Paul Said WHAT About Women? Debunking Misused Bible Verses

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman

Episode: Paul Said WHAT About Women? Debunking Misused Bible Verses
Date: April 8, 2025
Host: Megan Lewis
Guest: Bart Ehrman

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Episode Overview

This episode tackles a highly debated topic: what does the New Testament—especially the letters attributed to Paul—really say about women, gender roles, and marriage? Dr. Bart Ehrman, drawing on critical scholarship, interrogates passages often cited to justify patriarchal church practices and "biblical" marriage ideals. The conversation also explores how ancient views on sex and gender shaped early Christian writings, challenges misinterpretations, and reviews the evolution of gender roles in Christianity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Influence of “Trad Wives” and Bible-Based Gender Roles

• Modern "trad wife" movements cite “biblical marriage” as inherently patriarchal, and many conservative churches rely on specific New Testament passages to bar women from leadership (00:30).
• Ehrman: Evangelical upbringing reinforced these roles, restricting women in ministry and preaching (02:48).

2. The Two Main New Testament Passages Used Against Women’s Leadership

a. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: “Women Should Keep Silence”

• Often cited by conservatives as a ban on female church leadership or speech (05:00).
• Contextual Problematics:
  • Literally says women “are not permitted to speak,” but few take this entirely literally (06:30).
  • Ehrman: “If it doesn’t mean what it says, that’s fine, but… scholars...recognize reasons for thinking these two verses were not originally in 1 Corinthians.” (06:30)
• Scholarly Consensus: Many critical scholars, including Gordon Fee, argue this is an interpolation (a later addition), not Paul’s own words (08:46).
  • Key Evidence: Contradicts 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul discusses women praying and prophesying in church (10:00).
  • Passage’s Context: Interrupts discussion on prophecy and breaks textual flow (10:40).
• Quote: “I think, my guess is the majority of scholars are on that side...that these did not belong here.” (11:36)

b. 1 Timothy 2:11-15: “Let a Woman Learn in Silence”

• Even more explicit: prohibits women from teaching or having authority; ties command to creation order and Eve’s deception (12:09).
• Passage says: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent.... Yet the woman will be saved through childbearing if she continues in faith and love and holiness with modesty.”
• Authorship Doubts: Strong scholarly consensus that Paul did not write 1 Timothy (15:41).
  • Key Counterpoint: Paul’s genuine letters show women in leadership roles and a high view of their abilities (16:44).
• Quote: “How do you, you know, what would misogyny be if it wouldn’t be telling women that they’re deceived by the devil...?” (17:18)

3. Paul a Misogynist? Rethinking Paul’s Real Views

• Galatians 3:28 (Undisputed): “In Christ, there’s neither... male and female.” (20:38)
• Shows theological equality, which challenges patriarchal readings.

Paul’s Positive Depictions of Female Leaders

• Romans 16 — Paul greets:
  • Phoebe: a deacon (minister) (23:04)
  • Prisca (Priscilla): fellow worker, listed first ahead of her husband Aquila (23:22)
  • Junia: a chief apostle (“of note among the apostles”), her role obscured in later translations (25:00)
    • Quote: “…translators have taken the woman out of the text...Junia is a woman’s name...He calls her one of the chief apostles.” (25:34)

4. Feminist Approaches and Historical Context

• Feminist scholarship since the 1970s:
  • Some seek to recapture women’s suppressed voice in the Bible
  • Others accept the Bible’s patriarchal bent as unfixable (28:42)
• Historical context essential: Ancient world viewed male and female as degrees on a hierarchy—not equal “kinds” but men as “perfect” and women as “imperfect” humans (32:48).
  • Power relations everywhere: “Women are imperfect men...in physiological terms, women are literally the weaker sex.” (33:52)
  • Domination by the powerful was the norm in antiquity—applied to gender as much as politics or slavery (36:00)
• Quote: “You have to understand them in their historical context. You can’t assume somebody in the first century had 21st-century understandings.” (30:58)

5. Did Early Christianity Challenge Patriarchy?

• Jesus: Unusually inclusive toward women (public conversations, discipleship, support) (38:38).
  • “Jesus tries to shift the paradigm away from… domination to… the need for service.” (40:47)
• Paul: Women in significant roles, but later church practice erased this openness.
  • Theory: As Christianity moved from house churches (women’s domain) to public spaces (men’s domain), women lost authority (43:17).
  • By the 2nd century, women largely barred from leadership.

6. Listener Q&A Highlights

• “What order to read Ehrman’s books?”
  • Recommendation: Jesus, Interrupted for clear, wide-ranging introduction. (52:51)
• “Do Jews accept Jesus as a prophet?”
  • Most Jews today see Jesus as a Jewish moral teacher, not as Messiah or divine (54:48).
• “Why did Matthew use ‘virgin’ if he knew Hebrew?”
  • Likely read the Greek Old Testament which used ‘parthenos’ (virgin); many Jews did not read Hebrew (56:40).
• Dead Sea Scrolls & Mushroom Cults?
  • John Allegro’s theory is “not credible,” though respected as a linguist (60:55).

7. Book Project and Reflections

• Bart is writing on parallels between Euripides’ Alcestis and Jesus—both sacrifice themselves, both are revived, but with key differences in views of altruism (49:13).
  • “Jesus dies for people he’s never met before, and he dies for the world… It’s that kind of thing I’m using to highlight...differences in what altruism is.” (50:27)

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Notable Quotes

• “If it doesn’t mean what it says, that’s fine, but… scholars...recognize reasons for thinking these two verses were not originally in 1 Corinthians.” — Bart Ehrman (06:30)
• “She [Junia] is eminent among the apostles. Whoa. So, you know, how suppressive is Paul being of women’s voices here?” — Bart Ehrman (25:57)
• “You can’t assume that somebody in the first century had 21st-century understandings of men and women and gender and sex…” — Bart Ehrman (30:58)
• “Women are imperfect men... Their penises have not grown... The woman is owned by her father and then by her husband.” — Bart Ehrman (33:52)
• “When the churches were small and meeting in homes, women had more prominent roles because this was their domain. But...as the church grew... men started taking over.” — Bart Ehrman (43:17)
• “If you want to be a follower of Jesus, be a follower of Jesus. If you don’t want to be, that’s ok. Just don’t tell me you are one.” — Bart Ehrman (41:56)

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:30 — Trad wives and biblical gender roles intro
• 02:48 — Personal evangelical experiences with gender roles
• 05:00 — 1 Corinthians 14 and its context
• 08:46 — Interpolation and scholarly arguments
• 12:09 — 1 Timothy 2 and its problems
• 20:38 — Galatians 3:28 and Paul’s view on equality
• 23:04 — Paul’s greeting of female leaders in Romans 16
• 28:42 — Feminist readings and Bible patriarchy
• 32:48 — Ancient sex and gender hierarchies
• 38:38 — Jesus' interactions with women
• 40:47 — Ideological shift: domination vs. service
• 43:17 — Evolution of women’s roles in church
• 52:05 — Listener Q&A: book recommendations, etc.

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Conclusion

Ehrman and Lewis present a nuanced, critical exploration of New Testament passages on women and gender. They debunk common misreadings, explain why certain verses do not mean what is often claimed, and highlight the importance of historical context. Far from presenting Paul or early Christianity as monolithically misogynistic, the episode reveals complexity and moments of unexpected liberation—while also tracing the eventual suppression of women’s roles as Christianity became institutionalized.

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Transcript

[Bart Ehrman]

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[Megan Lewis]

Unless you have sworn off social media, you're probably familiar with the existence of trad wives, women who live their lives according to traditional conservative gender roles. They often describe themselves as living biblically or having a biblical marriage, celebrating that they are subservient to their husbands. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman provides insight into what the New Testament actually says about gender roles and marriage. Is this style of patriarchal living actually biblical? And how would women at the time have been expected to live? Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host Megan Lewis. Lets begin. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus everybody. Today we're going to be talking about what the Bible actually says about women, gender roles and marriage. And we also have a little bit of news about what Barth is currently working on. And finally we'll have some listeners questions before we get to all of that. Bart, how are you doing today?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I'm doing well. I'm getting ready to make a trip up north to New Hampshire to see the grandkids.

[Megan Lewis]

Oh lovely.

[Bart Ehrman]

I'm, I'm way too young to have six grandchildren but I do. And what the one of them is in their high school school play that I'm going to and the other, another one of them is, is applying to colleges and so a lot to talk about.

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, exciting times. Oh that sounds like fun.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. Yeah. How are you doing?

[Megan Lewis]

Yes, good. No plays for us. My eldest is going to be graduating this year so we're kind of working out where she goes next and kind of next steps. So similar to kind of transition period I think.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, well it's a difficult transition period but it's a great one too because possibilities open up and it can be scary. But yeah, good luck.

[Megan Lewis]

Yeah, yeah, it'll be good. But gender roles today. So what experiences have you had with the Bible's view on gender roles and is that something that was talked about while you were an evangelical.

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, boy. Was it? Yeah, we, we had very firm views about gender roles when I was an evangelical. No, we, you know, we thought that the Bible was quite clear that women were be. To be submissive to men and that the wife was to, you know, I mean, we didn't think that men had the right to abuse women, but we did at all. You know, we were very, very much against anything like that. But think that the, the man was to be the authority figure and that it was related to how Christians understood men, not only in relationship to when women in their marriages, but also in the churches, that men were to be the authorities and women were not to be. So that when I went to, when I went to Moody Bible Institute, which is a very conservative evangelical school, one of my close friends, a woman was not allowed to take the preaching class that the men took because why she wanted to learn how to preach. And they said, no, you can't preach. And so that translated. So it affected a lot of things. It translated in a lot of areas, but including marriage, but also church life.

[Megan Lewis]

So conservative Christians today, Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, you use certain Bible passages to show that women should not be leaders in the church, as you just demonstrated.

[Bart Ehrman]

Women.

[Megan Lewis]

What are the main passages that get pulled out and are there any problems with interpreting them in this manner?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, there are some key passages, and they tend to affirm both in people's minds. They tend to affirm both women's roles in the churches and women's roles in the household. And so there are two passages in particular, I think, that at least we've turned to. I think many conservative Christians continue to turn to as showing the relationship of, of men and women. And they're both allegedly written by the Apostle Paul. And one of the problems is going to be that scholars have argued that neither one is written by Paul. So, so this, these are the passages, by the way, that when people tell me, as they still do, that they think Paul was a real misogynist and a first century misogynist, that these are the passage that passages they have, they have in mind. So. So the first one is in a letter that definitely was written by Paul, and it's First Corinthians, chapter 14, verses 34 through 35. This is. So First Corinthians is one of the undisputed Pauline letters. So that's established and in the context of talking about the spiritual gifts in the church, how people are to speak in tongues and how they're to prophesy and how they're to use the gifts of healing and administration and teaching and stuff in the context of that. He says the women should keep silence in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there's anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. So that's 1 Corinthians 14, 34, 35. And it seems pretty clear.

[Megan Lewis]

I was going to say that. That seems pretty unequivocal. Is that how the verse should be taken, that we should understand that women should not be participating in church life in this kind of role?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I think it is definitely saying that, but there. There are a couple problems. One problem is that this does not say that women are not supposed to preach or that women are not supposed to lead the Eucharist or women are not supposed to be a leadership in the church. This says women are not allowed to speak. Does anybody really take that literally? No, of course not. Women talk in church. You can go into a church building and talk if you're a woman. No, you're not allowed to speak. So they say, well, that doesn't really mean that. Well, okay, so it doesn't mean what it says. So if it doesn't mean what it says, that's fine. But the other problem is that scholars for a long time have recognized there are debates about this. I'll say this, there are debates about it, but there. Scholars have all recognized that there are reasons for thinking these two verses were not originally in First Corinthians 14, and that they weren't originally in Paul at all, but they were added by a later author. Now, I need to differentiate between two things here. I am not saying that this is a textual change made by a scribe, because we don't have any manuscripts lacking the verse, the verses. So I'm not talking about a textual variant here. I'm talking about what scholars call an interpolation. And interpolation is when a scribe or a copyist added something to the text before any of our surviving manuscripts appeared. This does happen on occasion. It's harder to prove than a textual variant, because with the textual variant, you have two manuscripts, and one has the verse, one doesn't have the verse. And so you know that the scribe has added it with an interpolation. You don't have that. What you have is a passage that really does not make sense in its context when you actually look at it. And it's hard to believe the author actually wrote It, I am definitely on that side and I think, my guess is the majority of scholars are on that side. There is. I'm sorry, I need to get in the weeds just for a second.

[Megan Lewis]

You will be making lots of people very happy. By the way. We occasionally get people saying, I want more detail. So.

[Bart Ehrman]

Okay, well, to get into the weeds here for a second. My, I had a, I had a very good friend who was a, who is a Pentecostal preacher and evangelist who is also a New Testament scholar. And some readers will know about him. His name was Gordon Fee. F E E. He and I wrote a book together and we were very, very friendly. But he was, he was a very serious Pentecostal preacher, but he was also like a high level New Testament textual critic, textual scholar. He did not think these verses were originally in the Bible and he are. He made a textual argument for it. This is where I'm getting into the weeds. These verses are found in every manuscript, but sometimes they don't occur after what is now verse 33. They occur what is after now verse 40 in some manuscripts. The reason that matters is because Gordon Fee argued in his Commentary on First Corinthians that originally these were a marginal note note that a scribe had written into a margin of a manuscript and some subsequent scholars copying that manuscript weren't sure where he wanted them inserted. And so some stuck them after verse 32, most of them did, and others stuck them after verse 40. So Gordon took that as. As textual evidence that in fact it's a textual variant that scribes added because it makes best sense as a marginal note because of its relocation. So that's pretty interesting. And it came from somebody who had a pretty traditional view of Christianity. He was a conservative evangelical, but so that part's interesting. There are other reasons though for thinking that these did not belong here. I'll just give you a couple because there are a lot of discussions about this. But one is the idea that women can't speak in church seems to contradict what Paul himself says three chapters earlier. As Gordon Fee points out in chapter 11, we're told that when women pray and prophesy in church, they're to have their heads covered. Well, that's speaking in church. And so why does he say do it with your head covered in chapter 11, but then say don't do it at all in chapter 14? That doesn't make sense. The other reason it doesn't make sense is that if you actually read this entire passage, the, the two verses come out of nowhere. He's been Talking about prophets and prophecy. And right before this, he's talking about for how prophets are supposed to be speaking, how prophets are supposed to prophesy in church. And right after this, starting in verse, the next verse, verse 30, the next verse, again, it's talking about prophecy. So all of a sudden he's got this. And if you just leave these verses out, there's absolute continuity between what he says, between the verses. But then all of a sudden, this thing's stuck in there. And so it looks like it's been stuck in there, both because of the contradiction with 11 and because of the flow of the passage. And so I don't think Paul wrote it. And I'd say that's probably the majority view among critical scholars today.

[Megan Lewis]

That's interesting.

[Bart Ehrman]

So it isn't like it's not biblical. If you think the Bible is what he originally wrote, then you know, this isn't really biblical proof that you. That women are supposed to be subservient.

[Megan Lewis]

Excellent. You said when you started to answer my question that there were two examples that are often used. What's the other one?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, the other one's even more explicit. And it's in another book that is allegedly written by Paul. This is in first Timothy. First Timothy is one of the Pastoral epistles. First and second Timothy and Titus are called the Pastoral epistles because these are books that claim to be written by Paul to pastors, to Timothy, who's a pastor in Ephesus, and Titus, who's the pastor on the island of Crete. And he's giving them instructions how to carry out their pastoral duties. So they're called Pastoral epistles. And in 1st Timothy 2, 11, 15. These are, among some people, the most notorious verses of the New Testament. This is where he says that he starts out by telling women how they're supposed to dress in verse nine. And they're dressed modestly. They're not supposed to have braided hair. They're not supposed to wear gold or jewels. They're to practice good deeds. Okay? They're supposed to be clothed in good deeds, not in nice clothes or jewelry. But then he says, Verse 11, Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men. She is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet the woman will be saved through childbearing if she continues in faith and love and holiness with modesty. Okay, there it is. There we go. You know, and the thing about this particular verse is that in some of Paul's language about women in First Corinthians, apart from the two verses I read are talked about by people saying, well, yeah, but he's talking about that situation, and it's that historical situation. That's why he says these things in this verse, he, this author tells us why he says these things. It has nothing to do with a particular historical situation, has nothing to do with a cultural understanding of things. It has to do with the nature of creation. Women were made subservient. Adam was made first, then Eve. Eve in the. In the book of Genesis, in chapter two, is made as his helper. She is made to help him out. The first God makes all the animals to help him out. That doesn't seem to work very well. So then he gets a woman, makes the woman to help him out. And so he's pointing out, look, women came second. She came as the helper of men, so she's to be submissive. Adam was formed first, then Eve. And then he goes on to point out that in the Garden of eden, in Genesis 3, Adam's not the one who is deceived by the devil. Eve was the one who was deceived by the devil, and then she led Adam astray. What happens when you allow women to exercise authority over men? They get deceived by the devil and. And they lead their men astray. That's what happens. It's always happened. And that's why women have to be submissive to men. And then he goes on to grant that they can be saved by having children if they continue on in modesty. So this is. I mean, it's very much a, you know, keep them barefoot and pregnant kind of. Kind of passage, are there?

[Megan Lewis]

Does this one have problems with it also?

[Bart Ehrman]

Boy, does it.

[Megan Lewis]

That's a loaded.

[Bart Ehrman]

I'd say. Well, several things. Several things to say. One is that, I mean, the main thing is that there are very good reasons, even apart from this passage, in fact, completely apart from this passage, very good reasons for thinking Paul did not write first Timothy or second Timothy or Titus. These pastoral epistles are not among the undisputed Pauline letters. These are letters that since the 19th century, scholars have adduced very solid reasons for thinking Paul did not write. This is not a 100% consensus among critical scholars, but it's way up there as one of those things that critical scholars are really convinced by for a wide range of reasons. I talk about how we know which books Paul wrote we have 13 in the new Testament claim to be written by him. We have a bunch of them outside the New Testament that claim to be written by him. And you have to determine which ones did he really write write. And the reasons for this one are really solid that Paul did not write it. So this would not represent Paul's views. That's one thing. But people could say, well, look, it's still in the Bible. Yeah, it's still in the Bible. It not only the book itself clearly wasn't written by Paul. This passage is clearly different from what Paul himself says elsewhere, where Paul actually has a high evaluation of women and allows them to exercise official roles in his churches. And here. No, so, so I think, I think it's highly problematic both for both. Because it, I mean, how do you, you know, what would misogyny be if it wouldn't be telling women that they, they're deceived by the devil the whole time and lead men astray? I mean, what. So yeah, it's problematic.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. We're going to take a brief break. We'll be back soon to talk more. More about Paul's views, Paul's actual views on women and how the ancient world tended to view gender roles. Additionally, It's not every day we announce something this big. Hello, Misquoting Jesus fans. It's Megan and I've got some big news to share with you today. After more than three years of creating world class courses on the historical Oracle, Jesus, the New Testament and Early Christianity, we're turning the page, literally. We've officially changed our name from Bart Ehrman courses to Paths in Biblical Studies. This name change marks a big moment in our growth. What started as a platform centered on Barth's expertise has grown into a collaborative effort now featuring some of the top scholars in the field. It's no longer a one person endeavour, it's a full academic community and the new name reflects that. Just to be clear, the Misquoting Jesus podcast isn't going anywhere and the name is staying the same. The change is on the course side where we'll keep pushing to provide high quality, affordable biblical studies courses that are accessible and understandable to a non academic audience. To celebrate, we're launching a month long April campaign with two two major offers. First, every week this month, five of Paths in Biblical Studies best selling courses will be 50% off with new deals released each week. And second, for the entire month of April, we're reducing the price of our Biblical Studies Academy by an incredible 40% for new subscribers. But that's not all. Everyone who purchases a course of any value, even if it's just one course, in April will get instant access to Paul and his Letters, a basic introduction, an online course by Bart Ehrman. Plus, you'll be entered into a drawing to win a mystery prize. We're not saying what it is just yet, but we promise it'll be good. Head over to PBSCourses.com to explore this week's deals and take advantage of the celebration. That's PBS, short for Paths in Biblical Studies courses.com Once again, that's PBSCourses.com thank you. So welcome back. Before the break, we were talking a bit about the passages that are often used by modern conservative Christians to justify a patriarchal view of society. And you mentioned earlier, Bart, that Paul is often described as being a misogynist, using those two passages from Corinthians and Timothy. And given the problems that you gave with those passages, do you think that the identity or the identification of Paul as a misogynist still stands, or do you think that's, that's something that we can probably do away with?

[Bart Ehrman]

So I, I think it's a, it's a very complicated question. You know, I, in my, my New Testament classes at Chapel Hill, I have all of my students. They are organized when I'm not giving lectures, they have small group discussions like 20, 20 people. And, and in those small group recitation groups we call them, they each have to participate in a debate during the semester. And one of the debates that I used to do was resolved. The Apostle Paul was a misogynist. And so some students would be arguing, yes, he was, and others already know he was not so affirmative and negative. I had to stop using that because at Some point about 10 years ago, I started having a lot of students who did not know what the word misogynist meant. So they were debating something. They didn't even bother to look it up. Oh, my God. So, so then I changed it to resolve Paul's views of women were oppressive. And these are the two main passages that people talk about. There are, there are other passages that people turn to that some people will be thinking of that we're going to be able to, to, to cover here. But what I will say is that, that in that there are several things about Paul that show a different side to him and that are important to, to take note of. One thing is that Paul explicitly says in the book of Galatians, which is an undisputed letter, he certainly wrote it. And I think he certainly wrote this verse, Galatians, chapter 3, verse 28, where Paul says that in Christ there's neither slave nor free, neither Greek nor barbarian, not male and female. That in Christ, male and female is not an issue in Christ because everyone is equal before Christ. That's an important verse because it shows that really, he thinks that it's not that women have a secondary standing before Christ or are subservient or submissive. You know, they are. They're equal when it comes to salvation in Christ. And so that. That's. That's one point that really matters. The other point that really matters is that women are. Can demonstrably be shown to have leadership roles in Paul's churches with his approbation. And so surely that shows that he doesn't, you know, doesn't think, you know, that they have to be just servers of the men.

[Megan Lewis]

So can you give us a couple of examples of this, Bart?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. You know, one of the places that is most interesting for this is a. It's a passage that most people kind of skip over because it's Paul kind of greeting a bunch of names that nobody knows. And so it's the final chapter of the book of Romans. Romans is written to the church in Rome, which will be the topic of our. I think it's our next episode about how that church got started. And our earliest evidence of this church is Paul's letter that he writes to the Romans. It's the only letter he wrote to a church that he did not establish, as he makes clear in this letter, but he wants to visit them. And at the end of the letter in chapter 16, he greets a bunch of people he knows. There are over 20 people that he greets by name, and most of them are men, but there are a number of women that he greets. And the things he says about them are really interesting because they show something about Paul's churches. For one thing, he says. He indicates in chapter 16, verse 1, that a woman named Phoebe is a deacon of the local church in a church in a local town, Centria, near Corinth. And that. That she's a deacon there. And so, okay, so that means that she's one of the ministers. The word deacon is the word that actually Diaconos literally means minister. Okay, so that's. That's interesting. But then he goes on to greet all these people. The first people he greets are a Prisca and Aquila. These people show up in the book of Acts. Prisca there is named Priscilla. Same name, shorter version of Prisca, but It's interesting that she's listed first, these two. And we're told that they are his fellow workers in Christ and that they risk their lives for Paul at one point. And they have a church that meets in their home and her name is listed first. Normally to list the man's first if he's like the priority. But no, Prisca comes first. Then he goes on and greets other people. He talked about co workers of his, including somebody named Mary. He greets a number of people who have churches meeting in their homes, and he names the women as these people who have the churches in their home. He names one woman that he says is my mother. Doesn't mean his literal mother, but he looks up to her as a mother. So you can go through this whole list. He greets over 20 people, and a lot of these are women. But the most interesting is in verse seven where Paul says, greet Andronicus and, and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. This is so funny. I'm reading an older translation here. I just happened to pick up this thing. This is the. I think this is the original Revised Standard Version or something. Let me read the translation that, that this thing gives me, because this, that kind of makes my point. It says, greet Andronicus and Junius, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are men of note among the apostles, for they were in Christ before me. The reason that is so, the reason I'm laughing is because the translators have taken the woman out of the text. What it literally says in the Greek, as everybody knows, I mean, who reads this thing? And people wrote books on this thing, but it's very quite clear what it says is green Andronicus and Junia. It's a woman's name. He doesn't say my kinsmen, he says, my compatriots. And he said, you know, in other words, probably means their fellow Jews and they are people of note or they are. They are. Oh, it just says they are of note among the apostles. So what's happened here? This is. It's a very interesting thing the translators have done for a long time. They take this woman's name, Junia, and they take. And they make it a man's name, Junius, which would be a male name, but the Greek, it's a woman's name. And the name Junius, the male name, Junius is not a name in the ancient world. Junia is a woman's name. But translators just can't believe he's greeting a woman. And so they call Her a man. I know men of note. But. So. So that's. Yeah, that's bad. But that's an older trans. That must be the RSV or something. But, but the. But it's all. It's greed. This is a woman. But the thing is, he calls her one of the chief apostles. She is eminent among the apostles. Whoa. Ah. So, you know, how suppressive is Paul being of the women's voices here? I mean, he's like, he's. He. He acknowledges that there are women evangelists, women ministers, women apostles in his churches and in Christianity generally. So I think that counterbalances a lot of things that might seem negative in Paul, might seem like women are to be subservient. But, you know, here it is. I mean, I think he clearly had women leaders in his churches.

[Megan Lewis]

When feminist scholars are looking at the New Testaments and trying to grapple with these kind of patriarchy supporting passages, is it enough for them to say in these two examples, well, they're. They're not original. This isn't what Paul actually thought? Or are there additional things that they have to contend with when they're trying to kind of understand and make sense of what's going on?

[Bart Ehrman]

You know, feminism hit New Testament scholarship in a big and serious way, especially in the. Starting in the 1970s, going into the early 80s. And it was a very interesting movement as women theologians, especially feminist theologians, were trying to grapple with the Bible generally. And it was interesting in one way because there were two different approaches the different feminist theologians took. One was to the main. One was to recapture the voice of women in the Bible and to recognize that they had a significant place, even though male interpreters have downplayed it. And this works in both the. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament, where you can show that, in fact, women were far more prominent than you would expect. And that kind of capturing the voice of women was a major, major feminist concern for a while. But it's interesting that on the other side of the spectrum, there were feminist scholars who just said, look, the Bible's patriarchal, and we may as well just admit it, it is patriarchal. And we don't need to try and salvage it because it's unsalvageable. And so you just have to recognize this is a book written in a patriarchal culture. And so that was a very different. A very different kind of approach. And you had both things. And you still do. You still do kind of have both things. This passage I mentioned from First Corinthians 14, I said that my friend Gordon Fee, the Pentecostal conservative evangelical Christian, thought those verses were not originally there. There is a, there's a feminist scholar who wrote a, wrote a book on First Corinthians who argued that they were there originally. And you would have expected that the argument would have gone the other way. Right. But in fact. And so, so there are various ways, ways of dealing with it. But I think the one thing that everybody recognizes or they should recognize if they're a critical scholar, is that whatever you say about these, these particular passages or any passage, you have to understand them in their historical context. And you can't assume that somebody in the first century had 21st century understandings of men and women and gender and sex and everything else, because they weren't living in our time, and so they didn't have our understanding.

[Megan Lewis]

That's a really nice lead into my next question. So thank you. Could you explain, explain a little bit about why these passages, whether or not they're original to, to what Paul wrote, why so many of them seem to minimize the significance and the role of women? Is this something that we see more broadly in antiquity and does it relate to how ancient people did understand gender?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, yes. And. Oh, yes. So this is, this is the part that I think most people would not know. My students have never heard this before, but it has to do with ancient understandings of, of the sexes. So today, of course, we have very complicated understandings of gender. You know, we no longer, most of us no longer have a binary understanding that there's male and female. And that's kind of it. Although, you know, a lot of, a lot of people do insist that that's, that's the way it is. But it, you know, a lot of us understand it's more complicated than that. In the ancient world, it was not more complicated than that. It was binary, male and female. But so if you just put yourself in the mind set of a modern person thinking that it's a binary of male and female, what people typically think when they think of male and female is they tend to think that those are two kinds of the same thing. You've got a human being and they come in two kinds. Some are male, some are female, okay? So that's, that's way of doing it. And that's why, that's what makes common sense to us. And in the ancient world, they didn't see it that way. They did not see male and female as two kinds of thing. Somewhat weirdly to our thinking, they thought of male and female as 2 degrees of something. They're 2 degrees of what it means to be human.

[Megan Lewis]

How, how does that work?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, yeah, right. How does that work? So the way, the way I try to explain it to my students is I, I, I explain to them that in ancient understandings, life goes along a kind of progression line. Like you've got. So like, suppose you're drawing a line, like a horizontal line. It looks like a timeline. So goes from, say it goes from, from left to right. And on the far left are. This is the line of life rather than the line of time. And so on the far left are things that are not alive at all. You know, so rocks, things are, that are inanimate. Okay. They're at one side, and at the other side are the things that are the, like the most significant, biggest fulfilling living things there are the gods. Okay, so, but they're transitional stages. So when you go from rock, you're moving toward more and more life. You have plants, for example, okay, so you got a rose bush, which is more alive than the rock is, but

[Megan Lewis]

not as alive as a God, not

[Bart Ehrman]

as life as it got. Yeah. And from the plants you move up into animals. And so you have all kinds of animals. And some animals, you know, seem more, more like us than other animals do. And because there are progressions. And so slug doesn't have as much life as like a monkey does, you know, or something like that. And so, so there are timelines and, and there, there are these lines and gets more and more life as it goes along. Humans are further along on the lifeline than our, than our. Either plants or, or any animals. We're far superior to animals. But there's a different, there's progression within the human side too. It's all on a. It's, it's all transitioning into something else. And women are not as far along as men on this line. Men are understood to be the perfect humans, and women are imperfect humans. And after men come to come the gods. So the way it works out is that ancient people who talk about this, talk about women being imperfect men. And they talk about this in physiological terms. You can find this in a range of authors. This is not like weird marginal stuff. This is central stuff in the ancient world. We have ancient medical writers who talk about it. We have, we have gynecologists, ancient gynecologists who talk about it. We have philosophers who talk about it. It's just embedded in all sorts of kinds of literature, even things we would call fiction. This idea that women are imperfect men and what they mean by that is that physiologically, women are literally the weaker sex. Their muscles haven't developed as men's have, their voices haven't deepened, their lungs haven't developed sufficiently enough. Their penises have not grown. They. They literally thought that we have. We have medical writings that talk about how the p. The women's vagina is an inverted penis. And if you just kind of look at a picture, it kind of looks that way, and it's. The penis hadn't grown out, and for men, it has. And so men. Men are the superior form of human and. And superior to men are the gods. And so it's this kind of line, this line of life. And this had huge implications for almost everything, in part because of a separate but related issue, which is the understanding of power in the ancient world and who was to make decisions, who was to dominate whom. And throughout all of Greek and Roman antiquity, and probably, I suppose, most every culture, it was thought that those who had greater power were to dominate those with lesser power, and that this was not a moral problem. And so that's why you read all these texts, whether you're reading Greek histories or the Hebrew Bible or whatever, Roman history, whatever period, any place, if you've got a. If you've got a city or an empire that's more powerful than another, there's not a moral problem with destroying the other empire. Like, if you've got a city that's more powerful than this other city, you're within your rights to kill all their soldiers and to take all their women as slaves. And this is not a moral problem, because that's what you do, that's what the powerful do. And so it plays out in every way, not just politically, but socially, economically. The rich are to dominate, the poor, masters are to dominate. Slaves people didn't have. There were no moral problems with slavery even in the Bible. Just everybody assumed that the more powerful dominate. So slaves are to be submissive, but it applies to gender relations because women are naturally to be dominated by men. And that applies economically, socially, politically, culturally, physically. A woman is the. Is owned by her father and then is owned by her husband and is to be subservient, submissive to the one who owns her. And so this is not like just a Christian thing, it's a worldwide thing. And it applies in Christianity because Christians were born in that world. And so they naturally had these views. This is the view they had. And so that's why you get these passages in the Bible that are adopting that point of view without Even thinking

[Megan Lewis]

about it, do we see anything in the New Testament that runs counter to this? Anything kind of questioning or challenging the status quo? Or is it. Is it more just this is the way that things are and we're just going to carry on?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. You know, the thing is they. They would never quite say this is the way things are and we have to carry on because they wouldn't even occur to them that it'd be some other way. I mean, it's like. Of course, but there are. There are things that suggest that both Jesus and Paul and others were adopting a different view. Jesus himself in the Gospels has a lot more contact with women than you would expect of a rabbi in the first century. He converses with women, he travels with women. Women support him financially. These are. This is independently attested in a number of our different sources that Jesus, he touches women in public, he has conversations, he actually has discussions, intelligent discussions with them in public. And this is, you know, this. It seems to be significant because this is at least, it's showing that the early Christians had no problem with thinking that women were very important in the ministry of Jesus. And that would be unusual. I would say. There were. There were some Greek philosophical schools that did think that there should be equality and maybe that Jesus is more like those things, like the. So possibly in Stoicism, for example, there was some thought about this, or in Cynicism. So. And then with Paul, as I said, he says that when men and women are equal in Christ, I mean, there, there's. And he. And he has women who are in active roles. And so it's a question of whether there's a kind of the beginning of a breakdown of this cultural assumption of the inferiority of women. Within the earliest Christian movement, it's debated, and it's really worthy of debate because it looks like early in the early stages of the Jesus movement and then within the churches, women had a more prominent role than they had later in the New Testament.

[Megan Lewis]

More broadly, do we see a questioning of this natural domination of the weak by the more powerful that would be linked to this understanding of gender.

[Bart Ehrman]

We have mixed messages in the New Testament, and we do have mixed messages in Paul as well, but in the New Testament, I mean, the New Testament ends with the book of Revelation, which is all about how the powerful are to dominate. The issue in the Book of Revelation is not that it's wrong for might to make right. The problem is that the wrong people have the might. And so the Romans are the ones with the power. And that's what's not fair. The Christian should have the power. And when they have it, and when God asserts his power, he wipes out everybody else. And so it's clearly a theology of dominance, but it does run contrary to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus emphasizes that people are not to dominate others. This is a new paradigm. He says that people are to serve others rather than be served. He says that people should have the power of a young child. In other words, no power. People are not to dominate like the Gentiles do. They are to serve one another. And so it ends up, Jesus tries to shift the paradigm away from an understanding of domination and the right of domination to the. To the understanding of the need for service. So it's a sh. Ideological shift from domination to service. I'll say it's an ideological shift that has not always caught on in Christianity and throughout history. You mentioned, we mentioned at one point, we've talked about things like, you know, the crusades or pogroms against Jews or, you know, all sorts of things. But today there are a lot of Christians who just are all out for the power and want to assert their power, and they can do that if they want. But don't tell me you're following the teachings of Jesus because you're not. Jesus taught service and subservience. He didn't, did not teach domination. Yeah, but if I'm like that, they'll walk all over me. Yeah, that's right. They'll crucify you. That's what happens. So if you want to be a follower of Jesus, be a follower of Jesus. If you don't want to be, that's okay. Just don't tell me you are one. Sorry, I got my soapbox there.

[Megan Lewis]

No, I love it. It's perfect. So if, if I'm understanding correctly, then Jesus and Paul seem to have had a more generous, possibly even liberating view of women. As you've just mentioned, that's obviously not carried through very successfully into modern Christianity. How and why was this changed by later writers?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, it definitely was changed so that by the second century, this was not the dominant view. It actually looks like there are two trajectories that come off of the teachings of Jesus and the churches of Paul. One trajectory is more liberating in its understanding of women, and that goes into the second century, where we start getting stories of women followers of Paul or women disciples who, who are exercising roles that would normally be preserved for men. For example, in stories of. There was a very famous disciple of Paul named Thecla who, who is a, you know, exercising the authorities of men and so coming off of the Pauline tradition. But then the other side are people who are men taking charge and returning to the standard ways of domination. So there are lots of, you know, there's a lot of law of scholarship on this. A lot of people have written about it, a lot of different understandings of it. One view that I've always found attractive to explain the shift away from the more open view toward women, of giving them a voice. One view that I found attractive deals with the nature of the early Christian church. The church, as I mentioned, I mentioned earlier just in passing, that there were women in Rome who had churches meeting in their houses. We don't have church buildings for a couple hundred years, so people would meet in private homes. The deal is that when we talk about women being subservient to men, what that really means is that men in the Greek, the Roman world, the Jewish world, were understood to be public figures. They had the political power, the economic power, the social power, the cultural power. They're the ones who voted, they're the ones who decided. They're the ones who ran things. But the women did have a domain, and the domain was their home. And in the home, the woman ran the show. She made the decisions about finances. I mean, if the husband overruled her, he'd overrule her. But the woman had to run the budget, she had to run the household, had to organize the slaves, had to organize the servants, had to organize the children, had to educate the children. This is where she had her authority, in the home. And it's interesting that the early Christian churches met in homes where the women had the authority. And so one theory that I rather like is that when the churches were small and meeting in homes, women had more prominent roles because this was their domain. But what ended up happening is the church grew and grew and outgrew the houses and became more of a public thing. That was the man's domain. And because of the natural growth of the church and the understanding of the different domains, men started taking over then and. And insisting that they're the ones who are going to take charge, because this is now in their domain. And, you know, the church grew pretty quickly and over into the second century. By the second century, it looks like it's a pretty done deal. You don't get. You don't get women bishops of churches or anything in the second century or people, women being called apostles or such. They were serving the men in the churches.

[Megan Lewis]

That is about all we have time for today. But thank you so much, Bart. This was absolutely fascinating. We are going to now go to a very brief update of what is going on in Barts world.

[Bart Ehrman]

Welcome to our upcoming Highlights and Events segment where we catch up on Bart's courses, community updates and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.

[Megan Lewis]

So Bart, you've mentioned, I think a couple of weeks ago that your book is finally in for editing. For now, that is out of your hands. So my question is what are you working on? Because I don't think you're a man who tends to stand idle.

[Bart Ehrman]

I do not. And so. Well, you know, I, I hardly ever write articles anymore, but I decided to write an article because I'm really interested in a particular topic that's a little bit unusual. I, I've been starting, I've been for some years now. I've been reading a lot of the class Greek classics, you know, because the Greek I learned was really kind of Koine Greek, which is from my time period. But I started learning the ancient stuff so I could read Homer and read the Greek dramatists and stuff. And I've been really obsessed with Euripides, the draw, the, the tragic, the tragedian, one of the three great authors of Greek drama. And his he's got a play called the Alcestis, which is named after a woman figure in this play who's, I won't go into the full detail here, but her husband is fated to die. He's the king of the country, of the city, and he doesn't have to die if he'll find somebody to stand in for him. And nobody will do it. And his parents won't do it, his friends won't do it. But his wife agrees to do it, Alcestis, and she agrees to die for him. And she does. She dies for him so he doesn't have to die, but then the God Heracles raises her from the dead and brings her back and reunites them. And I've always been fascinated by the, I've always been fascinated by the story even long, long before I started learning to read this stuff in Greek. And I'm fascinated because of the parallels with Jesus who agrees to die for others, but then it gets raised from the dead. And so I'm writing an article talking about the parallels between what's happening in this play, Euripides. His main plays that are performed these days are things like Medea and things which are also fantastic. But this one, not as much, but I think it's really interesting. The Parallels between. Between the two, because they show both similarities and differences in Greek and Christian ways of understanding things.

[Megan Lewis]

That's really interesting. We've kind of touched briefly on a couple of the similarities just in your description. What are some of the differences you found?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, for one thing, in the Greek and Roman worlds. Okay, so I'll just say this is related to the book I just wrote about how Jesus ethics changed our moral conscience. Because in the Christian tradition, you're supposed to be giving of yourself, serving others, as we were saying earlier, being altruistic toward everyone, even strangers, people you don't even know. Man, that didn't happen in the ancient world. And so I'm talking about Greek and Roman philosophy and how in their understanding, yes, to your friends, your family, those close to you, you. You were to. To sometimes sacrifice yourself for them, sometimes in an extreme way. This is an example of extreme sacrifice for your closest beloved one, your husband. Jesus dies for people he's never met before, and he dies for the world. And so that's a difference, and it's a key difference because it's different dying for somebody that you are who's the dearest one in your life, and dying for somebody you've never met. And so it's that kind of thing that I'm using to highlight, like the similarities of the idea of dying for somebody, but the differences in what altruism is.

[Megan Lewis]

That's fascinating. And altruism doesn't, doesn't play a part at all in, in the Greek way of thinking.

[Bart Ehrman]

It. Oh, no, it does.

[Megan Lewis]

Oh, it does.

[Bart Ehrman]

Altruism does. Yeah. Altruism for people who are close to you, either biologically or socially. So that if you've got friends, you are. Aristotle said that you should treat your friend as yourself. I mean, you should, you know, you should be willing to die for your friend, but, you know, not. Not for some guy across town you never met before. Are you crazy? But the Christians are supposed to. To not be like that. They're supposed to. To give to strangers. That's why when we hear of, when we hear of a disaster today, you know, LA fires or the Hurricane Helene or some disaster overseas, we feel like we ought to donate some money or help out, you know, relief. We don't know these people and, you know, we're never going to know them. If we did know, we may not even like them, but we still feel like we ought to give some money or to do something. We feel that way and sometimes we do it. They didn't feel that way in the ancient world. Why do we feel that way then? Well, my book tries to explain that and that that really it people don't believe me when I tell them, but I try and prove it in my book. It goes back to the teachings of Jesus, which are rooted in the teachings of Judaism. Absolutely rooted in the teachings of Judaism, but different.

[Megan Lewis]

Interesting. I read a lot of Greek tragedy in high school and college and it was nice hearing about it again. Thank you. And we will be, I'm sure, talking more about your book next year when it's closer to publication. We are going to now have some audience questions.

[Bart Ehrman]

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 erman.com Ask Bart.

[Megan Lewis]

Alright, we have some great questions and one the first one, most appropriately is about your books. The questioner says, I am impressed by the number and range of books you have published, both for scholars and the general public. I wonder if you could recommend an appropriate sequence for reading them. I realize your answer may depend on a reader's background and specific interest, but are some of your books better appreciated after having read another one?

[Bart Ehrman]

So I'll tell you, I actually have an answer to this that I would not have given a month ago. And so Megan, this is actually kind of funny because I listen to our podcasts every Tuesday morning when they come out just to make sure I didn't say something truly stupid as opposed to generally stupid stupid. And I was. So maybe two weeks ago I was listening to the podcast and the podcast ended and I guess I was doing an audible or something and. And I didn't have time to turn it off. I was Bill something. And so something else came up and what came up was my audible book, an audible book of mine, Jesus interrupted. And I've never listened to that book. I'm not sure I've ever read it again. And it was like. And I decided I'll just listen to this for a little bit. I started listening, I said, oh my God, that is like so clear. Why are. How come I'm not so clear anymore? I used to be. Wow. I end up listening to the whole thing. It's like, really? I just. And it summarized so much of what I think about things about so many of my other books. Many of my other books are actually taking like a section from that book and developing it into a book. But if you want the kind of like, as clear as I can possibly make something expression of the things that are really important about understanding the New Testament. Jesus interrupted. I'm gonna, yeah, I've. I'm not sure I've ever recommended it. I just thought, okay, that's one of the books I wrote, but man, I was really hot. So, yeah, I'd say Jesus interrupted to start with. And then there are a lot of topics in that book that I deal with in, in book length things, you know, like forgeries or the historical Jesus or whatever, you know, lots of things. And you can then move to other books based on that.

[Megan Lewis]

Excellent, thank you. Good advice. The next questioner said, I just listened to your latest episode on whether Paul hated Jews of. Not our latest episode currently, but anyway, when the question was submitted, it was the latest episode. You said that Jews didn't accept Jesus, but I thought he was recognized as a prophet, if not the Messiah. What does Judaism accept or reject of Jesus message and how is that different from Christianity?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, one of the things I said in the episode was that, you know, there are Jews and there are Jews. And so it's not that, you know, there's like a, a standard thing. What I would say is that most Jews who do not consider themselves Christian may understand Jesus to be a great ethical teacher. Most today would say that he's a Jewish ethical teacher and that people like Paul changed his message into something else and changed it into Christianity. I disagree that Paul's the one who did it, but Paul's certainly the one who popularized this kind of view of that. And the view is that Jesus, death and resurrection are what bring salvation. What Jews reject is that as a rule, they do not think that the death and resurrection of Jesus are what put you into a right standing before God. They don't think that God rescinded his law. They don't think that God changed his mind. They think that they are the chosen people and that God gave them the Torah, et cetera. These are religious Jews. I mean, a lot of Jews are atheists or don't believe anything. But this is traditional Judaism. And so the, the difference between Jews who follow Jesus and Jews who don't follow Jesus are that following Jesus means not just keeping his teachings, his ethics, but believing that his death and resurrection were from God to bring salvation to the world.

[Megan Lewis]

Excellent, thank you very much. Third question. I have read, or I think I have read, that the author of Matthew's Gospel aimed at least in part to Judaize Mark's Gospel, which was more gentile in tone. If that's true, then I would assume that the author of Matthew was a Jew. So I wonder why the author of Matthew used the mistranslation of Alma to fabricate a virgin birth narrative when he should have been familiar with the Hebrew Bible and thereby the correct meaning of your word. Of the Word. What are your thoughts?

[Bart Ehrman]

Wow, that's a complicated question because it's actually. It wasn't where I was expecting him to go. I'm not sure. I would say that Matthew Judaized Mark. Mark still talks about Jesus as the fulfillment of Scripture. John starts off with John the Baptist who's fulfilling Scripture. Mark is very much that way. I would say that Matthew goes farther along that line, but I don't think that he's taking something that is non Jewish and making it Jewish. I don't think I'd put it that way. I don't know that Matthew was Jewish. I don't think that emphasizing the importance of the Jewish law necessarily makes somebody Jewish. In Paul's letter to the Galatians, he is attacking his enemies who insist that the followers in Galatia, the Christians in Galatia have to be circumcised. These are people who continue insisting that the law has to be followed. But Paul gives indications that they started out as Gentiles. So, you know, if you have a Gentile who confirms to converts to a Jewish form of Christianity, they often become far more evangelistic about that and militant about it than people who are raised Jewish who may not have as big of a deal about it. So I'm not sure that Matthew himself was a Jew. He may have been a Jew. But if the question is why does he change Alma into something? So I need to explain that one for a second because it won't make sense to most people. Probably the questioner is asking about the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus is born of a virgin in order to fulfill what was spoken of by the prophet. Prophet Isaiah, that a version a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Matthew says that's why Mary was a virgin to fulfill this prophecy. That's found in Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14. But the questioner is pointing out that the verse originally in Hebrew did not say a virgin shall conceive. It originally said a young woman. And it actually says. He doesn't point this out, but it says a young woman has conceived is what the Hebrew Sundays of Isaiah 7:14. The word is used as alma, which means young woman. It does not necessarily mean virgin. There is a different Hebrew word, Bethulah, which does mean virgin. And that's not what Isaiah uses. So this questioner is saying why did Matthew, a Jew, intentionally misquote the Hebrew Old Testament in order to make it a virgin. So I'm not conceding that he was a Jew to begin with, but he may have been. He may absolutely may have been. Even if he was a Jew though, he wasn't reading the Old Testament in Hebrew. Most Jews, unless they lived in Israel, Jews read the Bible in their, in their language. Which people could read was Greek. Just as today Jews in New York typically, you know, read, read, read the English, they don't read the Hebrew just like, you know, you know, so where Jews in Jerusalem probably more likely read them in, you know, in Hebrew. So, so Matthew's written in Greek and he gives no indication of knowing Hebrew, Matthew or Aramaic. I think Matthew was a Greek speaking Jew, so he, he probably didn't know what Isaiah 7:14 said. He read the Greek translation which uses the word parthenos. The word parthenos means virgin. It also does mean young woman. The Hebrew word young woman can mean virgin. She's a young woman. It actually means probably, probably means a woman who's too young to be married. And you probably assume that woman has never had sex given the social and cultural situation. But it doesn't mean she didn't have sex. Whereas virgin ended up meaning pretty much a woman didn't have sex. I don't think it's. In other words, I don't think it's Matthew's fault and obviously I'm not a Christian apologist trying to defend early Christian authors. I just don't. I think he's reading the Greek Old Testament and he reads parthenos and he understands it to mean virgin.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Okay, final question. What is your opinion of John M. Allegro's translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Do you believe them to be accurate? And could his understanding of a psychedelic mushroom cult explain some of the visions mentioned in Scripture?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, he certainly thought it did. So I haven't, I haven't really read his translations of the Old Testament. I don't know if he did a full translation or not. John Olaga was a very fine scholar of ancient Judaism who's a very fine linguist who in addition to having very strong linguistic skills developed a theory about Jesus that some people kind of like, especially if they like this kind of thing, which is that Jesus actually his follow. Jesus and his followers ate psychedelic, psychedelic mushrooms and so and dad visions and so it was a mushroom cult. That part of his work has not withstand withstood scrutiny so basically, I, I don't know. You know, I know, I know a lot of scholars who respect what he had done philologically, especially with the Dead Sea Scrolls. But there's just this idea of the mushroom cult thing is just stuff people are making up. And you get, you get this continually in scholarship. It's, you know, it's, of course, it's far more sensational and you'll sell more books if you come up with something about Jesus and drugs and people are still doing it. But I think that, I think there's not a lot of good evidence for it. And there's really almost. I think there's almost no evidence for Jesus starting a mushroom cult. So it's just, you know, people could be really good linguists, but it doesn't mean that they are good theologians. It doesn't mean they're good philosophers. It doesn't mean that they're good anthropologists. They're good linguists. And I think in this case, he wasn't doing a credible job historically.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, we're dealing with a long and complicated issue that. About women in early Christianity. We ended up focusing on how women's roles in the churches of Paul, but also somewhat women's, women's in relationship to Jesus. And I was trying to show that, I think early on women had a more prominent role in Christianity and that eventually their voices got silenced and that we still have the effects of that today. And in some ways that is found not only in the churches but also in social relations, in marriages, for example. But one has to put all of these statements of the Bible in their own historical context and realize that their context is not our context.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that the code mjpodcast can be used for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back 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 favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.