← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
The Coming Apocalypse! Jewish and Christian Views of the End of the World
00:49:58
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- [00:00]
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Megan Lewis
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. Let's begin. Hello Bart. How are you doing today?
- [00:58]
Bart Ehrman
So far so good.
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Megan Lewis
Ready to talk about apocalypticism?
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Bart Ehrman
I'm always ready to talk about it. It's one of my favorite topics. How are you doing? Okay? Yep, busy.
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Megan Lewis
I've got some projects I'm trying to wrap up before Christmas hits us and it's all insane again.
- [01:17]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, what projects?
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Megan Lewis
My husband and I, we wrote an introduction to Sumerian grammar for people who who are interested but aren't ready to tackle a reference grammar because you can get on Amazon like teach yourself Koine Greek, teach yourself Biblical Hebrew, teach yourself Acadian, but there's nothing in the same line for Sumerian. So if you want to learn Sumerian, you're kind of reliant on Wikipedia and academic reference grammars, which are really intimidating. So we wrote a couple of years ago now an introduction for absolute complete beginners. And he's just finished up the main body of book two, which is more of an intermediate, going into a little bit more of the nuances really. So I'm going through that, editing it and putting all the exercises together because I want to try and get it out before Christmas, but don't know if we're going to make that happen.
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Bart Ehrman
For those of us who are lesser mortals, I assume Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer.
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Megan Lewis
Yes.
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Bart Ehrman
And do you have to learn cuneiform to write this? I mean, do they.
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Megan Lewis
Yes.
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Bart Ehrman
Alphabet,
- [02:22]
Megan Lewis
no Alphabet? Unfortunately, it's yes, written in cuneiform. And it's really interesting actually, because Sumerian persists long after it stops being spoken, kind of like Latin did in the Western world. So it gets used as a literary language and a religious language and a language of liturgy, a Long time after it stops being a commonly spoken language. And actually Josh's dissertation, his PhD dissertation was looking at phonetically written Sumerian. So it's Sumerian, not, not written with what we would call typical cuneiform spelling. It's written phonetically. And he's arguing that it was these texts were being used or being written for people who did not know Sumerian, but so they could still pronounce it in religious rituals. So they don't need to understand what they're saying. They just need to be able to read it and pronounce it, because the gods then will understand the actual words.
- [03:17]
Bart Ehrman
Interesting. Can I just add, just another quick thing. Is it related to other languages we know? Is it Semitic? Is it like, you know, like English?
- [03:28]
Megan Lewis
It's in its own language family. There's nothing comparable, nothing related. You do occasionally get people trying to argue that, oh, it's related to Finnish or it's related to Mandarin or something else, but no actual linguists have ever made a connection between Sumerian and anything else. It's definitely not Semitic.
- [03:47]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, I'm going to want to interview about you about this sometime. Okay, very good.
- [03:53]
Megan Lewis
I didn't ask you. How's your week been?
- [03:55]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, my week. My week has been fine. I, I've started a new book project and so started reading. We'll talk more about it later. But the rough idea is about how Christianity changed the understanding of ethics in the ancient world. And so I'm reading a lot of Greek and Roman ethics right now. Fantastic, fantastic stuff. And so I'm at preliminary stage. I'm not going to write the book for another year. So I'm just, just reading around, thinking about it.
- [04:23]
Megan Lewis
Are you still reading Greek every morning?
- [04:25]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I, you know, I've been working on my Homeric Greek, but I've decided that I've been reading Homer for, you know, a long time now. I'm thinking I'm going to start reading some of the dramas. And so I'm, I'm debating whether to read Sophocles, Oedipus Rex or to read the Medea. Oh, I love Medea. I love them both. And so anyway, yeah, so it's a debate, but I'm. Yeah, no Greek every morning. That's, that's not Sumerian, but Greek.
- [04:54]
Megan Lewis
So I don't, I don't know Greek, but we've read a lot of Greek dramas in my high school classics class and I need to go back and reread them because it. I have very fond memories of them. They're fantastic things.
- [05:06]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's like Shakespeare, you know, where you don't want to just read the play once and say, okay, I got it. You know, because you don't. You don't got it. And so these Greek. The Greek tragedies are so powerful and deeply meaningful even today. Very much so. It's a great. A great thing to be doing.
- [05:22]
Megan Lewis
I suspect they'll hit pretty differently given that I'm in my 30s compared to late teens.
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Bart Ehrman
Absolutely. No, that's right. Great literature does that. Right. The older you get, the things change and you have more life experiences and you start seeing things you didn't even think about before.
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Megan Lewis
Well, we should probably get on with our apocalypticism discussion. For those who are uninitiated. What is apocalypticism?
- [05:46]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'd say most people are uninitiated. This is not the kind of thing you talk about at the cocktail party or if you do, you came to
- [05:53]
Megan Lewis
the wrong cocktail parties.
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Bart Ehrman
Honestly, I have to go to the right ones because I go to the wrong ones. I got nothing to talk about. Somebody asked you, you're in a regular cocktail. What do you do? Yeah, I teach New Testament. Huh. That's interesting.
- [06:10]
Megan Lewis
I'm always stuck when people ask me what I do. Our pediatrician asked me this morning because I mentioned that the babies are now in daycare so I can, like, start working properly again. And she was saying, oh, so what do you do? I'm like, how much detail do you realistically want? Because I can go with, I'm an historian, or I can like, introduce you to the whole of Mesopotamia.
- [06:32]
Bart Ehrman
I'm writing a Sumerian grammar. What are you doing today? Right. Oh, so apocalypticism. So apocalypticism, as we're going to see, is really a very, very important topic for understanding the Bible, especially the New Testament. But not only the New Testament. The word apocalypticism comes from, people probably guess, comes from apocalypse. Apocalypsis in Greek. The word apocalypse in Greek. Apocalypsis means a revealing or an unveiling or a disclosure. This term gets applied to a religious point of view that developed in ancient Judaism starting about a couple hundred years before Jesus that believed that the world was controlled by forces of evil and that God was soon going to intervene to get rid of all the evil, destroy all the evil, and everybody supported the evil to bring in a good utopian kingdom here on earth and that this was all going to happen very soon. And so apocalypticism is called that because some of these Jewish prophets, these seers, had been shown by God, been revealed what this future this new future was going to be and that it was coming very soon. And so this became a movement within Judaism and it ends up affecting Jesus very seriously and Paul seriously, and the entire New Testament seriously.
- [07:54]
Megan Lewis
And I think still affecting us today because you still have these doomsday cults and people saying, oh, well, the world's going to end next Wednesday. I've sat down and calculated it, which I think is very interesting, because you see in the book of Revelation and probably other apocalyptic texts the importance of numbers. And people use, like, special religious, significant mystical numbers. But then you have people in. In modern religious circles doing almost exactly the same thing.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Counting the number of times X is mentioned and saying, oh, well, it's 12. So we've got 12 months.
- [08:27]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, that's right. And you can count the numbers because in these apocalyptic texts, starting with the Book of Daniel, but also Revelation, lots of other texts, there are numbers that are given that so and so is going to take, you know, it's going to last 32 months or two, 32 years. There's going to be 12 this or seven that, or you get, you know, six, six, six. These are all like numbers. And I've got a book coming out in March that's just on. The book is called Armageddon and subtitles Armageddon, what the Bible really teaches about the end. So I've been very much into that kind of discussion about how people think that, you know, the end is coming soon. They predicted it. And so part of my book is showing that these people who have thought that, you know, they're showing the signs are now being fulfilled. The end is coming soon. My book shows why that's a misinterpretation of the book of Revelation. The author didn't have anything like that in mind. And not just Revelation, but Daniel and Ezekiel and these other passages that get used. My books written for a general audience. And so it takes on these people who have been saying this, and the interesting thing is, you know, people said this every generation since the first century that, oh, yeah, now the prophecies are being fulfilled. It's so obvious now.
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Megan Lewis
The second coming is imminent.
- [09:48]
Bart Ehrman
It's right around the corner. And the funny thing is you have some of these people who have now lived to be in their 80s and 90s, who were predicting when they were in their 20s, that it's going to come sometime next year, you know, or it's going to come by the end of the 1980s. And what they do is they write a book, say, oh, it's going to happen by 1988. And then it doesn't happen in 1988. So they write another book that's going to be 1989, you know, then it's going to be 1994. And now they go on TV saying, now it's being fulfilled. You said that 50 years ago.
- [10:17]
Megan Lewis
My calculations were just slightly off.
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Bart Ehrman
That's.
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Megan Lewis
It's fine.
- [10:21]
Bart Ehrman
So part of my book is that part of the book is actually serious interpretation, trying to explain what revelation is really all about.
- [10:26]
Megan Lewis
What purpose did apocalyptic books like Daniel, like Revelation, serve for the Jewish community?
- [10:33]
Bart Ehrman
So it's a very interesting topic about where this point of view came from. When I was in graduate school, one of my first PhD seminars was a Hebrew Bible seminar called From Prophecy to Apocalyptic. And the thesis of the seminars stayed with me all of these years. I think it was absolutely right, which is that apocalypticism, as I've just briefly described it, emerged out of other ways of looking at God's relationship to the world. In ancient Judaism, when you read the Old Testament, there's a constant theme about why it is the people of God suffer. Poor little Israel, you know, first they get. The northern kingdom gets destroyed by your Assyrians, and then a century and a half later, the Babylonians come in and wipe out the southern kingdom, like one kingdom after the other. And then you get the Persians, then you get the Greeks, and then you get the Syrians. And it's because where Israel is, of course, I mean, if you want to
- [11:27]
Megan Lewis
control the, the Mediterranean, yeah, the Fertile
- [11:30]
Bart Ehrman
Crescent, you've got to get Egypt. But to get to Egypt, you got to go down the Fertile Crescent through Israel. And so it's the only way you can do it. So Israel's keeping being destroyed by all these nations. In the Bible, in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, there's a consistent, a consistent message about why this is happening to us. Why, if we are the people of God and God has given us this land, why are we continually being overthrown? And we have military defeat, we have economic disaster, we have, you know, and we have famines and we have droughts. We thought God was on our side. What's this all about? And the consistent message throughout the Hebrew prophets and throughout most of the Hebrew Bible is you. The people of God have sinned and God is punishing you. You need to repent. Because if you don't, he's going to wipe you out. Then they get wiped out and say, see, I told you we were going to get wiped out. And it's because you sinned. That God's punishing you. So that was the standard throughout the Hebrew Bible. And apocalypticism is a view that arose in response to that. After hundreds of years of Israelite thinkers saying this is God's punishment, finally there came a situation where they just couldn't say it anymore. So about 200 years before Jesus public ministry, there's a situation in Israel where the Syrians, not the ass Syrians, but the Syrians were in charge of Israel. And there was a particularly bad Syrian, bad for Israel's point of view, bad Syrian king named Antiochus iv, sometimes called Antiochus Epiphanes. And he legislated that Jews in Israel could not keep the Jewish law. They were not allowed to. If they circumcised their babies, babies would be killed and so would the mothers if they tried to keep the Jewish laws. Whatever, pick your law. So this monarch is trying to force them to eat pork and not allowing them to circumcise it. And on pain of death, at this point, Jewish thinkers saying, look, we're not being punished because we're sinning against God. We're trying to do what God said. He said, circumcised, your being punished anyway. Keep kosher. So it can't be God doing this. And they came up with the idea that there's an opponent of God, a supernatural power opposed to God, who's doing this. That's when they come up with the idea of the devil as a supernatural power opposed to God. And that's when they come with the idea of there being demons in the world. So you have God and his angels and you have the devil and his demons. And the forces of evil are fighting the forces of good. But since God is ultimately sovereign in the Jewish tradition, ultimately he's in control. He's going to destroy them. This is the view that scholars today call apocalypticism. And you first find it in the last book of the Hebrew Bible to be written, the book of Daniel. Then it becomes prominent throughout Judaism.
- [14:17]
Megan Lewis
So the books then are explaining how there is this giant cosmic battle, but ultimately just hold on, everyone, because God will win and we will be okay and paradise will reign.
- [14:28]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's it. I mean, in some ways, these books like Daniel and then the New Testament books are being written to tell people, look, it's going to happen soon. So just keep the faith, be faithful. If you're not, you know, if you're living a life of sin now, turn back because it's going to end soon and God's going to bring in a good kingdom here. On Earth. I should say something about the Book of Daniel, I suppose, because people will be saying, yeah, but wasn't that written like in the 6th century BCE? Isn't that like 500 years before Jesus?
- [14:56]
Megan Lewis
The dating of Daniel is much discussion. Many words have been typed.
- [15:01]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, a lot of ink spilled on this one. But among critical scholars today, they're really. That debate is pretty well solved now that the Book of Daniel was not written in the 6th century during the Babylonian exile. So 500 years before Jesus, 600 years before Jesus. But it was written in the 2nd century BCE at the time that. I'm talking about the rise of apocalypticism with Antiochus epiphanies. There are all sorts of indications in the Book of Daniel that it was written at this period. It claims to be written by a guy named Daniel living in the 6th century BCE. It's one of these ploys you find in these apocalyptic texts. We have a lot of texts that claim this kind of vision where a prophet is, sees the future and he sees that the end is almost, is almost here. And in almost every case, these Jewish apocalyptics are almost always pseudonymous, meaning they claim to be written by somebody who didn't write them. And so like we have an apocalypse written by Moses, you know, apocalypse by Abraham, the father of the Jews. We have an apocalypse by Adam, I think. So the Daniel and the others are, they're, they're written pseudonymously.
- [16:10]
Megan Lewis
Well, it's great because if you claim to be writing several centuries earlier than you actually are, all of your predictions are definitely accurate.
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Bart Ehrman
That's right. So that's what happens with Daniel. Daniel predicts this is going to happen. So he has this vision in chapter seven where Daniel, allegedly living in, you know, the 580s or something BCE sees that there's going to be this series of kingdoms that come up. There'll be four kings, kingdoms that represented by four dread beasts, one after the other. And these four beasts come up out of the sea and they wreak havoc on the earth and they're terrible and horrible and they persecute the people of God. But then after the fourth beast comes up and various kings from the fourth beast, then one like a son of man, comes on the clouds of heaven, and the beasts are taken out of power. The last one is destroyed, and the one, like a son of man, is made the ruler of the earth. So there's an angel standing by. In these apocalyptic texts, whenever you have like a vision, you think, wow, that's weird. And the prophet, all Daniel, sees this thing and he Faints because he's, oh, my God, this is too. Like, what. But then the angel. There is an angel. I stand by to explain what it is. And the angel explained, well, these four beasts that you saw coming out of the sea, reeking, have. These are four kingdoms. This will follow this, will follow this. And it's easy to see what he's saying. The Babylonians, they're going to be taken out by the Medes. The Medes are going to be taken out by the Persians. The Persians will be taken out by the Greeks. And as a Greek can have these rulers and the last. So he's predicting all of these things. And the reader's thinking, wow, he got all that right. How do you know?
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Megan Lewis
He must have been right about the rest of the stuff.
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Bart Ehrman
He must have been right about the rest of the stuff. And so what he does is he predicts things up to his own day. He's not predicting because he knows what's happened, but then he keeps predicting. And when he gets closer to his day, like, the predictions from a lot from centuries ago are kind of vague in general, but they get closer to his day.
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Megan Lewis
They get super suspiciously specific.
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Bart Ehrman
And you're reading this thing, oh, my God, that just happened two years ago. And, oh, my. And you know, and then you get all excited and then he goes on predicting what's going to happen next. And what Daniel predicts, he used the term Antiochus Epiphanies. He predicts that the guy who's causing the problems now is going to be wiped out and destroyed. And so you think that's definitely going to happen because you've seen everything else happen. And so that's one of the ways that the. That's one of the ways some of these apocalyptic thinkers did it was predicting that the horrible situation going on now is caused by these forces of evil in the world that are opposed to God. But we're at the very end, and soon God's going to intervene, he's going to destroy them, and he's going to give us the kingdom, those of us who are faithful to God.
- [18:49]
Megan Lewis
That's an excellent lead on to my next question. Do we know whether the people reading these and listening to them being recounted actually believed that they were, for want of a better word, true? Or was it more of a comforting story to make yourself feel better in a time of persecution?
- [19:08]
Bart Ehrman
This is a question a lot of scholars have asked, and ultimately it's very hard to know because we don't have any book reviews from the time. No reader's Reports that actually tell us what we do know is that when people do start talking about these books, they think that they're serious and that they are literally true and that they are predictions of the future. You find that in early Christian circles. For example, at the end of the second century, beginning of the third century, there's a church father named Tertullian, a very prominent theologian and a very important writer whose writings we still have today. Tertullian talks about one of the apocalypses that was connected with Enoch. Enoch was this figure in Genesis who's taken up to God without dying. We have a couple of apocalypses written by him, allegedly written by him, and Tertullian is writing about one of these things. Tertullian asked a kind of sensible question is, so if Enoch was living before Noah and Enoch wrote this book, how did it survive the flood? Wouldn't it have been destroyed and the world was.
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Megan Lewis
It was written on clay tablets and then fires.
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Bart Ehrman
Good guess. That's not what he said. He said what happened is Enoch was Noah's ancestor. And so Noah memorized the text and then after the flood he wrote it down.
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Megan Lewis
That's reasonable too.
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Bart Ehrman
And so he believes it's actually written by Enoch and he believes that it's an actual thing that's predicting. And he. So some of these books were taken so seriously and so literally that they were accepted as authoritative texts. Daniel's the only one who makes it into the Old Testament. But we have a number of these in early Christianity as well that are predicting the ends coming soon or making these various kinds of predictions. And they were often taken quite seriously as literal declarations of what was going to happen.
- [20:57]
Megan Lewis
My husband does a lot of anti apologetics work for the Old Testament and one of the things he's looked at a lot is prophecy, specifically the prophecy of Ezekiel against Tyre. So he says that the city of Tyre will fall. And the city of Tyre did not fall, demonstrably, archaeologically speaking, did not fall. And Ezekiel later on in the book essentially says, oh, I was wrong. But interestingly, you get modern apologists explaining how Ezekiel wasn't actually wrong. It's just that he wasn't talking about the island city of Tyre, he was talking about the mainland, which was, by the way, a completely separate city with a separate name called Ushu. Not tired, not what Ezekiel was talking about, but you have people kind of retrofitting this prophecy to make it true.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Is it.
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Megan Lewis
Do you get similar things with apocalypses?
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Bart Ehrman
With apocalypses and with the teachings of Jesus and the Teachings of Paul. I mean, for New Testament, this is the big deal. Is that. So we're going to be talking a lot about this in the podcast, and so I've got to kind of condense it. But when you read in the Gospels, and it's not that everything in the Gospels on Jesus lips is something that he actually said. The gospels are written 40, 50, 60 years later, and they report a number of things that Jesus did say. They also report some things that he probably didn't say. And there's debates about which is which. But some of the things it's pretty clear Jesus said were about how the kingdom of God, which is this utopian kingdom God's going to bring to earth. It's not what's going to happen to your soul when you die. It's not that you're going to die and your soul goes to heaven. That's not what he means by the kingdom of God. Jesus is talking about a kingdom. You got a kingdom of Rome, you're going to have a kingdom of God. And Jesus predicts it's going to happen, the destruction of the forces of evil, and the coming of God's kingdom is going to come before his disciples all die. Or as he says, according to Mark, chapter nine, verse one, which is something I think Jesus really said. And he's also said, as in Mark 13, that this generation will not pass away before all these things take place after he's described the destruction of the cosmos. And so Jesus, I think, did think that the end was coming within his generation, but like the destruction of Tyre, it didn't happen. And so people have to then explain, well, why didn't it happen? And you get a lot of that in early, early Christianity already, because 40, 50, 60 years later, it hadn't happened. And they start saying things like, well, it didn't really mean like that. He meant that your soul now.
- [23:30]
Megan Lewis
Oh, yeah.
- [23:31]
Bart Ehrman
Or, you know, with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is a day. So when he says it's soon, you know, if it's three days, it doesn't mean it's literally. When people, people today quote that to me, you know, they say, yeah, well, when he said soon, he doesn't, you know, day is a thousand years, a thousand years a day. I say, okay, great. I said, so that means if I'm telling you Jesus is coming in three days, we can start looking for him in the year 5022. It doesn't make any sense to say it's soon when you mean 3,000 years. Yeah.
- [24:03]
Megan Lewis
So we've kind of mentioned that one of the hallmarks of apocalyptic literature is this kind of very symbolic, kind of weird, trippy language and description. Do you think the supernatural nature of it and the symbolic nature of it makes it easier to go back and do that kind of retrofitting re explanation? You can say, oh well, it's a three headed monster. It's not actually supposed to be this kingdom, it's supposed to be this other kingdom and, and that kind of thing. Rather than with something like Ezekiel, which is, I would say, quite to the point and historically descriptive.
- [24:40]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that part of Ezekiel certainly is. And other parts are weird, right?
- [24:45]
Megan Lewis
That's true. That's true. The wheels within wheels thing is within wheels.
- [24:48]
Bart Ehrman
Oh my God. Yeah. So. And the later apocalypticists, you know, we're more interested in those kind of weird visions that you get in Ezekiel and the weird visions you get in Daniel for just the reason you're saying that if you've got highly symbolic language and if the language doesn't give you an explicit key for interpreting it, then you know, people can do anything they want with it and do and always have. The book most people would be familiar with, most people haven't read it, but the book of Revelation is the one people think of as being this heavily symbolic thing that gets interpreted in a million ways. It's quite easy to show that virtually every way that people predicting the showing revelations, predicting our future, what's going to happen, it's very easy to show they've all been wrong because they have been. When you say it's going to be in 1844 and it doesn't happen, you know, then you say it's going to be 1918 and it doesn't happen, then you say it's going to be in 1988 and it doesn't, you know, like every time you got it, thousands of people. But the thing about the book Revelation is even though, and this is true Daniel too, the author does give very clear clues what he's talking about and hints. And you've got to read it carefully to understand that. And people don't do that. They jump over the clues about what the author tells you he's talking about in order to expand whatever they want it to say. Both Daniel, Revelation actually do give keys to their own interpretation, but you have to look carefully at them and people just don't do that.
- [26:18]
Megan Lewis
That's a good lead into my next question. Actually, you said, and I agree that I think that the most famous apocalypse is the Book of Revelation. Even if people don't really know what an apocalypse is in terms of ancient literature, they've heard of it and are probably familiar with some of the imagery of the book. And then Daniel is probably the oldest apocalypse we have. And that was what, around 160 BCE? Revelation was the end of the first century. So that's, let's say, 300 years in between the two. Obviously, it's a very long lived literary tradition. Do we see changes or developments within the tradition between those two books or is it relatively consistent?
- [26:57]
Bart Ehrman
That's a great question. And it's a complicated question because the author of Revelation who calls himself John, and I think it was somebody named John, he doesn't claim to be the disciple John. John the son of Zebedee. In fact, he gives indications in the book he's definitely not. He's some other guy named John. John is very common name. This author used the book of Daniel. He knew it, and he utilized its imagery for his own imagery. And so, for example, you know, Daniel will have a beast coming out of the sea with, you know, seven heads and ten horns or something. So he's reusing a lot of the imagery. And so there are a lot of consistencies in basic worldview. Consistencies are things like these authors see the world in two forms. They're dualistic. You've got two powers in the world. You've got the forces of good and the forces of evil, and they're fighting it out. So that's distinctive of apocalyptic. You don't get that through most of the Old Testament. So you have God and you've got the devil, you got the angel, you got the demons, you got these various powers fighting it out. You also have the idea that the side that's winning now is the bad side.
- [28:10]
Megan Lewis
Always the bad side. It's well in modern retellings of the apocalyptics.
- [28:16]
Bart Ehrman
Oh yeah, I know.
- [28:16]
Megan Lewis
I mean, everything's going to hell, literally. This is like Satan is taking over, which means the end is near.
- [28:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, that's right. And it's crept into popular culture too. I mean, just watch Star Wars. I mean, it's like the back. So you get the bad guys winning out, but ultimately God's going to try out because God is sovereign and he's going to. He's going to win decisively and destroy the others. And when that happens, people who have sided with the other will be destroyed. But those who have sided with God will be rewarded and be given an eternal kingdom. So this is, you know, utopia and the other thing to have in common. So I guess those are three things. The dualism, two things, the kind of pessimism that things are not going well, not going to for a while. The third would be the kind of the triumph of God. And the fourth is imminence. It's going to happen right away. It's going to happen soon. Antiochus Epiphanies is going to be destroyed by God, or the Roman Empire is going to be destroyed by God. That's the teaching of Revelation, that Rome and its emperor are going to be wiped out and Christians will be given the rule of the earth, not the Romans. And so those are consistent. But there are other things that definitely develop. The book of Revelation is all about Christ. Daniel does not have a vision of Jesus as the Messiah directing it. And Revelation is all about Christ, who came the first time for Revelation and was destroyed by his enemies, and now he's coming back. In revenge, terms like vengeance, revenge are very big terms. The wrath of the Lamb of God, very big term in the book of Revelation. Blood, very big term. Interestingly, in the book of Revelation, there's no word about God loving anybody, and there's no word about hope, and there's no word about mercy. It's all about vengeance. I deal with that in my book, too. Whoa. This is. You know, people don't notice things like this. So the basic motifs are very similar. But now I guess Revelation is like Daniel, but in a Christian mode, emphasizing the importance of Jesus.
- [30:20]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. And there are, I believe. Please correct me if I'm wrong. There are two main categories. When you're looking at apocalyptic literature, there are two main categories. There's the heavenly journeys, in which a prophet is kind of taken up and given, like a personal guided tour by an angel, like going around a museum, except it's heaven. And then historical sketches, which I think is what Daniel and Revelation are with the mystical visions and symbolism. Do the two categories have different purposes, or is it the same purpose, just different ways of fulfilling that?
- [30:51]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's another really good question. And it's another difficult one. You know, at this point, you and I are talking about apocalypses, which is. We're talking about literary works. We're talking about books that embody an apocalyptic point of view. Daniel being the first one in the Bible, Revelation being the last book of the New Testament. And we have these others I mentioned, Apocalypse of Adam and Abraham and Apocalypse of Peter. We have these other ones. These kinds of books are not the only forms of apocalyptic thought. In other words, today you can be A capitalist without writing a book on economics. Right. If you have a capitalist write a book on economics, that's a capitalist book. But so with apocalypses, you had a lot of people were apocalyptic. Like Jesus was an apocalypticist, but he didn't write an apocalypse. So we're talking about the apocalypses now. And you're absolutely right. They tend to come in two forms. Sometimes a visionary, the prophet, will be taken up to heaven and we'll see kind of the heavenly realm. And by seeing what's happening up in heaven, that shows why what's happening on earth is happening on Earth. It's because the Earth is kind of a reflection of what's going on up above. And now you see the ultimate reality that explains this mess that you just can't understand when you're looking around down here. And so that's one kind. It's a heavenly journey. The other is a kind of historical prediction where you see these symbolic visions. This will happen, then that, then that, then that. And so a symbolic. And so there's more like a historical sketch. So a heavenly vision and a historical sketch. And Daniel does tend to be more like the historical sketch kind of thing. This, this, this and this, this beast and this, this, this beast. Revelation, interestingly, is kind of both. Revelation is unusual among apocalypses for a number of reasons, but one is that it has both. The heavenly vision. In chapter four of Revelation, the author gets taken up to heaven and everything he sees is up there in heaven, but it's describing the sequence of things that are going to happen here on earth. And so it takes the two and puts them together. So these are not inflexible categories. Some apocalypses are one, some are the other, and some have.
- [33:01]
Megan Lewis
Some are both. I'm not sure about historical sketches, but the heavenly vision does have. And I'm not saying that they're related, but there are similar modes of thought. In Mesopotamia, there's a giant carved stele called the Stele of the Vultures that shows on one side and historical conflicts between two cities with men and kings battling. And the other side is the divine equivalent, and it's the two city gods fighting each other. And which God is victorious has a direct impact on which army is victorious. So it's the same kind of reflection as what happens in the divine realm is directly translated into what happens for mortals as well.
- [33:44]
Bart Ehrman
I don't know about other influences on Judaism, but a lot of people have thought that Persia is mediating a lot of this stuff into Israel. In Persian religion, you get Zoroastrianism which is also another dualistic way of doing it. And the question is, you know, the Persians had conquered Israel for a while, and so is it possible that Zoroastrian thought is affecting this? And so when somebody's talking about something like apocalypticism, they're not necessarily saying, you know, this is the only thing ever like it, you know, in the universe. Because, in fact, you get a lot of these dualistic systems, and they're interesting because of their distinctiveness as well as their similarity. And so that's what historians do, of course, they try to figure out, okay, what's similar, you know, could there have been an influence and what's different that makes them unique? And the thing with the apocalyptic system that's different from Persia or ancient Near Eastern or whatever is that there's really only one ultimate God. They're sticking with the Old Testament. There's one God and the other things are not as powerful as he is. And eventually he's going to try.
- [34:47]
Megan Lewis
That's really interesting. I've enjoyed talking about this very much, and I could actually keep going for a long time. But we shouldn't do that because I think we should also do an episode on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, which I know you've written about. I think the audience would be very interested in hearing about. So we will save that for another time.
- [35:06]
Bart Ehrman
Maybe several other times. That's another big one.
- [35:09]
Megan Lewis
Maybe several other times.
- [35:11]
Bart Ehrman
All of these topics, you know, the thing we're doing on the podcast now, just so in case people didn't hear this earlier, we're covering kind of big topics now. You know, we're just kind of laying out groundwork for lots of things we could be doing in the future. We could have several easily on Revelation or the Book of Daniel or prophecy. I mean, like all of these things, Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet is a huge thing in New Testament scholarship. And so we definitely want to be dealing with that.
- [35:35]
Megan Lewis
We are going to take a brief break. We will be back with Barth's weekly update and a Q and A session where Barthes will answer listener questions. So please stick with us
- [35:47]
Bart Ehrman
if you're interested in the Gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible. You should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them out@Barterman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you a curious person with a passion for learning but don't want to go back to school? You need to take a look at Wondrium, the streaming service that provides classes on just about everything of interest. The Crusades, neuroscience, Beethoven, photography, travel, and lots else, all presented by true experts in accessible terms. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supported our show.
- [37:01]
Megan Lewis
And welcome back, everybody. It's time for Bart's Weekly Updates.
- [37:07]
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This is Bart's Weekly Update, where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings, and online course launches.
- [37:20]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what do you have for us this week?
- [37:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you know, I mentioned last time that I was. I've been reading all this Greek and Roman ethics things, and there's this, this author that most people don't know about named Diogenes Laertius. He's a. He's our. He. He wrote a book. They did small biographies of all the famous philosophers up to his day. He lived about 200. The Common Era. Yeah, it goes way back. You know, Plato and Aristotle and all these things. So I've been. Been reading about the Stoics, and there's the founder of the Stoics is this really interesting figure named Zeno. And so I've gotten interested in Zeno because Zeno maintained that people shouldn't. They shouldn't have many possessions and they shouldn't care what they eat, and they shouldn't care they have any housing or those aren't the things that really matter. And it's interesting because that's similar in some ways to what Jesus thought. You know, don't worry about what you eat. Don't worry about what you wear. You know, these are not the important things. And so one interesting question scholars have had for a long time is the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and things like teaching of Stoicism and the Cynic philosophers and things. Yeah, so that's, that's the kind of thing, you know, I'm, I'm doing in my spare time thinking about stuff like that.
- [38:30]
Megan Lewis
That sounds interesting. I really enjoy thinking about those kinds of connections and working out, is it an actual cultural transmission or is it just a similar idea being thought about by someone else?
- [38:42]
Bart Ehrman
Exactly. Right. Because obviously you also have Buddhists and you have people in completely other Cultures and people tend to think, well, so there must be influence, right? Is it like the Silk Road or something? And, you know, it's absolutely possible that that's right. But it's also possible that, just like with the apocalypticism we were talking about, different people in different cultures come up with different ways that are very similar.
- [39:05]
Megan Lewis
I think there's a lot to be said as well for the fact that humans in general have similar experiences just by virtue of being human, regardless of what culture you're living in. So there are going to be similar thoughts that are kind of prompted by those experiences.
- [39:20]
Bart Ehrman
That's exactly right. And we are hardwired in very similar ways wherever we live. I mean, because of evolution. I mean, the reality is our species has survived because of the hard wiring. Certain primates had ways of surviving, and we're their descendants because the others didn't. And so our brains do work in similar way. It's not identical, obviously, but so it's not surprising you'd have people in different cultures, different experiences, but they're very similar. And so similar ways of figuring it all out.
- [39:50]
Megan Lewis
I think we are going to go to audience questions now.
- [39:58]
Podcast Advertiser
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.
- [40:15]
Megan Lewis
It's been a couple of weeks since we've done some questions. Bart, are you ready?
- [40:18]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, you know, last time we did a stunt, Bart, and so I'm glad these are. These aren't, like, meant to stop me, although many of them probably.
- [40:27]
Megan Lewis
These are just people wanting your opinion on things.
- [40:29]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, opinions I can do.
- [40:32]
Megan Lewis
So why did Christianity follow a more supernatural or mystical path? Rabbinical Judaism did not.
- [40:39]
Bart Ehrman
Boy, yeah, that. We need a whole episode on that.
- [40:42]
Megan Lewis
We started with a big one, but,
- [40:44]
Bart Ehrman
you know, it actually relates to the apocalypticism we were talking about during the episode. Christianity acquired the apocalyptic ideas from Judaism, and Christianity stuck with basic apocalyptic categories. And so Christianity was apocalyptic through Jesus, through Paul. And so we still have the devil, we still have demons, and we still have the dualism and expectations that the ends come. But these are. These are rooted in a kind of mystical vision. And Rabbinic Judaism rejected apocalypticism, even though it started out. The rough lineage is that Rabbinic Judaism emerges out of Pharisaic Judaism, which is something we'll be talking about on the podcast, obviously. But Pharisees were apocalypticists who believed in the coming end with the resurrection of the dead and everything Rabbis traced their lineage back to the Pharisees. What ended up happening is when the Jewish wars occurred, in the war in the year 70, where Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was wiped out, burned. And then in the year 135, another uprising. The rabbinic teachers ended up insisting that this apocalyptic view, that God's soon going to intervene and destroy things, just is not the right way to look at the religion. And they developed a whole different religion that was anti apocalyptic. And so that happened within Judaism, but it didn't happen within Christianity. And I think that's why, of course, you still have Jewish mysticism through the ages, but the standard tradition is anti Jewish and not particularly mystic.
- [42:13]
Megan Lewis
Why did apocalyptic literature grow in the Second Temple period? And how were they understood by contemporary Jews?
- [42:20]
Bart Ehrman
So it grew in the Second Temple period because in the 160s, as you were saying, there was this uprising against Antiochus Epiphanies. It happens in the 160s. And there's a thing called the Maccabean Revolt. The Maccabean Revolt is called that because it's led by a family, a band of being guerrilla soldiers, who were sometimes called the Maccabees. And they were opposed to foreign oppression of Israel. They established Israel as a sovereign state in 142bce. It lasted for about 100 years. Israel again was a sovereign state, which it hadn't been for hundreds of years. And it stayed that way until the Roman general Pompey came in in year 40 BCE and took over. But so during this period, you have Jews who have adopted this idea that the reason things are going badly is because of these forces of evil. This became a very popular point of view. That makes sense within Judaism especially. It makes sense in a lot of cultures. But in Judaism, there still was this view that God had given us the Promised land. And this is our land. God promised us to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So we have it. And you still have these foreign powers got rid of the Syrians and all these Romans are in. And so apocalypticism becomes a prominent thing then because of that. And it absolutely was taken literally. This is a point of view that was widespread throughout Judaism. It was a point of view among the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was held by the Pharisees, it was held by lots of independent groups. It was held by John the Baptist, is held by Jesus. I mean, just kind of go on. And the people we know about, a lot of people held these, this view, and they did take it very literally.
- [43:57]
Megan Lewis
And finally, is the Book of Revelation's Condemnation of Jezebel, representative of a shifting attitude towards women.
- [44:05]
Bart Ehrman
This is a very troubling passage in the book of Revelation. For those who aren't familiar with it, there's a. You won't be familiar with it because this is not the part of Revelation people prefer to talk about. John, who's writing the book, Revelation, is instructed by Christ to write seven letters to seven churches in Asia Minor. And so he writes these letters. Christ dictates these letters. And one of the letters is written to a church in the city called Thyatira. In Thyatira, Jesus, through John, condemns a prophet in the church, a woman prophet named Jezebel. Jezebel is a symbolic name. Jezebel is a woman figure in the Old Testament, in the days of Elijah, who was an evil queen of Israel. And so this prophet in Thyatira is called Jezebel because she's an evil person as well. And she's a prophet, which means that she is one who God speaks through in the church, or at least claims to be. But John thinks that she is completely wrong because she is allowing people to eat meat that was offered to pagan idols in pagan worship ceremonies. And people, typically, when they ate meat in the ancient world, had to eat meat that had been sacrificed to gods. Because the priest, it's expensive, but also the priests were the butchers. You have butcher. You had priests, they kill the animals and then they butcher and they sell food. So basically, she's approving of, you know, if you want some meat, yeah, it's okay to eat that meat. Who cares? You know? And she was in support of gross sexual immorality. According to John, he's writing this letter. So John condemns Jezebel, this prophet, for saying these things, that you can eat the meat and engage in sexual license. And Christ tells Jezebel that he's going to throw her on a bed and men are going to come and have sex with her, and Jesus then will kill her children. Wow. Some translations will say that he's going to throw her on a sick bed, meaning a hospital bed. But it's not the word, it's just the word for bed. And what happens is she doesn't go to hospital. She has sex with random men. And so it's not clear what Christ is actually doing here, but it does say that he's going to kill her children that she has. And so you think, oh, my God. It is not a very warming view of Christ's relationship to women. One of the things I'm going to talk about in My book, I'm going to go through the entire Book of Revelation and talk about various images that are very troubling, admitting that they're images, they're symbols, it's imagery. But why this kind of imagery? I mean, why imagery where a woman's getting raped because Christ throws her on a bed and then he murders her children? I mean, why that kind of imagery? And so I'll be talking about the imagery, and one of the things I'll be talking about is, does this author, the author of the Book of Revelation, does he actually embrace the Gospel of Jesus? Is this the kind of thing Jesus held to? Not just this instant, but, I mean, the whole vision, revelation? For me, I think this ends up being kind of important book that I've written because it's dealing with a central issue of how and to what extent Christianity endorses the actual teachings of Jesus, how it goes its own ways, and sometimes not very helpful ways. It's an interesting question for today, I think. Has Christianity gone some other way?
- [47:25]
Megan Lewis
I absolutely think so. And especially, again, looking at apologists that we come across online, you get a lot of people saying, oh, that's not real Christianity. And they say it to each other about everyone who essentially doesn't agree with them.
- [47:41]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
- [47:42]
Megan Lewis
So I think this will be a very interesting book.
- [47:44]
Bart Ehrman
I think the question itself is legitimate. The way you answer it is the question, you know, if what you're saying is, yeah, well, you know, if you believe in X, Y or Z, you can't be a Christian, because I don't believe in it. You know, that's one thing. But if you're just doing it historically, I'm just doing it historically. I'm not a Christian. Is this what Jesus thought? Is this the kind of thing Jesus thought about women? Or, like, is this kind of energy Jesus would use? And so historically, it's a question, then people of faith also have the question about how to deal with it.
- [48:11]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Well, thank you. I. I'm looking forward to that. I'm sure other people are, too. Before we finish for the week, would you mind just giving maybe a brief summary of what we've talked about and why it's important again?
- [48:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So we've been talking about apocalypticism, which is a Jewish worldview that developed a couple of hundred years before Jesus ministry that maintained that the reason people suffer is because there are powers of evil in the world that are creating the suffering. So the devil's causing it, or the demons are causing it, or other forces are causing it. And in this apocalyptic view God was going to triumph over these forces of evil and destroy everything that was evil and everyone who sided with them to bring in a good kingdom on earth. And this was originally a message of hope for those who are suffering. It's a message that is not found throughout most of the Old Testament, just in one book, really, and parts of a few others, but it's dominant in the New Testament. It's the worldview that affected Jesus, and it's a worldview of the very foundation of Christianity. And so it's a worldview that's very important to understand.
- [49:15]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much and 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 also that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of bart's courses@www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be Back next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [49:37]
Bart Ehrman
Next week? We're talking about the truth. So a lot of people, you know, want to know, is the New Testament true? I think a lot of people ask that don't mean the same thing by it. And so I think we're going to talk about what would it even mean? What issues are involved in talking about the truthfulness of the New Testament.
- [49:56]
Megan Lewis
Always a good question. What is truth?
- [49:58]
Bart Ehrman
What is truth?
- [49:59]
Megan Lewis
We will see you all next week. Thank you so much 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 future 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.