again about the secret Gospel of Mark, because honestly, there's just so much here it's impossible to get through in one episode. But we had a good attempt last week at getting some of the basics down. For people who couldn't watch last week's episode or maybe are a little bit fuzzy on the details, you could you just remind us what the secret Gospel of Mark actually is?
- [06:14]
Bart Ehrman
Right. So in 1958, a scholar of ancient history at Columbia University was cataloging books in a monastery in Israel called the Mar Saba Monastery, a Greek Orthodox monastery. He was in their library and he came across a volume of the writings of a second century church father named Ignatius. At the back of this book, there were blank pages. As often happens, especially in older books, we have blank pages at the back. And somebody had written in there a letter from a different church, Father Clement of Alexandria, who lived around 200 common era, a letter from Clement of Alexandria to somebody named Theodore, where Clement indicated that Mark, the author of the Gospel of Mark, not only wrote the Mark that people are familiar with, but wrote a second edition that was a spiritual gospel, an expanded edition. And Clement indicates that this happened and that there was a group of heretics called the Carpocrations who had taken Mark's expanded version and expanded it further to support their own theology and their own liturgical practices, which for Clement were heretical. They actually added things that were a little bit on the licentious side. He was trying to explain to Theodore that in fact Mark did do this spiritual gospel. And then he quotes a couple passages in it and he says, but the carpal creations have messed it up. So this is a letter written in an 18th century style of Greek handwriting about a 3rd century church father quoting a 1st century text of the Gospel of Mark that Even when you don't look at the carpal gratian additions, seems like it might have homoerotic overtones, according to Morton Smith. And so he wrote two books about it. Fifteen years later, we have the books and we're talking about what was in this Gospel. Why is it problematic? Why is it interesting, which is very, very interesting to what we did last time. And now, you know, the question is, well, is it authentic or not?
- [08:13]
Megan Lewis
Now, could you just remind us briefly how Morton Smith actually came across this manuscript? Because this isn't something that happens really very regularly at all.
- [08:22]
Bart Ehrman
People often ask me, you know, how do you find manuscripts? Well, you know, you don't just, like, take a shovel and start digging in Egypt someplace. I. You just, like, they are easy to find. But so manuscripts sometimes are discovered accidentally by, you know, people in Egypt. Something will turn up someplace. But for a long time, the only places to find manuscripts, handwritten copies of ancient texts, was in libraries and in museums and monasteries and such. So this monastery had this library, and he. He was employing himself during a sabbatical to make a catalog of all the books because he thought there might be some interesting old books in there. And there were, including this one that just happened to be an edition of the letters of Ignatius that had this handwritten copy of this letter of Clement in it.
- [09:08]
Megan Lewis
Now, how did Morton Smith go about trying to determine the authenticity of this. The copy of this letter?
- [09:15]
Bart Ehrman
You know, it's the first question when you come across something that nobody's ever heard of before, and it's, you know, like it's in a manuscript of some kind, or you have to figure out, well, when was it written? Does it really go back to the person claiming to write it? You have to figure out, is it authentic or not? What does it date from? When Smith came across this letter, he was very busy trying to catalog all these books in the library. He had a limited amount of time. He was on a sabbatical from his university, and so he knew he wasn't going to have time to study this thing. But he knew it was special because it claimed to be written by Clement of Alexandria. And we didn't have any letters by him. And so he knew this is going to be special, whatever it is. He took three sets of photographs of these pages. It's written on three pages at the back of this book. He took three sets of photographs. And when he left the monastery after some months, he. He had the film developed and then he could read it, and he realized what it was. His first thought was I've got to authenticate this thing. Because if this is a forgery, then, you know, it's not of much use to anybody. But it's. It's a complicated process. And so he had to go through a number of steps in order to figure out. He wanted to figure out was there really another edition of Mark's Gospel.
- [10:26]
Megan Lewis
So what did those steps entail?
- [10:28]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so he's looking at this and he is a paleographer of sorts. He knows about handwriting and he knows Greek and he knows all these languages, and he's a philologist, and he has a good idea of when this thing was probably put into the back of the book. The book itself did not have a title page or a cover on it. So he had to figure out what it was. It was an edition that was produced in 1646 by a printer in Amsterdam named Isaac Voss, who had done this edition of Ignatius's letter. So that was in 1646. So if somebody wrote something in, in the back, it'd have to be after that, after 1646. And so he thought that probably it came from the 18th century. So his first step was he needs to have people look at the handwriting. He has to figure out, is this right, is it 18th century Greek handwriting or not? So he sent the photographs to a bunch of scholars of Greek handwriting. It changes over the years, over the centuries. And most people thought it looks like 18th century handwriting, could be late 17th century, could be early 19th century, but basically it looks like 18th century. He said, okay, good. Okay. Then he had to figure out, could this really be a letter of Clement that some scribe at the monastery put into this book? Did the scribe have like a worn out manuscript of some kind? He wanted to preserve it. He didn't know how to preserve it, so he just wrote it in the book in the 18th century. And if so, is this really a letter of Clement? So he sent contents, he sent photographs, maybe with a translation, but he sent the photographs to Clement scholars. There are people who spent their entire lives studying Clement of Alexandria. And they read it, and the various ones looked at it and said, you know, it sure sounds like Clement. He uses the vocabulary, he's got the ideas. I mean, this looks Clementine, looks like the sort of thing Clement would have written. Okay. Then he wanted to know, okay, if Clement really is writing this in the third century, copied in the 18th century. When he quotes the scene, Secret Gospel of Mark. Is this actually the style of writing that Mark uses when Mark wrote his gospel? So he sent it to Mark scholars. Gospel Scholars and they looked at it and they said, you know, this is very much like Mark in style. This sounds like the Gospel of Mark, only it's verse is not found in the Gospel of Mark. And so then he said, bang, zoom. I mean, got it. I mean it's an 18th century hand of a 3rd century letter that is quoting some form of the Gospel of Mark.
- [12:51]
Megan Lewis
It all sounds pretty convincing and relatively thorough. We're going to take a brief break and then we'll be back to talk about some of the doubts about the letter's authenticity and some more questions that people have about it. Jesus and Paul are the two most important figures in the history of Christianity. But did they even agree with one another? Join acclaimed scholar Bart Ehrman in his online course Paul and the Great Divide, where you'll dive deep into the complex relationship between Paul and Jesus, explore their differing views on crucial issues and uncover the profound impact of their teachings on the early Christian faith. In this eight lesson course, you'll gain valuable insights into the historical context of Jesus and Paul's beliefs, their views on salvation and their understanding of the Jewish law. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to enrich your understanding of these influential figures. Visit bart erman.com Paul to learn more or sign up today. And remember to use discount code mjpodcast for a special offer. Once again, that's barturman.com Paul with a discount code mjpodcast. Morton Smith clearly did a lot of due diligence in trying to establish the authenticity of this letter. What were some of the original doubts about whether it was authentic or not
- [14:15]
Bart Ehrman
when he published his books 15 years later? He spent 15 years, he was doing some other things, but he spent 15 years working on this project, making sure he had it authenticated and then analyzing it. He has this popular book I mentioned last time, the Secret Gospel of Mark that is really worth reading because it reads like a detective story. It's very interesting. And then he also has this very detailed philological analysis of everything where he'll do things like he'll say, you have these words in this letter and these are the words that occur in Clement's other writings. And he could show that these words are words common to Clement. Even unusual words like words that Clement uses that are not usual words in Greek show up in this letter the way he can do that now. So he's writing this in the 60s and early 70s, I guess mainly in the 60s. In the 1930s there was a German scholar who had published a kind of a concordance to Clement, where he listed all the words in Clement, like every word that Clement uses and every place you can find it in Clement's writings. And so what Smith could do is he could take this letter and he'd look at this word and see, okay, according to this thing, where does it, how often does it show up in Clement like an unusual word? Oh yeah, Clement uses that word twice, you know, that kind of thing. So he could do all that. So he did all of that and he analyzed this thing at great length before he tried to publish it. And he publishes it. But there were doubts right off the bat. And some people were suspicious because they were suspicious of the contents. The contents seemed a little bit quirky, especially because of the homoerotic overtones that Smith emphasized to a bit. And it doesn't sound quite right to them. Some people. A very, very important issue that came up almost right away. A couple of scholars started pointing out that if you're going to establish that a writing is authentic, in this case, that this is really an 18th century scribe putting this in, you've got to look at the manuscript. You can't look at just photographs to authenticate a writing. You've got to see the page. Because if you see the page and you use a magnifying glass, you can see how the ink is sinking into the pages. You can see how the impression of the pen is working. You see how often the scribe is picking up his pen. You can analyze things that can tell you whether it's somebody who's really a proficient writer at the time. And you can analyze the ink. Is this 18th century ink? And people said the only way to do that, as everybody knows who works with forgery, is to look at the manuscript. But Smith did not produce the manuscript. Nobody else had seen it. What we had were photographs taken on a 1950s style camera. How can we possibly evaluate the writing itself goes back to the 18th century? What if it's just. What if somebody put it in in 1910? You know something? How do you know? How do you know it's a forgery or not without looking? And that was a. That was a big issue. And they brought it up with Smith. And Smith's reply made made some sense. He said, look, I can't produce the manuscript for you. I don't have the manuscript. It doesn't belong to me. It's not my manuscript. It's in Marsaba library. So you know, if you want the manuscript, go look at the manuscript.
- [17:32]
Megan Lewis
So why hasn't anyone gone to Marsaba to Analyze the manuscripts.
- [17:36]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so this involves a personal anecdote, actually, because I wrote a book called Lost Christianities that appeared in 2003, Lost Christianities, 2003. And I was dealing with various kinds of false heretics, things in Christianity and how we got our Bible. But I have a chapter on the Secret Gospel of Mark and Morton Smith. And when I was doing my research for this book, I was writing this thing around, like the year 2000, 2001, something like that. And when I was doing my research, everybody said, all of the scholarships said nobody else has seen the manuscript. So as it turns out, just by happenstance, the night I finished writing that chapter, a colleague of mine was having a get together at her house. Elizabeth Clark. Liz Clark was one of my close friends, a brilliant scholar of early Christianity, 4th, 5th century Christianity, 1 of the international scholars in this field. But she's well placed, well known. She was having a get together because there was a fellow from the University of Jerusalem who was coming to give a lecture at Duke, as it turns out, on Clement of Alexandria. And his name is Guy Strumse. We're sitting in our living room, you know, we've had some supper and we're drinking wine and we're talking about it and we're introducing ourselves, and we come around to me and I say, I'm sorry, I'm a little brain dead. I finished a chapter today on the Secret Gospel of Mark and Morton Smith. And I said, you know, in case you don't know, you know, there's some controversy because nobody's seen the manuscript except for Morton Smith. And so we go around introducing ourselves. So Geese Drums was there, and he and I knew of each other, we hadn't met each other yet. But later, over wine, while we're sitting around just chatting, he says, yeah. He says, that's funny, you know, that's. Everybody says nobody's seen it before. He says, because actually, I did see it.
- [19:13]
Megan Lewis
Amazing.
- [19:14]
Bart Ehrman
What? What? What do you mean? He said, oh, no, I saw it. I went to Marsaba and I saw it. What? Because people had been saying, did it exist? You know, and so it turned out in 1976, Giestroomse was a graduate student at the University of Jerusalem. He had a professor of early Judaism and Christianity, and they were talking about the secret Gospel of Mark. And his professor said he thought that it was probably a forgery. You know, maybe Smith forged it, somebody forged it. You know, you won't really know unless you look at it. And Stromsen said, well, let's go look at it. And so they knew another student, graduate student, who was a Greek Orthodox monk who was in the program. And he said, yeah, I can get you into Marsaba. And so they all hop into Guy Stromst's car and they drive 12 miles to Marsaba. They go into the thing and they start looking around in the library. And it's this dusty place. The monks don't really use this thing. They're looking around. After about 15 minutes or so, somebody says, oh, here it is. They pulled it off the shelf and there it was. It's this 17th century book with the handwriting in the back. They said, oh, my God. And so they got permission, they wanted to test it, they wanted to test the ink. So they took it back to Jerusalem. They got permission to take it back to Jerusalem to the Patriarchate library there. You know, a library with significant scholarship scholars there and stuff. And they told them they wanted to kind of test the ink. And the librarian said they couldn't do it. They didn't have the facility, they didn't have the process to be able to do it, the equipment. They asked around. It turned out the only people in Jerusalem who could do this were the Israeli police department. And there was no way the Greek Orthodox priests were going to give their valuable book over to the Israeli police to examine. They said, no, we can't do that. So that was it. They saw it. They left it there at that library, and nobody has seen it since. And the story, I think Guy told me this is that the librarian himself cut the pages out of the book because he thought that there might be other people coming looking for it. And they just didn't want to mess with it. They're doing their own thing. They don't want people for looking, especially, you know, these Western scholars coming in, trying to uncover mysteries and things. He cut them out and he couldn't remember where he put them. And so nobody. So nobody's seen them since 1976.
- [21:30]
Megan Lewis
That is unfortunate. Oh, dear, oh dear. But all of the paleography and tests of handwriting were all seeming to be in favor of this letter being authentic.
- [21:45]
Bart Ehrman
Well, there are questions about all of it. So to begin with the handwriting, if it's a modern forger, it's very hard for forgers to imitate somebody's personal handwriting. But, you know, good forgers know how to do that. In this case, what the forger would have to do would be to imitate an 18th century style of handwriting, in other words, a style of handwriting that thousands and thousands of people used. And so it didn't have to be anybody's particular handwriting, just had to be the form of letters that Greek people were making in the 18th century. And so really good paleographers could do that. If they had any skill at writing, they could do that. So it wasn't that compelling that it looks like an 18th century hand to many people. And they continued to say, well, you know, you'd have to look at the manuscript to know about the hand. But people could come up with that. So then they said, well, in his book, he gives these long explanations about how this is just like Clement. And so there are all sorts of studies done on that, whether that's true or not. There are some aspects about this letter that are not at all like Clement, especially the idea that you would have secret knowledge that would not be available to everybody, that he would approve of. That wasn't Clement's view at all. He had the opposite view that the knowledge needs to be available to everybody. But the other thing is, when I mentioned that he could show that these words appeared frequently in Clement, and even the unusual words appear in Clement, one scholar very carefully and thoroughly documented that, in fact, this letter has more features of Clement in it than any writing of Clement, any comparable length of writing in Clement. So it's hard for me to explain this to people, but it's like this. I think maybe when I was writing this book in 2000, people were still saying the word awesome a lot. Okay, so, like, you had somebody, you had a friend, they say awesome a lot. Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. And then it becomes a characteristic of them. And so when you're talking, you're trying to imitate them to someone else, you use the word awesome a lot, you know, and they say, oh, yeah, you're making fun of Joey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's a awesome. So, but if you actually do a statistical analysis, it might be that, like, Joey says the word awesome once every 500 words, which is still pretty often, but you'd imitate him, say it every 100 words. You're more like Joey than Joey is. See what I mean? And this letter, Clement looks like more like Clement than Clement ever was. Including, like, there'll be a word that occurs once in Clement and it'll happen to show up in this short letter, you know, and, like a bunch of these, like. So how'd that happen? Well, whoever forged this would have had the same access to this concordance of Clement that Morton Smith had to analyze it. All you have to do is look up some rare words in Clement. Make sure you use them. Look up his most common words and use them. And so this person argued, yeah, so that doesn't work either. So there are things like that that were still being called into question.
- [24:37]
Megan Lewis
Is there anything suspicious about the book itself, the book that it was allegedly copied into?
- [24:43]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'll say a couple things about that. One is Morton Smith was precisely right when he said that he didn't own the book and so he couldn't loan it to somebody to check out that is in the marsupial library if anybody wanted to look. So that's absolutely right. Morton Smith was an expert on forgery, and he knew, as everyone else knows, that to validate a handwriting, you have to look at the manuscript that it's written. You have to look at it. I don't think scholars have given this enough thought. Other scholars. What's really puzzled me is Smith knew that to validate this, he couldn't do it on the basis of the photographs. He had to look at the book. He spent 15 years of diligent labor studying the photographs without ever going back to look at the book. Why would he do that? If he's wondering if it's a forgery, he knows he has to look at the book and he knows where the book is. I don't get that. I don't get it, why he wouldn't do that. So that's one thing that's odd. The other thing that's odd is something nobody hadn't occurred to anybody, I think, until I wrote about it in my Lost Christianities book. Because I was just like, wait a second. I had done an edition of the Letters of Clement for the Loeb Classical Library about the same time I was doing this stuff. And so I was really interested in the Letters of Clementine, the Letters of Ignatius. So remember, this book is a collection of the letters of Ignatius. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was thought that Ignatius wrote 13 letters, you know, so throughout the middle hundreds and hundreds of years, people read the 13 letters of Ignatius. But in the 17th century, some scholars started realizing, wait, some of those are not going back to Ignatius. Some of them are forgeries. The first time anybody published just the authentic letters of Ignatius, but not including the forgeries, was this particular volume in 1646 by Isaac Vos that printed only the authentic letters. And it's in the back of that book that we have this letter from Clement dealing with what is the authentic version of Mark and not the later forgery of the Carpocrat that is such an amazing place for this letter to show up. I mean, you couldn't pick a better place because it just happens, it's unrelated in terms of like, you know, it's Clement and it's about the carpal creations and secret mark, but it's in a book that is about getting rid of forgeries. Ha. That's interesting. So make of it what you will.
- [27:18]
Megan Lewis
That is very interesting. It's quite a remarkable coincidence, in fact. So do we have the whole letter preserved or does it break off this particular point?
- [27:26]
Bart Ehrman
It's the whole letter of Clement. But the other thing that's interesting about this book, again, that nobody had noticed before, the way this book works is that, you know, you get these blank pages at the back, but the blank pages here, the first blank page is on the other side of the last page of this book by Voss. Okay, and see if I can explain this. Very well. Smith published the photographs that he had taken of the letter of Clement. In his hard hitting scholarly philological book, he published the photographs only of the pages that had the letters of Clement on them. But in his popular book he published the full two page spread where on one side you have Vos last comments on his page, but then you have the letter starting. And it occurred to me, I wonder what happens on this last page of Voss, what he's saying over there. Okay, is this too confusing? Is this making sense that you've got these blank pages and you've got this and so it's written in Latin. So it's written in Latin about Greek texts. And I thought, well, just be kind of interesting. Just, you know. And I realized why nobody had looked at that before is because the scholars who have studied the secret gospel have looked only at Smith's scholarly version. He published the two page thing in his popular version for people who wouldn't know Greek or Latin or, you know. So okay, so I thought, well, okay, got that, I'm going to translate this. And man, it's a little bit weird for my taste because at this last page of Voss, he's talking about rascals who take a text and interpolate forgeries into them in the ancient world. He's talking about another early church, Father Barnabas, where people have taken manuscripts of Barnabas and insert and forged interpolations into that them. And then on the other page you start getting this letter from Clement of Alexandria about how the Carpocrations have taken this thing and forging tribulations into them. I think, man, this is just too good to be true. This is like, oh, my God, this is quite amazing. I don't know, it just. The whole thing seems really suspicious to me. You know, I lean toward thinking that in fact it's a forgery. And I lean toward thinking that Morton Smith did it.
- [29:42]
Megan Lewis
I was going to say, if it is a forgery, the person who did it has not only a very large understanding or wide understanding of all of these different fields and practices, but he's got one hell of a sense of humor.
- [29:56]
Bart Ehrman
Well, and that's the question people have always said, well, why would he do that? So let me say a couple things about that. Because he died 15 years ago or so, or more than that, actually. But there are a lot of people still alive who knew him pretty well. And I know some of them. And every one of them who knew him well says he would never have done it. They know him, they say, look, he just would never have done that. Why would he do that? He wouldn't do that. But, you know, I think people have secret lives. And, man, he didn't suffer fools gladly, as I said before in the previous thing, and he was always the smartest guy in the room. And we have cases throughout history of people who have done forgeries precisely to see if they can make fun of somebody else, see if they could get rid of it and fool them and show that they're smarter than them. We have cases back in antiquity of this happening. You know, if Smith did it, man, that's an amazing accomplishment. He'd have to come up with this content of the Gospel of Mark that sounds a lot like Mark, even though it's a second edition. He'd have to put it in a letter of Clement that sounds just like Clement, or maybe too much like Clement. And he'd have to write it in an 18th century Greek hand in a book that would be perfectly appropriate for it. How in the world. But I suspect that he did it, and I think he did it in order to show that what he thought is that a lot of New Testament scholars really are just a bunch of idiots, which may be true, but I mean, it's not. But I mean, if he could pull this one off. So I don't know, the people know him, say, yeah, he wouldn't do it, but I don't know.
- [31:33]
Megan Lewis
So if Morton Smith was not always charitable in his views of other people, I'm assuming his detractors were possibly similarly inclined. What I'm guessing at is that scholars can quite often make very personal attacks on people who take controversial positions, positions they disagree with. Did this happen?
- [31:50]
Bart Ehrman
In this case, it did happen, and it was. There were a lot of ad hominem attacks. He was a controversial figure. Some of the most serious ad hominem attacks happened by very, very fine scholars who were being possibly indiscreet. He was single his entire life and he never came out. But the open secret was that he was gay. At least that was what everybody said. I mean, when I was in graduate school, that's what people said, oh, yeah, yeah, Morton, he's gay. And so, you know, people just go and say that and gossip. There were scholars in print who said that this is a kind of a homosexual joke. Because what he, as I said in our last episode, he tries to argue that this is actually an event from the life of the historical Jesus and that Jesus actually did baptize men in the nude and then had sex with them. And so that they'd have not just spiritual union to enter the mysteries of the kingdom, but also have physical union with him. People thought that this is just kind of his way of getting back at, you know, the culture, the society, the field. That's what was going on. So, yes, that did happen.
- [32:59]
Megan Lewis
Is there a scholarly consensus on whether or not this letter is forged?
- [33:04]
Bart Ehrman
Well, there's not a complete consensus. There's been a recent book that's published saying that it's a forgery, but they don't think it was forged by Morton Smith. They think it was forged in the 5th, 6th or 6th century by a monk in the monastery who wanted to justify homosexual practices that were happening within the monastery, for example. So that's a recent book. I'm not sure how many people that's convinced. I think there are problems with that view. They think there are problems with my view, which is that Smith probably forged it. There are a number of people who think that still. I've increasingly thought that, and others do. My guess is that if you took a majority vote, the majority are going to think it's authentic, that it goes back to Smith. When I get in discussions with other scholars about this, it's one of those things where, personally, I'd be very happy of this thing. If there really were a secret mark for the kinds of things I do, that would be good. That would be fantastic. But I have serious doubts, some of which I've said to you here. And I think a lot of people, I don't know why, they get very defensive about hidden. Defensive about him. And I think sometimes they don't take arguments seriously. When you hear people summarize the arguments for it being a forgery. When they summarize these arguments, they just misrepresent them often or they don't take them seriously or something. And I think that's too bad. But I don't think we'll ever have I can't imagine that we'll ever have a final resolution of it. I'd say now probably most scholars still kind of accept it as authentic, but many still don't.
- [34:33]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time to share all this really fascinating information with us. We are going to go to news on upcoming events and then this week's bonus segment is Outsmart. But
- [34:47]
Bart Ehrman
this is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [35:02]
Megan Lewis
So the new Insights in the New Testament Conference is coming up September 21st and 22nd. People who are interested can sign up at NINT conference. We are going to be talking about a couple of the other presenters this week. We have Joel Marcus, who's going to present reformer or renegade, Paul, the Law and the Jewish People. What can you tell us about Dr. Marcus, Bart?
- [35:26]
Bart Ehrman
Well, Joel Marcus has been one of my good friends for a very, very long time, since the mid-1980s. He started teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary right after I finished doing my degree there. And he's taught at Glasgow, he's taught at University of Boston and he ended his career at Duke and he still lives in Durham. I think Joel Marcus is one of the very best exegetes, interpreters of texts of the New Testament on the planet. He's an expert on Paul along with lots of other things. And he's really interested in Jewish Christian relations in the ancient world. And so this will be dealing with Paul's relationship to the Judaism of his day. Joel is very insightful. He's very incisive in his thinking. He's funny. I think this is going to be a very good talk.
- [36:10]
Megan Lewis
It sounds fascinating. And the shows that we've done on Paul and looking at his relationship with the Jewish people have been really interesting. So I'm particularly looking forward to being able to hear a bit more about that. And the other person we're going to talk about is Jason Staples, who's presenting not by Faith Alone. Paul's Gospel wasn't what you probably think, which is a very intriguing title.
- [36:31]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, indeed. Jason's a very intriguing guy. Jason was my graduate student at Chapel Hill some years ago. He's like one of the brightest human beings I've ever had in my program. He was like, really smart and he knew a lot. He wanted to write a dissertation on one little line in Paul that said all Israel will be saved. And there's a lot of scholarship what Paul meant, that all Israel is going to be saved. What's that even mean? And so Jason started writing a dissertation on it and he wanted to know what the word Israel means in ancient Judaism. He wrote an 800 page dissertation on this. It was quite astounding and, you know, not the sort of thing a dissertation advisor wants to read because it's 800 pages. But it was good. And I said, look, Jason, when you publish this thing, it ain't gonna be one book. So he divided it in two. Both volumes have been published with Cambridge University Press. So it's really impressive.
- [37:25]
Megan Lewis
Very nice.
- [37:26]
Bart Ehrman
He teaches at North Carolina State University now. He's a very, very dynamic and good presenter. And he has views of Paul that he can back up with everything that are not always the common view. And so he and I really like to go at it sometimes to have disagreements about things, especially on Paul. Yeah. So this would be a good one because he's dealing with one of the major topics.
- [37:46]
Megan Lewis
Fantastic. Thank you for kind of filling us in about that. That sounds very exciting. And if people are interested again, that's coming up on September 21st and 22nd. You can register and buy tickets@nintconference.org and you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on those ticket prices. And as always, everything you buy through arts courses and conferences, you get lifetime access to the recordings afterwards. So if you're Busy on the 21st and 22nd, that's okay. The recordings will still be there. We are going to now go to our Outsmart Bart segment where one of our listeners sends in a selection of three questions specifically to try and outsmart Bart.
- [38:28]
Bart Ehrman
Dr. Ehrman has written six New York Times best selling books and holds a Ph.D. steve from Princeton Theological Seminary. It's not often you'll see him made a fool, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's time for Outsmart Bart.
- [38:48]
Megan Lewis
Okay, Bart, are you ready?
- [38:50]
Bart Ehrman
Don't know.
- [38:51]
Megan Lewis
Maybe. A solid maybe. Question one. What saying of Jesus comes right after the story of the woman caught in adultery?
- [39:00]
Bart Ehrman
After it, he starts talking about, you are the light of the world. Maybe I am the light of the world. I am the light of the world. Yeah, it's tricky. I thought maybe she meant that go thou and sin no more. But yeah, the interesting Thing about that story, the woman taken in adultery, is that it involves a Jewish festival that involves pouring out water at the beginning of the festival and a showing of lights at the end of it. And it interrupts the flow. So the bit right before this, you have. Have first part of the kind of pouring out of water. And the second part, you got the lights, and he's using both of these to talk about himself. And so the light of the world picks up on that. And so that's. It's one of the things that shows that that story wasn't originally there because interrupts the context.
- [39:42]
Megan Lewis
Interesting. Thank you. Question 2. In Romans 16, two verses before the famous Junia, who is said to be the first convert in Asia for Christ. Who is said to be the first convert in Asia for Christ.
- [39:55]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, well, so I think Dionysius says Epenetus.
- [40:00]
Megan Lewis
Okay, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that.
- [40:04]
Bart Ehrman
I don't know either. Yeah, okay. No, that's good. You got me. So Junia is in chapter 16, verse 7, and she and her husband Andronicus are said by Paul to be the foremost among the apostles. And so probably I've been more interested in this idea that a woman was one of the foremost apostles so much that I didn't reach read verse five well enough to memorize it.
- [40:28]
Megan Lewis
Just appalling. Every name in the New Testament box.
- [40:31]
Bart Ehrman
I know. I mean. Okay, yeah, it sounds like this person wants me to memorize every chapter and verse. Okay, yeah, go ahead. Let's try number three,
- [40:40]
Megan Lewis
First Corinthians 6, 9, 10. Lists 10 groups of people who won't inherit the kingdom of God. It says list three other than Malakoy. And I can't read this Arsenico toy. Yes, there we go.
- [40:56]
Bart Ehrman
See, this person's being unfair because this person is picking out the things that I do know and say. Yeah, except for those.
- [41:03]
Megan Lewis
Talk about the ones you know. You have to choose the ones you don't know.
- [41:06]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, well, robbers, drunkards, and idolaters.
- [41:10]
Megan Lewis
Yes, yes. Two out of three.
- [41:14]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so. So at least he didn't ask me to list all eight. Or. Wow, congratulations. But, you know, it's a funny thing because the two words that you mentioned, malakoi and arsenokoites, is not funny. It's actually quite serious. The translation of these words is really important because in some translations, malakoi is translated as effeminate and arsenokoites is translated as homosexual. And this is the passage that people have used to show that the New Testament condemns homosexuality the meaning of these words is much debated, especially arsinokoites. And I think we mentioned last time that in this conference that's coming up, the new insights into the New Testament, that one of our presenters, Jennifer Knust, is going to be dealing with the vocabulary of sexuality in Paul, and she's certainly going to be dealing with arsinoecoetes, I'm sure. The word appears to have been invented by Paul. It didn't exist before, but it's based on two words that we know. One means male, as in male and female male, and the other means bed. So it's a male bed, but male beds will not inherit the kingdom. And so what does it mean? And to say homosexuality is really problematic on lots of levels, and it's much debated what it means. So it is an important passage. But the thing I like to point out is that people say, oh, yeah, Paul's against homosexuality. You know, they're not going to get into the kingdom of them. I sometimes, you know. Did you have too much to drink at that cocktail party the other night? Because, you know, you're sorry, you're not getting any either. Oh, yeah.
- [43:00]
Megan Lewis
Well, thank you, Bart, for a successful attempt at your Outsmart bot. Thank you to the listener who sent those in.
- [43:07]
Bart Ehrman
I mean, I'm telling you, if I was in the major leagues and I'm batting.666, man, I'm an all star. I think so I'm in the hall fame. Yeah, not so much Bible trivia.
- [43:16]
Megan Lewis
Okay, now, before we finish up for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [43:22]
Bart Ehrman
Well, in this episode, it was our second round on the secret Gospel of Mark and Morton Smith. And in this case, we were wondering, we're asking and looking at the evidence of whether this could be a forgery. And if it's a forgery, is it possible that Morton Smith himself, the one who discovered it, whether he himself forged it, and. And there are reasons for thinking that he may well have, It's a much debated thing still, and scholars have different views on it. But my view is that it seems to be more likely that he did than he didn't. But I'm completely open to other evidence.
- [43:59]
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. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses and the new insights in the New Testament conference over at Butt. And misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [44:19]
Bart Ehrman
We're dealing with a really hot topic next week. Abortion is a huge issue in our country right now. It has been for a very long time. And people use the Bible to support their views about whether abortion is ever allowable or never allowable or something in between. And we're going to talk about what the Bible actually says about abortion and about issues that are quite relevant to the debate. And one of the things we'll be asking is whether people correctly quote the Bible when they do quote it.
- [44:48]
Megan Lewis
Thank you, Bart. Thank you, audience. We will see you next week. 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 Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, US thank you for joining us.