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Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
The Bible Before the New Testament: A Conversation with Joel Baden
00:27:43
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I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com even though it
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was the religious text of Jesus, the Hebrew Bible is consistently overlooked by many Christians. Which is a shame, honestly, because it's a fascinating collection of literature and an incredible historical document. Luckily, today I'm joined by Dr. Joel Baden, expert in the Hebrew Bible, to talk about exactly what it is and how a group of disparate texts were formed into the collection we see today. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
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Have you ever wondered how Jesus message of repentance and preparing for the Kingdom of God somehow turned into the Christian message of we must believe in Jesus for eternal life? It's Chris Huntley and I'm on the Bart Ehrman team. And that's the question that Bart's going to be answering in his upcoming talk for the New Insights into the New Testament Conference titled A Core Teaching of Jesus and why His Followers Abandoned it. That's just one of the 13 fascinating talks that we have on the historical Jesus coming up this September 26th through the 28th. Besides the talks, we've also got additional events like attendee mixers, roundtable panels, and the chance to meet the scholars. If you're a Misquoting Jesus fan and you want to support the show, joining us at NIT would be a fantastic way to do that. We're offering two specials in August. One of them is Early Bird pricing throughout the month and the second is we're giving away a NINT journal to anyone who signs up at the elite level. So if you want to learn more or register for the event, head over to barturman.com nint and grab your seat before those deals are gone. And as always, use the Code MJ podcast for an additional discount. Thank you so much and I hope to see you there.
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B
Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus no Bart today, but I am joined by Dr. Joel Baden. Joel, thank you so much for joining me today.
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A
My pleasure, Megan.
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For those who are unfamiliar with you, I have a very brief introduction and then we will get into our questions. So Dr. Baden is professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the center for Continuing Education at the Yale Divinity School. Dr. Baden works widely in the field of Hebrew Bible, focusing on the literary history of the Pentateuch. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Source Criticism published in 2024, reconceiving infertility, biblical perspectives on procreation and childlessness with Dr. Candida Moss, and my personal favorite Bible, the United States of Hobby Lobby, also written with Dr. Candida Moss. Dr. Baden's brand new semester long course titled the Hebrew Exploring the Literature of Ancient Israel begins on September 2nd and he kindly agreed to talk to me today to give you all a taste of what to expect. If you are interested in the course then you can register@bartehrman.com HebrewBible and we were talking briefly before I hit the record button. The questions today are all very kind of ground level. This is stuff that you don't need to know going into the course. It'll give you a very basic foundation. But if this is interesting to you, the course is a whole 28 lectures. So there is a lot of room and a lot of time for some very thorough exploration of the Hebrew Bible. So highly recommend that you take a look at that if that is something that interests you. Now I said the course title already. It's the Hebrew Bible Exploring the Literature of Ancient Israel. And now this is probably the most basic question that I could possibly ask. But could you explain to people what I mean when I and other scholars talk about the Hebrew Bible?
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A
Yeah, I mean it's, it's funny because it's like it's a term that exists kind of, it's like a, it's like a fake term. Right? Christians have been calling this thing the Old Testament for like 2000 years and Hebrew Bible is kind of like the academic, the academic title, it's now spread beyond that, but the academic title for basically that same collection of works. The reason we don't call it the Old Testament is because, well, like if you're not Christian, like then Old Testament can come out sounding, you know, like, like, oh, I guess there must be a part two. But of course for Jews there's not. It is just, it's just the Bible and it's the part that's in Hebrew with a little Aramaic in it, whatever. But it's the Hebrew Bible. It's, it's the, the way of talking about the texts that are in the Old Testament, the Christian Old Testament, but that were also the, you know, the sort of the, the literary scriptural texts of ancient Judaism as well. It's always going to be more complicated than that. Right. Like Jews don't use the term Hebrew Bible, right. They have, we have like Hebrew terms and ancient and modern versions, but Hebrew Bible is sort of the, the, an attempt to find like a neutral terminology. That's not the Jewish terminology, it's not the Christian terminology. It's like those works that eventually became scriptural for Jews and Christians alike, but that we want to be able to talk about through non scriptural confessional lenses.
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B
Now your course talks about the literature of ancient Israel and the word literature has some pretty specific connotations in the modern world. I think most people are going to be thinking about narrative fiction that you read for your own enjoyment. What did these texts kind of do in ancient Israel, were they. Or did literature, as we would understand it, exist in the ancient world?
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Yeah, it was narrative fiction that people read for their own enjoyment. Yes. Like we can take literature somewhat more broadly, which is say not just fiction, not just like novels or whatever, but the real division we're trying to sort of uphold here is these texts as, as, as literary texts as opposed to, as like necessarily scriptural or religious texts. These are texts that would become the Bible. But one of the things that I like to say is like nobody wrote nothing that's in the Bible. Nobody wrote it being like I'm going to write Bible now. Right? They were writing whatever it was they write. You know, there's like all this stuff in there even in, in the New Testament, right? Like Paul's letters in the New Testament. This is outside of my wheelhouse, so you tell me if I say something wrong but like Paul's letters were not written to be Bible, they were written as letters. And in the, in the Hebrew Bible you know, you've got like laws and poetry and you know, like genealogies and stories and just like all these different genres of text and prophecy, right? None of which were written to be Bible. Right. They were all written in the same way that like, if we were to take like the sampling of the literature of contemporary America, it would involve sure books, but also in books, fiction and non fiction, it would involve plays, it would involve like movie. I mean there's like all of this, you know, poems. Literature encompasses sort of like all of the writing. And specifically. Right. We want to. Using the word literature reminds us that, like, these are like, writings that were written by people. We might not know who they were, but, you know, they were. When we think about, like, literature, it's crafted, right? It's. It's got. It's literarily crafted, right? It's artistic. It's. So we want to be thinking about these. Every bit of the. Of the Bible, whether it's the. The narrative stuff, whether it's fictional or not, whether it's poetry, whether it's, you know, laws or, like, building instructions, whatever, all of it comes to us as written text that is as literary product, right? It's something that was written and written to be read as written, right? As. As opposed to, you know, and that becomes complicated in. In. In. In lots of areas, but including, like, one of the things I'll talk about in the course is, like, when we read, like, the prophetic books, you pick up the. The prophecies of Isaiah. We like to think that what I'm looking at is, like, these are that dude's words, right? Like, that guy named Isaiah said stuff, and here it is. But. And like, that might be true, but what's definitely true is what I have is a piece of ancient literature that is like a literary description of a prophet and what he said. And, you know, that might correlate exactly to what was actually said, and it might not. But what we definitely have is text.
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Do we know how these different texts were used before they were kind of collated into what we know as. As the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible?
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In some cases we have better sense. In some cases, we don't have a lot of. A lot of idea. And in part, right, like, so one of the things we have to remember is, again, if what we're reading is a written text, then the way they were used was, at the very least by a very small number of people, right? Because in ancient Israel, literacy would have been very, very rare. So the people who are producing and reading these texts are the literate elite of ancient Israelite society, which means they might be using them in ways very different from how we might think about the way they're used today in a much, you know, broad, more broadly literate society. So, you know, there are some that I can feel relatively confident about. You know, I'll talk about in the course, right. Psalms were probably used sort of like as ancient Israelite liturgy, right? These are. These were like, some of the things that were there at least very much like the things that you would say during worship. You know, prophetic texts were probably, I mean, they were produced probably much the way that we expect them to have been. That is, like, as texts that were used to encourage people to behave certain ways or to, to. To hear from God. But, like, who could read them? Right. Again, a much, much smaller sliver of the, of the population. What about things like. What about like the, the. Like the stories in Genesis and Exodus, again, like, the stories themselves may go back to a much broader, more like popular oral, like orally transmitted origin. Right? Like people telling these stories generation after generation, but as a written text. They're probably, again, for a very limited set of the populace, and probably a lot of these would have been like, ways of establishing and transmitting, like, the values of certain specific groups. You know, like, we tell the story this way because we want to emphasize this, this thing because we're priests and that's the thing that we care about. So, like, you know, when you read like, all the sacrificial rituals in Leviticus, which I'll also talk about in the course, it's like my favorite thing. Nobody likes reading them except for me anyway. But when you, when you pick up like, this book of Leviticus and you're like, what is. Like, why. Why do I need, you know, 20 chapters of like, how do you perform bloody animal sacrifices? Like, okay, I don't need it, but if I were a priest in ancient Israel, it could come in useful. You know, so like, there's all kinds. But. But then, you know, like, I, I find myself struggling sometimes with, With a text, like, weirdly, a text like Proverbs. Like, I know how proverbs are used. We still use them today, right? Like, we use proverbs all the time. That's like, you know, but one of them, like, who uses 400 proverbs that a single. Like, like, what is that book doing? What was it used for, like, in Israelite society? I don't know. So, like, sometimes we have to. Sometimes we can really get sort of behind the text, like, what its social use might have been. And sometimes, I don't know. I guess I could say the same thing about things. Like, I don't know if I picked up today, like, the anthology, like, the 2025 Best American Short Stories Anthology. Like, how. How's someone using that? I guess they're just reading it, like, is the answer. And some stuff was clearly like that. I mean, you get like, short novellas. You get stories like Ruth or Jonah or, you know, little, little Esther, right? Like, stories that Are like, good stories. I imagine they were used, like, because they were literature, right? People were just reading them.
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Do we know if there was, apart from the liturgies, the Psalms, do we know if there was a, like, a tradition of performative reading in ancient Israel?
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No. That's a really interesting question. Like, one assumes, based on, you know, comparative ancient world, right? Certainly. Like, the oral performance of literature in the broadest sense would have been absolutely standard and, like, far more common than the written. You know, you can assume, I mean, we know, for example, you know, better than I do. But like, in, like, Mesopotamia, right? Like in. In Babylon, they were reciting, like, Enuma Elish, the creation story, like, on the New Year's festival. Like, it is the public recitation of it. There's the performance of it. Like, that's part of the thing. For generations, especially in the mid 20th century, scholars really used to love, like, trying to imagine the Israelite equivalent. So, like, people like, oh, yes, at the Israelite New Year's festival, they probably read, I don't know, like Exodus or whatever, you know, whatever text they decided, all of which was invented. Like, there's no evidence for any of it. But it is highly likely that lots of stuff, certainly, as you said, the Psalms, I mean, Proverbs obviously have an oral background to them. But, like, if the. If the. If the question is, like, we think about, I don't know, like, Homer, right? Like Homer's like the Iliad, the Odyssey and like, those kinds of things, they were orally performed. Like, that's where they lived. And the writing of them is actually, like, the weird part, in a sense. I don't know that we can say the same thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure we can't say the same thing about, you know, Genesis or Exodus. Like, those were originally performed. And then someone's like, I write this stuff down, or that having been written down, they were then subsequently performed. Except that, again, most people were illiterate. So in order for almost anybody outside of the very literate elite to access any of this stuff, it would have had to been read out loud. And so we do have, like, even if we don't have, like, on every, like, New Year's festival, you'll read Genesis. We do have, for example, that every seven. Deuteronomy tells us every seven years, the entirety of Deuteronomy is supposed to be read out loud publicly. Why? Because that's how people who couldn't read could. Could hear it. So I assume there was some. But not like in a. I Don't think we have evidence for it being in like a structure, a hugely structured way.
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B
Thank you. Now you were telling us about all the different genres of texts that are included in the Hebrew Bible. And I know this is a huge question that you've devoted a lot of your career to. It's like the subject of multiple books. But how do scholars think that this very diverse group of disparate texts were combined into the one document that we have as modern humans?
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A
Yeah, so there's a question with like obviously lots of different levels. You know, the, the Bible, if you pick up like a Hebrew Bible or the Bible as a whole, you know, you know you're not picking up like one thing written by one person. Right. So you've got, you know, we have, the books that we have all collectively kind of agreed belong in the Bible. And by we collectively, I don't mean us today, but like culturally going back a couple thousand years, you know, there were, in the first few centuries of the common era, there were debates about what was in and what was out. And you know, the Jewish canon is different from the Protestant canon, is different from the Catholic canon, from the Greek Orthodox canon, the Ethiopian canon. Right. Everyone's got their own kind of collections. So the first like the, the first big picture thing is like culturally groups of users sort of decide organically what's in and what's in and what's out. You know, there's like, you know there's, there's stories about like the councils where decisions were made, but really like most of the decisions are made by or organic use. Right. Like these are the ones that we as a community consider to be scriptural or sacred and other ones are nice, but not that nice. Right. Like, and that's, and that's totally, that's does got, you know, by community to community and, and, and then becomes part of greater traditions. So you know, the, the decision like ah, should for Judaism in its like, you know, early years of Judaism questions were like, should Ecclesiastes be in here like, or Esther or Song of Songs. Right. Those were the big three that they like were arguing about for the most part. It was clear that they were going to be in. But they recognized like these are not like the other books in, in various ways. You know, Song of Songs is like a love poem that doesn't really talk about God at all. And Esther never mentions God once in the entire book. And Ecclesiastes seems, I don't know, like depressing and like nihilistic and not in line with What? Anyway, but, but so, so you've got like, there's library collections, right? And we should. The big picture canon stuff. And we should remember that's also a relatively late kind of development. I'm not going to talk a lot about the Dead Sea Scroll a little bit, but not a lot about the Dead Sea Scrolls in this course. You really need an entire other course on Dead Sea Scrolls. But it is the case that, like the community, the Dead Sea Scrolls had a seemingly different collection of sacred or scriptural texts than what we consider to be biblical, which is to say, even at the time of Jesus, the turn of the millennium, this stuff wasn't settled. Okay, that's big picture. You know, as you get into every book or corpus, the answer is different. We have 150 Psalms in the book of Psalms, each one of which I assume was once an independent poem. Somebody came along and scooped those up and all said, let's collect all of these by genre. These all belong in the same category. We're going to put them all under one heading and we're gonna. I was gonna say, and we're gonna call it Psalms. But of course they didn't say that. Like, that's all the titles of books are later also, so. But that was also an ongoing process, right? So some, you know, they start collecting these. You can see in the Book of Psalms, there's like mini collections. There's like five different units even within the book of Psalms. And then like in the Greek translation, there's an extra Psalm. And the Dead Sea Scrolls have like six or seven extra. So like, it's a rolling corpus. It's not like, it's not like anyone said, let's it. That's it. That's. That's all the psalms they could ever be. And different books, as I said, different books coming in different ways. The Book of Isaiah, I promise I'll talk about all this in the course. This is all teaser, right? The, the book of Isaiah was like, somebody wrote some stuff, and then like 200 years later, somebody was like, ah, but I have more things to say that I'm going to say as if I were that guy. And so, like, the book gets expanded and, you know, so there's lots of books that operate that way that, you know, had something original and then some extra stuff. And then, I mean, what you alluded to is like, what do I spend my entire career doing is like really thinking about the first five books, the Torah or the Pentateuch, which are this entirely other process of like a selection of independent stories, like four distinct, independent tellings of basically, creation through the death of Moses, that somebody was like, I don't like this to be four different stories. I'm going to make it one story and smush them all together in the same way that, like, it's as if somebody took, you know, the four Gospels in the New Testament and said, the four gospels, they're really just one story would be fine, and smushed them all together into. Into one continuous story that would then end up being, like, weird and repetitive and contradictory in parts, which, by the way, someone actually did, right, like in the second century and his name was Tatian, and the thing he created was called the Diatessaron. But I don't know anything about the New Testament back to the Old Testament.
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B
So if we're thinking specifically about the Pentateuch, taking these longer narrative sections that essentially tell the same story and smushing them together must have caused some slight issues. How do we see that kind of being present in the text?
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A
Well, how much am I supposed to be giving away? Like, this is, you know, not to anticipate too much what we're doing, the class. But, you know, one of the interesting things is most of us end up hearing and knowing all these stories based not from having read the text itself, but through tradition, right? Like, we hear. We get them told to us in Sunday school or, like, religious school or whatever. You know, they're in movies, they're in the liturgy. They're. We end up getting them in all kinds of ways. You know, there's like. There's, like, a playground near me that has, like, the. The flood story depicted on the playground in, like, panels, which I think is terrifying. But, like, whatever. My point is there's, like. There's all this popular reception of all this material, all of which, you know, reflects a relatively straightforward story. So, like, I know that if I go up to almost anybody on the street and I say, tell me, like, the basic outlines of the story of Noah's flood, right? Everybody tells the story the same way, right? God says to Noah, get in an ark. Get two of every animal, male and female, right? Noah gets in the ark, right? It rains for 40 days and 40 nights. He sends out a dove, there's a rainbow at the end, and everything's happy. But, like, everyone tells the story that way. That's what it says on the playground near me, right? That's what it says in the. In. In, like, the movies. That's what's in, like, the kid song. Like, that's that's the story, but that's just not what's in the Bible. Right. So if you actually pick up the. The biblical text of Genesis 6 through 9, which is where that story is, you'll see that, like. Yes, it says 40 days and 40 nights. It also says 150 days, which doesn't, like, work as a calendar. Yeah. He sends out a dove. He also sends out a raven. Yes. He takes 2 of every animal. He also takes 7, 14 of every animal. Like, which is like. The story is actually very, very hard to read. And that's true not just in that story, but across the entirety of the, of the. Of the Pentateuch. It starts right at the beginning. I'm not going to give that one away. But, like, it starts right in the first couple of chapters. Go home and read for yourself. There's repetition, there's contradiction, there's doubling, there's gaps, there's like, the story, you expect it to go one way and then suddenly it's talking about something else, and then it comes back. Like all of these literary features, which, by the way, people have been recognized. Have recognized for 2500 years. Right? Like, ever since the text existed, people have been like, how am I supposed to make sense of this? Right? That's not. Like, that doesn't make. I don't know how to deal with the fact that it says one thing here and one thing there. Law codes. Right. I get a law over here that says one thing and a law over here that says exactly the opposite. Right. All of this is evidence that we've got multiple things stitched together. And it's, you know, these are issues, as I said, that, like, people for 2500 years have been trying to figure out what to do with. Now it may only be in the last few hundred years that we as sort of modern readers have. Have looked at it and said, I bet there's more than one author here because, you know, for the 1500 years before that, they were like Moses or God or whatever. But like, the literary features that, like, show us that there's something askew here, that there must be more than one author in the text. Those are everybody has seen forever.
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B
Wonderful. Thank you very much. I am not going to pry into that anymore because I suspect it's going to be fully explained in your course. So again, for people who are interested, the course is titled the Hebrew Exploring the Literature of Ancient Israel. It is 28 lectures and will start on September 2nd. You can register now at Bart ehrman.com the Hebrew Bible and you can use the code mjpodcast for a special discount. It is also available through the Biblical Studies Academy that gives you, that's a membership that gives you access to every single course in the back catalog. So you can also go and enroll there if you want to really just dive into the Bible as a whole. Dr. Bain, do you have anything that you want to add or share about the course before we wrap up for this week?
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No, I mean, it's just going to be, it's going to be a really good time. It's, you know, one semester trying to get everything in there. 28 lectures is a lot. We're going to cover a lot of stuff. We're going to have a lot of fun doing it. My hope is that there's going to be a lot that's unfamiliar and a lot of like, reorienting of the stuff that you thought you already knew. And by the end, I my hope is that we're going to have a, like, both have had a lot of fun and have a new appreciation for like, really not just the biblical text, but for like an entire ancient world that produced it that's just like so very different from our own. And I think it's super fun to explore.
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Wonderful. Thank you so very much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week along with Bart, so make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.