← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript81 lines
- [00:00]
A
Most people overpay for car insurance not because they're careless, but because switching feels like too much hassle. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry compares rates side by side from over 50 top insurers and helps you switch with ease. Jerry even tracks market rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jeri could save over $1,300 a year. Switch with confidence. Download the Jerry app or visit Jerry AI Libsyn today. That's J E R R Y AI Libsyn. 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. Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we are talking about the Gospel of John, specifically its treatment and depiction of Jewish people. Before we get into that, Bart, how are you doing today?
- [01:14]
B
Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. It's been a busy few months for me. Sarah and I are heading off to the Galapagos in two days, you said. And we've got a friend who's, who loves arranging trips. Trips. I love going on trips. I don't love arranging them because I usually make bad choices about like where to stay and what, you know, what to do. And so we have this friend who's like arranged international travel for university students. And so like she wanted to go with it so she planned the whole thing. Yeah. And so Sarah's a real nature person. She just loves animals and birds and so. And the Galapagos, I mean, you know, I'm gonna take Darwin with me and have a good time.
- [01:51]
A
That sounds wonderful. And I would also like a friend's who enjoys arranging international trips because I do it, but I find it very stressful.
- [01:59]
B
Yeah, it's funny how some people just love it, you know, love, love arranging stuff and other people just. Really? Yeah. For some of us it's just stress. So how about you? You're probably not going to the Galapagos this weekend.
- [02:11]
A
No, I wish I was. No, I'm not. I am in the middle of. Well, the middle. I've started teaching Sumerian, so that's going really well.
- [02:19]
B
Whoa.
- [02:20]
A
Yes, it's very exciting. I'm having a great time. So I'm spending a lot of time lesson planning because it's not. I haven't taught this before, so it's stuff I know, but I need to get it down into a format that I can then share with other people so it makes sense to them and not just me.
- [02:35]
B
So we have to get to the Gospel of John, but I will ask. So it doesn't have an Alphabet, right?
- [02:40]
A
No, no, it's written using cuneiform, and it's. Cuneiform's kind of an interesting one because it was in use for several thousand years, and it changes, obviously, quite substantially over that time period. So the sign corpus I'm using is one of the earlier ones, and it has a lot of logographic signs, but those same signs also have a phonetic value, so you can use them to write things phonetically, or you can use really one sign to mean one object or concept. Yeah.
- [03:09]
B
Wow. Well, I understood that. I hope everybody else does. That's probably day one, right? Yeah, pretty much.
- [03:16]
A
This is cunafel, right?
- [03:19]
B
Okay, well. Okay. More power to you. I need to sit in on that class. And sometimes you do.
- [03:23]
A
Yeah, it's fun. I'm glad to do it. But while I'm sure we could both talk about cuneiform for probably the next hour and be pretty happy about that, the show is not called Cuneiform with Megan. So we should get into John. And I wanted to start by just mentioning that reports released in March this year by both the FBI and the Anti Defamation League showed that anti Semitic hate crime in the US has been on the rise both in 21 and 2022. So I wanted to ask, in this context, with this background of what's going on in modern society, why is discussing the nature of apparent antisemitism in the Gospel of John important?
- [04:04]
B
Yeah, it really is important. You know, Jews have been around forever, roughly. And in the Greek and Roman worlds that I. That I specialize in, there wasn't opposition to Jews for being Jews per se. There weren't, like, persecutions against Jews because they were Jewish. Jews were widely understood to be strange and weird and bizarre. And, you know, most pagans, which is like 93 to 95% of the world at the time of the New Testament at least, was puzzled by Jews or. Or they made fun of Jews. And, you know, you don't eat pork. What, you own shrimp. You. You take a day off every week. You do what your baby boys, you cut their penises, you know, and so. So they. They were. You know, they were seen, but nobody tried to stamp them out. And what ends up happening is that within Christianity, Christians were opposed to Jews Eventually, Christianity started out as a sect within Judaism. Jesus was Jewish, his followers were Jewish, their first converts were Jewish. It started out as a Jewish kind of Judaism. But eventually, largely because most Jews didn't find the Christian claims about Jesus to be convincing, they didn't accept the claims about Jesus as the Messiah, let alone Jesus as God. And this created a rift between the Jews who believed in Jesus and Jews who did not believe in Jesus. And it became rather heated fairly quickly because Christians who believed in Jesus said, he's the only way of salvation and keeping the Jewish law isn't going to do it. And Jews said, well, what do you mean? I mean, God gave us the law. It's an eternal law. How can you claim to be a follower of the Jewish God and not keep the Jewish law? And Christians said, no, Jesus fulfilled the law, so it doesn't have to be kept anymore, and he's the only way of salvation. And you're going to go to hell if you don't accept this. And Jew said, but we're the children of Abraham. And so it ended up getting violent. And so the rise of anti Judaism, Anti Judaism, the opposition to Jews for being Jews occurred within Christianity. That's where it started in the world. And it became very ugly over the centuries, leading to legislation against Jews once the emperors of Rome converted and then leading to violent persecutions against Jews, and throughout the Middle Ages, pogroms and down into the modern world where there's just Christian hatred of Jews for having killed God or having, you know, being Christ killers or rejecting God, so God's rejected them, and since we're on God's side, we're going to reject you. It is what leads directly to American antisemitism, which of course is not unique. Antisemitism's had a long and ugly history. But so when you have reports of this kind of anti Semitic activity on the rise, even if people engaged in this are not personally doing it for religious reasons, it has very deep religious roots. And the opposition to Jews for not accepting Jesus and for remaining faithful to their traditions and not accepting Jesus goes back to the New Testament. So I'm not saying that the authors of the New Testament are anti Semitic, but I am saying that this opposition to Jews that leads to antisemitism starts in the New Testament itself.
- [07:18]
A
Before we go any further, can we just do a bit of good scholarship and define our terms? What do you mean by anti Semitic and how does that relate to being anti Judaism?
- [07:30]
B
Yeah, it's a very important distinction that most people don't make even. A lot of scholars will talk about antisemitism in the New Testament and probably in years ago. I was guilty of doing the same thing, but it's not quite accurate. The reason is because the term antisemitism means being opposed to Jews not for their religions or their practices, but because of their bloodlines, their genealogies. They're born Jewish. Before the 19th century, most people didn't have any sense of the races being distinct from each other and that you could kind of rank them in terms of inferiority and superiority. And so everybody recognized that some people are black and some people are white and some people. And that, you know, people recognize that. But it wasn't until the 19th century that anthropologists started developing race theories where they tried to lay out why it is there's such a diversity among the human race. And they developed ideas that some races are inherently superior to others. This helped justify slavery, for example. And as it came down into the modern period, it allowed people to classify Jews as Semites. And the Semitic race came to be seen as inferior in parts of Europe. The Nazis, of course, said that the Aryan race was superior and the Semitic race was inferior. And if you want a superior race of human beings, then you get rid of the inferior races. And so the Holocaust is driven by these race theories. The contrast is in the Middle Ages, if there was a persecution against Jews, like in a town, and they go after the Jews, usually Jews were given the option to repent and to become Christian and convert. And if they did, it still wouldn't necessarily be a bed of roses, but they weren't going to be executed. The persecutions would basically stop if you would convert. And so that means that they were opposed to Jews for their religious practices and their culture. In Nazi Germany, if you were born of Jewish blood, which they of course, strictly defined, it didn't matter what your religion was. You could be a practicing Roman Catholic with parents who had converted to Catholicism, but you were Semitic. And so since you were a Semite, it's off to the camps. And so anti Semitism is the understanding of Jews as a race with inferior characteristics, independently of their. Their religion. You don't get anything like that in the New Testament at all or throughout the ages, through the Middle Ages. It's a modern phenomenon. So I prefer not to talk about anti Semitism when it comes to the New Testament. I do think there's a lot of anti Judaism, though, and opposition to Jews and their religions and their religion and culture.
- [10:24]
A
So then anti Semitism would be Bigotry based on racial reasonings. Anti Judaism is bigotry based on religious beliefs.
- [10:33]
B
You know, I probably could have just said it like that.
- [10:35]
A
Oh, no, the explanation is much more helpful. I just want to make sure that
- [10:38]
B
I correctly understood based on racial characteristics as they developed within, you know, Western intellectual circles in the 19th century, mainly. Yeah.
- [10:47]
A
Thank you. When we consider then, how Jewish people are treated and depicted in the Gospels, or at least when I was doing the reading and the research for preparing for this episode, it seems to me as though you could divide people into, like, three distinct categories. You've got the Jewish authorities, the people, the Jewish people that they governed, and then Jesus and his followers, Jewish people, but treated differently by the authors of the Gospel. Is this a reasonable approach, or am I just completely missing the mark?
- [11:16]
B
You know, I've never heard it put that way, but I think it's right. I think that probably is right because they're in the Gospels, at least, the Jewish authorities are almost always isolated as being the bad guys, and they're always guys being the bad guys. The Jewish people are being appealed to, and many of them convert, and that's fine. Then you got the followers of Jesus are the ones who are really on top of things. So there is constant opposition between Jewish authorities and the Jewish followers of Jesus. And the Jewish people are the. Are the ones both groups are going for, I guess, who are kind of more neutral. Yeah.
- [11:51]
A
Okay. So if we. If we start by looking out or looking at how the Gospel of John treats and depicts the Jewish authorities, you do you see that kind of constant opposition? It looks like they're continually trying to catch Jesus breaking Mosaic Law. And the impression that I get is they're kind of looking for any excuse to justify their own attack on him. Does that play out?
- [12:15]
B
That's right. And you find that in the other Gospels as well, that they're just looking for ways to trip him up and to show that he's not being a faithful Jew and that he's blaspheming or whatever gets exacerbated in the Gospel of John. John is our last gospel to be written, almost certainly. It's usually dated to a decade or two after Matthew and Luke and maybe up to three decades, two and a half decades after the Gospel of Mark. So it's much later. Things have developed. It's written in a different community. Each of these groups is in a different community. And the local situation is probably what matters the most for each of these Gospel writers. They're not talking about, like, worldwide Judaism they're worried about the relationship their Christian communities having to the local synagogue or synagogues. And so John's situation developed. But one of the ways is exacerbated is that even though it's the Jewish authorities that are the enemy in John, John, the Gospel of John calls them the Jews.
- [13:18]
A
So that was going to be one of my questions because I read a couple of different translations. Obviously I don't have enough Greek to make sense of this. And I think the new international version that I grew up on says the Jewish authorities. But one of the older copies that my husband has just says the Jews. And I wanted to ask in the Greek, is that distinction made or is it just the Jewish people?
- [13:40]
B
Oh, no, it's Hoi, the Jews. So that's a translation where the navi translators. There's something good about that and something bad about it. On the positive side, they're trying to explain that this can't possibly mean all the Jews in John because Jesus and his followers are Jews. And many Jews come to believe in Jesus. And then it says the Jews were out to kill him. It's like, what? And so they're trying to clarify that this has to mean the Jewish authorities. But the downside is it's not what John says. John is conceptualizing the Jewish leaders and as the true representatives of the Jews. And so he's actually doing this intentionally. And if he wanted to say the Jewish authorities, he would have said it. The bigger translation issue, where I thought you were probably going to go with this, is a little bit more down in the weeds. There are scholars who've argued you shouldn't translate this the Jews. You should translate it the Judeans. Judean would be somebody who lives in Judea, the province of Judea. And so it wouldn't refer to anybody living like in Rome who's Jewish. It's just be referring to the Judeans. There's been big debates about this, but I think it's pretty clear to me that that's not what's going on. He wants the term the Jews not to refer just to people living in Judea. He's referring to the Jewish people and he's categorizing the Jewish leaders as representing the Jews.
- [15:08]
A
So when we read, I think it's in chapter nine, you have Jesus healing a blind man on the Sabbath. And his parents, the man's parents are interrogated by the Jewish authorities. And they say, like, he's a grown up, he can answer for himself. Are the people kind of on the periphery, the parents of this man, the man himself. They're not the authorities, but they are still Jewish people. They are not followers of Jesus yet. Are they supposed to be kind of marginal figures that show some kind of possibility of movement from this, like the side of the Jewish authorities to the side of Jesus?
- [15:48]
B
Okay, these are people who are open to Jesus, who are willing to hear what he says and experience what he can do for them and to do and act. And he's the one that Jesus appeals to. But, you know, it's an interesting passage because you're right, Jesus heals this guy. And the Jewish leaders don't believe that Jesus could have done that because it's a Sabbath and nobody can heal on the Sabbath. And so Jesus couldn't have done that because they didn't believe in Jesus. But they bring in the parents, and the parents are reluctant to say, you know, well, ask him. But then John explains why the parents are reluctant to say that Jesus could have healed him. And it's because the Jews had decided that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be kicked out of the synagogue. And so that's what the Jews have decided. And so the parents who are Jewish don't want to be kicked out of the synagogue. But it presupposes that verse. That verse presupposes that in John's community this had happened, that people who had come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah were now excluded from their local synagogue. And so already. So you see the tension going on, and John is reacting to that tension. And it's kind of like, you know, when you have a sectarian group that splits off from a larger group, the other group becomes evil and becomes the enemy, and that's the one you go after. And John seems to be going after these people who remain in the synagogue.
- [17:13]
A
So this blows my whole categorization theory completely out of the water. Do the people like the parents, the son who was blind, do they. Those on the margins of the Jewish experience? Maybe. Are they intended to stand in for the Jewish people who are not in positions of power, or are they more supposed to be outliers? So we're supposed to identify the Jews, the authorities, as the main homogenous group, and the people who are sympathetic to Jesus are more unusual. They're not representing the norm.
- [17:46]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know that it can be answered, really, from the Gospel of John. I mean, by categorizing the Jewish leaders as the Jews, it does sound like that's the normative understanding, that the normative Jew is one who has rejected Jesus. But there are people who are still open. And this is the tricky thing with reading the Gospel of John. It's been recognized since the late 1970s. Scholars have, have really thought about this a lot, that John, this may be true of the other gospels, but especially with John, it's like you're reading a two level story. You're reading what's going on in the life of Jesus, but what's dictating what's being, how it's being expressed is what's going on in the life of John's community. And so you're kind of reading two things at once. You're reading accounts of Jesus, but you're also reading accounts of John's community. And in John's community it's pretty clear that Jewish authorities have absolutely rejected Jesus and they're opposing those who accept Jesus. But there are some Jews who are still open to the message. And so these stories are trying to portray both of those groups, but the group that is opposed to Jesus is the one that's normalized as the Jews.
- [18:54]
A
So Jesus kind of butting heads against the Jewish leadership isn't restricted to John. We talked about it when we looked at the Gospel of Mark. I think I can't remember which one we did first. I would assume it's kind of common knowledge. If you ask someone who grew up going to church, whether Pilate or the Jewish priests were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, they're probably going to answer that it was the priests. But then within John you have like, we've been talking about the people who like are sympathetic to Jesus and you say represents people living at the same time as the writer of John, engaging with the community and being more open and more sympathetic towards Christian viewpoints. Now elsewhere you've given the example of chapter 8, verse 31 to 59, which is a conversation between Jesus and a group of Jewish people in the temple. And they're not identified or they don't seem to be identified as specific people or as people in leadership. They're people that he's preaching to. This is my reading again based on translation. So please, for the love of God, correct me if I'm wrong. But in this passage he calls them the children of the devil. And for me this very clearly is casting the Jewish people, not just the leadership, as being the enemy. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [20:14]
B
It's a really confusing passage in many ways because in many ways that are comparable to John being confusing throughout. John will sometimes Say something and then contradict it. For example, earlier in the gospel, he'll say that Jesus was baptizing people. And then he'll just straight out say he was baptizing people. Then a few verses later is saying that Jesus was baptizing people. Jesus and his disciples were baptizing people. And then there's this parenthetic comment says, well, Jesus wasn't really. It's just his disciples who were. But earlier he just had said explicitly, Jesus was baptizing people. Then like in chapter seven, the brothers of Jesus say, look, Jesus go to the. Go to the festival. You know, you can reveal yourself at the festival. And then the text and princes, they didn't believe in him. And Jesus tells them, I am not going to the festival. It's not my time yet. And then in the next verse, he goes to the festival. So you have these kind of things. So where one thing will be said and then the other, the opposite will be said. This passage in chapter eight is really kind of peculiar that way. So, in fact, I think maybe it would help if I just say it. This is in chapter 8, verse 31. Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him. Okay, so these are the Jews who believed in him. He tells them to continue doing what he has told them. They say, well, we are descendants of Abraham, and so of course we're doing the right thing. But then Jesus goes on to say that, I know you're descendants of Abraham, but you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. Wait, these are the ones who believe in him. Why would they be trying to kill him? Then he says, I speak of what I've seen with my father. You do what you've heard from your father. He goes on to say, my father is God. Your father is the devil. He's talking to the Jews who had believed in him. Something is funny here. It's not clear if the author is like taking different ideas and putting them together and not straightening them out or what. But apart from that weird thing about the Jews who believed in him, if he was just talking to anyone else, it's pretty clear. He's saying that those who are descended from Abraham, in other words, Jews, are not really people of God. They follow the devil. The devil is their father, and they do what the devil tells them to do. This is how he's characterizing Jews. That didn't do a lot for Jewish Christian relations over the centuries.
- [22:46]
A
And based on what you said at the beginning, that seems to be more anti Semitic than anti Judaism.
- [22:53]
B
Oh, because of the relationships? Yeah, it could be, except for there are Jews who believe in Jesus and they're okay in this gospel. You know, they just don't have our understanding of bloodlines. You know, they understand genealogies and they understand relationships. He says you are descendants of Abraham, but your real father is the devil. It's because of how you act and what you believe.
- [23:16]
A
I see. Okay, thank you.
- [23:18]
B
It's not because you've got that blood in you.
- [23:20]
A
Interesting. So there are other exceptions as well. You mentioned there are Jews who are the protagonists. Obviously we've got Jesus and his followers, but there are other people who are named or just feature prominently. We've got Nicodemus who's a Jewish leader who comes up in chapter three and acknowledges that Jesus was sent by God and. And then kind of pops back up again later after the crucifixion and helps prepare Jesus body. In chapter seven, there's like a split in the group of people. Some people are condemning him, some people are saying, oh, no, no, no, he's the Messiah, he's the Messiah. And then obviously the man that a couple of men that Jesus heals. So there are these exceptions, clearly, which I think probably speaks to what you've been saying about. This isn't anti Semitism, this isn't condemnation based on any kind of ethnic divide. This is anti Judaism. So could you talk a little bit about maybe why John is showing this anti Judaic tendency and how that informs what we know about the time he was living in and the experiences his community had.
- [24:23]
B
Yeah. The Gospel of John is often cited as a case where you can see how a person's personal situation affect how they tell their stories. An illustration that I used to give of this for my students back right after apartheid ended, is that if, you know, throughout the world today, many churches have the same Bible text that's read during the church services. And then a sermon is preached on that Bible text. And so they use a lectionary, which is the collection of readings. And so this is this particular Sunday and this is the Bible text. It would be possible for you to go and to take a sermon about how Christ sets us free, for example, based on a text, a biblical text like in the Gospel of John, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. If you went to a, say, an upper class, wealthy church in Manhattan, New York and heard a sermon about how you can be set free, and then you went to a Christian church in Johannesburg, South Africa and heard a sermon on the same topic, I can assure you they'd be very, very different sermons. And you could probably figure out the context within which the sermon was being preached. It'd be being preached on the same text, but in, you know, in Manhattan, you might hear a sermon about how, you know, you can be freed from your anxieties and your stress and you can be freed from your addictions, even your addictions to money or your addictions to alcohol or whatever. If you were in. In South Africa at the time, as you be free from this oppression of the white minority, you know, and preaching a doctrine of liberation, I'm not saying you'd necessarily get those sermons, but if you got those two sermons, if you just had the sermons, you didn't know anything about the context, but you saw those two sermons and read those sermons, you could reconstruct the context because what is said reflects how the person's reflecting on this text. Okay, so if you apply that to something like the Gospel of John, you look at what John is saying and what he's saying about Jews and saying about Jesus, you can reconstruct the historical context based on just what the author is saying. And when you do that, when scholars do that, they've been doing this since the 1970s, they look at John and they realize this is a community that started out as a group of Jews within a synagogue. The Christian community that John has come out of was in the synagogue. There were Jews who came to believe in Jesus, and they got kicked out of the synagogue. And they form their own community in their community now. They've been excluded from the larger Jewish community. They see the other community as the bad guys. And that's why they start talking in terms of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, God and the devil. They develop this kind of dualistic way of understanding things that's pronounced among the Gospels. And they're trying to explain why their Jewish friends and family don't accept Jesus. It doesn't make any sense. Everybody knows we know he's the Messiah. Why don't they know he's the Messiah? And they develop the idea it's because they're thinking of earthly things, we're thinking of heavenly things. Christ came from above. They only understand things on the earth. In other words, it's more kind of dualism. Only people who are born from above can understand the one who comes from above. And so you must be born from above. Born again. It sometimes translates. You need to be born from above in order to see the kingdom that is above. Otherwise, you're down here where the forces of evil are. That kind of dualism lies behind it. And the opposition is, are these Jews who don't accept Jesus, especially the Jewish leaders?
- [28:04]
A
This is a little bit off the wall, and I don't know if I'm seeing connections where there aren't any. Does apocalyptic thinking that we know Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, his followers were apocalypsists, does that kind of apocalyptic thinking play into this dualism that you see in the response to John's community after being kicked out of the synagogue?
- [28:24]
B
That's a great question. And it ends up like most of the things we're talking about, being a bit complicated. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is constantly proclaiming an apocalyptic message that the age we live in now is an age controlled by the powers of evil. But God's going to bring a good kingdom, and people need to repent in preparation for this appearance of the kingdom of God, because people who are not admitted into this utopian kingdom that's coming will be destroyed. And the time is short. The time's been fulfilled. Repent and believe in this so that you can enter the kingdom. That's an apocalyptic message where you've got a dualism, where you've got this age that's evil and the age to come that is good. What happens in John is that message disappears. Jesus does not preach that message anymore. He doesn't preach that the end is coming soon. And it may be because John is living, you know, decades after all of that, and it hasn't come. But what's interesting is that that dualism that you can sketch out on a horizontal timeline, a kind of horizontal dualism between this age and the age to come has been flipped on its axis so that now it's still a dualism, but it's not horizontal. It's vertical. It's not about now and then. It's about down here and up there. And so it's about life thinking in earthly ways and thinking in heavenly ways. And now Christ is not somebody who's come at the end of time. Christ is the one who's come from above. And eternal life is not going to be lived here in the future on this horizontal timeline. Life after death will be up there where Christ is. And so it's a dualism, but it's an apocalyptic dualism that's been de. Apocalypticized. And John is actually quite explicit about this, that when Jesus talks about the resurrection, for example, he's not talking about what's going to happen at the end of this age. He's talking about what he himself can bring. You believe in Jesus and you will have a resurrected life now.
- [30:22]
A
Thank you very much and I appreciate your willingness to go with me on my little rabbit trails. I know that this week was a little bit more scattered than we normally are. This was really interesting.
- [30:33]
B
John is a really complicated gospel and people, people read it as if it's very simple to understand. But the issues we've talked about are really crucial for understanding the Gospel of John. And this last point, it may sound a little complicated, but it, but it really is important to understand. This gospel is preaching a different understanding of who Jesus is. He is not just the earthly messiah ushering in a future kingdom on earth. He, he is a divine being. He's God who's come down to earth and life means believing in him. It doesn't mean doing good things for other people the way it does in, say, in Matthew and other gospels. Eternal life means believing that he's the one who came down. And so, man, this is a different gospel and it's all wrapped up in the anti judaism because these Jews don't see it. They don't see it because they're from down here and Jesus is from up there. You got to be born from up there if you're going to see it.
- [31:22]
A
Excellent. Thank you very much. We will take a very brief break and then we'll be back with Bart's news and some listeners questions.
- [31:32]
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 simply by entering the code mjpodcast. This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases. Speaking of engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [32:20]
A
And we're back. Thank you everybody. Bart, what is going on in your world this week?
- [32:25]
B
Well, I mentioned, you know, I mentioned we're off to a holiday vacation on the in the Galapagos. And one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to it is because when you do a lot of research, I try to do research all the time. Sometimes you've just got to give your brain a break. And, and it turns out that when you give your brain a break, you end up being More productive. Now you can stay up all night every night trying to study, but after a while it just ain't going to work anymore. You're not going to stick anything in there. And every now and then you've got to go off and just do something else. And so just going off and looking at birds and animals and turtles and you get rejuvenated. And so I'm really looking forward to that because I'm just, it's the Galapagos. I'm really looking forward to it. But also because I know when I come back I'm going to be just really to launch into, into my reading over the summer, which is something else I just really enjoy.
- [33:15]
A
So, yeah, I need you to tell my husband all of that or I'll just point him in the direction of this episode when it's out because the man does not stop working.
- [33:25]
B
I tell you, you got to give your brain a break.
- [33:28]
A
Last week I forced him to take a break. I took the children and I said, joshua, you can watch a movie, you can take a nap, you can read a non academic book, that's fine. And I left my 5 year old with him. And I said, oliver, if daddy tries to work, don't let him. He needs a break. I had not even left the driveway when Oliver called me and said, daddy is trying to work.
- [33:49]
B
Okay, now what you gotta do is you gotta get Josh in the car and take him off to some national park and just drop him off. Give him food and water, no books.
- [34:02]
A
I'll see you in two hours. Enjoy yourself.
- [34:04]
B
Yeah, exactly. Here's a compass.
- [34:07]
A
Not a bad idea.
- [34:08]
B
Yeah.
- [34:08]
A
Okay, we should go to listeners questions because that's one of my favorite parts of the show.
- [34:17]
B
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart ehrman.com askbart
- [34:35]
A
okay, we don't have any themes this week. I just picked the ones that were top of the list. So I think it will be an interesting mix. First up is related to John and Jewish leaders. So magically it does actually tie in with what we've been talking about. In John 18:31, the Jewish leaders state they are handing Jesus over to the Romans because they don't have the legal right to kill him for blasphemy. In Acts 8:54 to 60, they directly kill Stephen for the crime of blasphemy. Is acts correct in its understanding of Jewish blasphemy laws operating under Roman rule. And are the Gospels trying to insert Jewish culpability in what was purely a Roman decision to crucify Jesus?
- [35:15]
B
Okay, well, let me deal with the latter first, about the Gospel of John. So in John, Jesus is guilty of blasphemy. They hand him over to Pilate. The even more interesting thing in John, and this is only in John, is that there's a long trial in John. If you compare John's trial of Jesus with the trial in Matthew, Mark and Luke, you think, man, this is a different story. In Mark, when Jesus is tried, Pilate asks, marry the king of the Jews. And Jesus says two words, su leges. You say, so in John, Jesus gives extended discourses with Pilate back and forth. And Pilate, in John, tries three times to release Jesus. And the crowd stirred up by the chief priests and scribes won't. The Jewish leaders won't give in. And at the end, the chief priests and scribes insist that Pilate killed Jesus. And it says Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified. What? Yeah, the chief priest. So, yes, it is heightening the Jewish culpability. So that part's right. But then the question is, is it true that Jews were not allowed to execute people for not just blasphemy, but for anything else under Roman rule? The answer is yes, they were not allowed to do that. Then the question is, well, then why do they kill Stephen in Acts, chapter 8? Acts chapter 8 is not being presented as an authorized execution. It's a mob action. It's the mob going after this person because they think that he's committed blasphemy. And so it's not sanctioned by the Romans. It's understood to be illegal activity. It's not a contradiction. It's just two passages, both of them trying to show that Jewish authorities are opposed to God.
- [36:57]
A
Okay, thank you very much. Second question. If Jesus doesn't attest to the ascension of the soul after death in the synoptic gospels, which we've talked about a little bit before, what does he mean by today you will be with me in paradise?
- [37:11]
B
He means the ascension of the soul.
- [37:14]
A
Perfect. No questions.
- [37:17]
B
So I deal. I deal with this in my book, Heaven and Hell, where I talk about how Jesus himself did not believe that your soul, when you died, your soul separated from body, went to heaven. And I pointed out that's not the view of Paul either. And throughout the book, I say that there's nowhere in the New Testament that talks about the doctrines of heaven and hell. There are some passages, though, that do Indicate. These are later passages written later, the passages that indicate that when a person dies, their soul may go up to its heavenly reward. This is one of those two passages. It's a passage that is unique to Luke. It's written long after the earlier accounts of Jesus. And it is at a point where Christians are starting to think that the kingdom of God may not be coming right away. And so Christians are thinking, well, if it's, you know, we expected the resurrection of the dead to come right away and it didn't happen. What happens then when I die, am I just kind of in limbo for a while? And Luke, Luke has the saying that this person will be with Jesus in paradise. And so it's absolutely right. It's, it's where you start getting this as well as you start getting it in the later writings of Paul. There's nothing about hell here. Right? There's nothing about your soul could go to hell, is that just some people can go to paradise.
- [38:35]
A
Excellent. Thank you. That's very clear. Next question. I have often wondered what the Greek written text of the Lord's Prayer actually translates to. My mother was a Catholic and my father was a Protestant. And I was raised in the Catholic Church where we were taught trespasses and trespassers, where my dad's church said debts and debtors. I certainly see a huge difference between committing a trespass upon my neighbor and being in debts to them or to me.
- [39:01]
B
Right. So the difficulty is related to a kind of a larger problem with the Lord's Prayer. In the New Testament, we have two versions of it. One in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew in Matthew chapter 6, and another version of it in Luke chapter 11. Because both Matthew and Luke have this, the prayer. It's a prayer that's usually thought to have gone back to the source that scholars call Q. The source for many of Jesus sayings that are found in Matthew and in Luke, but they didn't get from Mark. These aren't in Mark. So the Lord's person not in Mark is not in John. And as often happens in this kind of Q material, Matthew and Luke report the prayer in different ways. The most striking difference is that Luke's prayer is shorter. Many of the petitions in Matthew are not found in Luke. The familiar petitions of the Lord's Prayer. And so Luke's version says, father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us today our daily bread, forgive our sins, for we ourselves forgive the debts to us, and do not bring us into temptation. That's it. That's the whole prayer in Luke. So it's missing several parts. If you're familiar with the Lord's Prayer, as most of us are, it's missing a lot. One of the interesting changes, apart from leaving out some of the lines or apart from Matthew adding lines, is that in Matthew it says, forgive us our. You could translate it. Debts. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And there it's a financial term. Somebody owes you something. Forgive us what we owe you, just as we forgive those who owe us. So that's the Matthew version. The Lukan version is, forgive us our sins, our shortcomings, or our transgressions. It depends how you translate the word. And so the difference is between the two different versions. And the interesting phenomenon is that the Lord's Prayer as we know it today uses the longer form in Matthew. But at least in many traditions, including the one I grew up with, it uses the trespasses from Luke, even though it uses the form from Matthew. And I think it's because I think that people think about God forgiving sins or trespasses more than they think about God forgiving debts. They don't think of it as a debt. They think of it more as a sin.
- [41:27]
A
Excellent. Thank you very much. I have a question, and given you've been teaching a film class this semester, I thought this would be a fun one to answer. The listener writes, I'm curious, what are your favorite films that engage with religion or spirituality?
- [41:42]
B
I have one that is my very favorite film that I always show the last two days of my class on Jesus and scholarship and film. It's the best film about Jesus ever made that most people have never heard of. But every scholar I know says this is the best movie, even people who aren't New Testament scholars. It's called Jesus of Montreal, directed by Denis Arcan. It is an amazing, amazing film. I've. God, I've seen this so many times. And it is a very deep, interesting film. Do you know this film, Megan? Is this a film? Yeah, it is really worth watching. It's not a historical movie about Jesus in the sense that, like, it's, you know, staged back in the first century or something. It's about a Canadian acting troupe that's hired to put on a passion play at a Catholic facility. And the play they put on, they attempt to do historically and trying to root the story of Jesus in history, actual history, and the Catholic authorities find it blasphemous. What's interesting about the movie, the way the motif works in the movie is that the, the lives of the actors, outside of putting on the funky play they come up with, the lives of the actors reflect the gospel stories and in really, really sophisticated and intriguing ways. And so it's a kind of a play within a play kind of thing. A story within a story. It is fantastic. Absolutely. Jesus of Montreal.
- [43:03]
A
That sounds really good. I'm going to have to look that up.
- [43:07]
B
Yeah, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
- [43:10]
A
Thank you. We have one more question and then we will wrap up. If Jewish canon was not finalized before the life of Jesus, do you think that the Jewish teachings of Jesus, where he's not portrayed as being God, would have found a place in Jewish scriptures?
- [43:25]
B
Yeah, that's a really good question and I think the answer is yes. I don't think they would have become part of the Bible. It sounds like that's the question. It would have become part of the Bible. No, it would not have become part of the Bible, but it would have fit in perfectly well with parts of the Jewish Scriptures. Part of the problem with both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I shouldn't say problem. I seem part of the glory. Part of the glory of them both is that they don't have a monolithic view about anything. Different authors writing at different times, in different places, in different situations, have different perspectives on God and the world and human's relationship to both. And so they're very rich, rich texts. But within the Hebrew Bible tradition, the prophets who are proclaiming God's word to his people have agendas that are very similar to Jesus agenda, the agenda of Isaiah or Amos, that the people of God need to return to God and start treating their fellow Israelite in just and honorable ways instead of oppressing them and taking advantage of them economically. This is the message of Jesus. The idea that God's message will go to the entire world. Jesus has hints of that in his teachings and in the Book of Daniel. The kingdom of God is going to arrive soon and you need to be ready for it. That's in the teachings of Jesus. So I think the teachings of Jesus line up very, very well with most of the Hebrew Bible. I don't think that the teachings of Paul or other authors fit as well in the Hebrew Bible tradition, but I think Jesus teachings do. It certainly would not have become part of the canon though. Even though there was no formalized conclusion to the canon, by Jesus Day, everyone pretty much agreed on the Torah, the first five books of the Pentateuch, on the Psalms and the prophets. There were some outliers but it was something as recent as Jesus would not have gotten in.
- [45:17]
A
Thank you. But it would still have been.
- [45:18]
B
Would have fit.
- [45:19]
A
Used in other places.
- [45:21]
B
It could have been used. Yeah, no, it could have been used. And the problem was that when Jesus died, he would have been seen as one of the prophets who was wrongly killed. But his followers claimed he got raised from the dead. And they concluded from that that he really was the Messiah. But as the Messiah, he had to die and rise from the dead. And eventually they started calling him God. And that simply wouldn't fit well with most Jewish teachings.
- [45:47]
A
Well, thank you so much and audience, thank you all for sending in your questions. They're always very interesting before we finish for the week. Bart, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about and answer the question, is the Gospel of John antisemitic?
- [46:00]
B
Yeah. Well, my answer will surprise many people because I do not think that John can be called anti Semitic, but it's because. So don't quote just that sound bite, please. It's because this Justin. This Justin.
- [46:14]
A
Ya.
- [46:15]
B
It's because antisemitism as we know it is a modern phenomenon based on ethnicity and race where Jews are seen as inferior and to be stomped out because of their inferiority. Anti Judaism as I define it is an opposition to Jews for their Jewish practices and religious customs and culture, opposition to Jews for practicing Jews Judaism in some way. The Gospel of John is strongly anti Jewish in that sense, but it's nuanced because in the Gospel of John, Jesus is absolutely Jew, his followers are Jews, they convert Jews, many Jews believe in Jesus, so that's good. The problem is that the Jewish authorities are represented as the normative Jews and are often simply called the Jews. And they are said to be opposed to God, not just to Jesus, but to God and to be the children of the devil. And so the Gospel of John got used for horrible anti Jewish purposes over the centuries and continues to drive some Christians and some Christian groups to anti Semitic actions which are on the rise. And so I think people need to recognize the roots of modern antisemitism. It's not that I'm saying that John is anti Semitic, but it is opposed to Jews who reject Jesus. And that leads to systematic anti Judaism within Christianity and eventually to antisemitism. And we need to recognize what the roots of that kind of thing are. I'm not trashing the Gospel of John. It sounds like I might be. The Gospel of John is a fantastic book, but you need to put it in its historical context and understand why it's saying, what it's saying and why it develops, the views that it develops.
- [48:01]
A
Bart, thank you so much as ever, this was a delightful conversation. 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 any future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. Ms. Quoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [48:25]
B
So next week we're dealing with one of the really fundamental issues of Christianity that lots of people wonder about, not just biblical scholars, but it has to do with the Apostle Paul. Paul's preaching about Jesus seems to be quite different from the teachings of Jesus himself. And Paul's teaching that you have to believe in Jesus, death and resurrection, and that's what Christians teach. So isn't it better to consider Paul the founder of Christianity rather than Jesus? It's a good question. We'll be talking about it.
- [48:52]
A
I'm looking forward to it. Thank you 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.