← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
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B
The discovery of new texts always sends shockwaves through the academic community. In 1958, Morton Smith, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University, made such a discovery. While cataloguing a monastery library, he found a copy of a previously unknown letter written by Clement of Alexandria which contained within it passages from a likewise unknown Gospel of Mark. Shockingly, Smith later concluded that one of these passages was evidence for a homosexual encounter between Jesus and one of his followers. In this week's episode, we're discussing the discovery of this amazing text, what it actually says, and how scholars have interpreted the intriguing passages it contains. Stay tuned for all of that and so much more.
- [01:14]
C
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 and the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
- [01:35]
B
When you're a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, the texts you work with don't really change that often. The New Testament is, well, the New Testament. So finding a new text truly is the discovery of a lifetime. Today we're talking about fragments of the so called secret Gospel of mark discovered in 1958 and their controversial interpretation before that, however. Bart? Hi, how are you doing?
- [01:59]
D
Yes, I'm doing okay, thanks. Not bad, yeah. How about you, you doing okay?
- [02:04]
B
Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. We were discussing before we started recording our relative frazzled states because, you know, things happen, but no, generally very well. And my question for you to open today is what are you planning in terms of retirement? Are you going to retire or are you just going to kind of do what many academics do and stop teaching and just keep working and researching?
- [02:30]
D
Yeah, I know a lot of academics who quit teaching and like stop everything, you know, and do something else for a while, woodworking or whatever. For me, retirement, I guess retirement would mean retiring from the university job. I was thinking about it kind of seriously a year or so ago and then I changed how I'm doing my teaching so Last semester, my teaching was something I'd never done before, which is to teach two small undergraduate classes. I always teach like this enormous class, like 350 students, you know, with an army of teaching assistants or, and I'll teach that class and a PhD seminar with six PhD students or something. Eight PhD students, because we have a two courses load per semester. Because it's a research university and we're supposed to be doing a lot of research. And so we, that's what we teach. But this last semester I just taught two small undergraduate classes and it was fantastic. Oh my God, it was so much fun. And then I started thinking, why would I want to quit? You actually get to know students and like have them make a difference in their lives. You're not just dancing on the table the way you do with 350 students. And so I, I really don't know. My, my plan a long time ago was to wait till I'm 70 and then decide what to do. And so that'd be in a couple years yet. And at this point I'm just going to kind of play it by ear and see what happens. But the thing is retiring for me is, you know, I do so many of these other things. You know, I do the podcast and I do my blog, which takes a lot of time, and I, I produce these courses online and as I do services, it's like I've got so much to do. But at this point, I think I'll keep doing undergraduate teaching for now anyway.
- [04:02]
B
I have to say, as an undergraduate, some of my fondest memories were the small seminars with six to ten other students and a professor. And you just, you get a more, you write a more personal connection with your teacher and with your fellow students. But I found it much more engaging.
- [04:20]
D
Yes.
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B
As a learner as well, and just more fun.
- [04:23]
D
Remind me where you were as an undergraduate.
- [04:25]
B
University of Birmingham in the uk.
- [04:27]
D
So you didn't, you didn't have the Oxbridge thing? Were you writing your one on one writing essays to tutors that kind of. You actually had seminars, right? Yeah, I'm a big believer in the seminar.
- [04:36]
B
Oh, they're wonderful. My department was small, so even our like whole departmental lectures were still only a couple of hundred students. But no, seminars were definitely my favorite things.
- [04:48]
D
Yeah, yeah, it makes a big difference in a student's life. And that's really what we're here for, is not just to kind of put information in their heads, but to help them think through, you know, in the humanities, to help them think through big Issues to understand about life and where they are in the world and what really matters and what they can matter for their entire life. And the seminar setting really can do that?
- [05:08]
B
Absolutely. Now we kind of teased it a little in my introduction, but the secret Gospel of Mark. What is that?
- [05:16]
D
Yeah, what is it? I know we're going to spending a couple of episodes on the secret gospel because it's, it's a little bit complicated to explain. It's not hard to understand or anything, but there's a lot to it. And as you pointed out, in 1958 there was a professor of ancient history at Columbia, very famous and extremely erudite professor named Morton Smith. He said he discovered in that year an account about a secret gospel that Mark had written. The basic idea is that he, he discovered a letter that was in a monastery library in Israel, a letter that allegedly was written by a 3rd century church father named Clement of Alexandria, who indicated that Mark not only wrote the gospel that we know, but he also wrote a longer version that is for the more spiritual people. And Clement says that this longer, more spiritual gospel had been co opted by a group of heretics who misused it to promote their own kind of licentious rituals that they engaged in. And so they took the secret gospel and maybe added some things to it to make it even more useful for themselves. And so the secret gospel is not like a separate gospel that exists someplace. It's a gospel that Clement in the third century allegedly refers to, but he quotes two passages from it. And so we don't have the entire thing, but we have these two passages according to Clement, and they are very interesting indeed. As you pointed out in your intro.
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B
We'll be getting to the actual kind of contents of those segments in a few minutes. But before we do that, who was Morton Smith? Why was he doing this research?
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D
So Morton smith was a PhD student in America in 1941. I guess he was going to Harvard maybe. And he was already expert as you know, like in his early 20s he could read ancient Hebrew really well and Latin and Greek and he learned modern Hebrew. He was a linguist. He really was very good at languages. And he happened to be in Israel in 1941 and was staying at Marsaba Monastery, which is about 12 miles southeast of Jerusalem. It's a Greek Orthodox monastery that's been functioning for centuries and centuries and centuries. And they had an old library there and they, he was there in 1941 just to, to kind of see what monastic life was like. He's interested in ancient Christianity and modern Christianity. And so he was there and he was really kind of taken with the worship services and the things that monks do, which is really quite astounding by normal standards. But he did notice they had a library there. So he ended getting stuck there during the Second World War because the Mediterranean got shut down. So he spent a lot of time there. So 17 years later, he's back in America and He's got his PhD. He wrote two PhD dissertations on aspects of ancient Judaism and Christianity.
- [08:09]
B
One is hard enough, you don't need to write two.
- [08:11]
D
And he wrote one of them in modern Hebrew. I know, that's what I'm saying. No, he was extremely erudite. And so just more about him. He was professor at Columbia University for many years. He was scary smart. He was always the smartest person in the room, and he knew it. And he didn't suffer fools gladly. So I only met him a couple of times when I was a young graduate student, and he was a very, very senior scholar at that point. And he just scared the bejesus out of everybody and anybody who would cross him. He had a rapier wit and he was sharp, and, man, he could just tear people apart. He would just eviscerate them in front of your ey. So he was really quite fun to be around, but he wasn't somebody you wanted to get on the other side of. So he ended up publishing. Two of his most famous books are on this secret gospel.
- [09:00]
B
Now he returned to the monastery at Marsaba in 1958 with the intent of cataloguing their library. Could you tell us how the discovery of this manuscript came about while he was. He was doing this work?
- [09:14]
D
Yeah. So, you know, ancient monastic libraries usually don't have ordering systems. They just have a bunch of books on their shelves or manuscripts, handwriting written copies of things, and. And unless somebody goes in and catalog them, nobody really knows what's in there. The monks don't spend a lot of time in the library in a place like that. They're spending most of their time praying and working and, you know, time out for eating and meditation in their cells and things, but they aren't spending a lot of time going through their books. And he thought, you know, we've got this old library here, and most of the important stuff had already been taken out of the library and taken to the, the patriarchal library in Jerusalem, the Orthodox library there. But he thought, you know, you. These books here, he was gonna. He had a sabbatical. He thought, I'm going to go back there and catalog it. And just see what's in there. There might be valuable stuff. And so it would have been an arduous task. He just take, goes through this library. You take one book off at the time and try and figure out what it was. You know, if it's a full book that was like, not too ancient, you know, he could figure it out. But often there'll be like, it won't have a cover or won't have a title page, and he has to kind of read through it to figure out what in the world is this. And, you know, unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge what books exist, it's hard to know if this is one of
- [10:28]
B
them, if this is that book, especially pre Internet. It's not like he could just Google a few lines and work it out that way.
- [10:34]
D
No, that's exactly right. And you know, it's religious literature. And he's, he, he was extremely well read. He had one of these memories that you just couldn't believe. And so he could do it. And so he, you know, he'd go one book at a time, trying to figure out what it was and filling out note cards, kind of like a card catalog back in 1958, of what, what the book was, you know, what the title was, if you knew the title, if not the topic and the, the author. And if it was a published book, you know what date it would have been he knew it would have been published in, and that kind of thing.
- [11:02]
B
This discovery is. It's a letter copied into another book. Correct. It wasn't just a standalone sheet by itself. What was it copied into?
- [11:11]
D
So one of the books he's looking at one of the days he goes up there and he's looking through this thing. He's looking through a book that doesn't have a cover and doesn't have a title page. And he starts looking and he realizes that it's an edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius of Antioch is an important figure right after the New Testament period. We have a number of his letters. His writings are considered part of what we call the Apostolic Fathers. He's a very early Proto Orthodox Church father and so been valuable to, you know, Christian theologians throughout all these many centuries. So this is an edition of his, of the, the letters of Ignatius in a Greek edition. And he's rifling through it, looking through it and seeing, you know, how much what, you know, what the contents are. And it gets to the last pages. And the last pages, as often happened in old books, had been left Blank when this thing was produced. He later realized this was a 17th century printed edition of Ignatius. And it's hard to make a book and sometimes you don't have the right. So there were several pages in the back that had been left blank, but there was a handwritten something in it. And somebody had written something on the blank pages of this book. And what he was writing was not a connect with. And he started reading what this writing was. It's in Greek. And he reads it and it says that it's from Clement, the author of the Stromatas, to Theodore. And it's a letter. Stromatas is one of the books written by Clement of Alexandria around the year 200 or so. But Smith, you know, Smith is an expert in early Christianity. He knows we don't have any letters from Clement. We have other books, we have some books from him that are really, really interesting and important, but we don't have any of his personal correspondence and think, oh my God, this is. He knew he was onto something. So the thing was, he didn't have a lot of time to be doing what he was doing. He had a sabbatical and he had this huge library he's trying to catalog. And he decides, look, I don't have time to study this because there might be other stuff like this in here. But he had a camera with him. So this is 1958. You know, he's got a 1950s style camera with him and he takes photographs of the three pages that this letter covers that had been blank pages in this book. So he takes photographs of them and he takes three sets of photographs just to make sure. And you know, obviously these are not digital cameras. So he had film and he took them back. And later when he got back to Jerusalem after his term doing this was almost up, he had them developed. Then he could read, read what it was. He was quite astounded. He suspected it looked to him like the handwriting was from the 18th century. Really good, really good. Greek scholars, unlike like us mere mortals, can look at something and say, yeah, this handwriting is the kind of style they wrote in, you know, the 15th century, or this is the kind of st they wrote in the 18th century. And he thought, seems like it's like 18th century, 17th, 18th, 19th century in there somewhere. But he translated it and he realized it's this letter from Clement describing a secret gospel of Mark that was a longer form of the gospel than the gospel we know about.
- [14:16]
B
So apart from being the only letter of Clement of Alexandria, which is pretty significant in and of itself that survived from antiquity. What other significance did this discovery have? How significant of the discovery was it?
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D
The letter itself would be important, but the letter itself doesn't give us, you know, tons of things that we don't know otherwise, except that it's about this secret Gospel. And nobody thought that Mark had written two versions of the gospel. I mean, everybody know, I mean, all scholars know that Mark comes down to us in different versions. Many people on the podcast will know that a lot of manuscripts, most manuscripts have verses at the very end of mark in chapter 16 that describe Jesus appearing to his disciples and talking to them after his resurrection and so forth, but that the earliest manuscripts don't have, that the earliest manuscripts have Jesus raised from the dead and the women told that he's been raised from the dead, but they don't tell anybody, and it just ends with them not telling anybody. And so he doesn't appear to anybody. So there. So in that sense, there are two different versions of Mark floating around where somebody's added 12 verses. So Clement is not saying that. Clement's saying there's actually a new edition that Mark himself produced for people who were really spiritual. And he quotes two sections of it, one of which seems it could be interpreted in a very interesting way because it seems like it has homoerotic overtones. Then there's another little brief liner that he quotes. But then there's another passage that in this letter, Clement says this other passage that the Carpalcratians say were these heretics who have this, they say, say it was in there. He said it wasn't originally in there. And that line is naked man upon naked man. And he said, yeah, that one wasn't in there. So this is all news, like none of this had ever been suspected before. And so, as you can imagine, Smith is just saying, oh, my God, what in the world?
- [16:16]
B
Thank you. We're going to get into more details on that in a minute, but we're going to have a brief call from our sponsor.
- [16:23]
C
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 gospel's authorship, such 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 any 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.
- [17:43]
B
So we'll get into the exact content of the secret gospel in a couple of minutes, but first, I wanted to ask, are there questions about its authenticity?
- [17:53]
D
Yes. This is something we're going to spend some time on, especially in our second episode, because later, as we're going to find out, Smith published two books about this, explaining the discovery and showing how he verified that this is a bona fide thing, bona fide letter talking about a bona fide secret gospel of Mark. And. But right away, there were suspicions that maybe it was not authentic, that maybe had been forged. And, you know, if it was forged, that opens up the floodgates. Was it forged, like, in the third Christian century? Was it forged in the fifth century? Was it forged in the Middle Ages? Was it forged in modern times? Was it forged by Morton Smith?
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A
Whoa.
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D
Okay. And so right away, there are two things that got people really intrigued by this, and many New Testament scholars continue to be really intrigued by this whole thing. One is, are these really homoerotic overtones in this alleged sea of gospel? If they are. Secondly, does it actually tell you anything about the historical Jesus? Because Morton Smith ended up concluding it does. And the third thing is, was it forged? So those three things continue to occupy people.
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B
And like you said, we will be getting into more of that in a lot of detail in our next episode. But suffice it to say there are questions, some of which have not been answered. Now, who exactly was Clement of Alexandria and what other sources do we know him from?
- [19:21]
D
Yeah. So Clement was a very important church father who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, which by the early third century or so was becoming one of the major centers of Christianity and was especially known for its intellectual life among the Christians. So soon after Clement, there was another church father we've talked about named Origen, who's one of the most important theologians of the first 300 years of Christianity. And Clement himself was a theologian and an ethicist, and he wrote several Books he wrote one book I mentioned earlier, the Stromatas, that means something like the miscellaneous in a sense. It kind of reads like random thoughts, but it's a lot of thoughts about different aspects of Christian life and theology. He wrote some books are about ethics, like how Christians are to behave and how they're not to behave. He was an important church father. He was dead set against various kinds of heresy. He thought that there were heretical groups, groups that were maintaining false understandings of Christianity and he was sharply opposed to them. For people who have heard about Gnosticism, we've talked about Gnosticism some on the podcast. It's kind of a large group of religions that emphasize the importance of secret knowledge for salvation. The irony is that Clement of Alexandria is opposed to a lot of these Gnostic groups, but he considers himself a Gnostic, not in the sense we might think of it as a heretical thing, but as a sense that he had the true knowledge of the salvation that Christ brings. And so he. He is. Before Gnosticism was like a necessarily a dirty word for Christians. It was just, you know, it just describes somebody who emphasizes the importance of knowledge. So he's an important fellow, so something coming from his pen that we didn't have before would be significant.
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B
Now the letter is written against the Carpocrations. Who were they and why was Clement concerned with them and what they were doing?
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D
So the Carpocratians are named after their leader, Carpocrates. We know about him and them from a few other sources, including one that was writing not long before Clement. Irenaeus was a church father living at the end of the second century. He wrote a book around the year 180 or 185 that scholars today call against the heresies. It's a five volume work that names and attacks a number of different heretics, especially Gnostic heretics. And he does mention Carpocrates and the Carpocrations. And since they are the enemy for him, he goes after them as ironies often did with some serious vitriol. And he said nasty things about them. One of the issues that historians have to deal with is how much can we trust what he says because we don't have writings from them. So how do we know if he's actually telling us the truth about what they believe? Believe. But he says what Irenaeus says is that the carpal creations, one of the things they believed is that God had created the world so that it could be shared equally by everyone. And that means everybody. You know, we don't own Our private property. Everybody has access to all of our goods. And so kind of like a. A worldwide communist idea. And the. In the. Not in the, you know, necessarily in the Soviet Union sense or the Chinese, but I mean, everything is shared in common. But according to Irenaeus, the Carpalcratians believe that for themselves and in their community, so they shared everything in common, including their spouses. And so according to here we get to it. So Irenaeus said that during their worship services, the way they would demonstrate their commitment to the equality of all beings is by exchanging spouses and having sex with them in the church services. Okay. The other thing that he said was that the carpal creations believed in reincarnation and that everybody gets reincarnated until they've had every possible physical experience they can have. And once they've had that, then they can move beyond the physical to the spiritual. First they have to have all the. All the requisite physical experiences, and that includes every possible sexual experience. These church fathers, they're always condemning the morals of others, but you can't help but thinking that they're a little bit like, too interested in these things. So there's kind of. Kind of this voyeuristic thing going on some of the times in these church. But so those are the things that said. And so, you know, according to this letter, the carpal creations loved the secret gospel, the longer version of Mark's gospel, and misused it for their purposes.
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B
So is Clement copying these sections of the secret gospel into his letter to explain how they're being misused?
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D
What he's doing is he's explaining to some unknown person named Theodore. So Theodore is a common name. So we have no idea who he is or, you know, if he existed or anything. But he's explaining what the real situation is. That the real situation, says Clement, is that Mark, you know, Mark wrote the gospel that we still have. He did that in Rome, he says. But then later he moved to Alexandria, where Clement is, and he wrote a second edition, a spiritual edition that was only for the insiders. See, only the Gnostic insiders who have the knowledge could handle the. This more spiritual version that has these additions that he quotes that we'll talk about in a second, but that the Carpal Cratians then took the secret thing and changed it even further by explicating what they took to be the overtones of the spiritual gospel, which for Clement means that they expanded it in order to include more justifications for their peculiar sexual activities within the church. And so he's Trying to warn Theodore that it's true that Mark did the spiritual thing, but the way these carpal creations, they have misused it, they've changed it and they've misused it. And so don't worry about them actually quoting Mark. They're quoting their own versions of things.
- [25:14]
B
I see. Now, secret knowledge isn't really a new idea in the ancient world, broadly. And obviously we've talked about the Gnostics today and previously. Is it surprising maybe that there is this entire secret Gospel out there, or is this something that we might expect to happen, happen?
- [25:30]
D
There's nothing surprising about something like that existing. I mean, we have lots of other gospels that are outside the New Testament. A number of them are Gnostic gospels. None of them actually read the way the church fathers say they're supposed to read. In other words, the church fathers have led us to think that when we found Gnostic gospels, it would be like heavy duty, banned in Florida kinds of books. They would be banned in Florida, but not because of the Sacks in this case, because the Gnostic books that actually do exist actually propound a different view of sexuality, which is that sex is something that, because it's pleasurable, it keeps you attached to your body. But the idea of the Gnostic is to escape your body. So if you want to escape your body, you can't indulge it in pleasure. And so this very idea is put upon the Gnostics by the church fathers, but from their own writings, it doesn't appear to be there. So. So if this book does have homoerotic overtones, it would be unusual among the Gnostic Gospels, I'd say.
- [26:29]
B
So Clement of Alexandria clearly thought that these passages were from an entirely later gospel, not original to the first Gospel. Could they have been part of the original and just kind of edited out by later scribes?
- [26:43]
D
This ends up being part of Morton Smith's argument. So what Smith did is he. When he. He found this thing in 1958, he spent 15 years studying this thing before he published books on it. In 1973, he published two books, one for a popular audience and one for scholars. The popular book was called the Secret the Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark. In that book, he writes for a popular audience. It's a fascinating read, really interesting read about how he discovered it, how he authenticated what it really means. And it's more like a detective story story. The other book is an extremely erudite, learned philological analysis of this letter and the secret gospel. It's called Clement of Alexandria and a secret gospel of Mark. It's a very, very interesting. But, you know, most people aren't going to be interested in it because it's really detailed with a lot of Greek in it. So in Smith's analysis, when he gets around to actually analyzing the secret gospel, he makes an argument which is comparable to what you had said a second ago. His argument is that even though Clement said that Mark wrote a spiritual gospel and then later the copper creations expanded it with their additional things, what he argues, what Morris Smith argues, is that the fuller version was the original spiritual gospel that Mark actually wrote, and that scribes took out the more seedy parts because they thought they were just over the top. And so scribes took it out, and so Clement got it reversed so that the longer version actually is the original version of the spiritual gospel.
- [28:22]
B
So what do the preserved passages of the secret gospel actually say, and how did Smith go about interpreting them and understanding them?
- [28:29]
D
So the most important passage is a story that's similar to other stories in the New Testament with a twist. In the story, Jesus is approached by a woman who's from Bethany who says that her brothers died and can Jesus do something about it? So this is very much like the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Jesus goes to the tomb and there's a stone rolled in front of it, and he hears a loud shout from inside. He himself rolls the stone away and goes in. And there's a young man in there, and he takes the man by the hand and he brings him out. He's alive again. And he goes to that man's house. He's there for six days. And on the sixth day, Jesus gives him an order, we're told. And that night the young man comes to him wearing nothing over his nakedness but a linen cloth is what it says. And Jesus spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the kingdom of God.
- [29:28]
B
Okay, not a euphemism I've heard before.
- [29:33]
D
Well, it's an ecstatic experience. I mean, so it's the mysteries of the kingdom. Smith realized. Yeah, that sounds. Wow, okay, a little bit different. But also he noticed this thing about naked man upon naked man, and Clement said that wasn't originally there, but Smith is starting to think it makes sense if that's in there too, because that adds up. And so one of his arguments, which is kind of an interesting argument, that this longer version can explain some things in Mark's gospel that people have long been puzzled by, especially the one passage I get asked about more than any other in the Gospel of Mark, Mark found only in mark, in chapter 14, verses 51 and 52, when Jesus is being arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, we're introduced to a young man who has only a linen cloth over his naked body. And the people arresting Jesus tried to grab this guy. They grab him, but he runs away, leaving the. Leaving his garment in. In their hands. And so he runs away, runs away naked. What is that all about?
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B
That has confused me before.
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D
Well, it confuses everyone, and there are a ton of interpretations about it. But what Smith says, it solves the problem. This passage in secret Mark happens in what would be chapter 10 of Mark. And Jesus is baptized, this man who's wearing nothing but a linen cloth over his nakedness. According to Smith, what's going on is that this young man has come to him for baptism and that it's in the process of baptizing him. This is Smith's interpretation. In early Christianity, when somebody went to be baptized in the river, which is supposed to be baptized in real water, they'd come with just a robe on, but they would be baptized naked. And so they take the robe off to be baptized. Smith is saying that's what Jesus himself was doing. He was baptizing people naked. And that in Smith's interpretation, these people would have a spiritual union with Christ, as Paul talks about in Romans chapter six, that we're united with Christ in baptism. Smith goes further, though, to say that this spiritual union led to a physical union between Jesus and the man. And so it's not just spirit, but it's also body. And so Smith says, look, if that's happening in chapter 10, the man in chapter 14, it's the same guy. It explains why you have this man with a linen cloth over him. This is the guy that was introduced earlier that Jesus raised from the dead.
- [31:58]
B
Interesting. How else has this section been interpreted by other scholars?
- [32:01]
D
A lot of people have pointed out that there seems to be a lot assumed on Morton Smith's part when he interprets this. For example, the passage says nothing about baptism. It says nothing about the man being naked. It says nothing about them having sex. And so they're saying, you know, you know, he's interpreting it this way. But like, the text doesn't say what he says, it says. And so they're wondering if he's like, imposed some other interpretation on it. You know, you could say it's that, but it's bringing all this stuff into the text that isn't there. Smith, he seems a little bit hesitant in the main body of his text to say anything too explicit about the sexual thing. But he has a footnote where he points out that he doesn't think that it's just a spiritual union, but a physical union. Because he says in this kind of magical rite, magical rite like baptism, where you have this mystical experience, there's often some kind of manipulation of the hands in magical rites. And he says, you know, Jesus is known for using his hands a lot in healing miracles. So it's like he's okay, he does it without being as graphic as he could be, but it's pretty clear what he's talking about.
- [33:12]
B
Interesting. Have other scholars offered alternative interpretations or has it primarily been disagreeing with what Smith has argued for?
- [33:19]
D
Well, a lot of it's disagreeing and a lot of it is just saying, look, there are other ways to interpret this. I mean, there's nothing sexual in the passage. There's no baptism in the passage. It's just wearing linen over naked could be like a sign of purity. Like this is a purity thing where the person is simply coming to the presence of God the way, you know, a priest, for example, would come to the presence of God or like a baptized person comes into the presence of God and that Jesus is actually, it says that, you know, he, he's teaching him. It doesn't say that he's, you know, taking him to bed with him. So it's not clear what the passage might mean, if it's original, if it really existed at some point. But I think the, the general sense along among a lot of scholars was that it's just an imposition on a meaning to a text. It doesn't say what Smith is saying.
- [34:05]
B
It says what are some of the ongoing issues or debates about the secret gospel.
- [34:11]
D
So, you know, there's a debate about whether this is actually, is home erotic, as we were just, just saying, saying, you know, one big debate is whether it's original or not, whether this really is a letter of Clement, if it's really written in an 18th century hand, if it really is a quotation of a secret gospel, if Mark really did write a secret gospel or not, or whether, as Morton Smith argues, that Mark was simply a longer gospel that got edited into the version that we have it now. And so these are all questions. And there are very fine scholars, I mean, very, very fine scholars who think, think that the secret gospel of Mark was originally written by Mark, that these passages originally belonged to Mark. They help explain Mark better and that they got taken out. And if you want to understand Mark, you've got to read this longer version of it.
- [34:58]
B
Are there other sections of Mark that would similarly benefit from having something reinserted?
- [35:06]
D
There's another short passage in what Clement quotes of the Secret Gospel which says that, that several women came up to Jesus, including the woman whose brother was brought out of the tomb and a couple of other women and Jesus would not receive them. It's too short to make much of, except for Smith points out that later in chapter 10 of Mark, there's this incident where Jesus kind of comes into Jericho and then leaves Jericho right away. It's not clear what. He doesn't do anything in there, so why is he leaving? But in this, this thing with, in the Sacred Gospel, Jesus leaves these women who wants nothing to do with them. And it would, it would explain this, this kind of curious coming into Jericho and then leaving Jericho right away without any story in there, if that were actually in the Secret Gospel as well.
- [35:50]
B
Thank you. We are going to stop there because I have 8 million approximately additional questions, but we're going to save some for part two, which should be coming to you next week. So we're going to take a brief break and we'll be back with news on upcoming events and then some listeners questions, questions.
- [36:08]
A
This is bart'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.
- [36:22]
B
So Bart, what is going on in your world that you would like to share with us today?
- [36:27]
D
Well, you know, I suppose maybe and technically this podcast, the Misquoting Jesus Podcast, is part of my professional services, the bartim professional services. And the main thing we do apart from the podcast is put on courses online, as people know. And those are always great fun to do and they've done so well that we're expanding what we can do and what we want to do. One of the things we're going to start doing now is actually doing courses. Like semester long courses.
- [36:56]
B
Amazing.
- [36:57]
D
With like, you know, with lectures and Q and A with a professor teaching a topic topic, you know, introduction to the New Testament, the Historical Jesus. The huge number of topics we could do but where people would sign up and it'd be like two lectures a week with quizzes and things and people, you know, and so like people can actually take a course. And so we're, we're working on that now. So that would be a lot of fun. I wouldn't do all of those. I would do occasionally ones, but we'd get Other, you know, I'd get really top. Absolutely get the top level quality people to do a course on something that people are interested in. And we're thinking, man, that would be good. That's lots of fun. Yeah, I think that's going to be, that's not going to be too far off.
- [37:37]
B
I think so. I know you said that you wouldn't teach all of them. What is something that you would like to teach for one of these courses?
- [37:44]
D
I'm a little bit restricted because I've taught a number of courses for the great courses for the Wondrium Group. And I have a contractual obligation not to, you know, repeat any of those courses. But you know, there are so many things that I'm interested in that I haven't done courses on. I've taught so many things over the years. You know, I started teaching universities in 1990. When was that? God, it was like so long ago, I can't remember when it was. It was 1984 when I started teaching. And so I've taught all these years. I've had all sorts of courses on, you know, everything from historical Jesus and the Gospels and Paul and such. Like I used to do a course called Apocalypse now and then for example. And I've taught this course, Jesus in scholarship and film for example. And I've taught courses on the origins of Christianity, Christianity in the second and third century, courses on the, on the history of the Trinity. There's a lot of things that I've taught over the years. You know, the non canonical Gospels could do a whole course on that. Oh my God, easily. So there are lots of things and there are lots of things that other people are experts in that I'm not that are really fascinating and completely related to what we do. And so those are some of the
- [38:51]
B
things that sounds wonderful and we will definitely have more information available as and when. Again, those are organized and available for registration. So keep listening if that is something that you are interested in. We're going to go to listeners questions now.
- [39:09]
A
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.
- [39:26]
B
Okay. We have, as always, an excellent suggestion of questions from our listeners. If you are interested in submitting a question to Bart, you can go to Bart ehrman.com Ask Bart. We will get to all of them. We have a bit of a backlog that we're trying to work through. But your question will eventually be answered. Which is just incentive to keep listening to the possibly greatest podcast on the Internet. Internet. Not that I'm biased or anything. First up for today, did ancient Christians believe that people who weren't Christian would go to hell or suffer for eternity, or were other people allowed to be saved?
- [40:00]
D
Well, it depends which early Christians you talk to. The vast majority would have said, yes, they'll go to hell for eternity. There was a movement within Christianity for universalist salvation, as there is today. We've talked about it a bit on the podcast before about this tradition that Jesus went down to Hades after his death and before his resurrection to liberate people down there. And in some of those traditions, the traditions themselves go back to the fourth, fifth century, probably. least in some of those traditions, he takes everybody out because God is far more powerful than death, than the devil. So he takes everybody out. So there was a universalistic strain, but it was always very much on the margins of Christianity. It's still on the margins, I suppose, but it's definitely growing these days.
- [40:46]
B
Thank you. In a previous podcast about apocalyptic Judaism, you mentioned the dichotomy of good and evil and how similar parallels are found today in pop culture such as Star Wars. Is the trope of all hope being lost only for the good guys to prevail in the end something that can be accredited to Judaism or early Christianity? Or was this a more common narrative in ancient literature?
- [41:08]
D
Well, it's a common narrative in literature generally, I suppose, because it's a common human host. One of the very big questions is where it comes from once it gets into Judaism. Christians get it from Judaism because Jesus had this view and Jesus it was a common view in Jesus day. John the Baptist had it, the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls had it, the Pharisees had it. So the good would triumph in the end. One of the big debates has been whether it comes from Zoroastrianism into Christianity. So that'd be from Persian religion. And I'll tell you, I used to think so. I used to think that that's probably where it came from. But after I actually spent a lot of time reading about it, both the Persian religion and Judaism, I came to think that we actually can't say, I think that Jews picked it up from the Persians for a variety of reasons. But a lot of them have to do the dates of the sources that say these things are way post the Jewish developments. And so I'd say it's hard to say. The trope is there in lots of different traditions.
- [42:11]
B
Thank you do we know anything about the class structure of Palestine in the first century? How is it that upper class, literate Greek speakers were inspired to write the books that would become the New Testament by illiterate Aramaic speaking peasants?
- [42:25]
D
We know a good bit about class structure not just in what became Palestine, but what was throughout the empire. I'm going to be dealing with this some in the book I'm writing right now which is basically on the ethics of Jesus. But since I have a section section on their dealing with charitable giving in the Roman world and in Judaism and in Christianity, I have to get into social structure issues. And you know, the very basic, the very basic point is most people were very poor and that there was not really anything comparable to our like large middle class, probably half the population was either on the poverty line or were completely destitute. And there are some people did better than that. But the very top would be, you know, the top 1%. So it's a good question, how is it that you get these Greek speaking authors, none of them lived in Israel, they were all from outside of Israel. They were people who would have lived in urban areas where you could get an education if you had family resources to allow you to go to school. That's very, very few people. But as it turns out there were some Christians in that boat. It's important to remember though that in the New Testament there are not that many authors really. I mean virtually half of the books claim to be written by Paul, they all weren't. But the estimates are that maybe 10% of the population, population, maybe 15% could read and write. And so, you know, if you've got a thousand people, then you got 100 people who can read and write. And so it's not unheard of. But you don't have any Aramaic speaking people writing books at this point and you don't have any Greek speaking Christians writing books in Israel itself. These are all from the outside.
- [44:04]
B
Thank you. And final question for today. Once Christianity started to take hold in the Roman world, how did the politics of power shape Christian doctrine?
- [44:13]
D
Doctrine? Yeah. Well that's a complicated question and part of it relates to what we were talking in the episode today about these various groups that are the Proto Orthodox call heretics. You've got these powers, they're power struggles for who is going to dominate Christianity, who's going to get the most converts, who's going to organize and run the churches and the Proto Orthodox, the ones who decided eventually what the church structure would be, where you have a bishop at the head of each church. And there'd be, you know, the elders under this person and deacons and you these various kinds of official orders. And the same group decided not only the structure of the church, they decide what the canon would be of scripture, they decide what the theology would be. These are all not just idea oriented issues. These are power issues. Somebody gets to decide. Well, who gets to decide. And so there are power struggles in early Christianity, and I think that's one of the strong realizations of modern scholarship, especially since the early 20th century till now, that these are not arguments even like the argument about the Trinity. These are not argum just being carried out in the realm of ideas. There are also real power struggles that involve social affairs and political affairs within the church.
- [45:24]
B
Thank you so much. Audience thank you again for all of your questions. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [45:32]
D
Well, we've been talking about the secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Morton Smith in 1958, published in 1973. It would be a brilliant discovery. It'd be one of the most brilliant discoveries of the 20th century. When it comes to the New Testament, many people have suspected that it's forged. Some people think that Norton Smith forged it. If some modern person forged that thing, that would be the most brilliant work of scholarship of the 20th century because it'd be really hard to do. And we're going to talk about that next time.
- [46:02]
B
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 mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. and that code is also valid for the new insights into the new testamen conference coming this September. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [46:26]
D
We're talking part two. Is this a forgery or is it an authentic book? Is the secret Gospel mark something that actually existed? Is the letter of Clement actually a letter by Clement? Was it really written in the 18th century into this book? We're going to talk about that next time.
- [46:42]
B
Join us all then. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [46:47]
C
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Barbara Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode
- [46:52]
B
next Tuesday, so please be sure to
- [46:55]
C
subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel. So you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.