← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
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Another pina colada?
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Shopify has the world's best converting checkout up to 36% better than other e commerce platforms. What you do with those extra sales is up to you. Switch to Shopify today@shopify.com setup and get a $1 trial. Shopify.com setup. 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. Welcome back everybody to Miss Quoting Jesus. The preoccupation with mortality is one of the most enduring features of humanity. We see it in literature from around the world, dating almost as far back as the invention of writing. What role did this fear play in the development of Christianity? And did the Christian afterlife provide an incentive for non Christians to convert? Before we get onto that uplifting and charming topic though, Bart, hello. How are you this week?
- [01:19]
B
I'm fine. I actually, I've not been obsessing about death this week, but I have been thinking a lot about age. My daughter just turned 43 and I'm thinking, yeah, wait, how'd that happen? And then like the day before my, I've got a student in one of my classes who came up to me and she told me she liked my classes. And she said that her father had taken two classes with me. And when she told me what it was, I realized that was eight years after I started teaching here. It's like, oh my God. There's nothing wrong with this picture. How are you doing? You look ageless.
- [01:59]
A
Oh, well, that's very kind of you. It's the wonders of makeup. Because I don't sleep always because I have small babies who yell a lot at nighttime. But I'm good, I'm good. Hopefully they will. They have a bit of a cough at the moment. So I have to wake up in the night and give them their inhalers and then put them back down to sleep. And because they have a different, like a slightly different severity of cough. So I have to give one an inhaler every six hours and one an inhaler every four hours. When you're doing that round the clock, it Effectively results in me waking up every two to three hours.
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B
Oh, my God, no.
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A
Which is. It's less than fun. But the good thing is it's only for a very short period of time. So tomorrow they should be on the men's.
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B
And eventually this too shall pass and.
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A
Exactly, exactly.
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B
They will be 43
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A
and you'll be still going wrong.
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B
Oh, God, it sounds awful. I'm sorry, it's. I know it's. Look, it's not easy. It's not easy having young kids. Never easy, but. Sounds like that inhaler thing, man. Yeah, that's not good.
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A
The good thing is it is something they will grow out of. So the way the specialist has framed it is the next couple of years, you're probably going to be doing this slightly less each time until they just have a winter without getting bronchitis or pneumonia or anything, which will be delightful for everyone, I think.
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B
Yeah, well, it's kind of a low level for delight, low bar. It's like, okay, everybody doesn't have bronchitis this week.
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A
I haven't had to go to the ER yet this winter, so I am taking that. That as an absolute win.
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B
Okay, okay.
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A
We should. We should actually get into this and stop boring everyone with my children's various health concerns. So we're talking about the fear of death and how that has impacted the development of Christianity. If we start before Christianity, how far back can we trace the fear of death in human cultures?
- [03:55]
B
Well, yeah, in terms of human culture, I think you can trace it as far back as you've got. Human culture, depending how you define culture, of course. But if you think in terms of high culture, like literature, it's an obsession of a lot of our earliest literature. You're actually the expert on this, so maybe you should be talking about it. But the oldest narrative in our culture is the Gilgamesh epic, originally discovered in one of your languages, Akkadian, and later found in much older versions in your other major language, Sumerian. We have accounts of the Gilgamesh epic that go back to a thousand years before the oldest parts of the Old Testament. So we're talking about really old materials. And the Gilgamesh epic is about this kind of superhero, two thirds divine, one third human person, Gilgamesh, who has a kind of a mischief streak in him and is a kind of a bully to men and a kind of a predator to women. And he's pleasant person by modern standards. But a lot of the Gilgamesh epic is about his fear of death because his best friend dies and he is afraid of himself experiencing that fate. And in the Gilgamesh epic, there are graphic descriptions about what it's like to be dead. And it's not pleasant. You know, you're basically living in the complete dark, eating dirt. And a lot of this epic is about how to escape your own mortality and the impossibility of doing that. So, yeah, it goes all the way back.
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A
If we look then specifically at the cultures that would have been predominant around the time that the New Testament was being formed, what do we see in terms of fear of death and afterlife beliefs for Greek and Jewish culture?
- [05:35]
B
Yeah, so those are the two cultures that Christianity grows out of. I mean, the Roman world at the time of the New Testament was most heavily influenced by Greek culture. And the New Testament itself, of course, emerges out of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. And so if you're interested in issues like death, then you'd want to see how death was handled in both of those cultures to see what comes out within Christianity. The earliest Greek cultures thought of death as kind of just not being alive. And so, like when you read Homer, for example, when people die, everybody goes to Hades and it's this kind of unpleasant place where you don't have any strength, you don't have any brain power, you can't really talk. And everybody goes there, everybody goes there. And so it's very unpleasant. But over time, what happens within Greek culture is they develop the idea that people who are actually good people are going to be rewarded after death, and people who are rotten people are going to be punished after death. But the way it'll work is you'll die and your soul will go one place or the other. It'll either be rewarded or punished. And that becomes a theme sometimes in Greek culture. And a lot of people just thought that you died, that was it, the end of the story. But any of those prospects were fearful to people. If you're kind of living this vague non existence, but you're kind of still kind of conscious, that's not good. If you're in danger of being tormented, you know, go to Tartarus. In Greek myth, that's bad, that's torture for forever. And if you don't exist anymore, how do you even get your mind around that non existence? So none of those options was very good.
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A
Does the Bible then speak about fear of death or have specific explanations of an afterlife?
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B
Yeah. So the Hebrew Bible, of course, comes out of Israelite culture, which early on was not tremendously influenced by ancient Greek culture. The big problem in the Hebrew Bible is that when you die, that's it. It really is a non existence. Some parts of the Hebrew Bible talk about Sheol. A lot of people imagine it like Homer's Hades where everybody goes there and it's this netherworld or not much happens. And it's probably not that it just means going to your grave. Probably when you read the psalms or you read poetic books especially, there's quite clear expression of the fear of death and what's going to happen. And so what ends up happening in the Jewish tradition is that people came to think that it just really wasn't quite fair because God, if our God, the God of Israel, is the ruler of all, and he rewards those who are on his side and punishes those who are not, then how is it that people can be righteous and have a horrible life and those who are wicked can have a great life and they both die and, and get away with it? It's like that's not fair. And so they developed, probably about a couple hundred years before Jesus, they developed a view that said that God wasn't going to end the story with death, that in fact God was going to raise people from the dead at the end of time and people would be bodily raised in order to be either rewarded if they were on God's side or punished. It wasn't that their souls would live on after they die. It's at the end of time God would resurrect bodies, the righteous would live forever and the wicked would be raised from the dead, shown that they had really botched it, even though they thought they'd gotten away with it and they'd be annihilated in horrible ways.
- [09:10]
A
Do we see ways in which Greek and Jewish thinkers tried to deal with this fear of death, try and mitigate it for people?
- [09:18]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in Greek circles I think a big breakthrough is made by, actually by Socrates. I guess that's not surprising. But in Plato's writings we find out, you know, the views of Socrates. We don't have any writings from Socrates, who is Plato's teacher. But we have accounts of Socrates in Plato and Xenophon and we have a few other sources that mention Socrates. But one of probably our main source is Plato. And at one point Plato writes this dialogue about the defense of Socrates. When he was on trial, he was facing a death sentence. And in the course of this trial he comments on how he's not going to do something that he thinks is wrong in order to escape death. He knows it's evil to do wrong, but he doesn't know if death is evil. And so he's explaining his view of death. And I've always thought it's a really kind of helpful explanation. In Socrates view death as one of two things. Either he says, you're annihilated. You don't exist anymore. And so it's like. He says, it's like you don't have consciousness. And it would be like having a deep sleep forever. And who doesn't like having a really deep sleep when you're not, like, even dreaming, you're just, like, out of it? And you wake up, man, that was nice. And you won't wake up. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's fantastic. In fact, you wish you had it more often. And so that's okay. He said the other option is that you live on afterwards. And if you live on afterwards, you're going to be around everybody else who's living around long afterwards. And he says, man, I'm going to be able to sit down and talk with Homer as much as I want to, and all of these great thinkers before me. And I've got lots of questions, and I've got, you know, we can do this forever. He says, that's going to be really good. I'll die 10 times to get that. And so it's either, you know, it's either going to be one or the other, he says, and so there's nothing to be afraid of. And so within the Greek tradition, that was it, you know, nothing to be afraid of.
- [11:15]
A
Do you see something similar in Jewish tradition, or is it just this kind of nothingness?
- [11:21]
B
Well, what happens in the Jewish tradition is this idea of resurrection, which I think is meant to be a source of comfort. This is the view that we've talked about as an apocalyptic view that developed, you know, about two centuries before Jesus. And it's a view that Jesus had and John the Baptist and Paul, and most of the early Christians had this view that there'd be a resurrection of the dead. It's distinctively different from what Socrates and Plato and others were talking about. In the Greek tradition, a person dies and their body dies. The body's matter and it decays, and it's going to be gone. It's going to decay, but the spirit is immortal. Some of Plato's dialogues are designed to show that the spirit lives on, cannot die. And so the spirit lives on when the body dies. And so the spirit, in some Greek circles, can be punished or rewarded after death, depending on how well a person lives. In the Jewish Tradition, they didn't have this idea of the separation of the soul and the body. The human being is a solitary thing that is soul and body combined. And that when the person dies, both the soul and the body die. And so the only way to live is to have the soul come back into the body. For the Jewish tradition, that's why at the end, there's a physical, bodily resurrection. But at that resurrection, people will be rewarded if they've been on God's side. And so this is a kind of theodicy, you know, why is that the righteous suffer? Well, we're not really quite sure why they suffer, but in the end and forever, they'll be rewarded. And so this is sometimes talked about as the hope of the resurrection. So it's the idea that what's really going to happen in the long run is going to be good. So you don't need to be afraid of dying, because God will take care of you in the end.
- [13:10]
A
Do early Christians have this Jewish idea of a bodily resurrection, or does it get modified or nuanced at all after Jesus death?
- [13:20]
B
Jesus certainly had this view of a bodily resurrection, as did other apocalyptic Jews in his day. It appears to have been a widespread idea. It was held by Pharisees, for example, and by the Essenes, the people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it's followed the view of John the Baptist and apocalyptic prophets like him. And it was the view of Jesus and his followers. And so this was the view, there'll be a bodily resurrection. That's why when the disciples after Jesus death, when they thought that he had come back to life, they didn't think that, like his spirit had come back to life. They thought that his body had come back to life, that his spirit had reentered into his body, and that his body had been, in fact, glorified, so that now the resurrected body of Jesus, it's still his body, but it's been glorified so that it cannot die again. He's been made an immortal being. And that's what they thought would happen with Christians. The followers of Jesus will be raised from the dead at the end, and their bodies will be raised and their bodies will be made immortal. And so this is what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, how in the future resurrection, it will be a bodily, physical resurrection with the spirit coming back into the body to live forever. And so that was the earliest view of the Christians. And it was the earliest view for the reason we talked about in the previous podcast, which is that the Earliest followers of Jesus were all Jews, and they didn't change their ideologies about or their understandings of what it meant to be human. At that point. They thought that there'd be a future resurrection of the dead.
- [14:56]
A
Do the earliest Christian people seem to have this idea of the exclusive resurrection resurrection being reserved only for people who follow Jesus, or is this something that develops later on?
- [15:07]
B
It's hard to say whether they all had the same idea. But the idea that appears to have been adopted by Jesus and Paul and the people who are kind of on, you know, who thinking just like they were, seems to be the view advanced in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. In Daniel, chapter 12, the only reference really clear, certain reference to a future resurrection of the dead, where the righteous will be raised and rewarded and the wicked will be raised and punished. And so it appears that this passage was influential on the early Christian movement. The Book of Daniel is frequently misunderstood by readers because the author of Daniel claims to be living in the 6th century BCE, but he's actually probably. This author is actually writing in the second century bce, and so he's part of this apocalyptic movement, an early part of this apocalyptic movement. And that became the view then of Jesus and his immediate followers. But what ends up happening is that over time, non Jews start converting to Christianity. And as non Jews come into the religion, then their views of the afterlife change because they come in with Greek views of what it means to be human.
- [16:19]
A
Is the Book of Daniel then maybe the original source for our modern understanding of heaven and hell?
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B
Yeah, I'd say not quite, because it has this view of physical, bodily resurrection that people are not going to go up to live with God forever in. The idea of the bodily resurrection is that people will be raised from the dead and they will be, you know, they'll live here on earth. This is what becomes the view based on Daniel. Daniel, it's a slightly different thing. The thing is, it's bodily resurrection here on earth. God created this planet. God created earth, and he created it to be a paradise. And humans messed it up, but God's going to return it to paradise the way he designed it. And he designed humans to live in the paradise, so they're going to be living in the paradise. And so that was the original idea of the resurrection. What ends up happening is that as non Jews come into the Christian faith, they bring in their Greek ideas that there's a separation of the soul and the body, and that when you die, your body dies because it's material, but your spirit is not material, and so it will live on. The modern views of heaven and hell are predicated not on Jesus view of a future resurrection of the dead, but weirdly, on Plato's view of the separation of body and soul. And so you don't have the modern ideas of heaven and hell without the separation of the body and the soul, which is not what Jesus thought, but it is what Plato thought chronologically.
- [17:54]
A
When do you think that the idea of this spiritual resurrection, maybe not officially, but took over as the prevalent view in Christianity as opposed to a bodily resurrection?
- [18:03]
B
Yeah, it eventually does take over and becomes the dominant view. And the question is, you know, when does it happen? We don't know for sure, but it looks like already in Paul's lifetime, people are starting to think that way. Reasons for thinking that are first, that when Paul writes 1 Corinthians 15, the chapter I just mentioned, when he's arguing that the future resurrection is bodily, he's arguing against people who appear to think that the future resurrection does not involve the body, but involves only the spirit. And Paul is arguing that the future resurrection that we will be experiencing is the same kind of resurrection that Jesus experienced. And that's why he talks about how Jesus was physically raised from the dead. And since he was physically raised from the dead, it means we will be physically raised from the dead. So Paul's arguing against people who seem to have the idea of some kind of spiritual afterlife, and they're calling the resurrection a spiritual experience rather than a bodily experience. And it's not an accident that he's writing to a church in the city of Corinth, and he indicates that these people in Corinth had previously been pagans. He talks about how they turned away from idols to begin worshiping the Jewish God, but when they turned away from the idols, they didn't turn away from their way of understanding what humans are, which is the separation of body and spirit. So you have that as one indication that already in Paul's lifetime there are people understanding things differently from Jesus. The other indication, though, is that it looks like Paul himself started changing his views. The reason we're thinking that is that in the letters that we can date chronologically to his earliest period. For example, 1 Thessalonians appears to be his earliest letter that we still have in 1 Thessalonians. He clearly thinks that he is going to be alive when Jesus returns and there will be a resurrection of the dead and people will bodily encounter Jesus. And Paul thinks he will be alive at the time. He's one of the ones who will not be dead, he'll be the ones who's alive, who bodily meets Jesus. So that's early on. Later, toward the end of his. If you line up his letters chronologically, toward the end he appears to think that he might die before it happens. And get this in 2 Corinthians and in the book of Philippians, and that he seems to come to think that if he dies before the end comes, he will go and be in the presence of Christ prior to the resurrection. But he doesn't think his body is going to go there. He appears to think his spirit in some way will go join Christ in heaven for that short period before Jesus returns, and then there'll be a resurrection. So it appears that Paul kind of introduces this idea of a dichotomy between body and spirit at the end sometime in his life, probably because he just couldn't imagine that he'd die and be separated from Christ because he's already united with Christ. So surely when he's dead, he's not going to be separated for a while. And so he develops his idea and that becomes then the dominant idea.
- [21:09]
A
So when this becomes the dominant idea of a spiritual resurrection, would the thought of heaven, where your spirit goes and it's all nice and there are angels and whatever else, would that have been an attractive option to non Christians? Especially if you think about pagan views of the afterlife that we talked about at the beginning of the show? Or was it probably not that much of an incentive in terms of conversion?
- [21:33]
B
Yeah, a lot of pagans didn't believe in an afterlife at all. One reason we know it is because we found tomb inscriptions. And in the Roman Empire, in the western part of the Roman Empire, there was a common tomb inscription that was kind of like our. If you see an old tomb today, you'll sometimes see RIP Right? Rest in peace. In the Latin tomb inscription was also a set of initials, but it was seven of them. It was NFF N S, N C. And it stood for non fooey, fooey, non sum, non curo, which meant I was not. I was, I am not, I care not.
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A
So.
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B
So there's time when I didn't exist and there's time I did exist now I no longer exist. And so I don't care. I don't ex. So there was a lot of that. People just didn't think they were going to exist anymore. Christians insisted that you will exist after your death and that there are two options. You can either have eternal bliss or you can be tortured forever and so which do you want? So this is portrayed as a huge incentive in some of the ancient texts that talk about conversions to Christianity that people come to realize that they might go to hell if they don't convert, so they convert. And so Christians did use this as a missionary tool. You know, some people have asked me, well, like, if people didn't believe in an afterlife, why would they be worried about going to hell when they die? Because they don't even think there's an afterlife. And it's kind of like, you know, you've got to, when you come up with a new product, you create the need for the product and then you sell them the product to fill the, fulfill the need. And it seems like that kind of thing where the Christian missionaries are creating the idea that you might roast in hell and it scares people and then they convert. So it's, you know, it's the ancient version of fire and brimstone sermons which continue to be effective sometimes.
- [23:34]
A
So do you think that the role of both Christian views on the afterlife and a fear of death changed in terms of converting people to Christianity? Do you think that role changed over time?
- [23:47]
B
So the fear of death, I think, has always been with humans. And I think the Christian teachings of afterlife for believers was meant to, to resolve that so that many, many Christians still today are not afraid of dying because they think, well, you know, then I'll see Jesus, you know, and I'll be up in heaven and I'll see my loved ones, I'll see my family, I'll see my parents, I'll see my, you know. And so it resolves the terror that many people feel in the face of death. I think today. My sense is that there are several kind of fears that different people have. Some people have all of them. But you know, some people are just afraid of dying. They're not afraid of what's going to happen afterwards. They just, they're really terrified about the process of dying and maybe being in pain, being helpless, being a burden on other people and it dragging on forever and nothing you can do about it. People, you know, some people are really terrified of that. Other people are terrified of being tormented when they die because this teaching of hell has crept into Western culture so much that most people still believe in heaven and hell. The numbers are dropping significantly these days. But a lot of people are still afraid of that. A lot of people are really terrified of non existence. Just the concept that you will not exist anymore is terrifying for people. And I would say that religions and philosophies have always had that in the forefront of their thinking about how to deal with the fact that people are terrified when they don't need to be. And the solutions are varied. In addition to what I said about Socrates, there's a very common line in the ancient world that you find in Epicurean philosophers and in Stoic philosophers. That was basically that, look, you didn't exist before and you were not bothered by it. You know, you were not upset when, you know, here in the south, where many parts are still fighting the Civil War, when the actual civil war is going on, you were not disturbed by it. You were not upset, and you were not upset about the trench warfare in World War I when it was happening. You weren't. And you won't be upset after you're dead because you won't be conscious of it. You have nothing to be afraid of because you won't be afraid then, so why should you be afraid now? And so that was an ancient philosophical view that you found. But you know, the Christians had a different view. The Christian view was you can guarantee what's going to happen to you and it's going to be great. You have to believe in Christ. And if you do, then you know, there is absolutely nothing to fear. And in fact, there are things to look forward to.
- [26:23]
A
Bart, thank you very much. We're going to stop there. We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back with Barth's weekly update. Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by 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 Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospels 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.
- [27:55]
B
This is Barth's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [28:09]
A
And we're back. Bart, what are you up to this week?
- [28:12]
B
Well, I've been able to get some research done this week, which has been a nice change. And as I've said on here before, I've been working on this book on how the ethics of Jesus are different from the ethics of the broader Greek and Roman world. But one of the things I've been thinking about lately is just how the earliest followers of Jesus, they accepted a lot of what Jesus had to say, obviously. But there are parts that, man, they just weren't going to buy. Even the devout Christians, and especially in some of these ethics that Jesus teaches because since Jesus thought the world was ending soon, it radicalized his ethics because, you know, it's going to end soon. And so it changes how you approach life. And one of the things is I think Jesus really meant it when he told people that if they wanted to follow him, they had to give up everything and they had to sell their property and give to the poor. And, you know, we're at the end of time here. And it was not long after Jesus death when people started saying, yeah, he didn't really mean that. And in the second century, you started getting these sermons about people preaching on this passage where Jesus tells people to give away everything. And the preacher, the head of a big church, you know, probably with a wealthy people in there are saying things like, yeah, don't do that. If you give away everything, you won't have any more to give to the church. And so you can't give away everything. You know, be generous, but don't give it all away. He didn't mean that. Don't be that generous, please. So I've just been thinking about how the fairly radical teachings of Jesus get modified with the passing of time and, you know, how they come to be manifest then in later Christian circles.
- [29:42]
A
Fascinating. I have to say I am looking forward to both reading the book and hearing more about it as your research continues. Philosophy is not something that I am terribly familiar with, so I feel like I'm getting additional education from you in not just New Testament studies, but also philosophy. Okay, we are going to move on now to some questions from our listeners.
- [30:05]
B
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 bars.
- [30:23]
A
Okay, we have some good ones this week. First up, it is said that if we translate mark 227 to 28, which is then he, Jesus said to them, sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. If you translate that into Aramaic, it makes more sense than in Greek or English. Is this correct? And are there other such examples? Word translating into Aramaic actually makes more sense. And does it mean that this is more likely to be something that Jesus said, given that he spoke Aramaic rather than Greek?
- [30:55]
B
Right. Okay. It's a very interesting saying. It's one of these sayings that people might know, but they've never really quite thought about very closely because the grammar doesn't make very good sense in English. So it says. So Jesus is trying to explain, the disciples have been going through these fields of wheat or grain, and they've been. They're hungry. They're pulling off grain. They're eating it. They're not supposed to do this because it's the Sabbath day and you're not supposed to be harvesting crops on the Sabbath day. And the Pharisees complained to Jesus about it. And he tries to explain, look, you know, satisfying human need is okay on the Sabbath. And then he says, sabbath was made for man. I'm going to use the not very good, exclusive language. It was made for humans. But for the saying, he'd have to use man. Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. So when I have my students read that, I ask them, what's that? Therefore. Therefore, why is it there? For Sabbath is made for humans. Humans are not made for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. Why does that follow that Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath? Because Sabbath is made to help humans. It doesn't follow. And the reason it doesn't follow is because it's a translation from the Aramaic which does make sense. In Aramaic, the word for human or man, as it's translated, human is the same as the word for Son of Man. It's the same word bar. And so what Jesus said was, Sabbath was made for Baranas, not Barnash, for the Sabbath. Therefore Barnash is Lord of the Sabbath. Now it makes sense. Humans lord it over the Sabbath, not vice versa. It makes sense now. But what ended up happening is that when Mark or whoever translated it from Aramaic into Greek, they wanted to make a statement about Sabbath is made for humans, not humans, but they wanted to make a statement about Jesus as well. So then it becomes so. So Jesus, the Son of man is the Lord of the Sabbath, but it doesn't make sense anymore because therefore it doesn't make any sense. And so that's one of those places where you say, yeah, you know, it actually makes better sense in Aramaic. There are some other things that make better sense in Aramaic. Some of the sayings of Jesus and one of the things that scholars do who are experts in this kind of thing, they tried to do translations from Greek into Aramaic to see what it would look like and to see if it makes sense there. And then the issue is, well, if it makes sense in Aramaic, does that mean it's more likely that Jesus said it? What I would say is that it doesn't show that Jesus said it, but it makes it plausible that he said it. And if he didn't say it, then it's a saying that originated early on in the Aramaic speaking Christian community. And so if you have a saying of Jesus that does not translate back into Aramaic, then that's an indication that he probably did not say it.
- [33:55]
A
So do we have then examples of Greek sayings that just don't work in Aramaic?
- [34:01]
B
Yeah, one of the sayings that sometimes you will find behind the plate at the home World Series, at least when they used to allow you to hold Bible verses up, you see this Bible verse a lot. And it's one people know about from the Gospel of John. In John 3, Jesus is talking to a Jewish leader, a Jewish teacher in Jerusalem, Nicodemus. Nicodemus says, we know you must come from God because of all the great things you do. And Jesus says, truly, I tell you, unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of heaven. Some translations don't say born again. They say born from above. If you're not born from above, you cannot see the kingdom of heaven. And when you actually read this word in context, it appears to mean from above. The word is anothen. Greek word is anothen. If you're not born anothen, you cannot see the kingdom of heaven. Anothen is used throughout the elsewhere in the Gospel of John to mean from above up in heaven. And it makes sense here because Jesus is saying, you've got to have a spiritual birth from heaven so that you can go to heaven. Okay, that's what he's talking about. But it gets translated again because the word anothan has a double meaning. It can mean both a second time and from above. Okay, so it can either be a temporal thing or a spatial thing, depending on its context. What happens is Nicodemus thinks Jesus means a second time. And so he said, well, how can I crawl back into my mother's womb and be born a second time Jesus? No, no, no. I'm saying you have to be born from above. You got to be born from the heavenly realm. And so the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is predicated on the double entende, on the double meaning of this single word. The problem is the Aramaic word for from above is not the Aramaic word that can be mean also. Again, the conversation is predicated on the double meaning of a word in Greek that doesn't have that double meaning in Aramaic, which means Jesus wouldn't have said that in this conversation.
- [36:03]
A
That's fascinating. Thank you. Okay, next question. To get the best possible view of the historical Jesus, should we be looking at the New Testament as we have it today, or should we be including other gospels? Should we be granting the same degree of credibility to the non canonical gospels as those that are in the current canon? Or are the non canonical gospels as a whole so ahistorical that you probably just wouldn't want to use them anyway?
- [36:31]
B
I think the best answer to that is that historians use every source that's available for studying their subject. You look at every source and you treat it equally. You don't privilege sources that religious people think are better sources and you don't disprivilege them because you disagree with their religion. You know, you treat every source the same. When you do that with the New Testament evidence and post New Testament evidence and every other kind of evidence about Jesus, you treat every source the same. So you don't treat the Gospel of Thomas differently from the Gospel of John. When you're trying to see does it preserve historically reliable information or not, you treat them all the same. But when you do that, it turns out that the four earliest Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They tend to have more historical information in them. Matthew, Mark and Luke more than John. So it's not because you're giving them different treatment. It's because you treat them the same. But after you treat them the same and actually do the analysis, almost everybody agrees that the four earlier are better sources, even though they're highly problematic. But it's not because you're privileging them from the outset. It's because that's the conclusion of your study, not the assumption of your study.
- [37:47]
A
Excellent. Thank you another question on a book recommendation, this time asking for your recommendations on a parallel version of the Gospels.
- [37:57]
B
So this is a. It's a very important tool for somebody who wants to study the Gospels in depth, which is to. To read how different gospels tell the same story, what kind of wording they use. And you know, when you compare like ma Matthew, Mark and Luke might have all the same story and like what parts does Matthew have that Mark doesn't have? And what does Luke have that's different from Matthew? And if you can see that on one page, you can just read across the page so that you see this column as Matthew, this has Mark this as Luke. And that's a very, very helpful thing. And a lot of stories are also in John as well. And so if you can get a parallel with all four, that's great. My favorite one that I think is the best one is called the Synopsis of the Four Gospels by Court Aland A L A N D Synopsis of the four Gospels. He has other things that look like that one in titles, but you need to get the one that says that you don't want the one that has a Latin title, which is Synopsis of the Four Gospels because that one with the Latin title will have B in Greek. And there are other ones that have both Greek and English. The English one is the Synopsis of the four Gospels by or the Synopsis of the Gospels by Kurt Allah.
- [39:06]
A
And finally, another recommendation or request for a recommendation. This person says, I've learned a lot about biblical and Near Eastern history through your explanations of textual criticism for a popular audience. But it can be difficult to find a similar survey for things like archaeology, partly because popular audience materials are often written with an apologetic spent. But also the state of Israel has official limitations and interpretations as well. So do you have any recommendations for popular level materials for the archaeology of Syra, Palestine?
- [39:38]
B
So I can suggest authors who are not doing apologetics but are actually just archaeologists trying to figure it out. Most archaeologists today of Israel, both ancient Israel and say Israel in the time of Jesus really don't like the idea of biblical archaeology where you do archeology to prove the Bible. That's not a good thing for most of these people. Several things to say. There's a magazine you should subscribe to called Biblical Archaeology Review the Biblical Archaeology Review bar and it has up to date articles by experts written at a popular level for Hebrew Bible. I like the work of William Dever D E V E R who does not mind saying it like it is for understanding Ancient Israel through Archaeology. And for more New Testament times, I like the work of my colleague Jody Magnus, M A G N E S S who has books on she's just coming out with a book on Jerusalem in the days of Jesus and she's written on Masada and she's written on Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. And she's a premier archaeologist of Israel at the time. And so I think her books would be a good place to turn.
- [40:52]
A
Thank you very much for that, Bart. Now, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about and let people know where they can find more?
- [41:01]
B
So in this talk we were discussing a fear that most people have. Many people have the fear of death and how that influenced both ancient Judaism, but also especially early Christianity, and how various religious views and philosophical views developed in order to assuage this fear that many people have. People who are afraid of having nothing after death, it's an annihilation where there's non existence people being afraid of being tormented after death. People have various fears. But within both Judaism and Christianity there were views that developed that were meant to help resolve those fears, especially within views developed both within Second Temple Judaism and within Christianity that at the end of time there'd be a resurrection of the dead, the bodies would come back to life to be rewarded if they'd been on God's side and punished if they were not. But eventually this became the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell, which is meant to help people understand that in fact life could be good forever if they had the right beliefs. So the fear of death is still with us, but it's still something and people talk about. But these religious traditions are meant to help remove the fear from people's lives so they can get on with things without worrying too much about what's going to happen next.
- [42:19]
A
And would your Heaven and Hell book be a good place for people to go?
- [42:22]
B
For more information, it's where I deal with this and I have a chapter, an early chapter, showing that the fear of death goes all the way back in our culture, voight to our earliest literary writings in the west and on up till now, obviously. But then I talk about how the development of afterlife views were meant to deal with this fear.
- [42:43]
A
Thank you, Bart. Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast and make subscribe sure to you don't miss future episodes. Remember also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com and misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time next week?
- [43:04]
B
We're talking about something I get asked about a lot. Could Jesus read and write? It seems like most people wouldn't think of that. But when people do think about it, they wonder, well, could he really? Does that make sense given his social and cultural context and his historical context? And so what do we know about it? Jesus being able to read and write? Was Jesus literate?
- [43:23]
A
Join us then. Thank you everybody 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.