← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
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B
When you're raised in a single faith tradition, it can be easy to miss the fact that modern Christianity contains a wide variety of denominations, theologies and disagreements. So too, it can be easy to miss the fact that ancient Christianity was by no means a single unified religion. Today I'm joined by Dr. Paula Fredrickson to talk about the huge variety present in early Christianity and her new book, Ancient Christianity's the first 500 years. 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 Misquoting Jesus. Today I am joined by Dr. Paula Fredrickson, formerly a Professor of Scripture at Boston University. Dr. Fredrickson currently teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity and on the pagan Jewish relations in the Greco Roman world. Her publications include Paul the Pagans, Apostle and When Christians Were Jews as well as her most recent publication and the topic of today's conversation, Ancient Christianity is the first 500 years. Dr. Fredrickson has also been a consultant on a variety of media projects including the BBC series the Lives of Jesus. Dr. Fredrickson, thank you so much for
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C
joining me today and thank you for having me.
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B
It's my pleasure. Before we get into the book, I wanted to open by asking how you first became interested in the study of the New Testament in early Christianity.
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C
Well, like most things in life, it was by accident. I went to a college that before, just before I got there, had required all students to take Old Testament in the fall and New Testament in the spring. And when I got to Wellesley, they that requirement had been relaxed, but the faculty was still really enormous because it had been a service for the entire college. So I started Studying Christianity in the medieval period and kept slipping backwards. You know, why are the Middle Ages like this? Well, I think I'll go to Roman antiquity. Why is Roman antiquity like this? I kept slipping backwards until I bumped into the Gospels and was interested in the. And particularly in the spread between Christian origins and when Christianity becomes an arm of the imperial government. And that's what the book is about too.
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B
Perfect, thank you. Now, I said the title earlier, Ancient Christianities, and as the title suggests, it looks at the variety present in the development of Christianity. So the variety of beliefs, voices, texts, among other things. Has this diversity always been a research interest for you?
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C
Very much so. The self image of Christianity is, as you've already mentioned, a kind of uniform faith tradition. And it turns out that that was never the case, and that is loudly obvious in the New Testament collection itself. I should add that the New Testament is a 4th century anthology of late 1st and early 2nd century documents. It doesn't represent the full spread of what we have from Christian writings, so that there's broad diversity. And what's interesting is some of the texts that were left out of consideration when the official collection was put together again by the imperial church.
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B
I have to say one of the most interesting parts of doing this podcast for me is hearing about those non canonical texts, the ones that didn't make it into the New Testament, and talking about what they contain, why they're not included, and all of that kind of thing. What prompted you then to write Ancient Christianities as a standalone book for non specialists? Two things.
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C
The first is that there's a wonderful book that was written in 1967 by Henry Chadwick called the Early Church, which covered the same spread chronologically, beginning in the first century with the first chapter and ending in the sixth century with the last chapter. And it's a wonderful book, beautifully written. Chadwick knew everything, but it's a history of theology approach. And I thought, well, we've learned so much about the social world of early Christians, there's been such a surgeons of interdisciplinarity, so that all sorts of different methods are now taken to this material. And in short, the ancient Mediterranean and 2025 isn't the same place that it was in 1967. So I thought it was time to do it again. And I also wanted to recon conceptualize the approach because again, Chadwick does this single arc of historical writing from the first century to the sixth century. And what that does invariably is give a false impression of clarity. Right, you, you're developing a narrative that that's a smooth development. What I wanted to do is emphasize and savor all of the different diversity. So each chapter in my book is thematic. Each chapter begins in the first century and goes to the sixth century and. And emphasizes again, the great variety stylistically as well as substantially so.
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B
Before we get to Christianity specifically, I wanted to ask about the cultural background that Christianity developed. In what role did diversity and variety play in the religious lives of ancient pagans and Jews?
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C
Well, what we call paganism was just normal Mediterranean culture. And by definition, it's incredibly various. It's very local. You have big gods, little gods, medium gods, local gods, family gods. So there's energetic diversity among majority pagan culture, but there's also great diversity among. Within the Jewish community as well. Jews are divided into two big language Aramaic, Hebrew, and the other one being Greek. And that means that these two different populations were reading two different Bibles because. It isn't the Old Testament yet. There's no Old Testament until there's a New testament in the 4th century. But, but the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible done by Jews, probably completed by the minus second century, meant that there is. To the degree that Jewishness played off of inherited texts, these two populations are working with two different texts. And. And in the Diaspora in particular, Jews tended to concentrate in Greco Roman cities. And Greco Roman cities are themselves religious institutions in antiquity. They're not secular spaces. Cities have gods that watch over them and are powers that you want to solicit their goodwill so that the city will be safe. And Jews are living within that context. It's a little bit complicated for them because according to their own ancestral traditions, they are supposed to give their allegiance to only one God, the God of Israel. But there's this awkward social situation. There are all these local gods. They have pagan neighbors, human and divine. So you also get improvisations of Jews managing to deal with these other. These other lower gods who are still. They still know ancient monotheism isn't about the belief in just one God. It's a belief that there's one God on top. So the God of Israel for Jews is the God on top. And meanwhile, there's a certain level of courtesy that has to be extended to these lower gods. That's much more true in the Diaspora than it obviously would be in the homeland. So that's another version of the diversity we see within the Jewish community.
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B
Did this diversity of belief, all of these different gods and within Jewish culture, the two different strains of tradition. Did this cause conflict for people?
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C
Yes, in a way. We have acerbic pagan comments on diaspora Jews because Jews were weird. They didn't eat pork, they circumcised. They took one day off out of every seven. And we know this is what Jewish populations are doing because of these outsider comments on it. And that could cause irritation or bad feeling on the part of these pagan observers. And there's tension obviously. For Jews with how to deal with these lower gods, because by not paying cult to the lower gods, they're not matching the standard that their pagan neighbors would want. So there's tension as well as wide meadows of cooperation as well. Just what makes the story so interesting.
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B
Thank you. We're going to take a very brief break, but we will be back in a minute or two to start looking at the variety in the New Testament. What we can see there Ryan Reynolds
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I'm Bart Ehrman and I'm happy to announce a new two lecture course called Did Jesus Really Exist? I'll be giving these lectures on Saturday, July 19. It will involve as well a Q and A session and the best news is that it will be entirely free. As you probably know, scholars have long maintained that there are non historical materials on Jesus in the New Testament Gospels. But is it possible that Jesus himself was not historical? Not too many New Testament scholars think so, but plenty of other people do. And mythicists, as they are sometimes called, have become a vocal presence on the Internet. They are not a new phenomenon. Mythicists have been around since the French Revolution. But what kind of arguments do they deduce? How strong are they? And what kind of counter arguments would scholars present beyond that? Why do scholars almost invariably agree that Jesus did exist, even if they have different interpretations of his life and different views about what he actually said and did? In this two lecture course I'll be looking at the evidence at some length. Again, it will be on Saturday, July 19th consisting of two lectures and a Q and A, completely free. If you're interested, Please register@Barterman.com. did Jesus exist? I hope you can come. I'm really looking forward to it.
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B
Welcome back, everybody. Before the break, Dr. Fredrickson was explaining something about the variety of beliefs and gods present in the ancient Mediterranean at the time when Christianity was developing. I wanted to jump ahead a little bit to start to look at the New Testament. Your book talks about ancient Christianity's plural, obviously talking about how there isn't this uniformity that modern people might expect and that I'm sure some of the church would like to present to the world. So can we see a variety of beliefs present within the New Testaments that would have been held by early Christians?
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C
If we look at Paul's letters, which is the earliest stratum that we have from this anthology, written probably in mid first century, in the 50s of the mid first century. Not that we have manuscripts that go back that far, but that's when these writings originally would have. He would have originally dictated these letters. There's already diversity because Paul's complaining about it already. He complains about apostles with a different gospel from his gospel coming into his communities. He complains about other. It's an anachronistic term, but Christian missionaries, let's call them, advocating circumcision for followers of Christ who are males. He's dealing with controversy in the city of Antioch when he and Peter have a falling out about whether Jews and Gentiles, who are all Christ followers, should be eating together or not. He's having fights with people back in Jerusalem whom he calls false brethren, which means if they're brethren, they're members of this movement as well. So already with Paul's letters, we have great diversity. And then when we get to the Gospels, and I'm just talking about the canonical Gospels now, there's also evidence of great diversity. The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 21 and following, talks about people who will come to Jesus. This is a Matthean Jesus talking. Some will come to me on that last day and say, lord, didn't we work miracles in your name? And didn't we prophecy in your name? And we drive out demons in your name? And I will say to them, go away, I never knew you. So he's casting these. There's not. He's not saying, no, you didn't do these miracles in my name. He's saying, basically, he's saying, I don't agree with you because I'm Matthew's Jesus and I have a certain stake in my own interpretation. So that's already with Matthew. So there's tension and there's also great, great difference. I mean, the different stories in, for example, Matthew and Luke have two mutually exclusive birth narratives. And in Matthew, Mary and Joseph's hometown is Bethlehem and the wise men come and then the holy family flees from Egypt. And, and then when the angel gives the all clear sign, the holy family goes up to Nazareth and that's how you have Jesus born in Bethlehem but known as Jesus of Nazareth. In Luke, the hometown is Nazareth. The word goes forth that the world should be taxed. They go all the way down to Bethlehem just in time for the messianic birth, then they go back to Nazareth. Those are two mutually exclusive stories. I don't think Matthew knew Luke or Luke knew Matthew, but both of them are looking at the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, seeing that there's a strong Davidic tradition to the Messiah and they're dealing with somebody known as Jesus of Nazareth. So they fix it by having, by each imaginatively generating these two different stories. And the resurrection stories are different. I mean, there's a lot of variety in the New Testament text.
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B
Do. Well, not do, but how do non canonical texts add to this picture? You spoke earlier about having gone further and further back in your own studies getting to the canonical New Testament and that there were a lot of extra canonical sources that you can use to better understand ancient Christianity. How do these show even more diversity than I think a lot of people would realize existed?
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C
Well, first of all, we don't have as many of them still extant as we would like. What we have is church fathers complaining about the existence of these things. Irenaeus and Tertullian are famously grumpy about different non canonical texts. Something like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which fortunately we do have a lot of versions of because Thecla was a popular saint, even though Tertullian denounced this, these acts, as an imaginative forgery. You wouldn't know that from the cult of Saint Thecla that grows up in Asia Minor. And Paul in that story is an ace missionary and a wonder worker. He's got a flashier profile than he does in Luke's version of the Acts of the Apostles. The big find, of course, is the Coptic Nag Hammadi library, which was discovered in the 1940s. I think it was fully translated only in 1991. And those again have the Gospel of Thomas. Lots of different Gospels, lots of different revelations, but they're all Christian. Christ has a high profile in all those writings. Well, they're so various. If you read Irenaeus and then you look at these actual heretical texts, you can see how Irenaeus exaggerates or distorts what these texts actually say. P.S. we don't know why the library was buried. They could have been buried because they were part of the holdings of a monastery that knew the books were going to be condemned and so they preserved them and put them away. So again, there's, even after the period of canonization, you still have a lot of these, call them outlaw texts.
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B
Why do you think early Church fathers were quite so grumpy about all of these different thoughts and beliefs that were rude enough to continue persisting after the canonization?
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C
Why your Church fathers so grumpy? I think part of it is a principled position that truth is one. And if you have the truth, then anybody who disagrees with you or is different from you by definition does not have the truth. So there's, this is also a phenomenon in pagan philosophy. At the same time there's a great emphasis on what's called homo noia, concord, you know, mental noose in your mind, mental concord agreement. And you get the same kind of anxiety in pagan philosophical writings about the true teachings of Pythagoras or the true teachings of Plato as you get in Irenaeus, who's worried about the true teachings of Jesus. By the way, it's Irenaeus who first ventures the idea of a fourfold gospel for good scientific reasons. There are four cardinal directions of the compass, north, south, east and west, and also the faces of the cherubim. Cherubim, in case you didn't know this, have four faces. So therefore, obviously there should only be four gospels and no more of that than that. So there's plenty to fight about and fight with. But I think it's this idea that truth is exclusive, it's not multivocal. If it's multivocal, then it's not truth. And that accounts for a lot of the anxiety and the aggression I think that we find in the Church fathers.
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B
Do we see this kind of anxiety present in non Christian religions around this time? I know you said that people were discussing philosophical writings, what was like the truth and who wrote what? Do you see it also in religious beliefs or is this something specific to the more monotheistic theology that you, you have with Christianity?
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C
That's, that's an awfully good question. I, I think that you see, you see it in Rabbinic Judaism, which is just A minority stream of Jewishness at this point. But you have a tremendous concentration on what is the correct way to interpret the biblical text. The interesting thing about the Jewish documentation, the rabbinic documentation, is that it will present different interpretations of the biblical text and leave it for the reader to resolve. Whereas there's more of a, a hierarchical. I'm giving you your marching orders in the, in the Christian text. And majority culture is just spread out all over the place. It's the intellectuals, the philosophers who worry about this, not the, can we call them normal pagans, Just the normal pagans don't worry about this sort of thing.
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B
People on the ground actually practicing their religion are just living their lives, living their lives.
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C
And also we know again from grumpy church fathers that all of these different populations, Jews and Christians of different stripes and pagans, are meeting together, having meals together, marrying each other. We get complaints about this in the canons of church councils. So there's a tremendous ideology of separation. But one of the reasons the ideologues of separation are so loud is because they're frustrated because all of this even cohabiting co celebration is going on.
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B
I want to jump ahead again, or actually no, backwards to talk about the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. What impact did that have on specifically the diversity and the variety of beliefs and practices among early Christians?
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C
Oh my goodness, it's. It's hard for me to imagine the future of what Christendom would become had it not been for Constantine's decision to become the patron of one particular church. There's argument that he was already from a Christian leaning household well before the year 312, which is the canonical year for his conversion, before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. And he sees a cross in the sky and everything else. But he seems to be already fairly well integrated with bishops. He has a bishop advisor. He's already off and running after. After 3:12 for a good Roman reason. If a God helps you win a battle, the correct way to say thank you to that God is to show respect to that God. And that's what Constantine does with Christ. But he's. He opens the door and there's all this noise of Christians fighting with each other about the right way to be Christian. And one of his jobs as emperor is to make sure everybody's on the same page for two good reasons. One reason is financial. He has to know which bishops to give his financial support to. And the second one is a homeland security issue. If God is angry, he won't be looking after the empire. So Constantine feels very, very much the responsibility to get everybody in the church on the same page, and he gallantly makes several efforts at doing this. It doesn't always quite work, but it did definitely have an effect in terms of motivating other Christians to be less diverse than they were and join the church that's imperially sponsored.
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B
Thank you. I have one final question before we finish up for the day, and that is, why do you think it's important to understand the variety that is present in early Christianity?
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C
First of all, I'm a historian, so I always think it's important to understand, have a clear view of the past. I think that it's important partly because I think an awareness of all this energetic diversity right from the beginning might make modern people more patient of all the great Christian diversity we still have, from papal Rome to Kentucky snake handlers to millenarian enthusiasts to women's movements within churches. And diversity doesn't threaten the tradition. Diversity has always been part of the tradition. If my book can encourage respect and tolerance among different Christian denominations, I would be very happy.
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B
And the book, again for people who are interested, is ancient the first 500 years. It came out late in 2024 and is available in all good bookshops. And I'm sure that your local library could order it also. Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week along with Bart to talk about whether Jesus really claimed he was God. Thank you all. It's going to be a good one. Dr. Frederickson, thank you for your time.
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C
Thank you and goodbye.
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B
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.