← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
A
Wildfires can start without warning. At Pacific Power, we're taking every step to stay prepared. From meteorologists using real time monitoring to crews on the ground with deep local knowledge and experience. Our teams train year round so they're ready when it matters most. When it comes to wildfire prevention, we're all in this together. Stay informed, stay prepared, stay safe. See how you can prepare@pacificpower.net wildfire. 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. Today's episode focuses on schisms within early Christianity. What did early Christian groups believe? Why were their beliefs so different? And how did they deal with their contradictory claims? Also, what happened to them? Why don't they exist anymore? But before that. Bart, good morning. How are you doing this week?
- [01:13]
B
Yes, good morning. I'm doing well. Classes are going along and as you know, I was on leave last semester. So I'm introduced to a new form of reality, the old form of reality. And I was thinking the other day, you know, I started teaching in 1984. I told my students at Chapel Hill that I first started teaching there in 1988. They started looking at each other like, oh my God, my parents are in grade school. So yeah, so it's an old reality. But here we go again. Everything's on your end.
- [01:46]
A
Yeah, really good. Thank you.
- [01:48]
B
You've got this other thing going on, this digital Hammurabi thing. What is that?
- [01:52]
A
Yeah, Digital Hammurabi is. It's a public outreach and education YouTube channel and podcast and we self publish various books aiming to make Mesopotamia and the ancient world more accessible to interested laypeople because.
- [02:08]
B
Wow. Okay.
- [02:09]
A
Well, we, we looked around and realized that everyone knows about the pyramids and the pharaohs and relatively few people can tell you an awful lot about Mesopotamia. And Josh and I are both Assyriologists. We think Mesopotamia is awesome. So we decided to try and share it with people who might be interested.
- [02:26]
B
Is this a regular podcast that you do or.
- [02:28]
A
It used to be. And then I had eight bazillion children. So at the moment it's kind of. We update as and when we have time, but we do interviews, primarily interviews with academics on whatever area of research they're particularly interested in. So we've done when we cover eight bits of Egyptology and Hebrew Bible, ancient world things. But I try and focus on Mesopotamia. So the interview I'm trying to schedule at the moment is with a linguist looking at why we know or why we call Sumerian a language isolate, a language with no known relatives. Because quite often you will get people saying, oh, it's the same as language family, as Chinese or Finnish or Swedish or Chinese. Yes, apparently, tellingly, they're almost always people with no linguistic training. And, yeah, a lot of it seems to be looking at tentative similarities. So I wanted to talk to a linguist about how we know Sumerian actually isn't related to these languages and how we would go about trying to form a connection if we find another language that we think is related.
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B
But, Megan, you're making the mistake of thinking that expertise matters.
- [03:36]
A
I know, I know. It's. It's a perennial experience.
- [03:38]
B
Why can't anybody on the Internet just say it's related to Mandarin?
- [03:42]
A
Exactly. I should. I should really just. Just sit and listen to everyone who knows better than me.
- [03:47]
B
Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, that's interesting. That's called digital hammurabi. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, good. I want to hear more about that down the road, down the line.
- [03:56]
A
It's a lot of fun. It keeps me busy. So we should get into early Christianity, which is, as I'm sure our audience will be shocked to hear, not something I know a lot about. Why do you think it's important, Bart, to know about early divisions in Christianity?
- [04:13]
B
Well, you know, a lot of people today still think of Christianity as one thing. My students at Chapel Hill, most of them have grown up in churches in the South. They tend to be fairly conservative evangelical churches. They think that the Christianity is that and that something else isn't really Christianity. You know, like those Roman Catholics. I'm not sure what they are. Greek Orthodox, you know, Mormons. These are not like, oh, they're not, Chris. But in reality, I mean, these are all people who. All these denominations and many, many more believe that Jesus Christ is the way of salvation. You know, they all have the Bible, they all have baptism and Eucharist and stuff. And so they're Christian, even though people say, yeah. So if you look at Christianity today, it is so massively diverse. You know, you get Greek Orthodox priests, and you get Appalachian snake handlers, you know, and you get liberal Presbyterians, and you get Jehovah's Witnesses, and you get Mormons, and you get Methodist, whatever. I mean, it's like, so what? A lot of people realize. Yeah, that's happened. And I think a of people think people with kind of historical knowledge might think, well, that happened at the Reformation, right? It was all the Catholic Church. Then the Protestants came along and they just couldn't get along. So they kept splitting and splitting and splitting, splitting. And so that's why we have all this diversity. And to some extent, that, of course, is true. What people don't realize is that Christianity was always diverse and that the diversity in early Christianity was far more significant than anything we see today. People who identified themselves as followers of Jesus, who believed, they kept his teachings, who had sacred texts that they said were written by apostles, that they believed were written by apostles that held the views that seem bizarre and off the wall to all of these groups today. The idea is that one of these ancient groups ended up establishing what became the Christian church in broad outline. So I'm really, I've been for years and years really interested in the diversity of early Christianity and this massive profusion of different kinds of. Of Christian beliefs and practices.
- [06:10]
A
I want to go back to something you just said, that modern Christianity has this really distinct way of dealing with differences in belief. It's that, oh, well, you're not a real Christian because you believe differently to me. So the ancient world that Christianity kind of came up in was a very polytheistic society. And you didn't really have that kind of idea. It doesn't matter that you believe differently. To me, your beliefs are as valid as my beliefs. Where then did this idea come from? And was it present in the ancient Christian sects that we're going to be talking about today?
- [06:42]
B
Yeah, these modern debates, like, you know, when I was an evangelical Christian, you know, when I, for example, was at Moody Bible Institute, whereas basically I was a fundamentalist, and, you know, we just thought, those Methodists, they ain't Christian Catholics. I don't know what they are, but man, oh, my God. And so that attitude goes back way back in early Christianity. So that various groups of people who said that they had the truth, which is what virtually most of the groups seem to have said, they thought these other groups were not really followers or deities, not really Christian, they were heretics or they were outliers and things. And where it came from is really interesting because you're completely right. In the Greek and Roman worlds, out of which Christianity emerged, there were hundreds and thousands of religions with all sorts of different gods. And even like a God like Zeus, who's, like, in a lot of places, different places had different kinds of Zeus and they had different ways of worshiping him. And because everybody was polytheistic, except for Jews, since everybody was polytheistic, Everybody knew there was multiple gods and there are multiple ways to worship the gods. And so, you know, it didn't matter because they're all worthy of worship and none of these religions. This is one of the weirdest things. We probably will do an episode or so on this. One of the weird things about ancient religion is that it really didn't matter what you believed, because religion wasn't about your belief about the divine. It was about your religious practices. You're pleasing the divine gods by sacrifices and by prayers. And the gods wanted to be worshiped. They didn't want you to agree to a bunch of propositional facts. They wanted to be worshiped. But Christianity came along, and I think it happened right off the bat. It's one of the most interesting phenomena in the history of religion that Christianity, unlike everyone else, insisted that there's only one way to be right with the divine realm. There's only one God, and there's only one way to worship the God, and it's through his one Son. And you have to believe in X, Y and Z or you will not be able. And you need to do X, Y and Z or you will not be able to have salvation. And so Christians insisted on that. Now, they got the idea of the one God, of course, from Judaism. But, you know, Jews in the ancient world did not insist you become a Jew in order to be right with God. They didn't care if you became a Jew. They were Jews, just leave us alone. You've got your gods, fine. You may be wrong about that. But it's not going to matter because none of these people really much believe that there's an afterlife. So it was a very, very fluid situation, with Jews being an exception in the ancient world, everyone else very, very fluid. And Christians came along and said, no. One God, one son, one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one. It's one, it's not a bunch of things. And you got to get the right one. And so that's where it started. And Christianity started out as an exclusivistic religion, even though there were lots of different views of it.
- [09:36]
A
So you said that there was relatively little conflict around what one should believe because people had different beliefs and different ways to practice their religion. And as long as there was a religious practice, generally people that's all fine. In contrast, and we'll see this further through the episode, these early Christian groups didn't really play very well together and that it led to a lot of infighting. What was it about Christianity that led to this conflict that we don't see in polytheistic religions, you know, I mean,
- [10:07]
B
polytheistic religions, of course they had boundaries. I mean, everybody has boundaries. You know, the idea that you believe this about Zeus or that about Zeus had nothing to do with anything really. But yeah, the Christians come along and the pagans do have boundaries. I mean, if you engage in religious practices that are socially dangerous, if you practice human sacrifice or something, you know, or if you are, if you're antisocial, if you refuse to worship, you know, the God of the city, for some crazy reason, you know, they did have boundaries. So they had some boundaries. It is like. But Christianity came along and it had this exclusive focus. And it's precisely because of this exclusivity that you have so much infighting, because there develops the idea in Christianity that there's one religious truth, whereas in pagan religions there are many paths to the divine. And you have a path and I have a path. I prefer my path. You prefer your path, but you know, actually you can walk both paths if you want. So there are various routes to the divine, but in Christianity there's one way. Christ is the way, the truth and the life. And no one comes to the Father but through Him. As it says in the Gospel of John, if there's only one way, you better go the right way. And if people are going the wrong way, that's a problem for them, but it's also a problem because they lead other people astray going the wrong way. And so the fighting became fairly intense between these various groups. It rarely came to swords, but it did lead to very, very serious polemical situations.
- [11:37]
A
Okay, we should probably look at some specific groups and to try and keep our discussion under some semblance of control, I'm going to limit us just to four, because I know there are many more than that. But the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the Proto Orthodox, we obviously don't have time to go into large amounts of detail and as ever, we will have specific episodes on each of these groups to look at them a little bit further. But to begin, did these four groups exist at the same time and in the same place?
- [12:06]
B
So these are broad umbrella category groups. There's a lot of variation within them. You know, it's kind of like, say if you've got the Gnostics, you know, you could say it's kind of like the Protestant, you know, you got the Baptist and the Methodists, and you got that, you know, you got the. There's a wide range of things but there's some things they hold in common. It's kind of like that with the Gnostics. And. And so these groups are first identified as groups, various groups of Gnostics. You have groups of Marcionites, groups of Ebenites, groups. They all exist. They do exist. At the same time in the second century, there are big debates among scholars about when each one of them arose. They all claim to go back to Jesus, right? And they all claim to go back to the beginning. But you don't find these distinctive groups. At least you don't find evidence of them until the second century, and they go on to the second and third century. And it's not until Christianity pretty much takes over the Roman Empire that you start having a much more kind of unified sense that this is what it means to be a Christian, and this other thing, not so much.
- [13:04]
A
Were they operating in the same parts of the world or are they geographically more distinct?
- [13:09]
B
Well, this is one of the interesting questions and one of the most important. So just to give you a little bit of background, historians of Christianity have always known that there are these various groups with different beliefs and different practices. And that knowledge, of course, goes back to when they were being attacked by their enemies. There's a group that ends up emerging as defining what Christianity is going to be for all time. For example, saying that there's only one God and that he's the creator of the world, that Christ is his Son, and that Christ is both a human and divine. Most people hearing that today would say, yeah, of course, that's Christian, yes. But in the early centuries, there were people who said there are two gods. The God of the Old Testament literally was not the God of the New Testament. Or there are groups that said there are 36 gods. Or there was a group we know of that said there are 365 gods, these are really gods. Or that Christ was a human, but he wasn't God, or that he was God but he wasn't human, or that there actually Jesus Christ is two things. A God and a human are temporarily put together. And so you get these various views going on. The group that ended up being victorious is what today people call orthodoxy. So orthodoxy means somebody who has the correct belief. Orthodoxy, and somebody who believes in something else is usually called a heretic. So heresy and orthodoxy both come from the Greek. So Orthodoxy is from two Greek words that mean the correct opinion or right belief. Heresy literally means choice. And heretics were people who chose to believe the wrong beliefs to do the wrong practices. You do get These descriptions going back to the early church and what's happened historically is that scholars from the 4th century on, and actually with roots deeper than that, said that Orthodoxy was always the original thing. The right belief is what Jesus taught, taught his disciples, taught the others, they've passed on down. And every now and then a heretic would come along and, like, mess it up. Like, they'd be driven by the devil and they'd be a bad intent and, you know, or they'd be stupid or they'd be, you know, and they'd come up with some crazy idea and, you know, they have some followers, but basically God was in control and he squashed them. So that was the view for hundreds and hundreds of years, until the early 20th century, until the 20th century, that basically Orthodoxy was the primary thing, the major thing, always the major thing goes all the way back. And heresies were kind of these offshoots. And today most historical scholars have a different view of that. They think that, in fact, these diverse things are going on all at once, including the predecessors of the Orthodox. And they were in competition with the Gnostics and with the Marcite Knights and with the EBE Nights and with all these other groups, and they ended up being victorious. And then they rewrote the history of the engagement. They said, we've always been in the majority. And so all of the writings that come down, come down from them. Did they answer your question?
- [16:00]
A
Kind of. Kind of. Were there then pockets of Marcionites and pockets of Proto Orthodox and pockets of Gnostics, or did these people all kind of intermingle and attend the same churches and live in the same communities?
- [16:13]
B
Yeah, right. Okay. You were asking, right. Location, geography. So here's the deal. There's very good evidence that you had communities of Christians, like, in a city, say in the city of Antioch or in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, where you had large churches where you could have a variety of groups represented all at the same time. You were using the term Proto Orthodox. And that's the term that I use to refer to people who held the view that became Orthodoxy before it became the dominant view. Right. So before it's dominant, you got to call them something. They're not Orthodox yet in the sense that they're not the dominant view. So I call them Proto Orthodox. Do many. Most other people. People. The idea, though, is you get these Proto Orthodox authors in the 3rd, 4th centuries who are saying things like, be careful when you're traveling over to Antioch, you know, because if you go in there, you got to make sure. That's not a Marcionite church, you know, or if you go to Ephesus or something, or, you know, these Gnostics, they're in our congregations, they sound just like us, but they say the same words, they mean very different things by them. So they were, there was intermingling, but there were areas that were more dominantly one than another. And so this was the breakthrough that happened in the 20th century is that scholars started looking at our oldest sources by location, by geography. And they tried to find our oldest Christian sources for Alexandria, Egypt, and for Antioch and Syria and for Asia Minor and for Rome and for, you know, and they went to, and they looked at the ancient sources and they found some places. All of the ancient sources appear to be Gnostic. The earliest form of Christianity in this region, say in Egypt, appears to have been Gnostic. And you go to what would be now Turkey, to Asia Minor, so eastern Asia Minor. That looks like almost everybody we know of early on was connected with the Marcion. They were Marcionites. So there are regional majorities, but there's also a lot of intermixing here and there.
- [18:08]
A
I see. So how then do you. Do we know about these groups? What sources do we have and what biases maybe should we be careful of when we're looking at these ancient sources?
- [18:21]
B
Yeah, this is, you know, for any historian, the key to every claim, the key is always sources. How do you know that most people know things about these groups and about Christianity, about everything else, by looking it up on the Internet and somebody tells them something and say, oh, that's what it is, we're all guilty of that. But for historians who want to know, they have to figure out, well, what are our sources and as you said, what are their biases and prejudices and can we trust them and do they conflict with each other? The deal with these various groups is that as I said, for basically 1900 years, everybody understood them to be offshoots of what was really orthodox. And the reason for thinking that is because our sources of information were always orthodox sources, proto Orthodox, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries sources, and then orthodox sources, which were Christians who were attacking these people for their views. And so if you wanted to know what the Gnostics thought, you would read an author like Irenaeus, who's a late second century church father whose writings we have. You can get them in English in five volumes, this big, big book that's called against the Heresies. And he describes these various heresies and he shows why they're so ridiculous for Centuries, that was our only information were church fathers who were attacking these groups to know what they thought. But, you know, you just think about that for a second. If you really wanted to know in this last election what Joe Biden thought, you know, is Trump going to be your best person to ask, you know, in earlier elections, you know, if you got, if you wanted to know, like Nixon's views, do you, do you really want to ask Kennedy? I mean, you know, I mean, he's a nice guy and everything, but, you know, he might like, slap things. Some people slant them a little bit, some people slant them a lot. And when you're attacking your enemy, your enemy has no recourse, no way to answer back to you. It's easy to say all sorts of things. And so people wonder, yeah, you know, are these reliable reports, you know, these Proto Orthodox are attacking their enemies, can we trust him? And people basically say, oh, yeah, he's telling the truth, he's just telling the way it is, you know. But then we started discovering ancient writings from these groups, especially the Gnostics. We found Gnostic writings and turns out, whoa, wait a second. A lot of what Irenaeus says is right, but there are some things, oh, man, he's just wrong about that. He's just making that up. And so you've got to evaluate the sources and it isn't just a matter of reading them and kind of. It means spending your lifetime studying these sources in relationship to one another and in relationship to other realities that we know about and devoting yourself to it and then drawing your conclusions.
- [20:51]
A
I see. This is a big question, I know. So apologies in advance. Are there any defining features that we can use to talk about these particular groups? What did they believe that was distinct to them?
- [21:05]
B
Yeah, the answer is yes, probably best take them group by group. So the Proto Orthodox, which was not familiar to most people because they insisted that there's, as I said before, there's only one God, the God of the Jews. He chose the Jewish people. He gave them the law. The law couldn't save them. So God sent Christ his Son, who is both human and divine, and his death brought about salvation. He was raised from the bodily, raised from the dead, and taken up into heaven. And the only way to have salvation is by believing in his death and resurrection. That will sound like Christianity to most people today because it's the view that did become Christianity. If you take a group like the Ebionites. The Ebionites, it's a complicated term because scholars use it in a Variety of ways, and we're not even sure exactly where the term came from, but it's referring to people who were ethnically Jewish, they were born and raised Jewish, or had converted to Judaism, I guess, who believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, but who maintained their Jewishness, who believed that when God gave the law to the Jews, he said that it's an eternal covenant. Circumcising baby boys is. God calls it an eternal covenant when he gives it to Abraham. And they believed he meant eternal. It means it's not going to end, it's eternal. And so they thought that the law was continued to be in force and to be a follower of Jesus, you had to continue keeping the law. You had to keep kosher, you had to observe the Sabbath, you kept the festivals, you did circumcise, you did the things. And keeping the law was bound up with having salvation, because if you're not following God's law, you're not on his side. And so they were basically a form of kind of Jews who were Christians and Christians who were Jews, doing both things at once. So when you get to somebody like the Marcionites, the Marcionites are followers of a man named Marcion who had kind of the opposite view. In fact, pretty much the opposite view. Marcion thought that the Apostle Paul was the one who nailed it. Paul differentiated between the Gospel of Christ and the law of the Jews. And Paul said, you don't have to keep the law in order to be a follower of Jesus. That was a useful message for Paul historically, because he was preaching to gentiles, to pagans, and he's basically telling them, look, you don't got to get circumcised, and you can eat ham sandwiches. You don't have to be a Jew. And so if Paul hadn't done that, I doubt if he would have converted lots of people. But he had that message. He converted lots of people. So Marcion, who's living 100 years later, thought Paul, he's in the second century. He thought Paul really had gotten it right, that there's a difference between the law and the gospel. In fact, they're antithetical. Marcion thought that the God who gave the law was not the God of Jesus. They were different gods. And so he believed in two gods. The God who created this world, who called Israel his people and gave them all these laws. That's the just God, the very righteous but wrathful God, who gives you a law you can't keep and so sends you to hell for it. Jesus comes from a different God who's above that God, who has never had anything to do with this world. And he sent Jesus into the world to save people from the wrathful God of the Old Testament. And so you get the wrathful God of the Old Testament and the loving God of the New Testament. So Marcion categorized that, and he said, okay, that's what it is. So he not only doesn't think you should keep the Jewish law, he doesn't think the Old Testament is a Christian book, it's a Jewish book. So Jews have their religion, Christians have theirs, and they're completely different. The Gnostics are the most complicated because there are so many different kinds of Gnostic groups, but they have a different thing altogether. Their view is they agree with Marcion that this world is not the creation of the good God, but they have a very different way of doing it, where they have an entire realm of divine beings that came into existence sometime in eternity past a whole bunch of beings, depending on which Gnostic group you're following. You know, 12 beings, 36 beings, 365 beings, who are all divine beings. Before the world existed, this divine realm came into being. And one of the divine beings in this divine realm fell out of the divine realm. And it was a cataclysmic event in the cosmos that led to the creation of this world by an evil divinity. The goal of the religion is to learn the secret knowledge that allows you to escape the grasp of. Of this evil divinity. This evil divinity created the material world. We're material beings. Some of us actually are spiritual beings who've been trapped in this material world. And the goal is to allow our spirit to escape our bodily entrapment, to return back to the heavenly realm. And the way that happens is not by faith in Jesus. It's by understanding his secret teachings. So the word Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, G N O S I S which, which means knowledge. These are groups that emphasize the importance of secret knowledge for salvation. That, in kind of a nutshell, is. Is what these groups are.
- [26:03]
A
So that gives us some insight into the differences in what these groups believed in their. Their distinctions. What did they believe that was the same?
- [26:13]
B
Yeah, so that. It's a good question. And as it turns out, it's a little bit harder to answer. These groups would probably have denied that they had anything in common that they said, yeah, that ain't. They don't believe anything like we do. But in fact, if you look at it from a broad perspective, there are a number of Very important similarities among the groups, even though within the similarities there are going to be major differences. They all, for example, believe in a divine realm and that it's important to have a correct understanding of this divine realm. They all believe that the world was created by a divine being and that humans are a result of divine activity. They believe that Jews and Judaism have something to do with Christianity, that there's some kind of relationship between Judaism specifically and Christianity. They all think that Jesus is very important and is the central part of the religion and that understanding who Jesus really is and having the correct understanding of Jesus is very important. They all think that their views of Jesus are what will bring salvation. And they think that their views can be authorized by written texts. Now, I emphasize that point because in the Greek and Roman worlds, broadly, written texts were not part of religion for the most part. I mean, ancient religion, Greek and Roman religions did not have Bibles. It's like Homer wasn't the Illiad and the Odyssey. They weren't Bibles, you know, mythology weren't Bibles. But Christians did have written texts. Each group said that their views were authorized by written texts, specifically texts written by apostles. And so they all agreed that apostolic writings were key to understanding the truth of the religion. And so they all have these things. And, you know, their ultimate goal is salvation that comes through Jesus as authorized by these texts.
- [28:07]
A
That's very much a whistle stop tour through the four, say, main early sects of Christianity. I have one more question before we move on with the rest of the podcast. How is it that Proto Orthodoxy was ultimately successful in becoming the correct Christianity while other groups were dismissed as heretical and abandoned?
- [28:29]
B
Yeah. Now here's a big debate. Oh, boy. This became a major debate about 90 years ago. There's a German scholar named Walter Bauer who wrote a book in German that the English title is Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. He's the first one who really pushed this idea that it's not that there was like one Orthodoxy and various heretics kind of split off, but that in different regions there were different majorities. And it looks like Christianity started out in Egypt differently from the way it started out in Syria. And it started out differently in Asia Minor than started in Rome. And, you know, and so he did these things regionally. And so his question was, why? Why did this one group win? The short story is that he thinks that the Proto Orthodoxy, what we're calling Proto Orthodoxy, was located in other places, but is very much the majority view in the city of Rome. And Rome, of course, was the capital of the Roman Empire. It was the largest city in the empire by far as a city. It had far more resources, a lot of administrative skill there. And the church became very big there and started to assert its influence on other churches and influence that it could assert, both because it had huge administrative skill, but also because it had a lot of money. And so it could use its money in ways to influence other church communities. And that eventually what ends up happening is that this Roman form of Christianity starts spreading farther and farther and to influence things more and more. When the Roman Emperor converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, Constantine, naturally his kind of Christianity he was familiar with was the Roman form of Christianity. And eventually then that becomes the form of Christianity that takes over the Roman world, even though there were other groups still in the 4th and 5th centuries. But that's the dominant view. And so it's a Roman form of Christianity. And because it's a worldwide phenomenon by the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries, the word for universal in Greek is Catholic Catholicos. And so that is then that's the Catholic Church. And since it comes out of Rome, it's the Roman Catholic Church. And so that's how Bauer understands that it took over by asserting the Roman influence. And I think virtually all the details of Bauer's very impressive book are problematic in one way or another, but I think the overall picture is pretty close to being right and that it's not an accident that this former Christianity you can find along with others, but you can find this former in Rome. I think it's not an accident that it's the one that ends up taking over the world.
- [31:10]
A
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your knowledge with us on this fascinating topic, and I'm looking forward to diving a little bit more deeply into the specific sects in later episodes. We are going to take a brief break and we will be right back with Barthes update where we get to find out what Barthes up to this week.
- [31:31]
B
If you're interested in the Gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible, you should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them out@barturman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases so simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you a curious person with a passion for learning but don't want to go back to school? You need to take a look at Wondrium, the streaming service that provides classes on just about everything of interest the Crusades, neuroscience, Beethoven, photography, travel, and lots else, all presented by true experts in accessible terms. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supporting our show.
- [32:44]
A
Welcome back, everyone. It's time for Bart's Weekly Update.
- [32:50]
B
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.
- [33:03]
A
Bart, what do you have for us this week? What's going on in your world right now?
- [33:07]
B
I'm kind of arranging a couple of speaking things that I'm working on that we've announced on my website. The big one is I'm going to be doing this multi lecture course just on the Gospel of Mark. This is so much fun for me to do these courses. And the Gospel of Mark, it is such an underappreciated gospel and it's my favorite book of the New Testament. I'm working now on this eight lecture course and for me the challenge is I'm doing that while I'm trying to teach, but it's just so much fun. I can't resist doing these things. And so that's what I'm up to now. That's what's going on in my world right now.
- [33:42]
A
Excellent. And we are going to have some reflections on life from Bart.
- [33:50]
B
In this segment, Bart shares insights from his uncommonly diverse experience as a professor and student, husband and father, and evangelical Christian turned agnostic. This is Bart Reflects on Life.
- [34:08]
A
Bart, what do you have for us to think about today?
- [34:11]
B
Like all thinking persons, I reflect on a lot of things in life and I've been pondering a lot. An incident that happened that was reported, I guess it was reported back in January, but it was something that happened last November. There was an adjunct professor of art history at a Hamline University in Minnesota. She's an expert on Islamic art and she was teaching a class on Islamic art. And people probably know about this incident or just to remind them, she wasn't doing it as a Muslim and she was celebrating, celebrating the greatness of Muslim art. And one of the things she was going to do is show a picture of Muhammad, a very famous picture of Muhammad. There are many devout Muslims who think that you really cannot show A picture of Muhammad. And so in her syllabus, she put in that she's going to do this. If it's offensive to you, don't come to that class. And then before she did it, she said she was going to do it. So I know some of you might be offended by this. And then she did it, and one of the students in the class got really upset. This is a devoted, devout Muslim student who got very upset and complained. And it got to the president of Hamline. And this instructor was an adjunct, meaning doesn't have tenure, doesn't have any protection. And so, in effect, Hamline fired this person for showing the picture, for being. Because they said is Islamophobic. So I have to say I think this is very scary on all sorts of grounds. As an academic, a professional academic who teaches at a university, universities are founded on academic freedom, where professors are experts in a field and they can teach that field the way their expertise takes them. Of course, every professor has First Amendment rights, right to speech, as everybody does. And there are big debates in the country right now about what that entails. But for somebody who gets fired for teaching their expertise because a Muslim student is upset, I understand a Muslim student being upset, but there were trigger warnings for this. Where does that lead to? I mean, for somebody who teaches religious studies like me, what if you are offensive to an orthodox Jew because you say, you know, Moses never existed or there really was no Abraham? Do you get fired for that? Or what if you're a Christian teacher and you show that, you know there are contradictions in the Gospels or that Jesus never called himself God? Can you get fired for that? It's a real problem, I think, let me just say I am. People know this, I'm sure, that I'm culturally, socially, politically, I'm liberal. And I'm a firm believer in sensitivity and respect for people who have different perspectives. But I'm also a scholar who believes in the university. And in the university you've got. People have to teach their areas of expertise without fear of retaliation from administrations and from boards of trustees and boards of governors, or to state school, from legislatures. If you don't have freedom of academic freedom, then higher education is sunk. And once you sink higher education, you're sinking a free society for the long term. And so all of this, of course, is part of the bigger bifurcation going on in our culture. That is really scary for a lot of us. You've got these two sides. People think you're crazy. You're flipping crazy to be in the middle somewhere on one side you get people who are banning books and outlawing the teaching of certain subjects, and on the other side you've got people who make it impossible to say or teach anything because you might offend somebody. And if you offend somebody, you're going to lose your job. And so I just don't know how higher education can happen in a world like this where there's no academic freedom and the academy is being driven by political power. So, you know, I mean, teacher, in my view, so maybe I'm a dinosaur, but in my view, teachers have to be able to challenge their students with new and possibly threatening ideas. And they can't be expected simply to tow political lines either on the extreme right or the extreme left or to try to do both at once, which is a interesting tightrope walking act. So that's basically my rather passionate view of things these days, that if higher education isn't allowed to proceed with academic freedom, and I'm not saying that I know where the line is supposed to be drawn, there have to be lines drawn, obviously. But without academic freedom in this country, we're going to destroy ourselves. We're going to have a police state. I'm not sure whether the far right or the far left is going to be the police. And so we don't want that, in my opinion.
- [38:25]
A
Absolute food for thought. Thank you very much. Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about and maybe let people know book suggestions if they want to know more?
- [38:35]
B
Yeah. So we've been talking about diversity of early Christianity and how there were various kinds of Christian groups that all claimed that they had the truth as represented by Jesus, the truth about God that could bring salvation. But they're completely at odds with each other and a lot of times at each other's throats. And only one of those views ended up winning out and becoming the dominant form of Christianity. That's the rough form of Christianity that virtually all Christians agree to today. And so one of the very interesting studies of early Christianity is trying to unpack that diversity and to understand where it came from and what it was all about. And I've spent years and years working on this one because since I was in graduate school, I've been really interested in it and there is a lot of good literature on it. For somebody who really wants to be hardcore, they need to read that book that I was. I make my graduate students learn this book inside out, Walter Bauer's book, Orthodoxy and Heresy and Earliest Christianity. But There are other books. I've written a couple books where I deal with this kind of thing. My book, Lost Christianities is about this. It's a book for a lay audience. It's not written for scholars. Another good thing for people to do is simply to read other Christian texts from the ancient world. My colleague Zlakoplaisha and I, for example, translated 40 texts from Greek, Latin and Coptic that are gospels, other gospels. And most of them are not proto orthodox. Most of them are agnostic or this, that or the other thing. So just reading these things is really quite interesting.
- [40:01]
A
Is there an anthology that you might recommend of apocryphal texts for people who are interested in non canonical Christian sources?
- [40:08]
B
Yeah, so there are several collections. And so if you're just interested in gospels, that's the one I would recommend. But if you want kind of the broader range of apocryphal texts, there's a lot of really good ones out. And I think the best one is probably the one by J.K. elliot. It and it's just called the Apocryphal New Testament. It has a bunch of gospel. It doesn't have as many as we have, but it has a bunch of. It has the most important ones. And books of Acts and epistles and apocalypses that all claim to be written by apostles have some really interesting and somewhat bizarre stuff in them for the modern reader. And so that's what I would really recommend is J.K. elliott's. If you don't want a full one. Like, that's a pretty full collection if you want a kind of selection. I also have a book called Lost Scriptures where I do the same thing, where I limit it to ones that I think are really the really hot items on the list. Those are some of the things people can look at.
- [40:58]
A
That's really helpful. Thank you so much, audience. Thank you for listening. I really hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses, including that upcoming course on the Gospel of Mark that he was talking about. And you can access Those over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [41:26]
B
So next week we're going to deal with the topic we alluded to today, which is I talked about how one form of Christianity ended up taking over the world and that the conversion of Constantine had something to do with that. And next week, we're going to look at that particular issue, not about the diversity of Christianity, but about how Christianity starts out of this tiny little group. I mean, in the New Testament, Jesus has, like, after his death, there are 11 followers left and a handful of women who come to believe in him off the bat. So 20 people or so, you know, say in the year 30, there are 20 people. By the year 300, they're like 3 million people. And by the end of the, by the end of the fourth century, it's half of the Roman Empire. Whoa. 30 million people. How. How do you go from 20 people to the 30 million? So that's what we're going to be talking about, how you go from this persecuted little group of people to being the official religion of Rome.
- [42:15]
A
Beautiful. I hope everyone can join us then. Thank you again, everybody, 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. Thank you for joining us.