← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
Bart Ehrman
Hey, he's here again.
- [00:02]
Megan Lewis
Oh, who hun?
- [00:03]
Bart Ehrman
Sammy, the puppy I had when I was a kid.
- [00:06]
This is the second time he's seen Sammy.
- [00:09]
Narrator/Announcer
Could this be related to his Parkinson's?
- [00:11]
Megan Lewis
I don't see him hon, but I know you do.
- [00:14]
Narrator/Announcer
About 50% of people with Parkinson's may experience hallucinations and or delusions over the course of the disease, seeing things that aren't real and believing things that aren't true. Symptoms generally worsen but are treatable. Learn more@mortaparkinson's.com and take the screener to see if it's time to start a conversation with your doctor.
- [00:34]
Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
- [00:55]
Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. We are actually recording a little ahead of schedule because Bart is currently in the Galapagos. So Bart, I hope future you is having a delightful time.
- [01:07]
Bart Ehrman
My future me is having a fantastic time and is so happy that he is not recording this while on vacation in the Galapagos.
- [01:17]
Megan Lewis
That would be not the most enjoyable thing that one could do. Well, I'm glad that future you is having a good time. Hopefully future me is also having a good time. And today we are going to be talking about Paul, which is kind of a big topic, so we've decided to narrow it down a bit, which I think is definitely worth doing. So next to the Holy Trinity, Paul is arguably one of the most important figures in the Christian religion and over half of the books in the New Testament are related to him somehow. And he spreads the gospel across geographic and ethnic lines. Some people consider him the founder of the Christian religion and that's what we're going to be talking about today. Does Christianity owe more to his understanding of Jesus death and resurrection than it does to Jesus own teachings? So I am excited to talk about this. It's not something I've really talked about, thought about, discussed before, But why is it important to consider Paul's role in the formation of Christianity?
- [02:25]
Bart Ehrman
Well, as a New Testament scholar, this is something I think about a lot and that I've thought about for a long time because there are a lot of people, not just New Testament scholars who will argue that Jesus didn't start Christianity, but Paul did. Famous people. Nietzsche thought this, George Bernard Shaw. Most people will be most familiar with him because he's behind Pygmalion. They won't know about that. But My Fair lady, he. He's the playwright. He wrote an essay once called the Monstrous Imposition on Jesus, which is about how Christianity just really botched it by going dealing with what Paul's views were instead of what Jesus views were. And this became a very popular view for a while, and it still is, I think that Jesus preached love and mercy and forgiveness and Paul taught blood and atonement and wrath of God being averted. And that the Christian church went with Paul instead of with Jesus. And so there has been kind of a Paul or Jesus movement on and off over the years. But it's a bonafide scholarly question. Is Paul the one who started what we think of as Christianity?
- [03:37]
Megan Lewis
And people have very big feelings when it comes to this, as I always do. Did some research before coming up with my questions. There are some very, very strong opinions on the topic, which suggests to me that obviously people have a very visceral reaction to it. Do you think that in my intro I overstated Paul's importance to Christianity?
- [03:58]
Bart Ehrman
You know, it's really. It is so difficult to state his importance in short terms. But the things you said are right. I mean, in the New Testament there are 27 books. Thirteen of them claim to be written by Paul. Nearly half of them claim to be written by Paul. Scholars today doubt that six of these were. There are six of them. They think Paul probably didn't write, but that would just mean that Paul not only did he write a lot of the books, but other books were attributed to him because he was so important. There's another book, the Book of Hebrews, a letter to the Hebrews that was accepted into the New Testament because church fathers decided Paul wrote it. The Book of Acts is an account of the spread of Christianity through the Roman world. And the hero of Acts is Paul. Two thirds of the Book of Acts is about Paul. And so over half the books of the New Testament are by Paul. And Paul's our best known missionary in early Christianity. We don't know the names of others who are out there spreading the gospel, but Paul was and started churches in major areas. The most important missionary and certainly the most important theologian of the early Christian church and arguably the most important theologian of all time. It's hard to overstate really the importance of Paul for Christianity. That's not the same thing as saying though that he is the founder of Christianity.
- [05:17]
Megan Lewis
So before we get into Paul himself and the writings that are attributed to him, the description of the episode, this episode refers to Christianity as a religion about Jesus, as opposed to a religion of Jesus. And Jesus religion was quite clearly Judaism. Do you think it would be reasonable to say that Jesus teachings aren't an attempt to construct a new theology, but to explain how Jewish law should be followed and to prepare for the imminent kingdom of the Jewish God?
- [05:46]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I think that we could do. You know, we'll probably do multiple episodes on the teachings of Jesus and his mission and what he was all about. But the short answer is that I agree that Jesus teachings were very much in line with Judaism at the time. He did not understand that he himself was starting a new religion. He thought that he had the correct understanding of the Hebrew Bible and of the God of Israel. And he was within part of the Jewish tradition that thought that God was going to intervene to get rid of all of the forces of evil, to destroy what's evil in the world, to bring the world back to the way he created it, with a paradise where there would be no more sin and there'd be no more misery and pain and suffering. And this was coming soon. And this was a strong strand of Judaism in Jesus day. And so I don't think that if you just look at the life of Jesus himself, his teaching, teaching, the things he was doing, perfectly consistent within Judaism. If we just had that, then Christianity would have been a sect within Judaism.
- [06:54]
Megan Lewis
So if Jesus wasn't attempting to construct a new theology, does it seem from Paul's writings that he was doing that?
- [07:02]
Bart Ehrman
This is where it gets a little bit tricky, because the teachings of Paul are different from the teachings of Jesus. Paul's understanding of the importance of Jesus does not reflect what Jesus himself said about himself in our earliest Gospel sources. And Paul's view of salvation is completely different from the view of Jesus as set forth in our earliest accounts. Let me stress here that one of the difficulties of talking about this is that historians have to figure out what Jesus himself really said and did, because we don't have his writings, we don't have any recordings of his teachings. We have Gospels that were written decades later, and the Gospels are written after Paul. We're used to thinking of the Gospels as being the first books of the New Testament because they are in our New Testaments, but they weren't the first books written. They are being written based on how understandings of Jesus had developed over the decades. Paul also is writing a couple of decades after Jesus. And so to understand Jesus, you have to get behind all of these sources to figure out what the man himself really said and did. And so when I talk about what Jesus said and did, I'm talking about that Jesus in that understanding, did not preach that his death and resurrection is what would bring about salvation for the world. That is not what the historical Jesus was teaching, but it is what his followers thought he taught right after they came to believe he was raised from the dead. And so the question is, since Paul advocates this belief that it's Jesus, death and resurrection, that is all important. He's the first one with God proclaiming that. Does that mean that he started this thing we call Christianity?
- [08:47]
Megan Lewis
Did Paul think that he was starting a new religion? And would he have identified as being something other than Jewish after his conversion, change of heart, whatever we want to call that?
- [08:59]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, this is a great question because I think a lot of people get the answer to this one wrong. I have no trouble talking about Paul's conversion. I don't mind using that word, but I define it an important way. I think conversion just literally means to turn around. You've got one point of view, you've got one philosophy, you've got one religion, you've got one idea and you switch and you go the other direction. Paul did that. But in his view, his conversion was not from one religion to a new religion. His conversion was with his understanding of Jesus and the importance of what Jesus did for salvation. So he converted in that sense. Paul continued to think he was Jewish. He would have been aghast by somebody telling him he wasn't Jewish. Yes, he was Jewish. In fact, he was the one who understood Judaism because he knew that the Jewish Messiah had come. And he knew that the Messiah was not supposed to be somebody who came to destroy the Romans and set up a kingdom in Israel. The Messiah was somebody who was supposed to die for the sins of the world and be raised from the dead. That's what God planned from the beginning. And God planned for that message to go to non Jews. This is how God fulfills his predictions in the book of Isaiah that the whole world will march to Zion and will follow the God of Israel. God's doing that. He's fulfilling that promise through Jesus. So Paul's the one who saw that his view, he understood that. He converted to believe that. But it was Judaism. This is what Judaism was supposed to be for.
- [10:42]
Megan Lewis
Paul and Paul, you mentioned, saw himself as an apostle to the Gentiles specifically. And despite being Jewish himself and viewing Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, he made it very, very clear that non Jewish followers of Jesus did not need to convert to Judaism, in fact should not convert to Judaism, because that's completely missing the point. In your opinion, how much of this focus of Paul on Gentiles not becoming Jews contribute to the formation of Christianity as a new and distinct religion? So if Paul had focus more on the Jewish community or required conversion, do you think that followers of Jesus would have remained as an offshoot of Judaism?
- [11:22]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, I do. I think that Judaism, that Christianity would have remained a sect within Judaism, that you'd have different kinds of Jews. You know, you have Pharisees who are emphasizing that you have to keep oral laws in order to be obedient to God. And you have Sadducees emphasizing you have to follow the rules for worship in the temple to be true followers of God. You have Essenes that are saying you have to keep your own purity by removing your from the negative influences of your environment to be true to God. And then you'd have the Christian saying you have to believe that Jesus is the Messiah in order to be that he's the one, in order to be a true follower of the God of Israel. So it would have been a sect within Judaism, which means it would not have taken over the world. It would have the historical significance probably. I mean, we're guessing, but we would have the historical significance of the Essenes. Well, how many people think about the Essenes these days? Well, how many people think about the messianic Jews? If it remained a Jewish movement moment, I don't think it would have been significant. And I need to stress that in my view this is Paul's contribution to Christianity. Paul did not contribute the theology that Jesus, death and resurrection bring salvation. Paul contributed the theology that it's open to Gentiles without becoming Jews.
- [12:37]
Megan Lewis
So if that's Paul's contribution and that that contribution was directly responsible for Christianity not remaining an offshoot of Judaism, could we not say then that Paul was actually the founder of Christianity? He didn't maybe come up with the theology himself. He obviously didn't invent Jesus. He didn't invent the importance of Jesus. But because of that focus on the Gentiles and non conversion, that's kind of what pushed it in the direction of new religion territory.
- [13:06]
Bart Ehrman
I guess the way I would put it is that Paul founded the variant of Christianity that ended up succeeding. So early Christianity was very diverse. I think a lot of people imagine that Christianity started out as this kind of monolith, like there was a thing and everybody had the same point of view. And that later, like every now and Then you have somebody coming up with some crazy idea about Christianity and someone else has a different crazy idea. And then, you know, every now and then these crazy ideas come up. But basically it was all the same early on. And I think that that's completely wrong. The earliest Christians were very, very diverse with very different points of view. We have hard evidence for that in Paul's letters. We have 13 letters that claim to be written by Paul. As I indicated, seven of those almost certainly go back to Paul. And one way to read these letters is to ask how many people are on Paul's side on this debate or that debate. He's got more enemies than friends within his own Christian communities, the communities he founded. He seems to have more enemies than friends. And so he has to keep convincing each of these communities to stop following these other teachers, these other Christian teachers. And there are different issues. The issues going on in Corinth are not the issues going on in Galatia. And so everywhere we go, we see these differences of Christianity. Paul had one version of Christianity that he was convinced was right because he said Christ revealed it to him. The difference between Paul and all the others we know about was not that Jesus death and resurrection brings salvation. The difference is that Paul thought that Gentiles could be saved without becoming Jewish. So I would not say he invented Christianity. I define Christianity very broadly, actually, just for the sake of having some kind of definition. I would say that Christianity is the belief that in some way Christ provides salvation. That covers a lot of territory because in early Christianity, there were people who said that Christ's death and resurrection brought salvation. You had Christians who said that Jesus death and resurrection had nothing to do with salvation. You have people like the author of the Gospel of Thomas thinks that the secret teachings of Jesus are what bring salvation, not his death and resurrection. Are you. There are all sorts of kinds of Christianity. Paul didn't invent that Christ is the way to salvation, and he didn't invent the kind of larger variant within that, that the death and resurrection of Jesus bring salvation. He created a variant within that variant, which is that Gentiles don't have to become Jewish. You don't have to be circumcised, you don't have to keep kosher, you don't have to keep Sabbath. Following the law of the Torah has no bearing on whether you're. You're saved or not for baal. So I wouldn't say he founded Christianity. I'd say he founded that variant of it.
- [16:04]
Megan Lewis
Okay, thank you. That's really helpful. If Death and resurrection thing isn't obviously peculiar to Paul. Is it something that shows up in Jesus own teachings at all?
- [16:15]
Bart Ehrman
This is back to the difficulty I mentioned earlier, that if you look at the Gospels and you see what they say about Jesus. Well, yes. I mean, Matthew, Mark and Luke and John all have Jesus predicting his death and resurrection. And there are indications in all of them that it's the death and resurrection of Jesus that put a person into a right standing before God. That somehow this death and resurrection brings about a right standing. The answer is for the Gospels. Yes, in the Gospels, Jesus does teach this. The question is, did the historical Jesus teach this? These Gospels are being written by people who believed that Jesus not only was crucified, but that he was raised from the dead. And because he was raised from the dead, they concluded that God must have raised him from the dead, which means that he was the one specially favored by God. And if he's specially favored by God, then why was he crucified? Is this what God does to the people he favors? He tortures them to death? That doesn't seem right. There was a reason, there's a divine reason for Christ dying and that is that he died for the sins of others. I think as soon as the earliest followers of Jesus believed in the resurrection, they made that connection. This death mattered before God. This death was a sacrifice for sins. And so they're teaching that right from the outset. They're teaching that for years before Paul even comes on the scene.
- [17:42]
Megan Lewis
So you mentioned that Paul is maybe one of the foremost theologians in certainly early Christianity. And if anyone listening is familiar with the Christian religion or various permutations of it, you see an awful lot of that coming through in how religion or how Christianity is practiced, if not responsible for the formation of the death and resurrection. The importance of the death and resurrection is he may be responsible for putting together or for writing about something that would be created that would be made into a comprehensive Christian theology.
- [18:20]
Bart Ehrman
I think the answer to that's probably yes. I mean, the earliest followers of Jesus were his disciples and the people they converted. The disciples of Jesus were from Galilee. They were day laborers or fishermen or you know, doing manual labor. They were poor. They were uneducated. Nothing suggests that they had ever had any schooling. Most people didn't. They're from a rural area of Galilee speaking Aramaic. Act even in the New Testament. That's stated in the Book of Acts. We're told that both Peter and John, two of Jesus closest disciples were agromatoi, which is a word that means Unlettered. They didn't know their Alphabet. So they were not deep thinkers. They might have been very, very, very intelligent. But they had no intellectual training at all, no academic training. Paul did. We don't know about Paul's early life other than what we can infer from his writings. He's clearly a Jew. He grew up outside of Israel. He grew up, he tells us, as a Pharisee. So he accepted the Pharisaic understandings of Judaism. He had to be highly educated because he writes complicated Greek. That took years and years of education. It's a weird situation with Paul, though, because he appears to be a manual laborer. He works with his hands. And in the Book of Acts, we're told that he's a leather worker, sometimes translated tent maker. Tents are made out of leather. So maybe he's a. But normally somebody with that high of an education would have something more, a different kind of occupation. But in any event, he knows a lot. He's not one of the great intellectuals of, of his day. He's not like Seneca or somebody, but he, but he is. He's very, very. And he's smart, very smart. He works out theological views that the others never would have thought of because he had training. He didn't have advanced philosophical training, but he had some training. And he worked out how it works that Jesus, death and resurrection bring about salvation. I mean, it's one thing to say it, but what does it actually mean? And this is something most people today don't think about. Most Christians say, yeah, Jesus, death and resurrection brought about my salvation. Well, why? What about his death and resurrection brought your salvation? Paul worked it out and he worked out the theology of it in a way that made sense. And because it made sense, it could make sense to a broad range of people. It isn't just a bunch of people with kind of this fuzzy idea. It's a very clearly stated idea of how it actually works. And Paul's the first to do that, that we know of.
- [20:56]
Megan Lewis
And he doesn't sit down to write a theological treatise that we know of. I mean, maybe 50 years from now we'll discover Paul's meditations on theology. What we have is kind of gleaned from the letters that he sends to churches that he's founded or has been in communication with. So I feel it's a really interesting situation where so much of the theology that Christians live by is maybe not cobbled together, but stitched together from a selection of writings that were never intended to be a comprehensive theological examination of a New religion.
- [21:32]
Bart Ehrman
That's exactly right. And it's one of the reasons there's so many disagreements among Christians and Christian communities, congregations, denominations, about what the true understanding of Paul is and what the true understanding of Christianity is. Paul's letters, the seven that we're sure we have, are written to six of them are written to churches, as you said, that he founded. Because there are problems that have come up and various kinds of problems. Each letter is addressing a different kind of problem. And he's writing the letter to help them solve their problem. It could be a problem about their faith, about not understanding something within their faith. It could be a misunderstanding of how they're supposed to behave, how they're to live together in communities as Christians, what kind of ethics to have. And there are all sorts of problems. And he addresses these problems. So when he's writing a church, he's not laying out what his theology is. The letter to the Romans is a little bit different. Luckily, the letter to the Romans is written to his first letter in the New Testament. It's his longest letter in the New Testament, is written to the church in the city of Rome. And he's never been there. He tells us he's never been there before. And he reminds them that he's been wanting to visit. He just hasn't been able to get there yet. And there he's trying to explain why he is on the up and up when it comes to the Christian message. And so there he gets. That's the closest thing he gets to a systematic portrayal where he's trying to explain his Gospel message to the Romans. And so that's what has always made Romans the most important of Paul's letters for those who want to know his theological views. But even there, you're cobbling stuff together because he's still got a reason for writing to the Romans and he's not writing a book for publication about the theology of Christ.
- [23:17]
Megan Lewis
So my next question is, why Paul? Why is this one person? Why are his writings considered so important that so many of them are included in the New Testament?
- [23:30]
Bart Ehrman
There are lots of angles one could take to that question, and I'll take a couple. One is, it's rather interesting to consider how important Paul was in his own day. As I mentioned, in most of his own churches, he has more enemies than friends. We elevate Paul because of his importance in the New Testament, and he's the one we know about. How broadly was he seen as important in the first century? It's a difficult question to answer, actually, as it turns out second issue is, you know, we are so glad that we have seven of his letters and six by followers soon after his life and the Book of Acts about him, because it gives us a lot of information. But you just think about those seven letters for a second. Paul converted three or four years after Jesus death, so say 33 or 34. And he's traditionally thought to have died around the year 64. He began his Christian mission right away, apparently. And so it was 30 years he was founding churches. So how many churches does he found in 30 years? Is it like 20 or something? I don't know. More. Probably more. But suppose he founded 20. And suppose, you know, he writes these letters. Suppose he writes each congregation just twice a year, twice a year. Well, if he writes each Congregation, there are 30, there are 20 of them twice a year. That's 40 letters a year. And if he does it for 30 years, that's 1200 letters. We got seven. It's like, oh, my God. So that's part of the issue of his importance.
- [24:58]
Megan Lewis
So if we only have, I mean, seven letters by one man is still, I think, considerable for the time that we're talking about. But if we only have seven out of a possible couple thousand, why is it that he's so important?
- [25:12]
Bart Ehrman
This is the key question. He is not important, as I indicated before, because he was the first to say that Jesus death and resurrection brought salvation. He's important because he realized this could be a worldwide movement. This message of Jesus death and resurrection was not a message only for those who are within the covenantal community of the Jews. When Paul got converted, what he converted to was not just a belief in Jesus death and resurrection. He got converted to a particular understanding of the significance of that resurrection. When he says that Christ revealed his gospel to me, as he says in the book of Galatians, Christ revealed to him his gospel. What he means is that he's not saying that. Christ showed me that he died and was raised from the dead. Christ showed me that this message applies to everyone, not just Jews. The logic is this. As a Jew, Paul had always believed that God had given his law to the Jewish people. And their part of being in God's covenant was that they kept his law. God agreed to be their God if they would be his people. And being his people meant keeping his law. Then God sent his Messiah, Jesus to die for the sins of the world and to be raised from the dead. And a person now is made right with God by Jesus death and resurrection. At his conversion, Paul realized that If Jesus death and resurrection is what puts a person right with God, it would put a person right with God whether or not they followed the Torah. Because the Torah doesn't make you right with God. If you're a member of the covenantal community, you're supposed to keep the Torah, but you're not going to earn God's favor by keeping the Torah. You're not going to be saved by keeping the Ten Commandments. Because if you could do that, if you could be a good Jew and have salvation, there'd be no reason for Christ to die. God could just say, keep my laws, and everybody could keep the laws. The fact that Christ had to die shows the law cannot do it. But if the law can't do it, then you don't have to do the law to be right with God. This is the realization Paul had at his conversion. It may have been just like a sudden thing. He's been persecuting these Christians for talking about the death of the Messiah. He thinks that's nuts. And all of a sudden he realizes that, oh, my God, this is how God is doing it for everybody. It's the death and resurrection of the Messiah, not the law. And so he goes to gentile areas and he says, you can have your eternal salvation. And he convinces them that God created the world and he sent his Messiah, Jesus and raised him from the dead. He's doing all these miracles. He convinces them to leave their traditional Roman Greek religions and accept Jesus. And they don't have to be Jewish to do it. You don't have to get circumcised. You don't have to keep kosher. You don't have to do these things. All you have to do is believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. If you do that, of course you're going to be ethical. A lot of his stuff is about how you, you know, if you're a member of the people of God, you still have to behave. But it's not by doing the things that make Jews Jewish and man that opened up the floodgates. Because now this could be a religion that could spread to everybody, to everybody in the world. Everybody in the world can accept this message. And without that, Christianity would not have taken over the Roman Empire and would not have become the religion of the West. So that's rather important.
- [28:41]
Megan Lewis
And I think that that speaks to kind of the practical aspects of the founding of Christianity. Founding is maybe the wrong word here. But if we're talking about the impact Paul had on the early formation of Christianity as a Distinct religion and his preaching to the Gentiles. The geographical spread, and you've mentioned it when we've been talking the geographical spread is a huge thing because he's founding new churches over 30 years and traveling widely. This must have had a massive impact on how fast Christianity spread and how far, geographically speaking, it went.
- [29:20]
Bart Ehrman
That's right. It's the combination of the geography and the ethnicity. I mean, so it's to Gentiles, it can go anywhere. And he's founding churches in Asia Minor, which is now Turkey, and in what is now Greece. And he wants to take his mission all the way to Spain. And the people he converts are converting other people. And so the religion begins to grow. He's not converting thousands and thousands of people. He doesn't need to. He only needs to convert a few people who will convert other people. And the point is, it starts growing. And once it starts growing with people converting other people, it's going to take off. So in another podcast, we'll talk about how it takes off, how it ends up taking over everything. And it didn't happen in Paul's day. It didn't happen for centuries. But he lays the seed for that. And the seed is both the idea that the death and resurrection of Jesus will bring salvation and that this can be taken everywhere and that you have to do it because there's no salvation otherwise. So that people who don't accept this message are going to be condemned. That's a selling point. And Paul certainly preached that.
- [30:30]
Megan Lewis
I think that's. That's a good place to finish the conversation, but thank you. You have actually a course on Paul and Jesus coming up. I think it's the 27th and 28th of May. I think it launches. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [30:45]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, for this little conversation we've had, we've scratched the surface of a very important topic about the relationship of Paul and Jesus. We're going to have more episodes on that. The next episode, we're going to deal with another aspect of it. We are in the back and forth, we're having. We're scratching the surface. There are really important issues here that are also unusually interesting about the relationship of Paul and Jesus. We haven't, as of now, as we're. As we're doing this podcast, we haven't settled on a final title for this series, for the course, but I'm calling in my head, I'm calling it Paul and Jesus. Two men, two different religions. So I don't know if we'll go with that. We'll go with something like that. But this is going to be a full course. It will be an eight lecture course over two days that people can purchase and if they purchase ahead of time, they can come to hear me do it live with a live Q and A. And if people hear this after that they can buy it as a course and with all the goodies that go with that. But it's going to be just on these issues of Paul and Jesus and about how it's hard to know about each one of them, whether they represented the same religion, whether Paul actually knew anything about the historical Jesus, all sorts of really interesting things.
- [32:00]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. That sounds really fascinating. And there will be full details of that on the website. So you can go to bartiman.com and have a look there. We are going to have your weekly update next, which is always fun to hear about about what you're doing.
- [32:16]
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.
- [32:30]
Megan Lewis
Now we've already said that you're in the Galapagos, so future you is looking at turtles and birds and having just a wonderful time.
- [32:39]
Bart Ehrman
Yes. So my future me is going to spend another week doing this and then my distant future me is going to come back and get ready for ready for a summer abroad really. But taking books and or at least taking a New Testament and thinking about my next book.
- [32:58]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. That sounds like really fun on all fronts. So I'm looking forward to talking more about ethics in the New Testament when you're entering more final preparation stages for that particular book. And we're going to have some soapbox time now, which it's been a while, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to talk to us about.
- [33:21]
Bart Ehrman
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists it's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Barthes exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [33:35]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what are you soapboxing about this week?
- [33:38]
Bart Ehrman
You know, as a scholar of the Bible, I pay close attention when the Bible is used in public discourse. I've thought a lot about it. I've written a little bit about it in terms of US Policies on this, that or the other thing. But like most biblical scholars, one thing I get rather upset about is when politicians and others use the Bible to promote views that they may have justifiably or may have unjustifiably. But for things the Bible doesn't talk about. And I find that a misuse of the Bible. And I think that it's really using the Bible for leverage rather than really caring about the Bible just to pick like the most controversial issue that we can possibly imagine in our context. There's a lot of debate right now about the abortion issue. And for the purposes of what I'm going to say now, I'm not going to take a side on that. I have very strong opinions about it. But I'm just going to say that using the Bible in order to show that God condemns abortion is completely wrong. The Bible doesn't talk about abortion. There is no passage in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament that directly condemns abortion, whether calls a fetus a living human being. But people assume that it does. Why do they assume it does? Because somebody told them it does. And they come up with these verses that've got nothing to do with abortion. Just as an example, you get this passage that you'll sometimes find in the Psalms and related words. They'll say something like, you knew me. This speaking to God, you knew me before I was in my mother's womb. Say, see, the person in the womb is a human already. So that shows. That shows that the fetus is a human. And you know, it's like they're not reading this verse. This verse is not saying that the person in the womb is a human. It says, before my mother conceived me, you knew me. So, you know, I'll ask somebody. So you think this is talking about, you know, before you were born? Yes, yes, before. Now when is it talking about before I was born? Is it talking about when you're in the, the womb? No, it's before I was in the womb. Okay, so do you think you're a human being before you were conceived? Well, no, but that's what this verse says. Before I was in my mother's womb, you knew me. And so you have to believe in the pre existence of the human being before conception. Well, I don't believe that. I know, but that's what the verse is saying. And so it's a metaphor, it's not a literal statement. Whereas there are some passages in the Bible that they don't speak about abortion, but they clearly show in the Old Testament that the fetus was not considered to be a human being. The best instance of this is in the book of Exodus, right after the Ten Commandments. There are these commandments about if somebody, if this happens, then that happens. You know, if this, this this is a crime. That's the penalty. Okay, so two men are fighting and there's a woman standing next to them who's pregnant, fully pregnant, and one of the men accidentally hits the woman with a, I don't know, with fist or with, with a board or something. And the woman miscarries. What's the penalty? It depends. If the woman dies, it's the death penalty. He's killed another human being. If the woman doesn't die but miscarries, it's a fine paid to her husband. That's the penalty for when you lose property. It's not the death sentence you get for killing another human. And so this passage is clearly not seeing the child that's born as a full human being. So there are passages like that, there are other passages that relate that way. So again, I am not taking a stand on the abortion issue because it's a complicated issue that has to do with what we today think about when life begins. And there are justifiably different opinions about when life begins in our modern world. But you should not use the Bible for it because the Bible doesn't talk about it. The Bible never talks about abortion and it doesn't ever refer to the fetus as an unborn human. Anyway, that's my soapbox. Think we'll get in trouble for that one, Megan?
- [37:37]
Megan Lewis
Complaints can be sent to the following address. It's a good soapbox, honestly, and it's a frustration that I have also because you're right, it's not there. You can't make up the Bible saying something about something it doesn't talk about.
- [37:53]
Bart Ehrman
Whereas the things that the Bible does talk about, everybody ignores. Read Amos chapters three to five and tell me what God is most in interested in. And is he interested in your social agenda? You know, just read the Bible sometime instead of taking the cherry picked verses that one person or another gives you. Read it and you'll see what God in the Bible wants.
- [38:15]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about?
- [38:20]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about the importance of Paul for early Christianity. And on one level, as I, as you and I both emphasize, you can't really overstate his importance for Christianity. The Apostle Paul, I think without a doubt is the second most important person in the history of Christianity apart from Jesus. But I don't think you can say that Paul founded Christianity. Christianity is the belief that somehow Jesus is the one who makes people right with God. And the traditional Christianity as it's come down to us is the Jesus death and resurrection put a person into a right standing before God. Paul agreed with that, but he didn't invent it. The followers of Jesus were saying that for years before he even converted. Paul's major contribution was indeed major. It allowed Christianity to take over the Western world and to become the dominant religion today. It's more followers of Jesus in the world today than any other religion. But the contribution Paul made to that was that he realized that people could be followers of the Jewish messiah Jesus without being Jewish, and that it's only belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus that matter. Others had said the death and resurrection of Jesus brought salvation. Paul realized that meant you could do that without being Jewish. This opened up the floodgates for gentiles to convert and allowed then for conversions to start happening all over the world.
- [39:45]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. that includes the Paul and Jesus course that is coming up in the very near future. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [40:10]
Bart Ehrman
Well, next time we're doing a spin off kind of related to what we're doing today. It's again Paul and Jesus, but this time we're going to be interested in what does Paul actually know what Jesus taught? Does he have the same teaching? It's about the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul.
- [40:25]
Megan Lewis
Thank you everybody and goodbye.
- [40:30]
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.