← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:23]
Megan Lewis
3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com the doctrine of the Trinity, that there's one single God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is central to modern Christianity. But is it even in the Bible? Today we're talking about the Trinity, what Bible verses are used to support the doctrine, and whether it's something that the historical Jesus would have recognized. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is listeners questions. I'm going to be asking Bart, among other things, one, why the brother of Jesus isn't more important than the Apostle Paul, a random dude that didn't even meet Jesus. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus podcast with Bart Ehrman. Bart, before we get to the scholarly response for the Trinity being in the Bible, I would like to ask, how did your early teachers or mentors explain the Trinity to you in a way that felt convincing at the time, you
- [01:18]
Bart Ehrman
know, I never had trouble getting convinced because I just, I was raised with it. From the time I had heard, you know, anything about Christianity, I knew that there was this, there was the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What I hadn't gotten my mind around and took a long time to realize that the doctrine of the Trinity was more than just there being a Father, Son and Spirit, but that in the churches I went to, that was, you know, it was just Father, Son and Spirit. And so you just kind of assumed it and you probably didn't think much about it because you didn't realize, wait a second, there's three of them and you're saying there's one God. And so I don't think that really kind of occurred to me very much. So it took like, no convincing for me. My sense is most people believe in the Trinity, believe in it because that's what they've been raised on.
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Megan Lewis
That's certainly how, how I was raised. And I think the way that I appreciated it being explained, not to me, because again, it was something that I was just, it's just a fact. But I was in a children's service one Sunday as an adult, I was helping and the. The vicar was explaining it in terms of water being liquid, gas and solid, but still all being water, which I really liked. My partner at the time was a theologian and really, really didn't like it. But I never actually got to the bottom of why that was a problem.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it is a problem, but to
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Megan Lewis
make sure that we're.
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Bart Ehrman
It is a problem, but. But it's like it's a problem for complicated reasons. So that's probably one didn't want. People have various analogies that. That's probably the best analogy there is. But it doesn't work. Okay.
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Megan Lewis
Seeing as I never had it adequately explained to me. Could you tell me why it doesn't work?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, we'll have to talk about what it is first, I guess. So I.
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Megan Lewis
The deal is, so, yeah, that's true. We should go. We should do the whole what is the Trinity? And then why is it. Because it's the same as water.
- [03:11]
Bart Ehrman
And, and also why is it, you know, not the Bible, which are. Or is it in the Bible? You know, when you ask what is it in the Bible, it really depends on what you mean. And this is why it's going to be important to understand what the doctrine is actually is because you definitely have God the Father in the Bible. You have Christ, the divine Christ, as God in the Bible, and you have the Spirit as God in the Bible. So, yes, you got all three in the Bible. But the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine that emerges within Christian orthodoxy toward the end of the 4th century is not that there is a Father, Son and Spirit. Everybody agreed with that. But there were trinitarian controversies about how to understand that for a really long time. And still down till today. The doctrine that emerged is a little bit stranger than that. It's the doctrine that you have these three figures, Father, Son, and Spirit, all three of them. They are all equally powerful, they're all equally knowledgeable. They are equal in substance, they are equal, equal in their essence. And they are distinct persons. They are different from each other. They're not the same person. They're different persons, but there's only one God. So you have three beings who are all independently God and separate from one another, but there's only one God. And so that. That's the doctrine. And of course, many people don't know that's the doctrine. When I ask my students, I have a big class of 300 students, I'll ask them, what's the doctrine of the Trinity? They'll say, Father, Son and Spir. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, you got to have that. But what's the doctrine? Yeah, they don't know.
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Megan Lewis
What were some of the competing views on the Trinity? If this is the. The most successful one, the one that. That we were left with, what were the other ones?
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Bart Ehrman
So the. There were several others. I mean, some said there were three Gods, some said there's that. That Jesus isn't, you know, really God. Not fully God. Your Spirit isn't fully God. That was the most. In the 4th century, that was the most common explanation is that you have God the Father who's. But you can't have two other people who are also almighty, because if you got three of them, none of them is almighty, if you see what I mean. Only one of them can be all. If somebody's all might. They got to be just one of them. And so that was a view that the Aryan controversy that people may have heard of, propounded by Arius, was the view that I think many people have today that God the Father is ultimate and the Son and the Spirit are subordinate to God. So they're God in some sense, but they're not like God. God. And so that was a common view. Another view that was prevalent in the second century, before the trinitarian controversies was one that scholars sometimes called modalism. And modalism is called that because it claims that God comes in three modes of existence and that it has to do with how he's relating to the world and people, whether he's Father, son, or spirit. And so the analogy is that I myself, Bart Ehrman, I am. I'm the Father of one person. I'm the brother of another person, and I'm the Son of another person. So I am father, brother, and son all at the same time. But there's only one of me. So there's one, but there's three. And it's like that with God. There's one of them. But sometimes when he's ruling up in heaven, that's the Father. When he becomes incarnate as the Son who's going to die for the sins of the world, that's the Son. When after the Son leaves, he's a spirit who comes down to dwell among his people. Now, that's when he's the Spirit, but it's all one God. It's just in three modes of existence. And that's more like H2O, where it's all H2O, but in different states.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. Now for my. It doesn't look like the doctrine of the Trinity that we Ended up with the. The separate, but also not separate.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, good luck. Good luck.
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Megan Lewis
Even the one that we're talking about.
- [07:22]
Bart Ehrman
Look, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard even to say it. It's even harder to understand it. Like. And the reality is, I mean, the point of this whole thing is you can't understand it. So people say, well, that ain't logical, you know, or the, the numbers don't work there. Yes, that's right. But it's. You are correct.
- [07:37]
Megan Lewis
They do not.
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Bart Ehrman
It's theological logic. It's not Aristotelian logic, and it's not numerical logic. It's theological logic. And people say there can't be something different. Yes, there is. Aristotelian logic is not numerical logic. And numerical. And so this is theological logic. Right.
- [07:55]
Megan Lewis
So it doesn't look like that this doctrine is something that Jesus ever states or refers to. And I suspect, given that he didn't think he was God, he would have really agreed with it. Does he ever mention any kind of. Of trinitarian thinking, anything along those lines?
- [08:15]
Bart Ehrman
Well, this is the, this is the point of argument, of course, between people who are traditional Christians and other people who are not. Is a. Traditional Christians would claim that Jesus was God and that he did believe in the Trinity and that it gives indications of the Trinity. And other people who don't subscribe to the Trinity, whether they're Christian or not, would disagree with that. Throughout history, there have been lots of Christians, and there are a lot of Christians today who don't accept that standard understanding of the Trinity as it came down to us from the 4th century. They just say, yeah, that's how they put it, but it actually can't be that way. So there are a lot of Christians who, Who think that too. The question about Jesus. So the. It's a complicated issue. It's complicated because scholars, as we people have been listening to this podcast for a long time, know that the Gospels appear to contain material that actually does go back to the historical Jesus, some of his sayings, some of his activities, but it has other materials that do not go back to the historical Jesus. And you can. If you look carefully at the critical scholarship, it looks like, you know, you can demonstrate that. That there are things in the Gospels that did not go back to the historical Jesus. And so the question is, which things do go back to him? Which things don't? The problem with this particular question is, does Jesus call himself God? And if he calls himself God, does he think himself as equal with God? Like, of the same substance of the same essence or not. And so in Matthew, Mark and Luke, our first three gospels, which are based on earlier sources that we can somewhat reconstruct. And so all of our sources prior to up to Matthew, Mark and Luke and Matthew, Mark, Luke themselves never have Jesus declare that he's God. It's striking. But when you see what Jesus says in his teachings in these gospel, he teaches about the coming kingdom of God. He talks about the need to repent. He calls himself things like the Son of man. There are indications that he's the Son of God, but he doesn't call himself God and gives no indication that he thinks he's God. People will take exception to that claim of mine, but I think it's true. And they'll say, well, he did miracles, so he must have known he was God. Well, Moses did miracles. Was he God? Elijah did miracles. Enoch did miracles. Jesus disciples did miracles. Were they God? Well, no, but they were working through the power of God. Yeah, that's what the New Testament says Jesus was doing. Matthew, Mark and Luke say that he had the power of God in him, but he does not call himself God. When you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus spends his entire teaching ministry, not teaching in parables, which he never tells. And John never tells a parable, not teaching about the coming kingdom of God, never mentions that in the Gospel of John, his entire ministry, he's teaching about his identity as a divine figure who has come down for heaven so that if anybody believes in him, they'll have eternal life. And at one point in John, he says things like, before Abraham was I am. Well, Abraham lived 1800 years earlier, and he's saying he existed before Abraham. And he says, I am, which is the name of God. And in Exodus chapter three, when Moses asked God, what's your name? He tells him, my name's I am. And so Jesus takes that, makes a claim for himself, and his Jewish opponents know exactly what he's saying. In John, they take up stones to stone him to death for blasphemy because he's calling himself God. Later he says, I and the Father are one. Well, okay, there he is. He's God and he's at one with God. Trinity, at least the beginning of it. So if you take the Gospel of John as historically accurate, possibly if you take it as indicating early Christian belief in Trinity, you, you. There's a way to get there from the Gospel of John, although it's a, as we'll see in a little bit, it's. That's problematic. Even there.
- [12:20]
Megan Lewis
We're going to get into that in a little bit more detail in a moment. But I do have a quick reminder for everyone before we move on. Bart's new course, through the Eye of a Needle. Jesus teachings on wealth and their modern relevance is being recorded live on May 16th and 17th. That's in just a few days. So if you want to join the live recording and have a chance to participate in the Q and A with Bart, now is the time to sign. But for anyone who hasn't heard about it yet, what is this course about?
- [12:47]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'm excited about this one because I've never given a course on this and like at unc, I never taught taught a course like this. But Jesus view of money and the reason one of the reasons for me it's interesting as a New Testament scholar is there seem to be contrary indications in the, in the Gospels about Jesus views of money. So much so that people who are Marxists can claim Jesus on their side for their economic views. Socialists can claim him on their side for their views, capitalists can claim on their side for their views, depending on what, what passages you look at. And so we're going to look at the passages and see if we can figure out what they really said and put these passages in the context of Jesus actual life. The, you know, what it was like in Jesus day and time in 1st century Galilee when it came to issues of money and the economy.
- [13:38]
Megan Lewis
I have to say I think one of my favorite things about the courses and about talking with you on misquoting Jesus is getting the conte behind all of the quotes and the parables and the stories that are like floating around just in, in the ether of Western culture. But getting the context is, is so, so valuable.
- [13:54]
Bart Ehrman
It's val. It's crucial. And I think one of the difficulties with reading the Bible for purely devotional reasons, which I, I'm not opposed to that, but one of the problems is that people tend to like pick a verse here or verse there or a passage here or passage and take it out of its context. And when you take something out of context and it's out of context and, and it tends to mean something in context. And so I'm not saying that the only way to read the Bible is a, you know, critical historian or anything, but if you really want to know what a passage means, you have to put it in its context, not just within the book that it's found in, but also in the historical context in which it was written. And so it's a Fundamental, fundamental principle of historical interpretation of the Bible. Which is valuable whether you want to do a devotional interpretation or not.
- [14:42]
Megan Lewis
Love it. And again, this is an eight lesson course. It's recording live this Saturday and Sunday, May 16th and 17th. If you would like to join, head over to bart ehrman.com Eye of a Needle to grab your spot. You'll also have lifetime access to the course, so if you can't make the live recordings, you can still watch it whenever you would like. That is Bart ehrman.com Eye of a Needle and as always, please use the code mjpodcast at end the the checkout for a special discount. All right, back to the doctrine of the Trinity. Before our announcement, we were talking about the Book of John and how, well, the Gospel of John and how Jesus is kind of giving a bit of a self identity tour, I suppose the verses that people use most often to argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is actually in the New Testament of First John 5, 7, 8. Could you talk a little bit about those for us?
- [15:39]
Bart Ehrman
I can. And for listeners who don't know, First John is not the same as the Gospel of John at the end of the New Testament.
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Megan Lewis
This is Trip's heart.
- [15:48]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah. No, it's. No, it's. But it's an interesting question. What the relationship of First John, which seems to be like an essay, a short essay, a treatise of some kind, and what the Gospel John, which is an account of Jesus life and death. It's interesting to know what the relationship is because they sound a lot alike. And so historically people have thought it's author, but there are questions about that among scholars. But we're talking about First John. Now toward the end of the New Testament, First John 5, 7, 8 are the only place in the entire Bible where something like the explicit doctrine of the Trinity is pronounced. Remember, the doctrine of the Trinity is not just that there's a Father, Son and Spirit. You get a Father, Son and Spirit in the Gospel of John, you can find that combination elsewhere. But the idea that the three are one is found only in these verses. These verses say that there are three that bear witness in heaven. The Father, the Word and the Spirit. And these three are one. Whoa. Boom, there it is.
- [16:54]
Megan Lewis
So it's pretty concise. I don't need any more evidence.
- [16:57]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, well, you, you don't. But let me, let me problematize your evidence for you. As we say in academics, problematize. Okay. The problem with these verses, they are found in the King James Bible and they, they were in the English Bible tradition until the 19th century. They continued in the 19th century too. They are based on problematic Greek evidence. So here's the deal. As, as we were saying in our last episode, our English translations are translations of the ancient languages. The New Testament is originally written in Greek. We have Greek manuscripts that were produced century after century after century prior to the invention of printing in the 15th century when the printers decided that they wanted it'd be profitable for them to print a Greek New Testament instead of having handwritten manuscripts, actually do it with set print, movable type, they had to choose which manuscripts. Of all these manuscripts we've got that are floating around, they knew there were lots of manuscripts floating around and they're, they're different from each other. Which ones do we use? So the Greek. The person who produced the first published Greek edition of the New Testament was a humanist scholar in the early 16th century named Erasmus. And he had a copy of the, of the book of First John that did not have this verse in it. And so they printed it without that verse. That there are three in heaven, the Father, the Word and the spirit. And these three are 1. They printed it without the verse. When that edition, the first published edition of the Greek New Testament was circulated, some theologians went ballistic because they claimed that Erasmus had taken the doctrine of the Trinity out of the New Testament. Erasmus replied that his manuscript didn't have it. And in fact he hadn't ever seen a manuscript that had it in it. This wasn't something from the Greek New Testament. It's a problem. And these theologians tended to be people who were reading the Bible in Latin, not in Greek. Latin was more widely the Latin Vulgate was the Bible that the Church used typically. And this verse was in the Latin Vulgate, but it wasn't in these Greek manuscripts. And so there's an apocryphal story about this that people tell me is not true, but it's so good it should be true, which is that Erasmus said, look, if you can produce a manuscript that, a Greek manuscript with its verse, and I'll include it in my next edition. And according to this tale, somebody produced a manuscript, he copied out the Greek New Testament. When he got to that point, he translated the Latin into the Greek, put it in, and Erasmus was true to his word. So it is certainly true that in Erasmus's later editions, this part is true. In his later editions he included that verse. And the fourth edition is the one that was used by the King James translators. So that today there are apart from really, really conservative Fundamentalists, not even every fundamentalist, but really conservative fundamentalists, will insist the verses are original because they can be found in the King James. But the. You don't start having manuscripts with them until roughly 1500 years after the book was written. And there's only. There's only a few manuscripts that have it in, and most of the manuscript you have it in actually have it in as a marginal note. What this means is that this verse was almost certainly not in the original New Testament in the book of First John. And it's the only place where it's explicitly stated. And so it was added in order to put the Trinity in.
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Megan Lewis
Fascinating. So we have references to God the Father and the Holy Spirit and Jesus popping up being Christmas, but we don't have this doctrine of the three of them being all fully God and all the same entity and also all separate. That's just not in the New Testament.
- [20:59]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it depends what you mean by not in the New Testament. Perfect, here we go. So it's not stated explicitly. So what people do is they. They find passages that in their judgment, make the best sense. If there is a doctrine of the Trinity. And the way they do it is they find passages where it's clear God the Father is God, Jesus is also God, the Spirit is also God. But there's an affirmation in the Bible that there's only one God. And so the natural conclusion, they say, is that all three are God, but the three are one. And so they. They deduce it from separate passages that are saying something about the Father, Son and Spirit individually. But you don't have. You don't have it stated anywhere. But it's a conclusion drawn by interpretation. And they often point to the final verse of the Gospel of Matthew, the final two verses, the Great Commission, where Jesus sends out his disciples in Matthew 28, and he tells them to. To make disciples of all the nations and to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
- [22:11]
Megan Lewis
Boom.
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Bart Ehrman
Trinity. Except he doesn't say they're all equally God and the three are one, which is the doctrine. So to get to the doctrine, you've got to take these disparate verses and put them together and say they're all absolutely true. And the only way they can absolutely be true is if there's a Trinity.
- [22:28]
Megan Lewis
So if we've got the Great Commission with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but it's not explicitly the doctrine of the Trinity, do scholars know what is going on there?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it's referring to the ritual practice in Matthew's community that when people were baptized, they. People recognized that Jesus was a divine being and that the Spirit had come in his replacement among the people now that he's not here. And the God of course, is. Is a divine being. And since these are all three divine beings and then, then when one is baptized, one is brought into the Christian community that believes that there's not that there is God the Father, but there's also the Son of God, Jesus and the Spirit. But that doesn't say that they are equal or that there's only one God.
- [23:17]
Megan Lewis
So if we don't have the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly mentioned in the New Testament and it has to kind of be cobbled together from lots of different places, are there verses to the contrary that kind of counter argue for that kind of relationship?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, most decidedly. And so, so as I said, the Gospel of John is the. Is the book where Jesus claims to be a divine being and he at one point says that he and the Father are one, but he. He doesn't say what that means. And in the context, that's unhelpful. Yeah, well, it would be helpful if he'd said, you know, actually I've coexisted with the Father forever and I have equal power. And equal. It'd be if he'd said that, but he didn't. And when you actually read it in the context, it looks like it means that he and the Father are on the same page the whole time. You know, we agree on this, on all this stuff. And so it's something like that. But it's also within the Gospel of John where Jesus explicitly says that the Father is greater than him. And in a number of passages in John, he indicates that even though he's a divine being sent from God, he's subordinate to God. And if that's, you know, if he's speaking the truth, then that's against the doctrine of the Trinity, obviously. And the Spirit in John, you know, Christ sends the Spirit as his kind of substitute when he's gone. So he's not the Spirit of God is, you know, he's like another Jesus on earth without being Jesus. And he's also subordinate that. And so the idea of there being three that are equal and one is not found. Not found in the Gospel of John or anywhere else in the New Testament.
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Megan Lewis
Is it anywhere in the Old Testament?
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Bart Ehrman
Yes. Well, I would say historically Israelites and Jews have said no, there's no doctrine of the Trinity in the Hebrew Bible. Christians have, Christians from the very beginning have had very Imaginative and creative and somewhat ingenious interpretations of the Hebrew Bible that can be used to. To show that the Trinity is there as well. The very most famous instance of this is in the beginning. And so Genesis chapter one. Christians traditionally pointed out that God created the heavens and the earth and the Spirit of God was floating over the water. So you've got God creating and you've got the Spirit involved with the creation. And then a few verses later, God says, let us make man in our own image. Who's he talking to? He's talking to Christ in the Spirit, or at least just Christ. And so there it is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit already in Genesis chapter one. And you can go through the Bible and find other passages like that that can be molded in order to show actually, this. This is. This is. This has been there from the beginning. This isn't something we made up. This isn't something, just a New Testament thing. This is actually part of God's revelation from the outset.
- [26:25]
Megan Lewis
That is fascinating.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
- [26:27]
Megan Lewis
And I'm assuming not terribly accurate. If you look at the context.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no. I mean, no, if you look at the context and if you look at how, you know, how this, you know, there's no indication that God is speaking to Jesus. It, you know, part of the, you know, part of the problem when I was growing up is, you know, before I started reading the Bible not just in Greek, but like, in, like, a serious English translation is I would read a paraphrase of the Bible because it's easier when I was 15 to kind of understand that. And it was. We used the living Bible, and the living Bible was a paraphrase of the Bible, but it put Jesus in the Old Testament. So, like, instead of saying, like God said to his son, God said to Jesus.
- [27:11]
Megan Lewis
Fantastic.
- [27:12]
Bart Ehrman
So, yeah, so once you have that in your head and then you stop reading that Version and you start reading other, you just kind of naturally translate things that way. And that's one reason why many Christians find the Trinity where it's not, because they're trained to assume that it's there.
- [27:31]
Megan Lewis
So if it's not something that was the doctrine, not the presence of different divine beings that may or may not have different relationships. If the doctrine of the Trinity was not original to the Gospels, doesn't seem to be in the Old Testament either. If you're actually reading it as the Old Testament and not as, like, New Testament light, I guess. How did Christian theologians arrive at this idea of the doctrine of the Trinity?
- [28:01]
Bart Ehrman
So it was a long process. I think actually, we May have done an episode just on this. Where did it, where did it come from? And this episode's been about the New Testament. But the long process entailed Christians being convinced that Christ was God. That's where it begins. And over time, Christ's divinity was elevated in status. Originally, I think the earliest Christians, I think, believed that when Jesus was raised from the dead and taken up to heaven, at that point he became a divine being, that he didn't pre exist, that he was adopted to be God at his resurrection. We have evidence of that actually in the New Testament. I'm not going to go into later they start thinking, well, he must have been God before he went up to heaven, been God during his ministry. Look, he did all these miracles. So they started saying, well, he became the Son of God at the baptism and then they thought about some more, well, he must have been God this entire life, right? And so then later they come up with the idea of a virgin birth and then they think about some more and they, and they say, oh, you know, he must have always been God. So then you come up with him being an incarnate divine being. And if you line up the gospels chronologically, that's the sequence you get with the baptism in Mark and the, you know, you get into the Gospel of John, the final one, where he's the incarnate God. But then it kept going after John was written where Jesus got elevated and elevated and elevated until some people started saying he was equally God. And once he's equally God, then the Spirit that was Jesus substituted on earth, he must be equally God. And so there you go, you got three of them and the Bible's quite insistent there's only one God. What do you do? Well, you say it's a mystery, all three, they're separate from each other, they're distinct, they're all equally God, but there's only one God. And so as I said, it's not a mathematical formula that works. It's not actually doesn't work in terms of Western logic about how things work, but it's a theological belief based on understandings of who Christ is in relationship to God.
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Megan Lewis
So my final question for the interview portion of today, and I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you think that the writings of the New Testament support the doctrine of the Trinity?
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Bart Ehrman
I actually what I would say, I mean, look, as a historian, no, I would say that the none of the authors of the New Testament believed in the Trinity period. But there's a different way to think about the question, which is, can the doctrine of the Trinity viably be supported by the New Testament? And I would say the answer is yes, obviously yes, because Christians have supported it from the New Testament. And the people who developed the doctrine were very intent on understanding the New Testament, but they had to understand it in a way that is not a way that a, you know, a scholar would understand it as being situated in its own historical context. In order to get the Trinity out of the New Testament, I think you've got to believe in some sense of divine inspiration of the text where it's revealing enough so that you can construct a doctrine without coming out and saying the doctrine. And so the. The Bible becomes then a provision of God to show his people how they can start thinking theologically. And if you go in the right direction, you'll come up with the orthodox doctrine, including the doctrine of the three in one.
- [31:24]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. That was two answers. I was anticipating one of them only. And I'm going to leave the audience to decide which one was the one I was expecting.
- [31:32]
Bart Ehrman
I know which one.
- [31:34]
Megan Lewis
Of course you do. So that is all for today's interview. We're going to move to this week's bonus segment, which is Listeners Q A. And fittingly, we are starting with the Holy Spirit. When is the earliest point in the writing of the New Testament that the concept of the Holy Spirit appears and what led to the development of the idea that the Holy Spirit is a separate entity from the Father and the Son?
- [32:00]
Bart Ehrman
Well, the Apostle Paul's our earliest writer. He talks about the Spirit being in our hearts. And so he talks about the Spirit. And the Spirit's important to Paul. So there's that the Gospel of Mark, our earliest Gospel, has the Spirit descending from God, from heaven and coming upon Jesus. When God declares, he declares, you are my Son, in whom I'm well pleased. And in that case, there again, by the way, people use that for the doctrine of the Trinity, right? Because you have Jesus, who's the Son, and you've got the Father declaring he's the Son, and you got the Spirit coming upon him. Boom, you got the three. You don't have the three in one, but at that point, the Spirit. Clearly, in all these passages throughout the New Testament, there are lots of discussion of the Spirit in the Gospel of Luke and in the Book of Acts as well. And in other places, they're all, they all have the Spirit as distinct from Christ and from the Father. And so that's, that's where this, the distinction comes from the idea that he was a member of the Trinity doesn't come till the 4th century.
- [33:09]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. One thing I find interesting is that relatively little attention seems to be paid to the apostle James, despite him being Jesus. Brother James in his writings seems to espouse a very different theology from Paul, but his perspectives are largely sidelined in modern Christianity. What is the historical consensus on James and how much can we learn about the historical Jesus from him?
- [33:31]
Bart Ehrman
Well, unfortunately, we don't have any writings from James. This person is probably referring to the epistle of James in the New Testament, which claims to be written by somebody named James. He doesn't say which James he is. James is a very common name. I do think he's claiming to be Jesus brother James. One of my reasons for thinking that is that this letter is explicitly directed to Christians in a wide swath of areas and to the 12 tribes who are dispersed, says this letter. And so it's talking to a wide range of people, most of whom would not have known the author by the fact that he says that his name is James but doesn't say which James suggests that he wants them to think he's, oh, that James, the brother of Jesus. And that was the assumption from the early times about this letter. I don't think there's any way James, the brother of Jesus wrote this letter, principally one of the main reasons being that the brother of James, almost certain of Jesus. James almost certainly could not write. He grew up in a small town, a little town of Nazareth, where there weren't any schools. And if he did get any education, it would have been to learn how to read Hebrew. True. It would not be how to compose letters in Greek. And so I don't think it could be written by, By James. We do have traditions about what James taught, though, going back to the New Testament. Suggestions in the author of Paul, in. In the. In Paul's letters and by later writers in books outside the New Testament. That suggests that James was especially known for his great Jewish piety. In one set of tradition, he was called Camel Knees because he prayed so often on his knees. They developed these calluses like a camel. And so he's very righteous and he prayed a lot. But he retained his Jewish identity and insisted that Jews who follow Jesus also remain Jewish to the t. And in that tradition, then he had some opposition with Paul. Paul himself also indicates that he had some opposition with James. Why isn't James more important than Paul? Probably because by the end of the first century, when Christianity is really starting to Take off for the first time, most converts to Christianity are Gentiles. Jewish Christians were few and far between. And so there are fewer people who would have cottoned on to James's message about the importance of keeping the Jewish law. And so Paul became the hero rather than James.
- [36:06]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Why is Eloy, Eloy Lama Sabaktani quoted in the original Aramaic?
- [36:13]
Bart Ehrman
So this is in the Gospel of Mark at the crucifixion scene. And Jesus is hanging on the cross in Mark. So I'm just talking about Mark now, just Mark himself. In Mark, Jesus is after he. After his trial, he's taken off to be crucified and doesn't say anything the whole time he's. When he's being nailed to the cross, he doesn't say anything the whole time he's hanging on his cross, doesn't say anything the whole time, doesn't say anything. This account until the very end when he cries out these words, Eloi, Eloi Lavisochtone. And so. And then the trans. Then Mark says, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So the question is, why put that in Aramaic? There are. Jesus language, of course, was Aramaic not Greek? Mark is writing in Greek. Mark in several places uses Aramaic words at the climax of a story. So for example, when Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead, what is that, chapter five. He's going to raise her from the dead. She's been dead, she's lying in a bed, and he touches her hand, raises up and says, talitha kumi. And Mark tells you that means little girl arise. So there are several things like that in the Gospel of Mark. And the question is why? Some people claim, well, it's because Mark wrote in Aramaic, and that is certainly not the case. Mark definitely wrote in Greek, which we could explain sometime why, but it's like, it's not much debated. So why does he leave these Aramaic things in? Well, probably because they add a sense of verisimilitude. So verisimilitude is a fancy way of saying. It makes it seem like it's something that actually happened. It makes. It has the appearance of truth, verisimilitude. And this is a common ploy among ancient writers, where I don't mean ploy in a negative way, but just like you make a. You make it like it gives kind of distinctiveness to this and it adds credibility to it if you throw in the ancient language. And so I may have said this before on the podcast, but I had a professor in graduate school who used to tell. Who lived in Germany for a year, studying New Testament with scholars there, who. Who used to tell jokes of things that happened in German Germany. And he would give the joke in English, but they do the punchline in German. It's like we would know what he's talking about. And. And he did that because it. Like it. It added kind of a nice sense to it, right? Added kind of an authenticity to it. And that's what I think. That's what's going on with Mark.
- [38:48]
Megan Lewis
Final question for the day. Do believers in the Book of Revelation as future prophecy view it as inevitable or something that believers must help happen? When evangelicals actively work to create conditions they believe will make the return of Jesus happen sooner, aren't they challenging the concept of God's ultimate control over human affairs?
- [39:10]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I suppose they would be. The people I know, I know lots of people, you know, over the last 40 years, I've known a lot of people who thought that Revelation's predicting the coming end. Most of them did not think that they could facilitate it because they didn't think they needed to facilitate it. They thought it was coming soon and that it was going to be God's initiative. There are fundamentalist groups that have made preparations for what's going to happen based not so much on Revelation, actually, as on, weirdly enough, the Book of Second Thessalonians. Who would have thought? But two Thessalonians, chapter two, talks about a. He doesn't call him the Antichrist, but he is called the man of lawlessness, who is an Antichrist figure. And the author of Second Thessalonians, who's claiming to be Paul, but probably is not Paul. But whoever's writing this says that the end cannot come until the man of lawlessness rises up and he enters into the Temple of God and declares himself God. When that happens, you know the end's coming right away. The thing is that there is no temple, because in the year 70, the Romans destroyed the Temple, and it's never been rebuilt. It's. It's on the Temple Mount. It would have been on the Temple Mount in. In Jerusalem now, where the Dome. Where the Dome of the Rock is. And so fundamentalists think that the Dome of the Rock has to be destroyed and the Temple has to be built there. And there are fundamentalist groups cooperating with Orthodox Jews who have actually gathered the requisite materials for the reconstruction of the Temple. The lumber, the accoutrements, the various things that have to be in there. And they've gotten. And so they They've done the things so that when Israel possesses the Temple Mount again, they can destroy the Dome of the Rock and build the temple so that the Antichrist can come. So that would be more like trying to facilitate it, I think, or at least they, in their, in their defense, I don't, I rarely defend these people, but in their defense, they may be thinking, not that I'm trying to facilitate it, but I know it's coming soon. I wanted, I want us just to be ready for, for it. So they may say that whether they're trying to facilitate it or not, it's hard, hard for me to know.
- [41:30]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much. But before we finish for the week, could you remind us what we spoke about today?
- [41:38]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So we're talking about whether the, whether the doctrine of the Trinity was in the New Testament and there's no direct expression of the actual doctrine that is the orthodox doctrine that there are three divine beings who are distinct and they're equal with each other, but the three are one. There's no expression of that. There are passages that people with this traditional belief can point to to indicate that in their judgment they make best sense if there is a Trinity. And so the Bible can be used to construct a doctrine of the Trinity and to construct doctrines that are anti trinitarian, but the doctrine itself is not stated in the New Testament.
- [42:17]
Megan Lewis
Audience, thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. and that includes Bart's upcoming course, which is bartman.com forward slash, Eye of a needle, Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?
- [42:42]
Bart Ehrman
Next time, we're talking about five Christian views that I used to have that I don't have anymore. That I think. Yeah. So kind of five kind of central views to Christianity that I disagree with now.
- [42:57]
Megan Lewis
Join us to find out what those are next week. Thank you all 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.