← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
Kiana
I'm Kiana. And I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free trial@shopify.com different Christian denominations
- [00:31]
Megan Lewis
have different beliefs about the Bible and those who leave the faith have different ideas. Again today, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to talk about how his changing beliefs impacted his views on the Bible and why he finally changed his mind about all of them. 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 and 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 Misquoting Jesus where today we are talking about what pre deconversion Barth believed about the Bible and why he changed his mind. We've also got our bonus segment listeners question right at the end where I'll be asking Bart in what language he reads the Bible. But before any of that, how are you doing today?
- [01:34]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. Not too bad. And getting kind of getting a little bit more downtime, which is never downtime, but it's time to do some other reading and things. And so it's all good. It's all good. Yeah. I keep hearing about what Sarah does, teaching classes and dissertation committees and department meetings and faculty politics. I'm thinking, oh my God, I'm glad I'm out of that.
- [01:58]
Megan Lewis
I was going to ask if you were jealous hearing about all the things that she's doing, but no, no, none except the teaching. None of that sounds like fun.
- [02:06]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. How you doing?
- [02:08]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, very well, thank you. Very well indeed. Glad that the weather is finally easing up and just enjoying some sunshine.
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Bart Ehrman
Good.
- [02:16]
Megan Lewis
Now my icebreaker for today. Before we get into your faith journey, how do you prepare differently for media presentations or interviews in comparison to academic presentations?
- [02:30]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, so by media that's what you mean like interviews and podcasts and stuff like that, right? Yeah, well, it's pretty simple. I don't prepare for those. If I'm being interviewed about a book, presumably I know about it.
- [02:47]
Megan Lewis
One more Time.
- [02:49]
Bart Ehrman
And, you know, if I just wrote it, I may not know about the one I wrote before, but I know about that one. I do prepare for these, obviously, because these are these, you know, our episodes together, because these are focused and sometimes we have to get down in the weeds a little bit. I just need to make sure that I know what I'm talking about. And sometimes I do. When it comes to academic presentations, usually those require a great deal of work, even if it isn't a topic one's familiar with. It's more like writing an article or something where you have to. You have to be. Make sure that you're advancing an argument in a compelling way. And often in those kinds of presentations, you're presenting things people, experts, if either haven't, haven't thought about or have different opinions about. And you're trying to. You're trying to make a case with presuppositions about what they already know. I think for most of the media things, most of the things we do here, most of my podcast interviews, you know, I'm introducing to people things to people that they haven't really thought about much, the things they do with their lives. And so it is a very, very different thing. And the academic presentations are much more difficult in terms of the preparation and the intellectual work that goes into it.
- [04:05]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. Thank you very much. All right, we are talking today about your beliefs surrounding the Bible and how those have changed over the years. And your faith journey, like many people's, has been a long one with several significant shifts along the way. With when you were a boy, before your evangelical conversion, what were you taught about the Bible?
- [04:27]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and I was very active in the church. I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church as soon as I could be. I don't know what the age was, but young, probably preteen. And as soon as I was of age, I became an acolyte. And I served as an acolyte all the way through high school as, like, the head acolyte of my Episcopal Church. And I enjoyed that very much. We had a fantastic priest who had been trained at Harvard as a. In philosophy as an undergraduate and was. I had no idea of that until much later in my life. He's the most kind, gentle, wise, interesting guy. And so. And within all of that context, my, my family went to church and all that. In that context, we almost never talk about the Bible. We were, I mean, we, we cut, you know, we, we believed it, I guess, but like, I, I never had read it, or even in Sunday school classes, we might talk about stories and things, but we didn't. It wasn't like, focused on the Bible. In the Episcopal Church, there's a much higher emphasis on liturgy and on the church tradition. And of course the Bible's there and is important, but it's not something we really studied.
- [05:39]
Megan Lewis
When you had your born again experience and converted to fundamentalist evangelicalism, how did that impact your, your relationship to and your beliefs surrounding the Bible?
- [05:51]
Bart Ehrman
So I got converted to a pretty conservative evangelical form of Christianity by a, a young man at the time, he's probably in his mid-20s, who had gone to Moody Bible Institute and was convinced that the Bible was a central aspect of Christian faith and that if you commit your life to Christ, you need to really know the Bible well. And he seemed to, he would quote the Bible all over the place. And I started thinking, man, that's amazing. And I remember trying to talk like friends and things, telling them about how I'd, you know, I'd been born again and how I was trying to convince them to be born again and telling them that, you know, this is required in the Bible. And they'd say, really? And I'd try and look something up. I had no idea where anything was. Looking around, I have no idea it's in here somewhere. And so trust me. And, but I think it's because of that association with this, with this leader and with people who agreed with him that I started thinking that my Episcopal tradition was kind of old fashioned and wasn't really on target. I mean, it wasn't like, inherently wrong, but we had the same set prayers every week. And the Bible was, you know, is important, but. And of course there'd be Bible readings in church and sermons based on it, but it wasn't like the thing. And I started thinking it was the thing. And then I started really thinking, you know, I really want to get to know this better.
- [07:15]
Megan Lewis
Did. With this kind of growing awareness of the Bible as an important aspect of your faith, did that come with an understanding of it as an inerrant, inspired text?
- [07:29]
Bart Ehrman
It did. And I, I think that probably I had thought that ahead of time. I just thought it was the Bible, you know, okay, it's the word of God. I guess I would have said that. And that, you know, I would never would have expected there'd be like mistakes in it or anything. But then when I became an evangelical, I began much more committed to it, started reading it, reading it, seriously thinking about it. And because of the people I was surrounded with who were involved in the same kind of religious faith in my religious community then outside of the Episcopal Church, I started, you know, really thinking this is the inspired word of God. And if we want a revelation from God about how to behave, how to relate to each other, how to relate to God, how to be saved, if we want to know what the correct doctrine is, it's all here. And since it's all here in this book, this book does not have internal contradictions or anything like that. I think originally, like, until I was probably started at Moody, I never even thought people knew there, thought there were contradictions or anything. It's just. But then I started realizing they did, and we had to learn how to defend against that. And so inerrancy became a big deal when I was. When I was at Moody because we had to. We had to defend the integrity of the Bible.
- [08:44]
Megan Lewis
So did this change, this shift towards evangelicalism, affect how you viewed the whole Bible, or was it confined to specific books? So I can see it having a really significant impact on maybe the book of Genesis or how you viewed the book of Genesis in terms of it being more historical, less mythological, that kind of thing. But maybe it didn't have such an impact on your views of the book of Deuteronomy. How did that work?
- [09:12]
Bart Ehrman
We understood that the Bible contained the 66 books that God had inspired, and that even though God used human authors who had different views and different writing styles, he guaranteed that all of the words in the Bible were completely accurate. We. We didn't have firm. Some people had firm ideas about it happen how. How it actually happened. In my circles, we didn't think that God had dictated the words to different authors. It wasn't a dictation theory of inspiration because we thought, well, look, these authors do have different writing styles and they have different interests. And that shows that at least some kind of human element is involved. But God made sure there are no mistakes in there. And it's true from Genesis to Revelation and that it's. Ultimately there's one author, and so he may have spoken through various people, but it's one author. And so there were some books that were culturally more important important or religiously more important to us than others. We were more interested in Genesis than Deuteronomy, you know, and the book of Leviticus. Forget it. It's like we'd read it and we would find places where it would be, you know, alluding to Christ or, or, you know, referring to Christ or predicting Christ. But basically, yeah, this is. This parts for Jews you know, and we. This isn't really something for us. And so it wasn't a concern, but we still thought it was inerrant. But with a book like Genesis, where you have a description of the creation of the world in six days and that God is the sovereign of the world, and this is how it happened, it clearly stood at odds with what people were saying in secular universities, teaching geology classes and biology classes and things. And so we just thought they were wrong and the Bible was right. And so that made Genesis more of a debating point for us. And so for that reason, it became more important. And generally, there were some books that were seen as more important than others. In the Old Testament probably have been Genesis, the Psalms and Isaiah, say the New Testament. You know, everything's important, but the Gospels and Paul were especially important, and so really had to do with what we saw as the books that were most relevant to our faith and to people who were challenging things that we said about our faith.
- [11:37]
Megan Lewis
So would it be fair to say that while there weren't any, maybe drastic shifts in what you thought about the Bible, going from your time in the Episcopal Church to the evangelical denomination, it was an intensification, The Bible became more important, more relevant, something that you spent more time thinking about.
- [12:01]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you know, it's kind of like, I guess it'd be kind of like a kid who plays a bunch of different sports, you know, and they, you know, they dabble around. They play some baseball and they play football and they play basketball, they run track, they do wrestling. You know, they. They do the various things and they. But at some point they decide they're going to become a tennis player and like a. And they want to be like the best tennis player in the world. And all they do is tennis. They eat, treat, drink and sleep tennis all day long, every day. And it's more like that. But, um, it's not that I had anything against the Bible or anything. I just didn't see its centrality. And then when I became a born again Christian, especially when I went to Moody, it became the central focus of my life. And so much so that, like, at Moody, you know, when. When my friends from high school were taking. Were at, you know, research universities or private liberal arts colleges, and they were studying things like, you know, Victorian literature and geology and Biolo and, you know, philosophy and things. I was studying the Gospel of Mark, you know, and. And, you know, first Peter. And so, like. And so. And I was really intense in that, I think unusually intense, even among Moody students who took the Bible for granted, but didn't like most of them did not completely throw themselves into actually studying it as much. But then, but, you know, then I started I realized I could memorize entire books of the New Testament. So I started memorizing on my spare time. Of course, I chose the shorter books. I thought they'd be easier. But I did. I memorized books word for word. And so that was quite different. That's quite different for being an acolyte in the Episcopal Church.
- [13:48]
Megan Lewis
We're going to take a brief break. We have an announcement. And when we get back, we're going to be I'm going to be asking Bart about what what prompted his his shift in how he thought about the Bible and his deconversion. So today I would like to tell you about a new course we're launching this summer called Judaism before Jesus with Dr. John J. Collins. Now, Bart, for listeners who might not know the name, can you tell us a little bit about Dr. Collins, please?
- [14:13]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'll tell you, if anybody has ever studied the Hebrew Bible in any serious way, they know who John Collins is. He is he is one of the greats of Hebrew Bible scholarship in, in our generation period. I mean, he Hebrew Bible and sec what they call Second Temple Judaism. Second Temple Judaism refers to the kind of Judaism that's being practiced when the second temple was built. So it's basically the first it's like the 400 years or so, 450 years before, before Jesus, when Judaism started developing in important ways. And there's all sorts of interesting literature there, including Jewish apocrypha, which are in the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions, are included in the Bible apocryphal texts. But also they're just a range of authors and events. And it's absolutely fundamental for understanding the historical Jesus. And John Collins is an expert in all of that. He's written the best textbook on the Hebrew Bible that is used, in my opinion, in undergraduate courses and seminaries. And he is one of the world's expert, you could argue the world's expert in Jewish apocalypticism, which we talk about a lot here on this, on the program, because Jesus himself is an apocalypticist. And so John is a major expert in all of those things. He taught at Yale University for years and years, and we are really lucky to have him do this course for us.
- [15:45]
Megan Lewis
And in this course, he's going to be exploring how Judaism actually developed between the Old and New Testament. So looking at the rise of apocalyptic ideas, the Dead Sea Scrolls, messianic expectations and the diverse Movements that really shaped the world that Jesus was born into. Which, honestly, just sounds absolutely fascinating. And if listeners are interested in that, you can get early bird pricing until May 2nd at bart ehrman.com forward/judaism before Jesus. And as always, make sure you use the code MJ podcast for an additional discount. Okay, we're going to get back to your views about the Bible, Bart, and how they changed over the years. And I want to just finish up looking at your time as a committed evangelical. Did your beliefs about the Bible remain relatively consistent while you were within this denomination or did they change and shift?
- [16:39]
Bart Ehrman
So when I, when I was at Moody, Moody was a three year degree program. And I would say that during those three years I, I retained my view that the Bible was inerrant in, in every way, whether it was talking about God or Christ or evolution. It was, whatever creation, it's all, it was inerrant. After that, I went to Wheaton College and I remained. I was still a very, very committed evangelical. I was still a youth pastor in a CH church and was still intensely involved in biblical studies. But I was also taking a lot of courses. I was taking mainly courses in things like a Western intellectual history and, you know, and things you have to take in a liberal arts college, including some sciences like geology, but you take, you know, music and art and you take English and you take. And I was majoring in English. And I would say there that my view started broadening a bit away from my narrow fundamentalism that I had at Moody. But I continue to be a committed evangelical. I think by the end of Wheaton, took me two years to get that degree. I probably, I still would have said I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, but I was kind of leaning toward not being quite so sure about some parts of it.
- [17:56]
Megan Lewis
Were there specific parts that were giving you pause?
- [18:03]
Bart Ehrman
You know, the one thing that really happened to me, I, is I started reconsidering my political and social views about things independently of my religion. I had been raised Republican and I had been Republican my whole life. I was, I was the only kid in my high school, in my crowd who actually supported the war in Vietnam. I believed in the domino theory. And I, you know, I was a conservative politically and socially very conservative. But then during the, the election, the Jimmy Carter election in 76, I, I actually flipped to become a Democrat. I started becoming more socially liberal and started realizing that I thought that was more in accordance with the Bible. But then I started finding passages in the Bible that seemed to be kind of problematic for my social agenda. And I started wondering about this and kind of wondering about, well, you know, here the Bible's kind of like this, but here it's kind of like that. So, huh. I mean, so I think it's inerrant, but like, how's that work? Exactly. And so that. That, for me, that was more. That was the main tip for me.
- [19:07]
Megan Lewis
It's really interesting to hear because something that you and I have spoken about before is how people tend to characterize your. Their understanding of your deconversion. And they. They tend to say that, oh, you discovered there was like a mistake in the Bible, and then everything went out the window. And that's clearly not what happened. You had already started reconsidering your views before you started this kind of deep philological search.
- [19:34]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, the ground has to be prepared for the seed to be planted. And so I think this is kind of the preparing of the ground and, you know, my concern for the welfare of people and wondering, you know, why so many of my conservative Christian friends didn't have the. That kind of view about being as concerned for welfare. Not everyone, of course. Some of my friends from Moody have done wonderful things for the world in terms of helping people in need, so I'll say that. But. But generally, I felt like I was entering a different world. Then when I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, it wasn't a. It wasn't an evangelical seminary. Absolutely Christian. I mean, they're training Presbyterian ministers, but they had different views of things. And it took me a long time, actually, to cotton onto that and to. To start realizing they might have something to say. But I eventually did and ended up changing my views.
- [20:30]
Megan Lewis
What was it that prompted you to. To start, I say, prompted you to start like it was a conscious choice. What prompted this shift, this change in views, once you got to Princeton?
- [20:41]
Bart Ehrman
So. Well, the thing is, it's a story I've told a lot, so people may have heard it before. They've heard me talk, but there's, you know, I was. My first. My first semester, I'd taken a course on the Gospel of Luke, and the professor was fantastic and really bright, seemed to know everything, but, you know, he thought like Luke, you know, what? Had mistakes in it. Man, this guy doesn't know very much if he thinks that, and he couldn't wreck. And he talked about difference between Luke and Mark and stuff. And that's not a difference, you know, because I could reconcile anything in my head. And so the second semester, I took a course on the Gospel of Mark with A different professor who was a very pious, kind of famously pious person around Princeton Seminary, very devoted Christian. I don't know that he would call himself an evangelical, but for all practical purposes he was, in terms of his beliefs. And he was an expert in Greek and Hebrew and read these texts very carefully in Greek and Hebrew. And I took a class with him on Mark, which was on the Greek text of Mark. We spent the semester studying Mark in Greek. And so ahead of time I memorized all the words in Mark that were in Greek so I didn't have to look at them up in a dictionary. And I would. And so I was intensely in this. And our final paper had to do with. We could do anything we wanted for a term paper in, in Mark's Gospel, in chapter two, there's this passage where Jesus disciples are eating grain on the Sabbath day. And the Pharisees see them doing this and are upset and tell Jesus to make them stop. Because this, you know, you're letting your disciples eat on Sabbath, it's not allowed. And Jesus tells them that they need to. Jesus rebukes them and says, look, don't you remember what happened in the, in the, in the Bible where David and his men were hungry and they, they went into the, the tabernacle when, when Abiathar was, when, when Abiathar was the high priest. And they ate the bread on the, the show. Bread that only the priests are supposed to eat. The Sabbath is made for humans. Humans are not made for the Sabbath. And he, and so he tries to explain that you can meet human need on the Sabbath. So I was going to write a paper on that. And the paper was involved with a very picky little detail. It wasn't the interpretation of the passage per se. There's this little detail. He said this happened when Abiathar was the high priest. But when you read the passage in 1st Samuel, Abiathar was not the high priest. His father Ahimelech was the high priest. And so this was like one of those famous contradictions that people had pointed out over the years that I, as a good evangelical Bible believing person knew was not a contradiction. So I had to prove it was not a contradiction. And so I write this 30 page paper dealing with the Greek grammar, explaining at great depth why it is that even though it says Abiathar was the high priest, it didn't mean that Abiathar was the high priest. And so the thing was that this professor, unlike these others that I had, I knew was really devoted to Scripture. Sure. And down. And he's in the details and all of that. And at the end of my paper, he just. He gave me an A on the paper. He liked the paper. He said, you know, maybe Mark just made a mistake. And when I heard that, I thought, what? Huh? Wait a second. That would be easier coming up with this 30 page, dancing around the problem. And so that. So it is. I can see why people say, like, a mistake changed my life around. And it, you know, there's kind of an element of that. But what it did is it kind of put a chink in my armor. God, maybe it is a mistake. Then I started reading around in Mark, and. And I really. You know, earlier in Mark, in chapter four, Jesus talks about, gives the parable, this mustard seed. And he says the mustard seed, which is the smallest seed on earth. Mustard seed's not the smallest seed on earth. But if you're a fundamentalist, it's got to be literally true down to the. You know, you start seeing stuff like that, and it shakes you and it makes you reconsider things. So that. That was the beginning of my reconsidering things.
- [24:42]
Megan Lewis
Did that lead to simply a reconsideration of the Bible as inerrant and infallible, or did that lead to a reconsideration of your faith as a whole?
- [24:51]
Bart Ehrman
Well, for me, those things were intertwined at the time, so that I don't think they were necessarily justifiably intertwined, but in my thinking, driven into me at Moody, that the Bible is the core of the faith, and if the bi. Of the core falls apart, where are you? And so I was a little. I was pretty nervous, actually, about even going down that road. But I. I started trying to think about how could the Bible be inspired by God if it's not inerrant? And I realized, in fact, I came to realize, because I did a lot of reading on it among biblical scholars and theologians, I realized there are a lot of. There are a lot of people who are firm believers in the Bible who don't think it's literally inerrant. And so I started developing other views about how the Bible conveys God's word and that, you know, God's. You know, God's not overly concerned about which seed is the smallest seed on the earth. You know, he's not really that concerned about whether it was Abiathar or Ahimelech, his father, who was the high priest at the time. He's concerned about conveying his. This truth for salvation and to help us understand how to live together. And so, so I started developing theories of inspiration. I didn't develop them and there were ones that other people had. I started accepting other views that, that still said that it is absolutely God's word that's communicating to us, but is not inerrant.
- [26:15]
Megan Lewis
So this must have had quite a substantial impact. It clearly did. Did you ever question your career choice as a result of this shift in understanding of the Bible?
- [26:26]
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- [27:13]
Bart Ehrman
Not my career choice at that point in my life because I, I continued to think it was an inspired book. I, I started seeing more and more contradictions and started, I continually was, was having to shift on my view of inspiration because I started realizing that these differences or these contradictions or these mistakes were not just tiny little things, but they were sometimes big things like understandings of salvation and who Christ was and you know, the, the nature of God and all sorts of things within the Bible. And so it was a time of struggle for me. One thing that kind of kept me going was when I graduated from seminary. I pastored a church for a year, the Princeton Baptist Church. So I was a Baptist minister for a year, American Baptist, preached every week and almost every week, three weeks out of four, I guess, and was on the radio and that kind of stuff. And so, but having to deal with this congregation, I think kept me in the faith because I realized there's a lot of needs here and I really, I need to kind of hold this together for these people. I think when I left there, I kind of, I left that position. I was just one year interim kind of thing. I, I was open more toward moving farther away and. But it was, it was, it was some years later probably, oh, I got, it was After I moved to Chapel Hill, it was probably in the mid-90s. So it was, you know, long after that, that, that I actually left the faith altogether. And I never had questions about my career leading up to my leaving the faith because I thought that I was, you know, it's still important to understand the Bible historically. What? What, What? Historically and as literature, whatever your view of inspiration is, it's just important to understand it. And so I was. I was happy then. And then even when I left the faith, which, you know, 30 years ago or so, I never really questioned my career because the Bible still hugely important. Even if I don't think it's inerrant, it's still this. This, you know, it's the most important book in the history of civilization. I mean, people don't like when I say things that bold, but it's absolutely true. I mean, you. There's nothing like it. There are other books. They're hugely important, but. And so why wouldn't you study it? And so I've never really had any questions about my career at all. And most of what I teach today or was teaching until two months ago would have been stuff I could have taught when I was still a professing Christian and did teach when I was a professing Christian, not when I believed in inerrancy, but when I still thought the Bible in some way was God speaking to us. I taught the same stuff then as I taught later. And so because it's historical, what I teach is historical. It's not. Not theology.
- [30:14]
Megan Lewis
Final question for this week. When did you finally decide that the Bible could not have been an inspired text?
- [30:21]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I suppose I believed it could not be inspired by God at the moment that I stopped believing there was a God. And so I continued to think as a. As a liberal Christian, going to church every week, teaching Sunday school and such, taught adult education at the, you know, at the local Episcopal church here in. In Chapel Hill, the Chapel of the Cross. I would actually, my. My good friend Dale Martin, who's also a New Testament scholar who ended up at Yale also, he and I would teach Sunday school today together. We do. We do a Sunday. We do an adult education class, kind of a point counterpoint thing. It was a lot of fun. So I did that until I left school. I did that until I. I left the faith. But leaving the faith then didn't really, you know, it. It made me. It made me leave the faith, but it didn't make me, you know, change anything else. I don't think I answered Your question, but because I forgot what it was.
- [31:23]
Megan Lewis
You kind of did. I was asking when, when did you finally stop viewing the Bible as an inspired inerrant text?
- [31:28]
Bart Ehrman
Oh yeah. So I continued to, even when I was in that kind of liberal faith, when I was, you know, thinking that the Bible was inspired but not like inerrant or anything like that, but that somehow God spoke through the Bible. When I was still in that phase, I, I still thought that, I mean, I, I thought it all the way up until I gave up my belief in God. Once I believed, gave up my belief in God, I couldn't believe anymore that God inspired the Bible. And so then I thought it was purely a human book. And that's, that's why I still think today.
- [31:57]
Megan Lewis
That's all for today's interview. Bart, thank you so much. We are going to make move to this week's bonus segment which is listeners Q and A. And if you do have questions for Bart, you can go to bart erman.com/ask bart and submit them right there. Okay, first question. But was Jesus crucified naked?
- [32:18]
Bart Ehrman
I assume so. I don't, we don't know. I mean, we don't know, but I, I don't know. It's a great question. We don't have, you know, the thing, the weird thing is we don't have detailed reports of crucifixion from the ancient world. So we, we actually don't know for sure how, how it worked. And people sometimes have questions like, okay, so you have this cross beam and you've got the upright and they obviously have to nail the person before the upright is upright. So how do they make it upright? How they make it stand still? I mean, how do they use pulleys? Do they use ropes? Do they what, how do they do it? And then how do they secure it? How high off the ground is it? How do they nail them? And, and so we have very limited information. We don't have descriptions of it from the ancient world. We have descriptions of people on their crosses and we have indications about things like some Roman soldiers thinking it'd be humorous to crucify somebody in a bizarre shape, possibly to intensify the pain. But we don't have, we really don't have descriptions, detailed descriptions. And so we don't, I don't think we know if they actually strip them naked or not. We may know, but if we know, I don't know.
- [33:46]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. What do you believe were the distinct personal characteristics of Jesus, such as charisma or storytelling ability that made him such a uniquely compelling figure to those around him, such that an entire religion would spring up following his death.
- [34:04]
Bart Ehrman
I don't think Christianity sprung up because of the charisma of Jesus. Most people think that you'd have to have a charismatic leader who could transform the world in order for the world to be transformed. And, you know, on the surface that seems right, but I don't think it's right. The reason Christianity took over the world was because people believed that he got raised from the dead. His disciples after his death claimed they saw him and that he had come to life again and that's what converted people. So I don't know that he was uniquely charismatic. I do think he had 12 followers, 12 men followers and at least a handful of women. I don't know how many more followers there were. I think that the stories in the Gospels about him having hundreds of people, even thousands of people following him and listening to him are very serious exaggerations. I don't think it could have worked that way when you know something about the demographics of Galilee and the economy of Galilee and how people had to work for a living and how people didn't go tramping around the countryside the whole time following preachers. And so I think those are. I don't think those are historically accurate stories. So I don't think we. I don't think necessarily we're talking about somebody with unique charisma, although people tend to think that about Jesus. I don't. I don't think that that's a necessary conclusion. I think he had a group of followers, and lots of people have groups of followers. I think the difference in Jesus case is for some unknown reason unknown in terms of why him and not others. His followers, some of his followers came to think he got raised from the dead. And I think that's what changed everything, not his charismatic teaching.
- [35:52]
Megan Lewis
The next person would like to ask who is the first person in history to claim that the Gospels or books of the New Testament are inspired, and which ones did they claim were divinely inspired?
- [36:04]
Bart Ehrman
It's a difficult question to answer because they are quoted as being scripture very early. The book of First Timothy in the New Testament quotes one of the sayings of Jesus that you can find in Luke and puts it together with a quotation of the Torah and calls them both scripture. So that. So that it looks early on that the followers of Jesus were citing the words of Jesus as equal to the Hebrew Bible in authority. That's not the same thing as saying that the book is inspired Scripture, you see what I mean? You can have a quotation of Jesus that's not in a book of Scripture. And so they're quoting the same of Jesus. It's not until you get to Justin Martyr around the year 150, that you have an author who quotes the Gospels and calls. He calls them the memoirs of the apostles, but he doesn't call them. He doesn't say that these books are Scripture. The first time you start getting people talking about them as inspired books from God that are authoritative because of their inspiration. I suppose it's probably Irenaeus around the year 185, so the end of the second century, then Tertullian soon after him. Climate of Alexandria right around the year 200 is when it starts becoming more common. And so this is, this is part of what I'm doing my work on now for this next book on the canon is when were these books considered to be scripture? And because that relates to when they started calling them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, because before they're called Scripture, they weren't called that, so far as we can tell.
- [37:53]
Megan Lewis
Final question for the week. How often do you read the Bible in English as compared to reading it in Greek and Hebrew? And when you do read it in English, why do you do that instead of the original languages?
- [38:06]
Bart Ehrman
Because I'm being lazy. It's like it's harder to read it in the original language. I tend to read if I really want to. If I really want to see what a passage says, I'll read it in Greek Week. If I'm quickly looking for something like, oh God, this parable is in, in Luke 11. Where is that? You know, you know, I think, oh God, I just opened an English. Like, I can find it like that. Whereas with the Greek thing, you're kind of reading through it. Oh, oh, there it is. And so, so if I really want, like, if I'm doing anything serious, like studying or anything, I'll do it in Greek. The nice thing with the, with the Greek Bible is that it comes out now in many different versions. And so one very convenient way to do it that I actually do this with my classes is I'd have a facing page edition where it has the Greek on one side and then a translation on the other side. And so if you're trying to read a long passage in public or something, you know, it's usually not a good idea just to translate it on the spot from the Greek. I mean, you can do that, but it's, you know, invariably you'll Find some words. Ah, wow, I forgot what that word is. And then you think, so you don't want that. Plus, it's harder, right? It's harder. So you just read the English and then if somebody asks a question, you just look at the Greek and answer it. And so, but I, for my study purposes, I always, I always read it in Greek, but for quickness of reference, like if I want to just whip through Matthew and try and remember like, like that, I usually will do that in English. English. The Hebrew Bible I basically read in English. My. It's. I just have not kept up my Hebrew enough because I've got too many other things my plate. I don't have time to, you know, I'm not like Megan and Josh here who like can read Hebrew. Oh no, my Hebrews Morning, morning newspaper. It's like, it's not like that. Yeah, well, but Megan does have a, you know, she does have a spouse. She can say, josh, what is this? And you know what? Yeah, my spouse does Shakespeare. She doesn't do Hebrew. So yeah, so I do English for the Hebrew. But, but I can look things up. You know, I, I am regularly looking things up in Hebrew, but that's more of a chore because that's not, I'm not as proficient at it anymore as I used to be.
- [40:19]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much, Bart, for all of your questions. Now, before we finish for the week, could you please remind us what we spoke about today?
- [40:26]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about how my belief in the Bible changed over the years. I'm a big believer in people changing what they think based on evidence. And that that happened to me, I think it certainly changed my, I've certainly changed my views about the Bible and how it affected my understanding of the faith. And so it's a, it's a personal story, but it's one that other people have shared, even non biblical scholars, a lot of them have changed their views and I think that that's okay. And if you think the truth leads you that way, that's absolutely the way you should go.
- [40:56]
Megan Lewis
Audience, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. you can also use that same discount for Dr. Collins course and you can find that at bartehrman.com forward/judaism before Jesus. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?
- [41:25]
Bart Ehrman
Well, for the, you know, the past 150 years or so, Evangelical Christian, Protestant evangelicals believed that before the end of the world comes, Jesus is coming back to take his followers out of the world prior to the disasters that are going to strike during the tribulation. So Jesus taking his followers out of the world is called the rapture. And many, many evangelicals still believe that there's going to be a rapture. Some are expecting it soon. We're going to talk about whether the Rapture is in the Bible.
- [41:59]
Megan Lewis
Make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on bart Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel. So you don't miss out from Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.