← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Pontius Pilate in a Different Light: A Little Known Apocryphal Gospel
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
the bad guy in the New Testament, Pontius Pilate is shown as a pretty decent chap. He probably tips well, pets the neighbour's dog, helps old ladies cross the street, that kind of thing. But why exactly is the official who sentenced Jesus to death depicted as such a nice guy? To try and get to the bottom of this, we are going to be taking a look at his depiction in some non canonical texts.
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Podcast Intro/Outro Narrator (Megan Lewis)
Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only 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.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
So as I said in my introduction, we're going to be talking about Pontius Pilate and we're going to be using a non canonical text called the Acts of Pilate. But when did you first come across this particular writing?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you know, this writing is not well known even among New Testament scholars. It turns out, as we'll talk about, there's a whole string of books connected with Pontius Pilate not found in the New Testament where he really is portrayed as a pretty good guy. And I guess it's a little bit odd that New Testament scholars don't know about it, but it's not really their fault we're not taught it. I mean, I wasn't taught anything about it except for my in graduate school, my mentor Bruce Metzger would sometimes tell funny stories from the Apocrypha. He told some stories the Acts of Pilate. Well, that's pretty interesting. I didn't really know much about it or any of the other pilot literature until many years later and I didn't become intimately familiar with this text or the other pilot gospels. They're called just, you know, God. I don't know. 10, 12 years ago when I, my colleague and I Zakoplacia produced an edition of the Gospels not in the New Testament and we had to translate everything from Greek and Latin and Coptic. And so I, I had to translate all these pilot texts and man, they're really fascinating. I was think at the time. These things are so understudied. I mean, even scholars of early Christianity, let alone New Testament, don't do much with them. But they're pretty fascinating as we're going to see, and important in ways for understanding, not the historical pilot so much, but understanding how Christianity developed and how Christian hatred of Jews escalated over time. Using Pilate as a way of showing that.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Why do you think that this collection has been so understudied by academics?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, so they're not in the New Testament. And these Acts of Pilate and other related texts, they were never contenders really for inclusion in the New Testament because most of them were written much later. The thing that we're going to be talking about the most, the act of Pilate may have had its beginnings in the second century, but the texts we have probably come from the fourth Christian century, so long after people had pretty much decided on which books were contenders for the New Testament. So they aren't studying that. So that no, New Testament scholars don't think they're relevant. And early Christianity scholars, it's only been the last 10 or 20 years that scholars have widely gotten interested in the apocryphal materials. Among the apocryphal gospels that people are interested in, these just don't seem to number among them, I guess, largely because they're legendary and entertaining, and so they're not really taken as seriously as they should be.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
So you mentioned a little bit in answer to my first question, why it's important to really look at these. Could you go into a bit more detail about that?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So they're important for a number of reasons. When you're dealing with apocryphal materials, gospels or epistles allegedly by Paul, for example, or allegedly by Peter that are not in the New Testament, or apocalypses that, you know, are attributed to one person or another that didn't make it into the New Testament for a long, long time. New Testament scholars just wanted nothing to do with those. They had no relevance to their interests in the New Testament. And people today, when they hear about a new gospel, like, you know, the Gospel of Judas when it showed up 20 years ago, or people just wanted to know, is it right? You know, is it historical? People tend to be interested in either what really happened or what the New Testament says about happened, and less interested in other things. But these materials are really valuable for something else, which is to show how Christians were thinking about the stories of Jesus over time. And you think, well, who cares why they're thinking about Jesus? Well, we live in an age when people have all sorts of stories about Jesus and they completely matter. I mean, not just for religious reasons, but for political and social reasons, why people are telling stories about Jesus the way they do. Or if you watch a film about Jesus, you know, it's a real mistake to watch, like, the Last Temptation of Christ or the Life of Brian or any of these movies, Jesus of Nazareth or whatever, you know, go through it the whole time thinking, is that what really happened? You know, or is that really what the New Testament says? The point is that it's a film that's trying to portray Jesus in a particular way. And if you want to understand your culture, you need to understand these things in their own historical, cultural contexts. If you want to understand how Christianity developed into the religion that it did, these apocryphal materials are hugely important. For one thing, in the particular case, these show quite clearly how Christians were developing very strong anti Jewish sentiments and placing their own kind of interpretations of Judaism on the stories of Jesus in ways that really show how wicked and evil all those Jews are. You get that here in this text. And so it's upsetting in many ways, but it's also true to Christian history and it needs to be taken very seriously.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. And we'll get into the content in a little bit, but when we talk about the Acts of Pilate, what exactly is this? Is it a long text? Is it a couple of fragments? What are we looking at?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, so turns out it's a complicated question. When most people would refer to the Acts of Pilate, they're referring to a particular book. It's not long. It's nowhere near the size of any of the New Testament Gospels. But it's a complete account we have. It's not a fragmentary account. It's in many manuscripts. It was a very popular text throughout the Middle Ages. We have over 400 manuscripts of this thing in Latin and probably about 500 manuscripts altogether in a number of ancient languages. And it got translated into, like, all of the languages of Europe at one point. I mean, people were reading this thing and taking it seriously. And this is part of the point I was making earlier. When somebody reads a text like this about the Acts of Pilate, they read the New Testament in light of what they learned from this other book. And so what they read from this other book informs how they read the New Testament. And so it ends up being pretty important. But what we have is this. A full account. It starts at the beginning, it ends at the end. But the account is not about the entire life of Jesus like the New Testament Gospels. It's an alternative account of Jesus trial, his death, his resurrection, and what happened in the aftermath of his resurrection. And so it has a beginning and a middle and an end. It's a complete thing. And it is reliant on the gospels of the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It uses them all over the place, but it puts a different spin on them. The reason I say it's a complicated question is because this Gospel, this Acts of Pilate, was copied by copyists over the centuries, as I was saying. And there are very different versions of it out there. Depending which manuscript you're reading, you're going to be reading a different version.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Why do you think or why do academics think this text was so widely disseminated? Because there are many other apocryphal, non apocryphal texts that we only have a few copies of.
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
I know it's a really interesting question because there are a lot of these apocryphal gospels that are hugely interesting that didn't get copied. So like we might have like a copy and sometimes that's explicable. For example, the Gospel of Judas. Well, the Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text that through the Middle Ages, you know, all the scribes were against Gnosticism, so they didn't bother to copy Gnostic texts. And so we don't have some of those. There are others that simply for some reason didn't capture the public imagination. This particular book captured the public imagination because it showed how awful the Jews are in being responsible for Jesus death. And it does that mainly through the perspective of Pilate himself.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Now you mentioned that there are various different versions of this text because it was so widely copied. Do they have substantial differences between them or are they relatively cohesive?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
So there are differences, substantial differences. The biggest difference is that some of the manuscripts of the Acts of Pilate continue tell the story up to the point where Jesus is raised from the dead and being corroborated by numerous, numerous witnesses. But at some point in the early Middle Ages, somebody or somebodies added an additional 11 chapters to it that describe Jesus descent down to Hades in order to save the people down there, either just the righteous people or everyone. That's the narrative called the Harrowing of Hell that becomes part of the Acts of Pilate throughout the Middle Ages and is copied as parts of the Acts of Pilate. Some scholars differentiate them that longer text call that the Gospel of Nicodemus versus the shorter version, that's the older version, which is the Acts of Pilate. What is now the Acts of Pilate is the first major part of it. And the Gospel of Nicodemus is a longer thing with the Harrowing of hell. And so depending which manuscript you're reading, you got a different. A whole different set of episodes going on.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. We're going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back to talk a little bit more about the Acts of Planet.
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Podcast Intro/Outro Narrator (Megan Lewis)
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Do we know who was writing and copying this text? Is it scribal activity? Do we have people kind of making copies in their own homes? What's going on there?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, it's got a very interesting textual history, in part because of the thing we have itself, the thing that we've got, like the best version of it that we've got, that looks like the oldest form of it that we've got starts off by somebody named Ananias claiming that he has taken a gospel that was written in Hebrew by Nicodemus. So for those who don't know, Nicodemus is this figure in the Gospel of John. Only in John, who's this Jewish leader who acknowledges Jesus, and he's the one that Jesus has this conversation with in John chapter 3, where Jesus says, you have to be born from above if you're going to see the kingdom of heaven. This is where we get the phrase born again from. And so Nicodemus is a central figure in the Gospel of John, and there's some hints that maybe he's actually a secret follower of Jesus in the Gospel of John and this gospel, then Ananias allegedly. This is a fictional character that whoever wrote this and came up with. Ananias claims that he's translating into Greek a gospel that Nicodemus himself wrote in Hebrew. Part of what's going on there is whoever's writing this thing is making up the Ananias thing. He's making up that Nicodemus wrote this thing in Hebrew. But it establishes the historical credentials of it because, oh, this must be. Oh, it's actually somebody who knew Jesus who wrote these things, you know, and so it provides authenticity to it. So once the author created that kind of fiction as the framework for his narrative, then of course, over the centuries, scribes copied it. We don't really know personally. Personally know who did the copying any more than for, you know, the copies of the New Testament. We don't know who the actual scribes were. We can usually date when their manuscripts were. They come to us principally from the Middle Ages. And we can assume that probably there are monks in monasteries who mainly probably copy biblical manuscripts. But every now and then they'll take a break and copy something else they think is important. And so that's how this thing gets transmitted is by copyists producing because it represents a point of view that they're comfortable with and they want to disseminate.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Does the language of the Acts tell us anything about maybe the educational background of the person who composed it?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
It's complicated because the thing was originally written in Greek, with Ananias claiming he translated it into Greek. It was originally written in Greek, but our best representatives of it are in Latin. And so the Latin text stands at the basis of most of the study of this thing. Neither the Greek or the Latin is very sophisticated. When Sarah and I, some years ago were working, doing Latin together, we would read Latin together every night for a while since, you know, that's what married couples do. And I convinced her to read the. The Acts of Pilate in Latin with me. She found it rather tedious because the Latin is, like, pretty low level as far as Latin goes. And so it doesn't look like this is somebody who's like one of the literary elite writing these things. But if it was composed in the 4th century, there are plenty of literate Christians by that time, and we don't know the identity of the person who actually wrote it, but wasn't one of the kind of the intellectual superstars of the faith.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. Now, when we Kind of get to like the meat of what we're talking about here. The figure of Pontius Pilate. What role does he play in the Acts?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Let me give a little background to the question, because it's one of the really interesting features of this thing. The thing we have, as I said, probably comes from the 4th century as a text. But earlier than that, we had records of Pontius Pilate recording events that had happened during the trial of Jesus, or the events being told at the time of Pontius Pilate, or there's some kind of connection to Pontius Pilate going back to the middle of the second century. Justin Martyr says he's writing about the year 150. He's a Christian apologist who says that there was an account of the trial of Jesus written at the time of Pontius Pilate. And the implication seems to be that it's connected with pilate himself. About 50 years later, the author Tertullian says that Pilate and the emperor Tiberius had an exchange of letters about the trial that Pilate had conducted for Jesus. So Pilate is now testifying about it, and these church fathers referring to this thing. And so all along, it looks like there's some kinds of traditions that Pilate told his side of the story. And so in this Gospel, Pilate is not the author of it, and he's actually not the main figure for the second half of it. But I think it's called the Acts of Pilate because it shows Pilate in such a positive light, and it gives an alternative account of how the trial actually was conducted by Pilate. And so much more than the Gospels of the New Testament, Pilate is a central figure. When you read the New Testament Gospels, of course, Pilate just kind of shows up at the end, and he's the Roman governor who orders Jesus execution. But especially in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there's not chapters and chapters about him. And so here there are.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
What kinds of things is he shown as doing in these kind of chapters and chapters about him? Is it just the trial or is there anything else in that?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, okay, so what happens is it starts with the Jewish authorities coming to Pilate and demanding that he execute Jesus because he calls himself the Son of God and the king. And Pilate seems kind of puzzled by this. Like, what's he done wrong? You can't do that kind of thing, they said. So. So Jesus has been arrested. So Pilate orders the guy, like, ahead of the court to go out and bring in Jesus. So they got the Jewish leaders there, you Got Pilate there. Since Pilate is a Roman authority, on either side of him, there are two standards being held by standard bearers. These standards are the Roman standards that would have like a, you know, have an image of the emperor on top. So the courier brings in Jesus into the courtroom, and these standards bow down and worship him being held by these Roman guards. The Jewish authorities get incessant. What in the world? These guards are worshiping Jesus with the Roman standards. And the guards say, we didn't do it. These standards bowed down by themselves. We couldn't stop them. And the Jewish started saying, come on. And Pilate says, okay, let's try this again. So this is. This is one of the kind of humorous stories in it. He sends Jesus back out with the courier. He says, okay, says to the Jewish authority, you get some people to hold these standards. And so they get 12, like, burly Jewish guys holding on to these standards. So six on each standard, you know, I say, okay, now hold these up tight, you know. And Pilate says, if these things don't bow to this time, he tells the original guards, I'm going to chop your heads off. And so Jesus comes back in, and now these six Jewish gorilla guys are holding these things. And the standards bow down to Jesus and start worshiping him again. Oh, my God. We couldn't stop it. The whole point of this thing is that Jesus, you know, he's the div king and he's being worshiped by the emperor by the standards with the emperor's vision. And it's showing who's superior, Jesus or the Roman emperor. And so this gets Pilate rather nervous because, you know, he doesn't want to condemn somebody to death who's like that. And that begins the narrative then of a kind of controversy between Pilate and the Jewish authorities who keep insisting on Jesus execution while Pilate keeps insisting that he hasn't done anything to deserve it,
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
as you've said very clearly is drawing upon the canonical gospels and trying to exonerate Pilate and say, this is not his fault. What do you think is the author's intention here? Why is Pilate being made a much more central figure, and why is this innocence really being amplified?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I think we probably talked about this on an earlier podcast when you actually line up the gospels just of the New Testament chronologically, so that, you know, Mark is probably the first Gospel, then Matthew's probably the second, Luke is third, and John is fourth. When you do that, and just look at the trial scene with Pilate where Jesus Goes on trial. Pilate becomes increasingly innocent over time. So in John's gospel, he kind of cooperates with the Jewish authorities and he doesn't really find anything wrong with Jesus, but he condemns him to death. In Matthew's gospel, Pilate washes his hands and he says, I'm innocent of this man's blood. And the entire Jewish crowd cries out, his blood be upon us and our children. The Jewish crowd taking authority for the death. That's not good. The Gospel of Luke, Pilate actually declares Jesus innocent three times and they still insist. And so even though Pilate finds him innocent, he feels compelled to get him crucified. In the Gospel of John, same thing, Pilate says three times that he's innocent, but in John's Gospel he hands Jesus over to the Jewish authorities to be crucified. So as time goes on, Pilate's like less and less involved in this. And it's to show the Jews are more and more guilty. And that thing is taken to a real height in the Acts of Pilate because now Pilate incessantly declares him guilty, finds nothing wrong with him, and on three occasions the Jews cry out, his blood be upon us and our children. This is like really emphasizing the fact that Jews are taking full responsibility. And then even after Jesus gets raised from the dead, the Jewish authorities won't believe it. Even though all of these people testify to it, that they trust. And so it's like somebody who doesn't trust the results of history, you know, and says, well no, it didn't happen that way when it did. And the reader sees that the ultimate point of that is hatred of Jews. It's showing the rise of Christian anti Judaism against people who should have accepted their Messiah and should have been convinced by his miracles. Which is a point that Pilate keeps making. In this text, Pilate interviews people who got healed by Jesus, you know, and he's telling the Jews look, these people got healed by him and they still didn't believe. And they don't believe after the resurrection either. And so the whole point is that the Jews are hard hearted and unwilling to believe, except for a few exceptions.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Do we know if there is a similar anti Jewish sentiment in other apocryphal texts that to kind of develop as time goes by?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Oh yeah, hugely, hugely. It becomes a major theme and it plays out in some of these other pilot texts even more that I talked about or I mentioned that there are these other, we sometimes call them pilot gospels. These other ones are even more focused on pilot. If I mentioned Just a couple of them, because I'll just mention two of them. There's a handful of them, but. But there's one that's fairly early, that. Fairly early meaning like, you know, probably after the Acts of Pilot, but where we have a letter that Pilate wrote to the Emperor Tiberius telling him what had happened. Allegedly a letter by Pontius Pilate himself, where he says, I didn't want to crucify Jesus, but you know, the Jews made me do it. And in fact, I know that he healed the sick and he healed the blind and he could raise the dead and he could. He did all these miracles. They still didn't believe him. They insisted. And. And so I had to turn him over, you know, had him crucified. And so he's explaining himself to the emperor, showing how. How bad the Jews are and how innocent he was. But there's a response to this written by a different author, but somebody who apparently knew this letter of Pilate. And in this, the second one goes even further. It's called the handing over of Pilate. And what happens in this one is the Tiberius gets that earlier letter, allegedly, and gets really angry with Pilate for executing the Son of God. And so he sends out, as he sends out the troops to arrest Pilate, and he brings Pilate back and puts him on trial in the Roman Senate. So this is the Roman Emperor putting Pilate on trial in the Roman Senate for executing Jesus. They're in the Senate building. And Tiberius puts him on trial. He says, why did you crucify the Christ? And as soon as he says the Christ, then all the statues of the gods, all the idols in the Senate building fall down and turn to dust. So Christ has this kind of power. And finally Tiberius orders Pilate's execution and he has him beheaded. But before he's beheaded, Pilate converts to become a Christian. And he prays to Jesus that, you know, he'll be saved. And he converts and his wife converts and the executioner lops off his head and an angel comes and takes it. And so Pilate now is this. Is this Christian convert. And that theme, by the way, continued on in some parts of Christianity. In the Coptic Church, Pilate was eventually declared a Christian saint. This is Pontius Pilate. So my point is you have this trajectory of the increasing exoneration of Pilate, and it's always combined with a heightened hatred of Jews for having rejected their Messiah.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
It's fascinating that you see this shift from the Roman Empire being like the ultimate big bad guy, penalizing people and Having a real issue with Christians because they won't worship. Worship the state gods, which is like a civic issue. That's a problem. This massive shift away in Christian thinking from vilifying the Romans to vilifying the Jews.
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's very, very interesting. You know, there are a number of explanations that people have given to it that people might think of. One is that in the empire at certain points in the first 300 years, there were times of persecution when Roman people, and then eventually Roman authorities went after the Christians for what you said, because they're not worshiping the state gods. And they were seen as troublemakers. Christians always proclaimed that they had done nothing wrong. And one way to show that you've done nothing wrong is to say, look, you're worshiping a crucified man. This was a person who's guilty for crimes against the state, and you are worshiping him. What does that say about you? Christians continually said, no, no, we're innocent. We haven't done anything wrong. And then they started saying, in fact, Jesus didn't do anything wrong. In fact, the Roman governor who condemned him to death didn't want to do so. He declared him innocent. The Romans themselves admitted he was innocent. And so the only reason he got killed wasn't because of opposition to Rome is because of those damn Jews. And so that's how that theme, then the theme starts playing out until Pilate eventually becomes a convert and then, you know, a Christian saint showing both the innocence of the Christians and the exoneration of Romans for having done anything against Christians and the guilt of the Jews.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Does this shift increase when the Roman Empire as a whole kind of converts to Christianity?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
It's an interesting phenomenon because when Constantine converted, he was the first Roman emperor to convert. He converted in the year 312, at the very end of the most serious persecution against Christians, the great persecution that had been started about 10 years earlier. Constantine Emperor now converts. Constantine does not make Christianity the official religion of Rome, but he starts favoring Christians. And they're no longer persecuted, they're favored. And they grow and grow and grow. By the end of the 4th century, probably half of the empire is Christian. By the end of the 5th century, most people in the empire are Christian. And so does that affect how people portray the Roman involvement with the death of Jesus? And it's interesting because you get one result that you would expect, which is this increasing exoneration of the Romans in the death of Jesus. But the other thing you get is an emphasis that those earlier pagan Romans were at Fault is only when they converted to Christianity that they got the truth. And so later people within the empire are able to say that, well, yeah, back then Rome was awful and now it's good. And so rather than exonerating Pilate all the way through, in that case they're admitting, yeah, he messed up on that one.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Fascinating. Thank you. We are about ready to wrap up. Is there anything that you wanted to add that we haven't already covered?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
I'll just say that this account has a number of very interesting episodes in it that we haven't had time to talk about. But it is worth reading. I mean, one of the interesting episodes has to do with Joseph of Arimathea. In the Gospel, Joseph buries Jesus. And in this account, the Jewish authorities get really ticked off at it him for doing this. Why did you give him a decent burial that evening of his death? They arrest Joseph and they put him in a room, they lock him in. There's no, there's one door, there are no windows. It's a closed room that's sealed. And they come back three days later to put him on trial and he's not there. What? And they go around, they send out the troops to find. And they finally find him and they bring him back and said, what happens? And he explains how Jesus had come down and lifted the house by the four corners up so he could get out. And then he and Jesus. Jesus had this conversation. And so this is a way of kind of proving that the resurrection had happened. And then they start calling in all these other witnesses about the resurrection. And so you get these kind of apocryphal stories. One other thing I'll mention that is kind of interesting, but a kind of a side note is that this gospel brings in witnesses to Jesus miraculous workings during his lifetime. And one of the interesting things about this is that this gospel will name people who are nameless in the Gospels. My mentor, Bruce Metzger one time wrote an important article, a fascinating article for scholars, called names for the nameless. What he did is he traced through apocryphal materials and manuscript variants and everything in early Christianity, where people who don't have names are given names in later materials. So the three wise men. Three wise men are given names, for example. And so they still go by name sometimes. But like in this gospel, the woman who, who was healed of a 12 year hemorrhage is named Bernus. The soldier who stuck the spear into Jesus side is called Longinus. The two robbers are named. You get the names of the two robbers you get like it's naming names and it's a way of legends developing so that they become more concrete and you put names to them and they become not just kind of unidentified people, they become more real people this way. And this is how legends work. And so it's interesting because you can see this within this particular account.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Do you have a recommended translation for people to read if they're inclined?
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Dr. Bart Ehrman
So I mentioned earlier that my colleague and I, Zlakoplasia did a book called the Other Gospels. That's just the title of it, the Other Gospels. And it's in paperback, it's easily accessible. We translated all of the earliest gospels for about the first 500 years or so that were written originally in Greek, Latin and Coptic. And Zako is a Coptic scholar and a Greek and Latin scholar. I translated all the Greek text, most of the Latin ones, and he did some of the Latin and some of the Coptic and he corrected my grammar. He's like, he's a real philologist. So these are accessible translations geared for just general readers. And we have about there about 40 texts, texts in here, either entire text or fragmentary text with introductions to explain what they're all about and then accessible translations. And so some of these texts are very hard to find otherwise. Like these Pilate Gospels are not easy to find in translation otherwise. And so I'd recommend that it also has like the Gospel of Peter, you know, and the Gospel of Thomas and other famous ones as well. So that's what I would recommend.
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Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Excellent. Thank you so much, Bart. Audience, please stay tuned. We'll be right back with with news on a new course, but also our anniversary livestream celebration.
- [31:09]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [31:24]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Welcome back everyone. Now we did the initial announcement of this last week when I interviewed you to Dr. Mark Goodacre, but this is your reminder that his synoptics course starts this week. You can learn more and sign up@bartehrman.com MML that's Matthew, Mark and Luke. But can you tell us a little bit about Mark for those who missed his interview and about what people can expect from the course?
- [31:48]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
This is going to be a new thing for us and it's going to be really, really important. I think Mark Goodacre is doing an eight week course for us, lecturing twice a week for eight weeks. 50 minute lectures with Q and A after each lecture on The Synoptic Gospels, that's Matthew, Mark and Luke. It's going to be covering all of the major issues of Matthew, Mark and Luke, their interpretation, obviously the different emphases of each one, obviously who actually wrote them, obviously also how they're related to each other. This will be far more extensive than anything we've ever done in my courses. And it's going to be interesting because Mark Goodacre is one of the top scholars of the Synoptic Gospels in the world, as everyone will say. And he's also a really good, really good lecturer. And he and I disagree on things, including, as many listeners know. I agree with what I think still the majority of scholars, that there was a Q source used by Matthew and Luke that provided Matthew and Luke with their material for many of their sayings of Jesus, such as the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes, a number of parables. I think that there was this source back there that Matthew and Luke both used. And Mark Goodacre doesn't think so. And he's written extensively on this and he's the world's authority on Q not existing. He's going to be explaining that, you know, it's not good, the whole thing's not going to be that, but he's going to be explaining how he thinks Matthew, Mark came into being, what their source materials were, and it's a different view from mine, but they're both scholarly points of view and it's worth hearing both sides. And so, and he's, he's the one to do it because he knows this stuff inside out. I'm really excited about this course. It's going to be the beginning of our doing long courses, like multi week courses. And this will be our first one. So I'm really, really excited about it.
- [33:35]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Absolutely. And this is for the Biblical Studies Academy, which, as you said, is going to be hosting multi week classes. And the idea is to offer people a minimum of three university level classes, which is honestly a fantastic opportunity because this isn't something that professors usually do outside of their university classrooms. And there'll be textbooks, there'll be quizzes, and members will be able to kind of get access to a community of similarly minded people where you can kind of discuss the courses that you're participating in and do various community events.
- [34:08]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Let me emphasize that it's absolutely right. This will be like what Mark Goodacre would be like what he teaches at Duke University. And the other courses will be like university courses. There will be textbooks. You're not going to be like required. And there'll be quizzes and you know, you don't have to worry about flunking out, you don't have to take the quizzes, but you know, you want to test your knowledge. So it's going to be set up that way. And so yeah, man, this is. Yeah, okay, it's good.
- [34:32]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
And you've got a 27 lesson introduction to the New Testament coming in January, I believe as well. So we'll have more information about that closer to the time. But I think this is going to be a really great resource for a lot of people. Like I said, the website is bartoman.com MML MML is for Matthew, Mark and Luke. And you can also join the Biblical Studies Academy for the introductory rate of $39.95 per month with an additional 14 day free trial. And you can use, as always, our podcast code, that's MJ Podcast at checkout for an additional discount on your first month's membership. So as well as all of that excitement, we are at the podcast coming up for our two year anniversary, which is very exciting, at least I'm excited. And as we did last year, we're going to do a live question and answer session with Bart. So we're going to give any audience members the chance to submit their questions. We'll email you if your question is chosen and then you can come on stream and ask Bart your question in person. And this was a lot of fun last year. I can't remember how many questions we got through. I think it was nearly 50. Do you remember?
- [35:44]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
I don't remember. It's a bit of a blur. But man, it was fun because they were coming from all over, all over the place and good questions and I did my best.
- [35:54]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
It was a masterclass in biblical trivia, I will say that.
- [35:58]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Right. And, and some stuff that was really significant. It's like stuff you hadn't thought of before, huh? Okay. Yeah. Well, this is a good one because, you know, this is important. So the wide range and really, really a lot of fun.
- [36:09]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Absolutely. Now this will happen, like I said, live. The date is 22nd October and will be starting at 8pm and running, I imagine just for an hour. So to submit your questions you can go through the usual question form on the website, which is bart erman.com Ask Bart. Put in your question. Make sure you tag it as being for the live Q and A anniversary session so that I can can detect them as they come in. We'll be going through all of the questions this is submitted and then a week beforehand we will email everybody and let them know if their question has been chosen or not. And you'll be given instructions on how to join the stream at that point. So please get your questions in, get them in early, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you all come up with.
- [36:58]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
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
- [37:16]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
okay, we have four. Five excellent questions. No, I was right the first time. Four excellent questions. First up, was Christianity as we know it now taking over the Roman Empire, or was the influence of Greek and Roman philosophy being infused with early Christian theology as it rose to prominence? I feel like fundamentalists point to Christianity taking root in the Empire as a validation of God's power and Jesus death and resurrection. But could it have actually been influenced by ideas outside the early church more than people realize?
- [37:46]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Well, no, absolutely. I would say yes. You know, going back even into the New Testament itself now it's clear that there are aspects of Greek and Roman philosophy that have influenced New Testament writers. There have been many books written about Paul's ethical views being in many ways very similar to the views of the Stoics, the Stoic philosophers. I think sometimes that's overdone because Paul has a very different basis for his ethics, but his ethical injunctions are very similar and look like they may well be influenced by Stoicism. The Gospel of John begins with saying, in the beginning was the Logos the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Logos is a major theme in many philosophical writings, including Stoic and Platonic starting then. But by the time you get into the second century, most Christian theologians were not raised in Judaism. They were raised in Greek circles and they were educated, which means they're educated in Greek thought, including Greek philosophical thought. And it becomes quite plain when you get to, to authors like Justin Martyr, for example, and then onward, once you get into the 4th century, theology is heavily dependent on philosophical categories that have been handed down by, through Aristotle, for example, and Plato. And so, yes, the answer is yes, it's very important to study that. And that, by the way, is the book that I'm writing now that I'm just about finished with is on the relationship of Greek and Roman ethical discourse with Christian ethical discourse. There are major differences that I'll be focusing on, but also lots of similarities.
- [39:18]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. The questioner says, I'm curious if the book of Revelation was more easily understood by its first and second century audience than by a modern audience. Or would they have found it equally obtuse? And why was there so much symbolism in this genre? Was it to hide its meaning from the uninitiated?
- [39:35]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
It's a very good question. And this is a question I deal with in my book Armageddon. And so I'll say a couple things about it. First, I think the answer is absolutely no. The book was not written in this mysterious way so that the authorities would be puzzled by it. That's an old theory. I had been taught that at one time too, but it's demonstrably wrong. That is not what's going on with this book. In fact, some of the symbolism would have been so obvious to any reader in the Roman Empire that there was nothing vague about it at all. When you have this beast coming out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns, and the seven heads represent the ten hills on which this woman is seated. And you know, this kind of symbolism may seem really weird to people today, but in the ancient world, anybody reading that say, oh yeah, that's the city of Rome and that is what they said. And so it wasn't to hide the meaning. Why is it put in what seems like really mysterious terms is because that's how apocalyptic literature works. It's not just the book of Revelation. You find it in the Book of Daniel, of course, but you find it outside the New Testament in other Jewish and Christian apocalypses where you have this wild imagery because the truth is not straightforward, the truth is complicated. It and you have to convey it in mystical language. Would the original readers have understood it better? Well, they couldn't have understand it any worse because most people don't have any clue what it's about today. But yeah, I'd say in the ancient world the original readers had a really pretty good idea what this is about. And we know that many of them did because we have discussions of it, including the first commentary on it in the second century is by a Christian. We have have parts of this commentary where the author says that the, the enemy here is, is rome. You know, 666 is Rome. And so he knows that already in the second century. Most people don't know that today.
- [41:29]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. On the topic of misquoting Jesus, the Bible actually has Jesus saying that he did not come to bring peace. It says it directly in Matthew 10:34 for just one example. How do scholars interpret this saying, yeah,
- [41:43]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
that's the passage where Jesus says, don't think that I came to beast earth, I came to bring a sword, and that he's going to divide families, father from son, mother from daughter, and brother from brother and stuff. You know, one task that historians have studying the Gospels and the Gospel sayings of Jesus is determining what actually goes back to him and what appears to be something put on his lips by later storytellers. This is just a very major and common feature of biblical scholarship, trying to make those kinds of decisions. And there are criteria for making those decisions. In my judgment, this saying does not go back to the historical Jesus. What the saying is doing is it's reflecting the early Christian situation after Jesus death where families would be divided between people who believed that Jesus was the Messiah and families who thought he decidedly was not the Messiah. And this saying is a prediction by Jesus that that's going to happen, that families will be divided over him. I don't think that that's something that's happening during Jesus lifetime. It's something that happens after his death when some people say he was raised from the dead, and other people say, of course he was not raised from the dead. And so it led to divisions in families. And this saying is a way of showing that Jesus knew this was going to happen ahead of time.
- [43:01]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. Final question for the day. When and why did early Jewish and Gentile converts begin to meet on Sunday to worship instead of using the Jewish Sabbath?
- [43:12]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
That's a very good question. It's not clear that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus worshiped on Saturday instead of Sunday. They may have done both. My guess is that most Jews who in the early decades who came to believe in Jesus continued to participate in their synagogues. Paul did. I mean, Paul was punished by synagogue leaders, as he himself says in Second Corinthians. And so that shows that he's in the synagogues. And so I think the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus probably did both. When did they start worshiping on Sunday instead of Saturday? Well, we don't know exactly when it started. Paul says in his letters to the Corinthians that on the first day of the week when they meet, they're to take a collection for the poor people and poor Christians in Jerusalem. And so that indicates they're gathering together on the first day of the week. That would be Sunday. The first day that Sunday appears to be called the Lord's Day is in the Book of Revelation. It's nowhere else in the New Testament but in the Book of Revelation. The author of Revelation, John says that he was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and that almost certainly means Sunday. And so it looks like by the middle or the end of the first century, Christians are worshiping on Sunday. And it perfectly sensible that they were, because the oldest tradition said that Jesus was executed on a Friday, but on the third day, Sunday, he was raised from the dead. And so they worshiped Jesus on the day of his resurrection. We don't know how far back that goes, but it looks like it goes back before Paul at least. So before the mid-50s.
- [44:47]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you. Now, before we finish for the week, Bart, do you mind just summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [44:53]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Yeah. We've been talking about this interesting apocryphal text called the act of Pilate, which is an alternative account of Jesus. Trial, death, resurrection, and then the aftermath. It's an account based to a large extent on the Gospels of the New Testament. But the author riffs on these stories, telling them in his own way, particularly in order to show that Pilate absolutely wanted nothing to do with killing Jesus, that it was a mistake and it was all the fault of the Jewish leaders who insisted on it. Even though they knew that Jesus was doing miracles and everything else, they simply refused to believe in him. And so this is a sign in 2nd, 3rd, 4th century of how Christians are blaming Jews for the death of Jesus and showing the rise of anti Judaism within Christianity.
- [45:41]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Thank you so much, Bart, for sharing your time and your knowledge with us. Audience thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. that includes the course coming up with Dr. Mark Goodacre. You can sign up at www.bartehrman.com mml misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [46:13]
Dr. Bart Ehrman
Next time, we're talking about what did Paul really write? We have lots of letters that claim to be written by Paul. 13 in the new Testament and a bunch of them outside the New Testament. And how do we know which ones he wrote? Scholars are pretty sure that seven of them were written by Paul in the New Testament, but they really doubt. Six of them, three of them, they doubt a lot. And these ones outside the New Testament were probably not, almost certainly not written by him. But we want to talk about that. What do we have from Paul's hand. And what do we have that claims to be by Paul that was not really written by Paul?
- [46:44]
Podcast Host (Megan Lewis)
Make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [46:50]
Podcast Intro/Outro Narrator (Megan Lewis)
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.