← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. Gold Belly Ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls and even Ina Garden's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT. That's goldbelly.com promo code GIFT. 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. We've previously taken detailed looks at the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, examining how each author portrayed Jesus and discussing what overall message they were trying to convey. This week, it's Luke's turn. Is his Jesus the son of God a distinctly Jewish messiah or something else entirely? Before we get to Luke and his depictions of Jesus. Bart. Hello. How are you doing?
- [01:18]
B
Yeah, I'm, I'm doing well, thanks. You know, life kind of goes on and every. It's one of these things, you know, where I don't know if it's like this for you, but like I, like, I seem like I'm really busy every day and like doing this, this, and then the next day. I cannot remember what I just did the day before. I kind of wonder, why do I bother? What's the point of living if you know, you don't even remember anything? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But it's like it's, it's been kind of like that lately. Like I get up in the morning, I must have done something yesterday. I cannot remember what it was.
- [01:48]
A
I remember I didn't sit down, but what I was doing when I wasn't sitting down, I don't know.
- [01:53]
B
And it seemed important at the time. That's the weird thing. Yeah. So. Yeah. So how are you doing?
- [01:59]
A
Similarly, honestly, I find that I eat entire days just doing things like grocery shopping and making sure we have all the things the kids need to start school again and really important stuff. But then I get to the end of the day and think I still have a whole pile of work that I haven't done that hopefully maybe will get done tomorrow or the day after. One day. One day. I will get to the bottom of my to do list, but I don't think anytime soon.
- [02:24]
B
Yeah, maybe not. I mean, the thing is, when you've got kids, it just. It's such a different universe. And then it's funny, though, because everybody has 24 hours in the day. You know, we all talk about how busy we are, but, you know, no one's more busy than another in another sense. I mean, we all have 24 hours, and so we all fill it. So.
- [02:42]
A
Absolutely. Okay. We should talk about Luke, though. Can we, like, open with some basic historical information about the Gospel of Luke? What do we know about who wrote it? And rough. When it was written?
- [02:53]
B
Okay, so we call it the Gospel of Luke. As with the other Gospels, it's anonymous. The author doesn't tell us his name. He tells us the person he's writing it for, somebody named Theophilus. And that's either a real person, somebody named Theophilus who might have been. Sometimes it's thought he was a Roman administrator or somebody high up, because the way the author addresses him, but the author doesn't tell us his own name. He's traditionally called Luke because the same author wrote the Book of Acts. These are two volumes of a single work. You can see that. For people who wonder why everybody thinks that is, just read the first three or four verses of each one of them and you'll see. Because in the second one, he says, well, in the first volume, I did so and so and so and so. And he addresses it to the same guy, Theophilus. And he, you know, and the style is the same, the theology is the same. So I think it's probably written by the same guy. But in the Book of Acts, this author, on four occasions, when talking about Paul's missionary work, moves into the first person to talk about what we were doing. And the emphasis in Acts as in Luke, as we're going to see in a minute, is a lot of it's on how Gentiles also can receive the message of Jesus. And so people thought, well, okay, so it's a Gentile. This guy has a Gentile concern, probably a Gentile, and he's a companion of Paul. And so what Gentile companions of Paul do we know about? And in one of Paul's letters, he mentioned somebody named Luke who's a physician, who's a Gentile, who's a companion of his. And so people say, well, it's Luke. So we have no way of knowing if it's Luke or someone else, you know, so we just call It Luke, as to when he was writing, it kind of depends on several factors. Normally within critical scholarship for a very long time, there was a consensus that he was writing sometime in the 80s of the common era, because he almost certainly used the Gospel of Mark, which is dated to around the year 70. And there are reasons for thinking maybe he's writing somewhat later. So somewhere 80, 85 would be a common guess. And that's the view I still have. The problem is that a number of critical scholars have started to think that the Book of Acts was written much later because they think that the Book of Acts shows usage of the writings of Josephus. That looks like some passages, in their opinion, show that this person's been influenced by Josephus's writings from around the year 93. And so acts these days is being dated by a lot of scholars. Yeah, a lot of scholars, too. 120. And if Luke actually was written near to the time of Acts, then it'd be that late. So I don't buy that, but it's a plausible argument that many people make now.
- [05:32]
A
So in very broad terms, how does it relate to the other Gospels?
- [05:36]
B
Right. So it's very interesting in several ways. One is we've talked about a lot is that you get Matthew, Mark and Luke, and it looks like Matthew and Luke both had. Mark is one of their sources. I think just about everybody thinks that's absolutely right. So you can see how he's changed Mark in order to get a sense of his own interests and the things he wants to emphasize. The big debate now is whether he also used Matthew. The orthodoxy for years and years has been that Matthew and Luke both use some other source that they call Q, which provides the sayings that are common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark. And so they got it from a separate source. Older scholarship, like way back, used to say that, well, Matthew was first and then Mark came, and then Luke copied Matthew, or Mark was first, then Matthew again, then Luke copied Matthew. So that way you could explain why Matthew and Luke both have the same sayings, because Luke just got them from Matthew. And so that's a possibility. But it's a possibility that hasn't really had a lot of traction until recently. Until my friend Mark Goodacre, who will be a speaker at this Bible conference we're doing, has been arguing that that's how it happened. So it's not clear whether. I mean, it's clear to me that Luke did not use Matthew, but it's clear to Mark Goodacre that he did so it's debated. One other interesting thing, though, is that there are a lot of parallels between Luke and the Gospel of John more than the other synoptics in John, so much so that some people have argued that John actually used the Gospel of Luke. And some years ago, there was a dissertation done at Duke University that I was on the committee of this thing that argued that actually Luke used the Gospel of John. So, okay, you got to say, say something, and everybody comes up with a different view, and you've got to argue for it. But so there's some relationship among these gospels, the one that's definite, that Luke almost certainly is Mark.
- [07:25]
A
So I mentioned earlier that we already looked at Mark and Matthew in earlier podcast episodes. Mark depicts Jesus as the son of God who has to die for the sins of others. But there's this recurring trope where no one actually recognizes or understands who he truly is. In contrast, Matthew portrays him as a very Jewish Messiah who's come to fulfill the Jewish scriptures. Does Luke agree with either or maybe both of these views, or does he have a completely different portrayal?
- [07:53]
B
I'd say it's not a completely different portrayal because Luke also thinks that Jesus is the son of God and that he thinks his death is important for salvation. And he definitely thinks that he's the Messiah that was predicted by Scripture. So these are emphases in Luke, but they're done differently in ways that are very, very interesting. It seems like, well, they've got that down. It's all the same thing, right? No, actually, Luke's theology, the way he portrays Jesus, his understanding of Jesus is very different in ways that is kind of startling.
- [08:27]
A
So what kinds of differences then do we see?
- [08:30]
B
You get a lot of small differences, but you also get some pretty big differences. I mean, the big difference in terms of kind of overall portrayal is that Luke, even though Jesus is the Messiah, fulfills scripture and stuff like Matthew and like Mark, too. But Luke wants to emphasize that Jesus is best understood as a savior figure for the entire world. He's not just coming to Jews, administering to Jews. There's really the whole point of his ministry is that this message is going to go to Gentiles, to non Jews. And Luke stresses that this is one of the reasons that Jews rejected Jesus, is because his intention was to bring salvation to Gentiles. So that's one thing. But then once you get into the portrayal of Jesus, there are a number of things that are different. But the most interesting ones come at the very end in the Passion narrative, because Luke wants to portray Jesus as going through his passion without suffering much. And scholars have long called his passion narrative, a passion less passion, unlike Mark, where he's in deep agony. Not in Luke, but the even more striking, and this one's a little bit more controversial among scholars, but Luke has gotten rid of all indications that Jesus death was an atonement for sins. Okay, then, what is it? And so these are big differences, I think.
- [09:57]
A
So I wanted to ask a couple of follow up questions about some of those differences. Looking first at Luke saying that Jesus did not come to minister to the Jews, does that suggest something about the audience he's writing for?
- [10:09]
B
It might do. It might mean that he's writing for a gentile audience. I would say broadly within scholarship, even evangelical scholarship, there's a thought that he was a Gentile and that he's writing for Gentiles. And the thought is that Matthew was a Jew writing for Jews. I'm not sure if that's true about Matthew, frankly. I'm not sure that he was writing for a Jewish Christian audience, but he may have been. Luke seems to be writing principally for Gentiles, but the issue is like, how he gets to that and what makes scholars think that. And there's a lot of evidence for it. But one of the interesting things that I like to point out, there are lots of things we spend a whole episode just on that question. But very early in the Gospel, both Matthew and Luke have a birth narrative. And so Jesus being born of a virgin in Bethlehem, Mark does not have that, John does not have that. People who think that Luke used Matthew sometimes say, well, they both have this birth narrative with a genealogy. And so it's clear he used it. And I think that's a weird argument because when you actually look at their narratives, they've got nothing, almost nothing in common. You're born of a virgin in Bethlehem. I mean, the stories are completely different and they're at odds with each other. Clearly Luke isn't getting this from Matthew. And so there's that. But the point I want to make here is about the genealogies. So genealogies are of course kind of the least favorite reading for most American readers of the Bible, because, you know, oh my God, here we go. So and so begat so and so begat so and so begat so and so. Oh my God. But actually they're very interesting if you take your time to look at them and somebody explains them. Matthew's genealogy is designed to show that Jesus is a descendant of the father of the Jews, Abraham, and of the greatest king of the Jews, David. Matthew introduces the genealogy by saying the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of Abraham, the son of David. And the genealogy goes back to Abraham, father of the Jews. It actually begins with Abraham and goes, you know, Abraham, his son was Isaac and Isaac's son was Jacob. And it goes all the way down then to Joseph, who's married to Mary, from whom Jesus was born. So it's a weird genealogy because it's tracing Jesus bloodline through a person that Jesus is not related to by blood. So that's weird, but that's what you have to do if he's born of a virgin. Right. The bloodlines have to be patrilinear because that's how genealogies work in the ancient world. But Jesus doesn't belong to the bloodline because his father didn't get his mother pregnant. So it goes, okay, so that's Matthew, but the emphasis is on Jesus Jewishness. And throughout this genealogy there are things doing that. Luke also has a genealogy and Abraham and David are both in it. But it's not tracing Jesus line, just back to Abraham, goes all the way back to Adam. And a couple of things to note are that in Luke's genealogy doesn't go from the beginning down. It starts with Jesus and then goes back. And it's a different genealogy from Matthew's. They both take Jesus back to David, but through different lines. They're different fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers. It goes different all the way back. So they're different genealogies. But for our point point here, the interesting thing is it goes all the way back to Adam. Now Matthew wants to trace Jesus genealogy back to Abraham. And when you, when you read Matthew's gospel, it's clear because he's trying to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus. But why doesn't Luke do that? Luke goes back to Adam. He's not the father of the Jews, he's the father of the human race. Jesus is descended from everybody. I mean, he's there not just for the Jews, but for all people, Jew and gentile. You get a hint of that already then in the genealogy. And then it becomes very clear through other aspects of Luke's gospel.
- [13:52]
A
Do we have other examples of Luke showing Jesus concern for Gentiles?
- [13:58]
B
Yeah. So this thing about the genealogy is kind of interesting, but it isn't really kind of particularly persuasive on its own. More persuasive is how Luke begins Jesus public ministry in Mark's Gospel, which was Luke's source in the middle of Jesus ministry. Like halfway through his ministry of Jesus going to his hometown, Nazareth, and preaching in the synagogue, and the people there don't accept him, so he gets rejected. And so prophets, not without honor, except for in his own home, in his own country, that kind of thing. Luke has that story, but it doesn't come halfway through Jesus ministry. It's the first thing that happens after he gets baptized and tempted in the wilderness. And it's a much longer version of the story. He goes to Nazareth, and in Luke's version, you actually have a record of the sermon that he preaches in the synagogue. He asks for the scroll of Isaiah, and they hand him over Isaiah. And Jesus starts reading the thing about being a light to the Gentiles. And he's come so that he's going to do all these miracles of healing the sick and healing the blind and things, and to proclaim the coming of the Lord. And he reads this passage from Isaiah and he sits down and he says, today this has been fulfilled. In your hearing. The Jewish men in the synagogue say, what in the world? What's he talking about? He's saying he's fulfilling prophecy. They get really angry with him. And Jesus says, yeah, I understand you're angry with me. But, you know, don't forget that, you know, in the Scriptures, Elijah in the time of drought, did not go to fellow Jews. He went to the widow of Zarephath when prophet Elisha was going to be healing somebody. He didn't heal Jews of leprosy. He healed the king of Syria of leprosy. What he's doing is he's saying that these prophets went to Gentiles rather than Jews because God had rejected Jews, because the Jews had rejected his prophets. And the people in the synagogue know what he's saying. He's saying, yeah, you're rejecting the truth of God. And so God's going to take the message somewhere else. And so they rise up and they try and kill him. They try and throw him off a cliff or a high mountain, but sets the stage. The reason scholars have long thought, you know, the reason Luke expands the story and moves it to the beginning, is because this shows what this gospel is going to be about. Jesus will be rejected by his own people. And as a result of that, God is going to send the message to the Gentiles. And to that extent, it's significant that this author wrote the Book of Acts, which is all about the spread of Christianity to the Gentile world. So this is how Luke is portraying Jesus somewhat differently in that respect.
- [16:37]
A
Thank you. One of the other differences that you mentioned was Luke and the Passion narrative being essentially passionless without suffering. Why would Luke do that? And is it related to this rejection of Jesus and a turning toward the Gentiles?
- [16:51]
B
It's very, very interesting to compare Luke's Passion narrative with Mark's. Matthew has a lot of the same themes as Mark at this point about the Passion narrative. When you get to Luke, there are striking differences. And what I have my students do is to compare the two passion narratives. And people can do this at home. You can do this one at home. Just take the Garden of Gethsemane scene where in Mark's Gospel, Jesus says that he's deeply anguished unto death when he's praying in the garden before he's arrested. And Luke doesn't have that. And Mark says that Jesus was deeply sorrowful, and Luke doesn't have that. And in Mark, he goes off and he falls on his face to pray. And in Luke calmly takes a knee. And in Mark, he prays three times that God will take this cup away from him. And Luke, he only prays once. And he precedes it by saying, if you will. And so it's like there's all this deep agony in Mark. It's all taken out in Luke. Well, that's interesting. When you get to the crucifixion scene, it's even more interesting because it looks like Luke is portraying Jesus as calm and in control rather than agonized. Okay, so when you get to the crucifixion scene, it's just ratcheted up a notch. What happens in the crucifixion scene in Mark is really quite stunning. I think it's one of these passages that is terse. And if you pay close attention to it, it's just so filled with pathos. So Jesus is put before Pontius Pilate for trial. And Pilate asks him, are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus says just two words to him. You say so in Greek. You say, so. That's it. Does it mean yes? Does it mean no? Why doesn't he defend himself? He's condemned to death, and he's taken off and he's silent. He goes to the place of crucifixion. He doesn't say anything to anyone. It's like he's in shock. He's nailed to the cross. He doesn't say anything. Being nailed to the cross. He's hung on the cross, and everybody passing by mocks him. The people just walking by mock him. The Roman Soldiers mock him. Both people being crucified with him mock him in Mark's gospel. And there he is. He's been denied, he's been betrayed, and he's been rejected, and he's been tried, and now everybody's mocking him. And at the end, the only words he says, he's hanging on the cross and he cries out, eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he dies. Whoa, that is disturbing. Now, people don't notice that that's what's going on in Mark because they're so used to thinking that Jesus says all these other things and does all these other things, you know. But if you just read Mark, he is in despair at the end. So Luke has the same story about Jesus going out to be crucified. But in this case, when Jesus is carrying his cross, going to the place of crucifixion, he sees some women weeping on the side of the road for him. And he turns to them and he says, daughters of Jerusalem, don't weep for me. Weep for yourselves and your children, for the faith that's to befall you. He's more concerned about these women than he is about himself going out to be crucified. He gets to the place of crucifixion, and he's not silent. They nail him to the cross, and he prays, father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. So he's forgiving them and asking God to forgive them. For this, they hang him on the cross. And this time, both robbers don't ridicule him. Only one of them does. The other one turns his head to the man, says, you know, be quiet, Leave him alone. We deserve what we're getting. But he's done nothing wrong. And then he says to Jesus, jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus says, truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. Jesus knows what's happening to him. He knows why it's happening to him. He knows what's going to happen to him after it happens to him in Luke, not in Mark. And in Luke, instead of crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Instead of that, Jesus says, father, into your hands I commit my spirit and dies. He doesn't feel forsaken of God at all. He knows exactly what's happening to him and why it's happening to him. And so here you have the passionless passion where Jesus, in fact, knows exactly why this has to happen and goes through with it.
- [21:09]
A
I wanted to go to that final difference that you mentioned as well. And then I have a question about the whole. How do scholars explain Luke's removal of atonement from his Gospel?
- [21:21]
B
Yeah, one more thing that people don't notice. There are several places in Mark where it's clear that Jesus is indicating that he has to die, and it will be for the sins of the world. And so, for example, in Mark, chapter 10, verse 45, Jesus tells his disciples that he himself, the Son of Man, came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Okay, Luke's copying Mark. Luke has that passage, and he leaves out that verse. That's weird. Why would you take that verse out? Gives his life ransom for many in Mark, not in Luke. Okay. In the crucifixion scene in Mark's Gospel, Jesus cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He dies. And the second he dies, the curtain in the temple rips in half. And the centurion sees how Jesus died, and he says, truly, this man was the Son of God. The curtain, as we've said in a previous episode, is that part of the temple that separated the holy of holies from the rest of the temple. God dwelt inside the holy of holies. Nobody could go in there except for on the day of atonement, when the high priest would go in to perform a sacrifice for the sins of the people. In Mark, the curtain rips in half so that now you don't need the priest going in for making atonement. Jesus death has brought direct access to God for everybody. Okay, it's an atonement, and the centurion recognizes it. He realizes that in his death, he is the Son of God because of how he dies. So it's somebody who makes a confession of faith. Everybody else in Mark has never understood that Jesus has to die. The centurion recognizes this pagan who just crucified him. Okay, so that's Mark. Luke has the same scene. Jesus gets crucified. He says his last words. What happens is different. In Luke's Gospel, the curtain in the temple does not rip the second Jesus dies. It rips before he dies. So it's not showing that his death brings access to God. In Luke's Gospel, it appears that the temple curtain rips to show that the Jews have now rejected Jesus and so God's going to reject them. This is a symbol of the destruction of the temple because they've had him crucified. And after he dies, and the centurion sees him die, the centurion does not say, this man is the Son of God. He says, truly, this man was innocent. Now you say, well, okay, but that's the same thing, right? Because if he's the Son of God, he's innocent. If he's innocent, he's the Son of God. No, it is not the same thing. Throughout Luke's Gospel, the whole point is that Jesus is innocent of any crimes, so that the people who are responsible for his death are guilty, Jews have rejected him, and so they're the guilty parties. But by framing in that way, Luke has gotten rid of every reference to Jesus death being in atonement. And when you get to the Book of Acts, written by the same guy, when you get to the Book of Acts, the apostles, when they preach their message to convert people, they talk about Jesus death, but they never talk about it as an atonement. They talk about it as an occasion to show that Jews are guilty for killing their own Messiah. The way it works in the Book of Acts is when Jews realize that what they've done, even if they personally weren't responsible, they realize, oh, my God, we've killed the Son of God. They repent and God forgives them. So Luke has a different understanding of the significance of Jesus death. For Mark, the death is an atonement. It pays the price for people's sins. For Luke, there doesn't have to be a price paid. For Luke, people have to repent, and then God will forgive them. So the analogy I think I've used on here before, if you owe me a thousand bucks and you can't pay me, one way to deal with that is for you to get somebody else to pay me. That's atonement. Somebody else pays me, it's got to be paid. The other way to handle it is me to say, I'll forget it. You don't owe it to me anymore. That's forgiveness. Luke has forgiveness. Mark has atonement. Well, that's surprising. Luke doesn't appear to believe in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus.
- [25:43]
A
That's really interesting. So taking all of those differences into account and as brief as you can, which I know is not easy given the complexity of what we're talking about, how do all of these features combine to support Luke's overall theological message?
- [26:00]
B
I think Luke believes that people need to repent and that it doesn't matter whether you're Jew or Gentile, if you repent and turn to God, that God will forgive you. Jesus death is an incentive to do that. I think one of the most interesting things is speculation the scholars have about why he would get rid of Jesus in agony. Why would he have Jesus common in control? And my view of that is that both Mark and Luke want to say something significant about Jesus death for why his followers are being persecuted. Both of them appear to have been written in context where Christians were experiencing some kind of persecutions as they were going back to the days of Paul. And Mark's message about persecuted being suffering for the faith is very different from Luke's message about suffering for the faith. Mark's message about suffering for the faith is, you know, Jesus at the end seems confused. He doesn't understand, why have you forsaken me? And he dies. And. But then the reader sees that salvation is given because of this. In other words, God is working behind the scenes in ways that even Jesus doesn't see at the end. And so the message for somebody being persecuted is like, you know, you may wonder why God's allowing this to happen, and it may not be obvious to you, but behind the scenes, God's doing something with this. So you just have to trust that this is going to be okay and that it's going to contribute to a greater good. It may not make sense, but God is at work behind it. So Mark would be teaching people that if Luke's writing for a context of persecution, he has a different way of doing it. What he's saying is, look, this is something that has to happen. You have to be persecuted. Jesus had to die. You have to be persecuted. But you know that God's in control. So you can be calm and in control at the end. You don't have to freak out because God is with you to the very end, just as he was with Jesus. Okay, so it's a different message. Both could be completely valid. But to get there, you got to portray Jesus in two different ways.
- [28:05]
A
So if all of the Gospels have all of these different messages, how should we be reading them? Are we taking them all as parts of the same story or treating them as different, distinct, individual stories?
- [28:16]
B
Well, the way people normally read the Gospels, if they read the Gospels, which most people don't, but if they do read the Gospels, typically what people do will be to read a passage from John, then a passage from Mark, a passage from Luke, and they'll just read random passages and kind of mix them all up. And they won't know which is which. It's just, this is all part of the Bible. When people do go about reading the Gospels from beginning to the end, the way you normally would read a book, they typically assume that these four are. They're all on the same cover, presumably all consistent with each other, because that's what happens with books when an author writes several chapters and they're not contradicting each other. And so you just assume that they're to inform each other and they're each telling different parts of the story, maybe, but it's all one story, and so it's a coherent whole. That's the traditional way of reading the Gospels. And there's a lot to be said for it, of course. I mean, there's value in doing that. But the author of Luke was not expecting you to make him say what some other author was saying. He actually changed Mark, which suggests that he doesn't want you simply to think that he's saying the same thing as Mark. He has his own message. And if you don't listen to his own message, then you're not getting what he's trying to do. And so scholars, for a long time now, historical scholars have insisted that you read each Gospel for what it has to say and not pretend it's saying what some other Gospels is saying. That works with contradictions. You can't just assume there's a contradiction that necessarily they can be reconciled. More than that, it has to do with kind of the big picture. Matthew has its own point, and it's not the same point as John or Luke or Mark. Luke has his own point, Mark has his own point, John has his own point. And it's not just that they're contradictory. It's that you're not getting the point if you assume that they're all thinking the same thing or all saying the same thing, because they're not. And so if you assume that, then you're misunderstanding each of the Gospels. And that's probably not a good thing if you want to read them.
- [30:22]
A
Most likely not. Thank you very much for that, Bart. We're going to take a brief break, and then we'll be back with more news about the upcoming conference. And then we will have a round of Outsmart. Bart, have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to miss Bart Ehrman's free webinar Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with the Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such as why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john? @barterman.com Authors thank you. Welcome back everyone. We've got some more conference news for you. All right, so unless you've had like your head in a box for the last few weeks, months maybe, we've been talking about the virtual conference that Bart and his team are putting on. It's called New Insights in the New Testament. It's September 23rd to 24th and there are 10 fantastic scholars who will be talking to an audience of non specialists. This is not a conference for other academics. This is not a conference for graduate students or even undergraduate students. This is a conference for people who have an interest in the New Testament but not necessarily any prior knowledge or understanding of the scholarship behind it. And today we are going to talk very briefly about two or the final two presenters that we've not covered yet. Amy Jill Levine and someone called Bart Ehrman. I'm not entirely sure who he is, but if he's included, I'm sure he's going to talk about something interesting. So Bart, Amy Jill is going to be talking about Jesus and women distinguishing history from apologetic.
- [32:55]
B
Yeah. So let me say I think you completely nailed what this conference is. I mean this is we haven't seen something like this before where these experts are talking to non experts. And even if you are a graduate student, a professor or undergraduate, you should come too, especially you undergraduates. So Amy Jill, she's a contemporary of mine. We're about at the same level stage of things and she is very well known as being an extremely dynamic and interesting lecturer. She's interesting personally because she's Jewish, but she spent the end of her career teaching at Vanderbilt Theological Seminary, training Christian ministers. And even though she's Jewish, she has a PhD in New Testament. Man, she is smart about the New Testament and especially about Jews and Christians in the New Testament and understanding The Gospels and the other writings of the New Testament light of Judaism at the time. And she is one of the leading experts on that. This talk is going to be really interesting, both because of what she's going to say. I'm not privy to the details yet, but I can just tell you to be great. And also, she's such a fantastic lecturer.
- [33:59]
A
Thank you. And obviously you are going to be speaking. You're running the conference, so it makes sense that you would speak at it. When I was preparing for the podcast today, I didn't have any information about what you might speak on. Have you finalized anything, or is it going to be a turn up and be surprised type of thing?
- [34:17]
B
No, no, no. I've actually decided. And it's. As it turns out, this is just serendipity. We didn't plan this. You certainly didn't plan it because you didn't know. But as it turns out, I've chosen to speak on this passage in Mark where Jesus says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because, you know, as I've said repeatedly on this thing, we have different manuscripts of the New Testament and they word things differently in different places. And sometimes it doesn't much matter. It's insignificant differences, but sometimes it matters. There are some manuscripts that report that verse differently in a way that really matters, and that, I have to tell you, most New Testament scholars don't know about in these manuscripts. Mark, chapter 15, verse 34. Instead of crying out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus cries out, my God, my God, why have you ridiculed me? Whoa. What?
- [35:06]
A
That's quite the difference.
- [35:09]
B
Yeah. He's saying God is mocking him on the cross. And so I'm going to look at that and it's going to be a way of talking about why textual differences matter. To talk about that particular textual variant and try to figure out, could it possibly be original? There are scholars who have said, some of the best scholars of the early 20th century said that actually is what the verse originally said. And is that possible? And if not, whether it's possible or not, who changed the text and why? And how do both readings actually work pretty well in Mark's narrative? So it's like it's this whole complex of things and it's unusually interesting, in my opinion.
- [35:47]
A
That sounds very interesting. And if you're interested in joining us for that conference or you just want to learn more about who's going to be presenting and what they'll be talking on, all of that information and ticket purchasing is available on the website, which is www.ntconference.org. we are going to move on now to a round of Outsmart Bart.
- [36:12]
B
Doctor Ehrman has written six New York Times bestselling books and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton. It's not often you'll see him made a fool, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's time for Outsmart Bart.
- [36:29]
A
Bart, are you ready for three questions designed to test the limits of your New Testament knowledge?
- [36:34]
B
I don't know.
- [36:38]
A
Let's give it a go. First question, how did the name Yaakov in Hebrew become James in English?
- [36:46]
B
Well, I don't really know. I mean, it gets transliterated in the New Testament Greek as Jacobus. And I've always just kind of assumed that. It's kind of like my grandfather's name was Henry, but they called him Hank. It wasn't like, etymologically, it doesn't really quite make sense. So I don't know the answer. I don't know why that comes into English as James, because we also obviously have the name Jacob, which does come directly from it. And so I don't know. But then how. Then again, how do you get from James to Jim? That's a little easier. But you know, how do you get from Jacob to Jim? So it's like, I don't know why it's not like some other names where, like Iesu, you know, Yahshua in Hebrew becomes Yeshua in Aramaic, sounds similar, becomes Jesus, which becomes sounds similar in Greek and becomes Jesus in English. And so that's more obvious. But there are other names like that that don't translate into English very well.
- [37:38]
A
So the person who submitted the question gave an answer. There's no citation, so I can't obviously verify it. They said in late Latin a change in spelling and pronunciation occurred. So La cobus, which was the Latin, became Jaco mus, and then in French it became Gemmes, and then in English it became James.
- [37:57]
B
Okay, I completely believe that.
- [38:01]
A
Okay, question two. What attributes is spoken of Adam at the end of Luke's version of James? Family tree.
- [38:09]
B
The way it works is that it goes backwards instead of forwards, and so so and so is this. It's more like he's the son of so and so instead of the Father. And so and so it goes Seth is the second to last, and then Adam, and so it ends with Adam. But then we're told that Adam was the son of God, which means that this is showing that Jesus is directly in the direct lineage of God, which Is. Yeah. That's interesting. It's really good. By the way, it's a really good genealogy to trace Jesus all the way back to Adam. You know, you get on one of these genealogical sites today and it'll you, you know, kind of your background because. But, you know, how far back does it go? A few hundred years. I had an aunt who did our genealogy in my family, and she got us back to the Mayflower, and we thought, wow, that's great, the Mayflower. But then Luke, you know, the Mayflower
- [38:54]
A
all the way back to God, Adam,
- [38:57]
B
who's the Son of God. So, yeah, that's quite a genealogy.
- [39:01]
A
And that's the answer that the person who posed the questions was looking for. So congratulations. And final question. How many chapters are there in Philemon?
- [39:11]
B
There's one.
- [39:12]
A
There is one.
- [39:14]
B
And it's not really fair to say they're chapters because there aren't any chapters. It's just this thing. It's the shortest letter of Paul in the New Testament. It's not the shortest book in the New Testament. They're probably, I guess, third. John is the shortest, but it's more like a regular letter in the Greco Roman world. Because letters in Greco Roman world tend to be like, on a single piece of papyrus or whatever. And Philemon is short like that, rather than Paul's letter to the Romans, which is like an extended treatise, really. Yeah. Right.
- [39:43]
A
Two out of three. Well done. I think we can call that a success.
- [39:46]
B
Good. You know, I just. I need to work on my. My French etymology. Going back to the whole. It's like. I know. What was I thinking when I was studying the New Testament?
- [39:55]
A
Took the wrong path there, but most definitely.
- [39:57]
B
I know. Yeah.
- [39:58]
A
So before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about?
- [40:02]
B
We were talking about the genius of Luke, and I think it's completely underappreciated. Luke takes his source, Mark, and the other sources available to him and crafts his own understanding of Jesus, which is similar, of course, in ways to the other Gospels, but is also really quite different. The emphasis is that this message from the very beginning, the point was to take the message to the Gentiles. And that requires Jews to reject Jesus. And so it's going to be Jewish rejection going to Gentiles. And Luke sets it up that way at the end. Other striking differences are that Jesus in Luke does not appear to suffer internally. I mean, he gets nailed to a cross, but he is not agonizing about it at all. He's calm and in control in contrast to Mark. And at the end, when Jesus dies, it's not an atonement for sins. Luke gets rid of all the language of atonement in his Gospel. It's interesting because it shows that Luke has his own message, and if you read him like he's saying the same thing that Mark is saying, then you're misunderstanding him. And so the part of the point of this is you have to read each of these Gospels for what it has to say and not simply reconcile them and smash them together into one big book.
- [41:15]
A
Thank you very much for that, Bart, and thank you for sharing your time and expertise with us. 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 also that you can use the code njpodcast for a discount on all of Barth's courses over at www.barturman.com. and tickets for New Insights in the New Testament can be purchased at www.ntconference.org. misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [41:44]
B
Well, I keep saying that the critical scholars say this, that, and the other thing, and that they're historical scholars who don' think the Bible is literally true in every place and even reject standard Christian who themselves don't believe, for example, that there really was a virgin birth or that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, or they're not sure about it. And I often get asked, well, how can they really be a Christian? Are you sure they're a Christian? Is that possible? And so we thought we'd have an episode on that. How is it possible to be a faithful Christian, committed Christian, and not believe some of these literal doctrines that are taught in the New Testament? Or is it possible? So we'll talk about that.
- [42:20]
A
It'll be a good show. 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.