← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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in an absolutely shocking turn of events, Barthes has learned of a first century gospel that will overturn everything scholars think they know about Jesus. Showing that he was actually a charlatan exposed by the Roman government for duping the Jewish crowds using sophisticated works of magic. The gospel, set to be published this week by the New York Times, details how Jesus deliberately faked his famous miracles in an effort to seek fame and fortune. How did he go from magician for hire to son of God? And was the crucifixion a tragic illusion gone wrong? Join us this week on Misquoting Jesus to find out more. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Sometimes the smallest archaeological discovery can turn the world upside down. This week we talk about one such discovery and discuss how Jesus, a rural carpenter with a talent for sleight of hand, ended up as the persecuted Messiah of a global religion. Before we get into all of that, however, Bart, good morning. How are you?
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Good morning. Doing fine, thanks. Yep. Just talking to my wife Sarah about our arthritis problems. That's what happens on my end. How are you doing?
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B
Yeah, good. I'm currently arthritis free. Josh, as I was mentioning, is not. But no, all good, all good. And before we get to our mild revelation, I wanted to ask how you got into doing public facing scholarship because it's not really a typical career path for academics. It's not something that you're encouraged to do.
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A
Oh no, you're discouraged from doing it. People don't realize this, but if you write a book for a general audience, that is frowned upon by many people in the the academy. And I had zero interest in doing it. When I was in graduate school, I was bound and determined not to do anything kind of, you know, popular I was. I was very seriously into studying Greek manuscripts and trying to analyze and classify Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. And I imagined my entire career would be doing that. My first three books were books dealing with understanding the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and two of them were highly technical, so that no New Testament scholar would have read these books, except for people who were interested in that particular technicality. What ended up happening is that after I wrote my third book, which wasn't as technical, the orthodox corruption of Scripture, Oxford University Press convinced me, after some kind of screaming and shouting on my part, to write a textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates, which I did and kind of liked it. And then they told me I should, like, write a book for a general audience on Jesus. I said, no, I don't want to write a book on this. Oh, God, no. I want to do my scholarship. So I wrote it anyway, and, you know, okay, that's that. Now I can get back to my scholarship. Then they wanted another. No, no, I wanted to. Finally, I realized, look, I'm just going to do both, in fact, all three things. And so my career has been writing scholarly books, which I still do, and textbooks for undergraduates, but trade books, books for a general audience. And I'm really glad I went that way, because the hard thing is doing that and keeping up your scholarship. And. And most people do one or the other. I was just bound to determine to do both. And so that was the hard thing. But I really like it because I like communicating ideas with the broader public, and this gives me the chance to do it. And so I'm a big, you know, now I'm a big advocate of it. When young scholars ask me, you know, when, like, they're coming in graduate school, oh, I want to write trade books. Say, no, don't write first. Write a few scholarly books first. Then you can write a trade book. Anyway, yeah, that's a short. Short of it.
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B
That's an excellent, excellent thing to do. And I've been thinking about the podcasting side of what you do the past few years. I think there have been a lot more, or at least in my experience, a lot more academics going this route or adding this route onto their other branches of work. And it's been very gratifying to see because I've previously heard a lot of stories about early career researchers and people pre tenure being told, absolutely, do not do this under no circumstances. So seeing established scholars like yourself and John Taylor from the British Museum, he does thin End of the Wedge podcast, which is A serological public scholarship. It's really exciting. I love it.
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A
Well, I'll tell you the hard part is that we're not trained to be able to talk to people who aren't in our field. We're trained to use jargon and have assumptions. And so just a regular old person who has a PhD in New Testament can't explain what they do to a normal human being. It's just. They try, but you just see the glaze come over people's eyes because they have no idea what they're talking about. It's not that they're smarter than the other person at all. It's not that at all. It's just that you're trained in a certain way of discourse and figuring out how to talk to other people is, you know, you're kind of left on your own to figure it out.
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B
It's hard. It's hard. We should get to the topic of the day. And in case you hadn't guessed, no, Barth hasn't had an academic revelation. And we will not be publishing proof that Jesus was the world's first, first recorded illusionist. This is a day late, but happy April Fools, everybody. Thank you for sticking with us. We will still be talking about miracles, though, so. But why do you think it's important for biblical scholars to examine reports of miraculous events in the Gospels and other early Christian writings?
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Well, you know, even though that little bit of it was a spoof, you know, it is the case that some historians have looked at the miracles of Jesus and noted that they are similar to activities that are attributed to magicians in the ancient world. And it's important to understand that nobody would have any reason to understand, really. But in the ancient world, when people talked about magic, they weren't talking about illusions. They weren't talking about what we were talking about. When you have some person pulling a rabbit out of a hat or sawing somebody in two or whatever, your card tricks, which seem impossible, but they, you know, you have ways of deceiving people. In the ancient world, it wasn't. Magic was not thought to be a form of deception. It was thought to be a way of accessing the superhuman world. And people could do that. And so Jesus actually was accused of being a magician. And there are scholars who have claimed that Jesus was a magician. So you have that side of things. And apart from, you know, whether you consider it magic or. Or the power of God, the big issue in the ancient world is which is which people can do these things. But who's empowering Them, where are they getting the power from? And so in Jesus case, the miracles in the Gospels play a fundamental feature. I mean, you can't read the Gospels without seeing the miracles. I mean, it's everywhere. He's born of a virgin as he's adult, he heals the sick and he casts out demons and he raises the dead and he controls the climate and he just walks on water. And like every page has miracles in it. And in the end, it ends. The Gospels end with the biggest miracle of all is not that Jesus has a near death experience, it's that Jesus actually comes back from the dead and is never to die again. That's a miracle. So you can't understand the Gospels if you don't take seriously the fact that they're filled with stories of the miraculous.
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B
So we see miracles happening in the Bible prior to Jesus in the Old Testament. When we talk about miracles today in that kind of biblical sense, what do we actually mean?
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Well, I think we mean something different by miracle than people in antiquity did. In fact, I know we do. We have an understanding of how the world works that is driven by what we would call natural law. And so there are laws of physics. People in the ancient world perfectly understood that the world worked in consistent ways. They understood that every morning the sun comes up, that it rains on occasion. And that they knew that you could not take an axe head and throw it on a body of lukewarm water and watch it float. You know, they knew it would sink. They understood the consistency of things. But we since the Enlightenment have developed scientific laws that are laws in the sense that it's not like you have to follow them, it's just they always, always work. If I take this pen and drop it, if I let go of it, it's going to drop, it's not going to rise to the ceiling and it will never rise to the ceiling. And there are reasons for that. So when you have natural law, laws of thermodynamics, for example, they just are never broken. They just aren't. And so in our thinking, if we have a miracle, it's because one of those laws has been broken and it requires some kind of supernatural intervention for that to happen. In the ancient world, they didn't have that view. This seems weird, but in the ancient world, people didn't differentiate between our world and the supernatural world. There wasn't a different realm in the sense that there's a supernatural world. The gods were within our realm and the God of Israel was within our realm. So everything is natural. It's just some things usually happen and some things usually don't happen. The things that don't usually happen, if they happen, you call that a miracle.
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B
So what miracles do we see in the Old Testament before Jesus comes on the scene?
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Well, you see most of the things that Jesus himself does. You have people in the Old Testament who can heal the sick, for example, or who can raise the dead. Both Elijah and Enoch, for example, raise the dead as Jesus does and can heal the sick. They don't cast out demons, demons in the Old Testament because the idea of demons is a later development within Judaism. But people do have power over nature. Moses splits the waters of the sea of reeds, and the children of Israel walk over dry land. Moses does a bunch of miracles. Holy people do a bunch of miracles. These are understood to be acts of God. But the sun coming up every morning is an act of God. It raining when you, you know, when you need rain and it rains, that's an act of God. And so in their mind, it raining technically, or the sun coming up technically isn't much different from healing a person with leprosy or raising somebody from the dead or splitting the waters of the Dead Sea. It's the same kind of thing. It's just. It's a different one of these things, but it's. It's how God is acting among us.
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B
So for Jesus as a holy man, would it have been surprising to people that he was performing reportedly, these miracles?
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No. I mean, if you think of Jesus as a particularly endowed representative of God, like the prophets in the Old Testament, for example, or like Moses, well, they did miracles. And so it would be more or less expected that Jesus could do miracles if he's empowered by God. But it's not only the Old Testament. It's also throughout the Greek and Roman worlds. We have stories of people who are, like Jesus, miraculously born. And because their parents are divine or because they have special divine power, they too do miracles. They can control the weather, they can heal the sick and raise the dead, and they can do things that are very similar to what Jesus himself is said to have done. It's just that was the popular view is that these kinds of things can happen. And the question is, who's doing them and who's empowering them to do them, like in the Christian tradition, later in the apocryphal Acts of the apostles. So you get accounts of the Acts of Peter and the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Thomas. You often, often have these miracle contests between the true representative of God and the false representative of God. And so in the Acts of Peter, you have Simon Magus, who does all of these things, who can do amazing miracles, but he's empowered by the bad side. Peter's empowered by the good side. And so there weren't debates about whether miracles happen. There were debates about what it means and who's providing the power.
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The miracle contests always put me in mind of the movie Prince of Egypt. When Joseph is having that miracle contest with the priests of Egypt. Are there any miracles that are specific to just Jesus, or is his miraculous repertoire very much in line with everything else we see from the ancient world?
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That's a good question. I mean, most of the stories about Jesus doing miracles are fairly readily replicated in other sources for other people. There are always differences, so that the differences tend to be in detail rather than in overall scope to begin with. And when Jesus is born of a virgin, in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is born of a virgin because the Spirit gets Mary pregnant. I guess that's true in Matthew as well. And so Jesus, in a sense, is literally the son of God, because God is the one who gets the woman pregnant, not a human. And so God's the father and the mortal is the mother. And you certainly get that in Greek and Roman traditions for other figures of divine births, the union of a mortal and an immortal, the birth of Alexander the Great, for example, or of Apollonius of Tyana, for example. But the difference is, in these other accounts, in the Greek and Roman world, the woman's not a virgin. And so there's a twist, because in the Christian account, she's a virgin. She's never had sex with a man. In the other, she has had sex with a man. But in both cases, she's made pregnant with this person by a God. And so there's a difference, but there's also similarity. I do this exercise with my students where I have my students read all these miracles about Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. I pick Luke. And then I have them read all the miracles about other people in other Greek and Roman sources. And so in order to see how, you know, the similarities and differences. And what they always say is, yeah, okay, you got these miracle workers doing this. But, you know, Jesus is different because of this or because of that, because of this other thing. But I point out to them that you're absolutely right, Jesus is different. But if you take any one of these others and put them over against the others and include Jesus among the others, then you can say, well, this person is different because of X, Y and Z. It's not that Jesus is the only one that's different. They're all different. But they also have lots of things in common.
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B
Do we see in the canonical Gospels, do we see differences between the kinds of miracles that they report, or are the writers using the same material?
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The miracles in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there are many of the same miracles, and there are many of the same kind that are different stories. A lot of the miracle stories are almost formulaic. What I mean by that is you can kind of set them up so there's like a sequence of action that happens, but the specifics vary every time. And so somebody is, you know, deathly ill or has a demon inside or, you know, has died. Somebody, a relative or a friend comes to Jesus and asks for help. Jesus agrees. Jesus goes to the person. Jesus speaks a word or touches the person. The person is healed, or the demon's cast out, or the person's raised from dead. And the crowds all marvel. So it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's the same sequence, but you have different. You know, you have differences within. And in the Synoptic Gospels, a lot of the miracles are set up in that kind of sequence. And a lot of the stories are actually the same story with varying details from one gospel to the other. The Gospel of John is pretty much like that. There are far fewer miracles in John. There are only seven miracles in John. They're not called miracles. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, these things that Jesus does are called their dunamis. The. That's the word we get dynamite from. And it means a powerful act. And so Jesus does a powerful act. And so the idea is not that it's a violation of natural law, it's a powerful act. When you get to John, they're not called powerful acts, Dunamis. They're called signs. They're signs never called miracles, never called powerful acts. Why are they called signs? Because in the Gospel of John, the point of these things that Jesus does seven times is that they show they are signs of who Jesus is. They are meant to show that he is who he says he is. And so he says that he is the bread of life. And after that, he multiplies the loaves of bread to feed people. He says that he is the resurrection of the life. And so he raises somebody from the dead. He says that he is the light of the world. And so he restores bread, somebody, to sight from blindness. And so in John, these are all signs. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they're all powerful acts. John doesn't call them powerful Acts. Matthew, Mark and Luke not only don't call them signs of who Jesus is, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus is asked to do a sign and he refuses to do a sign. So he considers in fact doing signs of satanic temptation in Matthew, Mark and Luke. But in the Gospel of John, that's all he does is signs. That's an interesting difference. And so John does have several miracles that are common with Matthew, Mark and Luke. But some of the biggies, like the raising of Lazarus from the dead, that's only in John. Or the favorite miracle on every college campus in America, changing water to wine at a party, that's only in John. And so John has its unique things and only has seven of them.
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Do we have additional or different miracles from non canonical writings?
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Well, yeah, we do. I mean it depends what your non canonical writing. But some of the most interesting stories about Jesus outside the New Testament involve him as a child. And so there's this. One of the favorite gospels of many people who like the non canonical gospels is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In that gospel, Jesus does things like early on he's a five year old and he's making these sparrows out of mud. He makes these 12 sparrows, goes, but a Jewish man sees him doing, is angry because it's the Sabbath, you're not supposed to be working on the Sabbath. And the man goes and complains to Joseph, Jesus father, that he's like, you know, he's working on the Sabbath. And Joseph comes, he's really upset because you're not supposed to break the Sabbath. He tells Jesus, why are you making these sparrows? What? And Jesus looks at his father, looks at these sparrows, claps his hands and says begone. And the sparrows come to life and fly off chirping. It's a great miracle because Jesus Sparrows. What sparrows? I don't see any sparrows. So he destroys all evidence of malfeasance, but he makes these animals to come to life. So Jesus doesn't make any animals come to life in the gospels and he's not doing anything out of mischief in the gospels. And so yeah. So depending on what kind of gospel is, there are things outside the New Testament with Jesus doing spectacular acts that are not quite like what you'd find in the New Testament.
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B
If we think about the occurrence of miracles in Greco Roman literature and in Christian literature, New Testament non canonicals, do we see them in the same literary genre or is this a phenomenon that kind of Crosses boundaries.
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In the New Testament, most of the miracles are reported in narratives, as you would expect. And that's also true of what you get in Greek and Roman and Jewish sources. There are almost always stories about somebody who's understood to be superior to the rest of us humans because of some kind of divine power. You certainly get it in Greek and Roman circles, in Greek and Roman mythology, but also in Greek and Roman historical texts. So for example, the Roman emperor Vespasian, after Jesus death, was reputed to have done miracles. But it shows that something about his superiority to the rest of his humans, that he can make somebody see where he can heal the lame. And so these are almost always in narratives. But you, you also do get discussions of miracles in non narratives. You certainly get this in Christian texts with authors talking about miracles without narrating them. A famous instance of that is the apostle Paul, who claims in a couple of his letters that when he was present with people, so Second Corinthians, he says that when I was with you, that he did signs and wonders and miracles. And so he's not telling a story, he's reminding them of something that they've seen, which makes historians just say, wow, we really wish we knew what he was talking about. What does he mean? And we don't know. But it happens in Greek and Roman circles too, where people will talk about miracles without narrating them.
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B
What purpose do miracles serve in ancient literature? And do we see them serving a different purpose in early Christian writings?
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A
I would say that generally when somebody does something spectacular that is seen to be something more than a human can do, it's in order to demonstrate the divine power within them and, or the power of a particular supernatural being, a superhuman being. And so in Greek circles, for example, Apollo is understood to be the God of healing. And so you can have a shrine to Apollo where people, these are not stories. People actually go to a shrine of Apollo or a shrine of Zeus or some other God for healing. And these are historical situations where people claim that they get healed there. And so one of the most interesting things about some healing shrines from the Greek and Roman worlds is when people would be healed of something, they would put up an image of their body part on the wall that would be made out of metal or out of clay. And so you would go to these shrines and you'd see eyes and ears and bre. Women's breasts and penises and like models of these things on the wall. And with people thanking the God for healing them. And so healing miracles and nature miracles, making it rain when you have drought. And things were always, almost always, interpreted as showing the power of God or the gods, because the gods were able to do these things for us when we have no way, if we've lost our hearing, there's nothing we can do, especially in the ancient world. But God can restore your hearing. A particular God could. And so within the Christian tradition, I'd say they function the same way. They function to show that God is powerful and that if you worship him, he will use his power to help you. And in the Christian tradition, one added bonus that's rather significant is that God's miraculous power is demonstrated not only here, but also after you die. And so in the afterlife, God's power will be everywhere. And if you're on his side, you will bask in it. And if you're against it, you're going to suffer from it. And so this became a missionary tool for Christians who argued that their God was far more superior than every other God. Well, how do you prove that? How do you show that your God's more powerful than the other gods? Your God does better miracles. And Christians repeated this over and over and over again for centuries to convert the empire up to Augustine in the fifth century. Augustine says people complain about nothing being miracles anymore. He says, I've seen a ton of them. And he starts listing all of these healing miracles that he's seen that are really quite amazing. And he says, it just shows that God, our God, is more powerful than any of the others. So it was used as a missionary tool.
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B
If we focus on Jesus for a second, is this identity of him as a miracle worker something that was imposed on him after his death? Or does it seem as if this was happening while he was still alive?
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So I have a minority opinion on this one among scholars, most scholars, probably with most lay people. Let me clarify this. Most laypeople and many conservative Christian scholars would say, well, it was during his lifetime because he actually did those things. Suppose you hold in abeyance the question, did Jesus really walk on the water? Did Jesus really raise Jairus daughter from the dead? If you're not a Christian, you'd say, no. But you do have these stories. And even if you're a Christian, I mean, I know a lot of Christian scholars say, well, no, actually, it didn't actually happen. You know, it's trying to make a point. But whether you think a miracle happened or not, did the miracle working materials arise during his lifetime? So people who believe in miracles would say, yes, people don't believe in miracles. Would be split. Most would say, yes, Jesus had the reputation of being a miracle worker during his lifetime. And they have very, very strong arguments for that because it is so widely attested among our traditions that he was doing miracles, that even if they weren't happening, it looks like everybody thought he was doing miracles. That's not the same thing. You can certainly say that Oral Roberts was believed to have done miracles during his lifetime, but skeptics would say, well, he wasn't really doing miracles. You know, people were deceived or people thought it happened, or there's propaganda. You know, they have other or other miracle workers today, but you could say it happened his lifetime with Jesus. I think there's some genuine doubt about what. I think it's a minority view. I think there's genuine doubt about whether the miracle tradition was floating around about Jesus during his lifetime. I don't know. I do think that once the disciples believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, they understood that he had experienced the greatest miracle that ever happened and that began to endow him with miraculous powers and that they started telling stories about him doing miracles. So the resurrection didn't come as a surprise. It came as a climax. So I don't know. It is interesting to me that the earliest understanding of miracles with respect to Jesus appear to be that Jesus was doing miracles to show that the kingdom of God was soon to come. The logic of this is that in the kingdom nobody's going to be sick, so Jesus heals the sick, there won't be any demons. So Jesus casts out demons, there won't be any death, Jesus raises the dead. So Jesus is being shown to portray his message almost through. Through enacted parables by doing these things. Was that going on during his lifetime? I don't think there's any way to know for sure. I doubt it. But I would say most scholars think, yeah, it probably was.
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B
So if we're looking then at different reports of miracles, why are they so common in religious traditions and are there compelling reasons or any reasons for thinking that Jesus did miracles, but that Apollonius of Tyana didn't, or Simon Magus or Muhammad? Only Jesus does the real miracles.
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A
Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, those are related questions. And why, particularly within religious traditions? Let me start by saying that it's very difficult. People might try to get their minds around this, but it's very difficult to define what religion is. In major universities throughout this country, there will be classes, Introduction to Religious Studies that spend virtually the entire semester trying to come up with the definition of religion. And you Think it'd be easy, right? It is not easy. Because what do you mean by that? And their entire books written, like, what do we mean by this? I say that as a preface because I need to talk about, like, what religion is. If nothing else, for most people, that's how you cover yourself. You say, for most people, religion is a recognition that there's a realm beyond us and that can help provide significance to our lives and our world. And in the ancient world, I'd say that that's absolutely the case. In ancient religions, it's that there are forces greater than our that are at work in this world. And in ancient religion, the goal was to figure out how to be on the right side of these forces so they assist us in this horrible world we live in. How do we get by? I mean, how can we possibly survive? We're just these peon bodies in this uncaring world. And so the gods can provide things for humans that can allow us to survive and to thrive, hopefully. And so the miracles are meant to show how the gods are doing that. And in most religious traditions, they're meant to celebrate what the gods can do so that people will worship the gods. And that's certainly the case in early Christianity. If you see that the God of Jesus is more powerful than any of the other gods, you will worship the God of Jesus. And the goal is to get people on the side of truth. And miracles lead people to the truth. If you look at it from a historical point of view, like if you're bracketing what you personally believe or what you personally don't believe, and you look at the miracles done by Apollonius of Tyana, a miracle worker living at the end of the first century, who would have been born around the time Jesus died, who also got in trouble with the authorities, and who was also put on trial and was also said to have been raised up to heaven after his death, a lot of similarities to Jesus. Is there any reason for thinking that his miracles didn't happen if you think Jesus miracles did happen? My view is that if you think Jesus miracles happened or Apollonius miracles happens, or if anybody else's miracles happened, that it's a step of faith, truth. It's not based on historical evidence. You can't mount evidence for people breaking laws of physics. I mean, you can say that people said they saw it, but unless you have some way of explaining how a law of physics is broken, it just doesn't never happens. So if you think it does happen, it's a leap of faith. It's not based on what you know, based on how we know everything else. The same principles apply to Apollonius of Tiana that apply to Jesus. When you have Christian apologists say, oh no, we have all these accounts of Jesus doing miracles. And so since you have all these accounts, it probably happened. Well, we have accounts of other people's miracles happening, but they wouldn't say, well, they actually did those miracles then, well, if they wouldn't say it for them, why would they say it for Jesus? Because it's a matter of faith. I personally think if you're going to apply criteria to say that Jesus miracles did happen, you need to apply the same criteria to Muhammad and to people of heretical Christian groups that you don't agree with and to other religions. You just apply it across the board and it turns out out, you know, lots of people are doing these things.
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B
Do you think it's possible to be a Christian if you also doubt that Jesus did some or all of his miracles? Maybe he wasn't born a virgin, he didn't walk on water, he didn't raise Lazarus from the dead.
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A
I do, yeah. Because I know people who are very devout Christians who don't believe in the literal truth of those stories that they actually happened. Empirically speaking, it is possible to be a Christian and not believe those things. I say it's empirical because there are Christians who don't believe those things. And if you say, well, they're not a Christian, then well, okay, that's your theology. So their theology is that they are a Christian. And by that they mean that there are some aspects of the life and death of Jesus that are important for them for understanding and accepting, for them to be followers of Christ. Many of these people would say that, you know, they can't prove that Jesus died for their sins, but they do think that Jesus is the way to go. They think that following Jesus provides them with salvation. Some of these people don't believe in an afterlife. Some of my friends who hold the two, they don't know if there's an afterlife. They hope there is, but they don't know. But they think if there is, that if they are a follower of Jesus, that God will protect them in the afterlife. I think it is possible to be a Christian without these things because Christianity is not a belief in Jesus walking on the water. It's a belief that Jesus somehow shows you the way to God. Traditionally, Christians have said that the death and resurrection of Jesus are what put a person in a right standing before God, that, well, Jesus could die and be raised from the dead without raising Jairus daughter from the dead. Maybe that miracle didn't happen, but he could still die and rise from the dead. And so I think by picking every miracle and saying it had to happen, had to happen the way it said otherwise, you can't be a Christian. I think, you know, you can think that if you want, but you're just making stuff up because there are Christians who think otherwise.
- [33:09]
B
Thank you very much, Bart. We are going to end there. We'll take a brief ad break and we will be right back. Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge every everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want To Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such as why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access. Access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john@barterman.com Authors thank you.
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A
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, Ehrman blog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [34:54]
B
So but given that we've spent today talking about miracles and the resurrection obviously is pretty big miracle, I wanted to point people to the resurrection debate that you and Mike Lacona had was a few years ago now and I moderated it. I think that was maybe our second or third professional interaction. If people are interested, it's over@bartehrman.com debate. You can use the MJ podcast code for a discount. It was a whole seven hours. How do you feel that went?
- [35:25]
A
I have no recollection. I was so exhausted. Seven hours. What were we thinking? It was. It was a seven hour debate.
- [35:32]
B
You weren't struggling to fill the time either. There was a lot to go.
- [35:35]
A
We could have kept going. So Mike Lacona is a friend of mine who is an evangelical Christian apologist. He firmly believes in traditional Christianity, and he tries to convince people to become Christians. So he's also an evangelist of sorts. And among other things, he believes that he can prove on historical grounds that Jesus was raised from the dead. The debate was not about whether Jesus was raised from the dead. The debate was about whether historians can prove it using historical criteria, or whether it's strictly a matter of faith, or whether it has to at least include a matter of faith as opposed to history. And so that was our debate. I very strongly feel, and have felt for a very long time, that even if you say the resurrection happened, you can't prove it historically using the kind of criteria that historians use to establish what probably happened in the past. I had that view, by the way, when I was still a Christian.
- [36:35]
B
Christian.
- [36:36]
A
When I was still a Christian, I believed that Jesus was raised from the dead. But I knew you can't prove it in the way that you could prove other things from the past. Mike thinks you can. And so that was our debate. And the thing is, it gets you into a lot of stuff. I mean, it isn't just, yes, you can. No, you can't. It's not that kind of thing. It's like you have to talk about, how do you establish what happens in the past? You know, what is eyewitness testimony worthwhile? Do we have eyewitness testimony for Jesus resurrection? If we do, does that mean it probably happened? Do eyewitnesses get things wrong? Are they reliable? Do eyewitnesses see things that didn't happen? So that's just eyewitness. I mean, you have these gospels. You have to talk about the gospel accounts. Are they accurate or not? How come they're inconsistent with each other? Are they inconsistent with each other? So there are like a thousand topics on this thing. He and I had debated this before in public, but like regular debates, we thought, let's just go for it and actually have a full debate. So that's what we did. It is seven hours. And so people. Yeah, people can still get it. People are still getting it. And it's. There it is. Can historians prove the resurrection?
- [37:43]
B
I remember a being surprised when I was asked to do it at how long you were planning on discussing this question for. I thought to myself, there is no way. No way they can fill seven hours. And then you did, and like you said, could have kept going very easily, but the breadth of information that was covered was really really fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. I really enjoyed it. I was very tired afterwards. And I'm sure that you and Mike were even more exhausted than I was.
- [38:10]
A
Well, I'm still exhausted by it. But the thing is, you know, when you have these debates, every time I have one of these debates, both people who are involved in the debate come out of there thinking, oh, man, I creamed that guy.
- [38:22]
B
Yeah.
- [38:23]
A
And it's just weird. I hear people like on Mike's side saying, oh, man, sorry, you did so badly. What? Oh, man, I destroyed. You know, Mike's saying, oh, man, I just tried. It's like that, kind of. But the thing is, that's the nice thing about a debate. The thing that I wish people would do with the debate is not just come in with your mind made up about which side you agree with, but listen to arguments. For me, that's the most important thing to listen to, the arguments. And so, yeah, there are a lot of arguments in that debate, and people can listen and see what they think.
- [38:53]
B
Absolutely. That is Bart ehrman.com debate. It is interesting. So, yeah, highly recommended. Our bonus segment this week is a new one. It is called Bart's Books, and Bart is going to share a book recommendation
- [39:08]
A
seeking to expand your knowledge of biblical studies. In this segment, Barthes shares influential works shaping biblical scholarship. It's time for Barth's Books.
- [39:22]
B
Barthes, what book are you recommending to us today?
- [39:25]
A
Well, you know, we've talked a lot in here about the historical Jesus, and we'll continue to do so because it's virtually an inexhaustible talk. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who didn't want us just to read the most current stuff, but who realized that the classic stuff is really classical for a reason. And one of the major classics in the study of the historical Jesus is Albert Schweitzer's book the Quest of the Historical Jesus. And it is justifiably a classic. And if anybody's interested in how scholars since the Enlightenment have understood who Jesus really was based on the fact that we have gospels that disagree with each other and have mistakes in them, how do they go about reconstructing Jesus? Schweitzer covers every major scholar who talked about it from the 1770s up to his own day in 1906. And it's still kind of a bedrock foundational book for anybody interested in this topic about how, you know what Jesus said and did. Schweitzer gives his own answer to this at the end of the book. It's a witty book. And it's very clever. And he's so smart. It's one of the brilliant books in the field of New Testament studies. So that's what I would recommend for anybody who wants to kind of get down there and see how it's actually happened historically.
- [40:40]
B
Excellent. Thank you so much. Now, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about?
- [40:46]
A
Right, yeah. Well, we were talking about the miracle tradition of the Gospels with Jesus doing miracles and wondering how do they relate to other miracle traditions in Greek and Roman circles especially, and how do these miracles function in the Gospels? What are they there for? And is there anything we can say about them historically? I mean, can we say that Jesus was a miracle worker? Can we say that he was reputed to be a miracle worker during his lifetime? And if so, what was the point of this miracle tradition within early Christianity?
- [41:16]
B
Thank you so much, audience. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all, all of Bart's courses over at www.bartleman.com. yes, that includes the resurrection debate. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [41:40]
A
Well, you know, next time we're talking about a kind of a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human today. The majority of people think that being human means having a body and a soul. And most people think when you die, your soul lives on. And that's a common sense among many people is like they don't even. There's no question about. Of course, that's how it is. And that's what everybody's every always thought. And it turns out it's not what everybody's thought. And it's very hard to find that thought in the Bible.
- [42:08]
B
Really?
- [42:08]
A
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to talk about what the ancient Christian view and the ancient biblical view of the soul was.
- [42:15]
B
Excellent. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bartlett 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.