← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Was Jesus a Copycat? The Role of John the Baptist in the Ministry of Jesus.
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- [00:01]
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- [00:38]
Megan Lewis
Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Misquoting Jesus. I have to admit a certain amount of ignorance on this week's topic. We're talking John the Baptist and he's not a figure I know an awful lot about. I know even less about the historical man. Do historians think he was a real person? How much of the New Testament is an accurate representation of him and how much is mythologized legend? We're going to be getting to all of that and so much more on this week's episode. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. So apart from his practice of baptizing people, what do historians know about the real man we call John the Baptist? What role did he play in Jesus ministry, if any? And why did he come to be an important figure in Christianity before all of that? As always, Bart, how are you doing this week?
- [01:44]
Bart Ehrman
Doing just fine, slugging along as we do.
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Megan Lewis
Just keep going.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. You keeping going?
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Megan Lewis
Yes, I am actually.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Everything's ticking along quite nicely. And the question that I had for you this week, I in the throes of helping my 6 year old with his reading and learning to read and all that exciting stuff. And I was a voracious reader in my teens and early 20s. So I wanted to ask, are you a fiction person or do you largely stick to nonfiction publications?
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Bart Ehrman
No, for pleasure reading, I almost never read nonfiction. I mean, I do, I'm actually rereading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Not light reading.
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Megan Lewis
Is that light like fun reading or is that research for a book?
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Bart Ehrman
No, no, I just get up early and when I get up early, sometimes I'll read something and I do my early hours. I do reading it can be non fiction, but it's everything from evolutionary biology to astronomy to. It's usually stuff I don't know anything about, but I read fiction every day. I was an English major in college and really liked fiction for years. I just read classics. I mean, I'm really a 19th century guy. I mean, I just really love 19th century novels for a variety of reasons. Dickens and George Eliot and Trollope. I mean, you just kind of go down the line and it's all good stuff. So this summer I've been on an Iris Murdoch kick. You know who Iris Murdoch is? Probably not.
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Megan Lewis
I do, but I confess I've never read any of her work.
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Bart Ehrman
She's a Brit. She was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, but she's also a novelist. She wrote 26 novels and they are fantastic. She's so smart and interesting. And the novels don't read like you're reading a philosopher, although they have, if you know, like platonic philosophy. You can kind of see what's going on here in a different way. But they're just absolutely fantastic books. And she's really one of my favorite modern novelists. Iris Murdoch. There was a film done of her just called Iris that had Jim Broadbent as her husband. But also Judi Dench played the older Iris Murdoch and the younger was played by Kate Winslet. Oh my God, that was a good movie. One thing I have to say about Iris Murdoch, I know we need to get on with things, but one of the reasons I've always admired her is because she was so such a messy housekeeper. She and her husband both that apparently when their house got too messy, they would move.
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Megan Lewis
I like that. I like that approach.
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Bart Ehrman
Oh my God. That's the way to do it, man. Just like, okay, God, this is a mess. Let's move.
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Megan Lewis
Perfect. So why do you think it's important for people to know about John the Baptist and the historical figure that may be behind the myths and the legends
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Bart Ehrman
that we have in all four Gospels, the way Jesus begins is by associating with John the Baptist. And so to understand the Gospels, you have to understand that association to begin with, because that's how he begins his ministry. Historians have long thought that it's absolutely. I mean, historians have always thought it absolutely happened. In some ways, it's a key to understanding Jesus own preaching ministry to realize that he first associated with this other person, apparently as a disciple. The gospels don't say he was John's disciple, but they do say that he got baptized by John and that indicates that he joined John's movement. And so to understand Jesus really, in some ways, it helps to understand who his predecessor was.
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Megan Lewis
So what was John the Baptist's movement then that Jesus joined?
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Bart Ehrman
John the Baptist was practicing a ritual of baptism where people would come to him and maybe crowds would come to him. And if they repented of their sins, he would have them baptized. This is a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The idea was that he believed, as other apocalyptic Jews did at the time, including the members of the Dead Sea scroll community, the Essenes and others, that God was soon going to bring in a new age and that there was a day of judgment coming. Destruction was soon to appear and people needed to prepare for it by repenting of their sins. And he would baptize people in preparation for that to show that they had repented. This is an apocalyptic movement. Apocalyptic refers to this concept that the end of the age is near and that soon God is going to destroy the current order and bring in a new order. Jewish apocalypticism was very popular at the time. And there were other apocalyptic preachers that also had followers. We know about them from various sources. And so he was one of those that has followers preaching this apocalyptic message. And it turns out Jesus joined his movement.
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Megan Lewis
Was baptism a relatively new thing or this something that had been around for a while prior to John?
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Bart Ehrman
So it's kind of a complicated question, because when Christians today think about baptism, they generally think about a ceremony that happens in church. Most realize that, at least in some points in history and still today in many churches, a person was actually dipped into the water. Many churches today will baptize infants. And there are a variety of theologies of baptism today, different practices, but it's always a one time event. And that was what it was with John. It was a one time event. And it was being dunked in water in the Jordan River. The word baptism comes from a Greek word, baptizo, which means to dip into water. So it doesn't mean to sprinkle or to spread. It's actually. It's used when you're dyeing a cloth, you know, or you put it into the water. John had predecessors for the idea of baptism in that in Judaism broadly, there were cleansing rituals that involved water. And some of these cleansing rituals did not require a full immersion, but some did. If somebody visits Israel in the modern day, they'll go to places like Qumran, where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, or Masada, which was the last stand against the Roman armies by the Jewish rebels. And you'll find there pits dug into the ground that have a staircase going down one side and a staircase going up the other side. These pits were used as immersion pools. They're called mikvot. The singular is mikvah, Hebrew word. So this pit was filled with water and someone who had acquired a impurity, they'd become ritually unclean, could be purified by this ritual. They go down the one set of stairs, would dunk themselves and then go up the other set to show they now have become clean. So impurity in the Jewish tradition was not about sin. It wasn't that they'd done something like sinful against God or committed a transgression. It was that they had done something to become ritually impure. That would involve anything from touching a corpse or a woman who menstruates or a man who has some kind of nocturnal emission. And there are various ways that in the Bible it talks about becoming impure and it requires purification. So these baptism rituals in Judaism were meant to bring purity after a person had become ritually unclean.
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Megan Lewis
So John the Baptist was presumably Jewish. Was he using baptism in a substantially different way to this kind of ritual cleansing that we see in other circumstances?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So this is the thing is that John appears to have come up with his idea of what baptism was. He may have had predecessors, but if he did, we don't know about them. His baptism was not for ritual impurity, it was for sin. And it was related to repenting and being forgiven of your sins and being cleansed of your sins. And unlike these Jewish rituals, it was a one time shot. So earlier when I said Christians, imagine this as a one time thing that starts with John the Baptist. Apparently the idea is that the end is coming soon. You don't have long. Repent and prepare for it. And so you're baptized to show that you've repented and you're cleansed of your sins so that you're ready for this coming kingdom. John may have come up with this idea. Jesus associated with John at the beginning of his ministry and was himself baptized by John. That demonstrates that at this point of his life, Jesus was accepting John's message of the coming end and also participating in this rite of baptism.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back to talk about where John appears in the New Testament, if he appears in other sources, and really what he's doing in the texts that we have.
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- [11:47]
Megan Lewis
So Bart, which books of the New Testament mention John and what is he doing when he appears in them?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, the four gospels tell about him and there's a brief reference to him in the book of the Acts, which is about the spread of Christianity after Jesus death. But John's mentioned there. But Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all have portrayals of John. Mark, as we've said before, was almost certainly our first gospel and it has an account of John's baptizing people and all of according to Mark, like the entire Jewish people are coming out to John to be baptized. Everybody's coming, he's baptizing everybody. That's probably an exaggeration. Jesus comes as well. Matthew and Luke are interesting because they both use Mark as a source for their accounts. And in Mark's account the emphasis is that John is Jesus forerunner. He's fulfilling scripture. Scripture predicted that the Messiah would have a forerunner, and that's John. And Jesus comes and is baptized by John. Matthew and Luke have the account roughly, but they've changed it in different ways. And to explain the changes, I need to explain why some Christians had a problem with the idea that John baptized Jesus. In early Christianity, the idea is that similar to now, that the person doing the baptizing was spiritually superior to the person being baptized. And so later Christians, you know, some years after Jesus died, were thinking, well, how could Jesus be baptized by someone else? Wouldn't that show that that person was his teacher and his leader and his spiritual superior? And I think that was an attitude that people had and it affected how both Matthew and Luke tell the story they got from Mark. In Matthew's account, Jesus comes up to be baptized. This is only in Matthew and in this Case John objects and says, wait, I should be baptized by you. In other words, he's admitting Jesus superiority. And Jesus says, no, we need to do this to fulfill our righteousness. So it's the right thing to do. We need to do it. And so he gets baptized. Luke is interesting because it also has Jesus and John the Baptist, and it talks about Jesus coming up out of the waters of baptism, but it actually doesn't explicitly say that John baptized him. He lives that little bit out. Why didn't he just say John baptized him? Because that's in a source. Maybe because he just doesn't want to kind of make the point too graphic and explicit. When you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus associates with John the Baptist. It's a very different account. In the Gospel of John, it's John the Baptist who identifies Jesus to Jesus original disciples. John the Baptist has disciples and he sees Jesus and he points to him and says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And so John the Baptist is now conceding even before he meets Jesus, that he's the one. And in John's account, again, he also does not mention that John baptized Jesus, but there's actually not an account of the baptism per se. There's no reference to Jesus being baptized. But it does say that Jesus, when he came out of the water, the spirit came as a dove and remained upon him. That John saw that happen. It's not the John baptized, but John saw Jesus coming out of the waters. And so in all these cases, it's trying to minimize the historical reality that Jesus was baptized by someone else. This shows, I think, that Christians were uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus possibly having, you know, being somebody else's disciple. And because of that, it also suggests that it really did happen, because it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that Christians later would make up because they were embarrassed about it.
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Megan Lewis
Do we have other sources, non canonical sources for John, or does he appear in like non biblical places at all?
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Bart Ehrman
So the other main historical source we have for John is Josephus. Josephus is this first century Jewish author that we'll be talking about at length in the next podcast. So I won't spill all the beans here, but I will say that Josephus writes a history of the Jewish people. And in his history of the Jewish people, he talks about John the Baptist and tells us a few things about him that roughly coincide with what you get in the Gospels. Josephus describes a lot of people throughout his history, especially in people near his own Time. And so he certainly has an agenda. He writes his accounts, but he doesn't seem to have any particular agenda about John the Baptist per se. There's some things he neglects to mention, but apart from that. So, you know, he's just writing about somebody he's heard about that had some kind of impact on society.
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Megan Lewis
What kinds of things does Josephus say about John the Baptist?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, he does say that he's baptizing, and he says that, you know, that he's baptizing people and this is his practice, and that he gets in trouble with the local king who arranges to have him executed. In rough terms, that's what you find in the Gospels as well.
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Megan Lewis
So what purpose does including John in the New Testament have? Obviously, different purposes, depending on which gospel you're reading. And is what Josephus doing kind of a different purpose?
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Bart Ehrman
Again, one of the things about Josephus is that, as we'll see in the next episode, he was not a fan of apocalyptic Jews. He doesn't think highly of people who helped an apocalyptic view. It's probably because he's writing after the Jewish War, and the Jewish War to some extent would have been supported by apocalyptic Jews because they think this war is going to bring the end to the Roman rule and God will bring in his kingdom now. And it didn't happen. And these apocalyptic prophets were always predicting things that didn't happen. And Josephus is writing his accounts both for Jews to give them information about their past, but also he's writing them as a court historian for the Romans, and he's trying to explain the Jews are not problematic. He downplays the apocalyptic aspect of Judaism, where there's a day of judgment coming where God will destroy his enemies, because it sounds like, you know, God's out to get the Romans, and that's what all Jews think. So he minimizes the apocalyptic character, including John the Baptist in the Gospels especially. Well, starting out in Mark, it's clear that John is an apocalyptic preacher. And you get even more of that in a bit of Matthew and Luke, where John is preaching an apocalyptic message. All the Gospels begin with John, and I think because they're roughly set up to be a chronological account of Jesus, his adult life. And everybody knew he started by being baptized by John. John came to be understood as the forerunner. And so the Gospels portray John as a fulfillment of Scripture because the Scriptures had predicted there'd be a forerunner. And it begins right away with Mark. The first thing he starts talking about is that John fulfills the Scripture and then he has scripture quotations showing it. And so John the Baptist was divinely sent. He was a human being. But this is how the Messiah had to start out.
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Megan Lewis
Do we know anything about John the Baptist's early life? Or does he kind of pop onto the scene as a full fledged adult?
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Bart Ehrman
He pops on the scene as a full fledged adult. People have speculated a lot about his early life. The only passage in the New Testament that says anything about his early life is an account in Luke chapter one, which narrates his birth. This is the only place where we have something about the birth of John the Baptist. And it's also written to show that John was secondary to Jesus, even though he came before Jesus. And so the way that Luke does it, in the birth narrative, John is also born miraculously. His mother is Elizabeth, who is some kind of relative of Mary. People always call her the cousin, but it doesn't say that it's some kind of relative of Mary. And before Mary learns that she's going to get pregnant, Elizabeth, who cannot have a child, is barren, as the Bible says is barren. She can't have a child, and God allows her to become pregnant miraculously. But she's been having sex with her husband to have a child, so she's not a virgin. Right after that, Mary learns that she, too, a virgin, is going. She's a virgin, she's going to conceive. And then Mary, who has conceived, when she's further along in her pregnancy, goes and visits Elizabeth. And Elizabeth comes to the door. The door knocks. Elizabeth shows up. And Elizabeth says that the child has leapt in my womb because the mother of our Lord has come to visit me. Who am I that you should visit me? And so this is showing that John is leaping for joy in the womb because Jesus has now showed up to visit him in the womb. And so again, this is one of these stories that's meant to show that Jesus is preeminent over John. So you get these stories, and they're all starting out to show that Jesus is having this forerunner.
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Megan Lewis
How do historians separate out these accounts that are intended to show John as being like the precursor to Jesus? Important, but not as much as Jesus will be. How do they separate those out from what may be historical fact about the man John the Baptist?
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Bart Ehrman
The problem is that when you have the accounts of the baptism itself, there are miraculous events that happen that are suspect historically. Just to take Mark's account, for example, John baptizes Jesus, and as he comes up out of the water, he sees that the heavens split open the Spirit of God descends upon him, and he hears a voice from heaven. You are my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased. The voice speaks only to Jesus. It's not speaking to anyone else. There's no indication anybody else hears the voice. And so this is a miraculous sequence of events that is highly significant for Mark for its symbolic importance. And it's very interesting because it's the first thing that happens in Jesus life in Mark, the last thing that happens in Jesus life in Mark. And when he's crucified, the curtain opens up. It's the same word. It's actually rips apart. It's the same word as happens to heaven in chapter one, at the baptism. The curtain of the temple which separates God from the people in the temple rips apart the same word schizomize. The word schizo that we get schizo from. It's the only time the word appears in Mark. It begins at the baptism and the voice says, you're my beloved son. It happens when Jesus dies with the curtain. And then the centurion says, this is the Son of God. And so you get the voice, you get the rip. Mark is using this symbolically. So when a historian's looking at this and trying to figure out, okay, so, you know, what can we say actually happened? So the miraculous things are problematic both because they're miraculous and because they're being used for a literary function in Mark, which shows that they have literary value. So you can see why Mark might want to come up with it that way. And also because when the voice comes to Jesus, it comes just to Jesus. So how would Mark know what the voice said? Because it didn't go, probably. So those are all things. You've got that. And from that, then you've got to figure out, well, is there anything historical here?
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Megan Lewis
What do historians think? Is there anything historical that we can say about this figure?
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Bart Ehrman
I think historians would say a couple of things. One is that it's almost certain that Jesus was baptized by John to begin his ministry. It's attested in sources that are independent of each other. John doesn't seem to have gotten this from the synoptics. Matthew has parts of the story that aren't in Mark. Luke has parts that aren't in Mark. Matthew and Luke have stuff together. It's not in Mark. So you have this independent stuff that all point in the same direction. So Jesus probably was baptized by John at the beginning of his ministry. So it shows how Jesus started out, that he's associating with this Preacher. But the other thing is that there's a passage in Matthew and Luke that shows what John was preaching, and it's an apocalyptic message. This is one of those passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke where Matthew and Luke have the same thing, like, you know, slight differences, but a lot of words in common, word for word, basically, with some changes that are not found in Mark. So it's a saying not found in Mark, found in Matthew and Luke. And that kind of saying is usually attributed to the Q source. It's a lost source. We don't have it. It's hypothetical in the sense we don't have it. But it looks like Matthew must have used a source for some of the sayings that are in the New Testament in this source. In Matthew's version of it, John's preaching is this. He says people are coming to him to be baptized, and he's explaining why they need to come. He says the axe is already laid at the root of the tree. Every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and tossed into the fire. Wow. Okay. What's that all about? Trees, roots, what axes? So it's an apocalyptic image. God expects people to bear good fruit. People are like trees. Their function is to bear good fruit. In other words, to live well and to do well and to do good. But some people are not. They're going to be cut down and cast into the fire. It's an image of judgment. There'll be a judgment, a fire on the day of judgment. And when is this judgment day coming, which people will be destroyed for not behaving well? The axe is already laid at the root of the tree. In other words, the chopping is ready to begin. John is preaching. It's going to happen any day now. That's whom Jesus started with. Preacher preaching apocalyptic message. And that shows that almost certainly Jesus himself began his ministry with. With an apocalyptic view. And there's very good reasons for thinking that continued throughout his ministry, just as it did with John.
- [25:53]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart, for sharing your time and your knowledge with us. We're going to continue with some news of what's happening in Bart's world. And then we have some wonderful audience questions.
- [26:05]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings, and online course launches.
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Megan Lewis
So as we do, because we have to, we are recording in advance. Bart is currently cruising. Where are you cruising, Bart? What's going on for you?
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Bart Ehrman
I'm Cruising. I'm cruising on the west coast of Europe. So I think I mentioned this before, I was going to do this cruise. It's. It's a cruise that goes from Amsterdam down to Lisbon and we stop at key places, key cities and spots along route including Normandy beaches and a lot of really interesting things. And so they asked me to do this cruise. This is a cruise company called the Thalassa Journeys. I've do cruises with them and they tend to be educational. And so I had a little trouble figuring out what I was going to lecture on. You know, I decided to actually do it. It ended up being really interesting. I think I decided to lecture on the high seas in the Bible. We're doing a cruise and so I thought, you know, we lecture about the sea, the ocean. I'm doing four lectures that are completely unrelated to other. So the first one I'm doing is the water in the book of Genesis at Creation because, you know, it's very interesting. God does not create water. Water is there already. And God divides the water in order to create land for people to live on, for things to live on. And so you got this water image. And as you know, there are all these, Megan, you know, there are these ancient Near Eastern myths about creation that involve God conquering a water monster. And the water in Genesis is also water monster. And this isn't in your material, but in Canaanite creation myths there's this figure, Lothan, which is a sea monster that is related to Leviathan, found in the book of Job as the thing that God conquered when he created the world. And so you have all these tie ins to Greek, not to Greek, but well, actually some Greek myth, but also to ancient Near Eastern myth. And you get the same Genesis. So I'm going to talk about Genesis 1 and 2, but also talk about how what's going on in Genesis 1 doesn't really line up very well with what happens happens in Genesis 2. That's just the first lecture. But then I'm going to do a lecture on the Exodus event. Did they really cross the Red Sea? I'm making that one a historical one. Did the Exodus actually happen or not? This miracle of the crossing, which is not the Red Sea by the way, as you know, but it's the Sea of reeds, whatever that is. So that'll be my second lecture. My third lecture is going to be Jesus walking on the water. And what do historians do with miracle? Because you know, I mean, some historians come up with natural explanations like, you know, he knew where the stones Were
- [28:47]
Megan Lewis
it was just a really shallow bit there.
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Bart Ehrman
He's on the seashore and they didn't realize it whatever. But then what are these miracles doing in the Gospels and what does a historian do with this stuff and could it have happened? And my final thing is a kind of an unusual body of water because it's not water, it's the lake of fire in the book of Revelation. And so who's going there? So I'm doing these parlays. It's going to be a scream because
- [29:10]
Megan Lewis
it's like it sounds wonderful.
- [29:12]
Bart Ehrman
I couldn't lecture on cruising to Western Europe so I decided to lecture on water.
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Megan Lewis
You mean Jesus didn't make it to Western Europe?
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Bart Ehrman
No. Didn't wash in the water, didn't walk on the land, anything like that? Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Now it's obviously too late for people to join you on that cruise because by the time this airs you are in fact there already. But you've got another one coming up later in the year that I don't know if we have access to ticket sales yet, but it will be coming up shortly.
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Bart Ehrman
They might be by the time this plays. But it's another one that had nothing to lecture on. So in December I think the 10th to the 22nd, I'm taking the cruise. The same ship, supposed to be this amazing ship, it's like 176 people can fit on. But it, it's like this high tech ecologically. I mean it's really a fantastic ship apparently. But we're doing a cruise to Antarctica and for that one I thought okay, I'm going to lecture on to the ends of the earth. So the Gospel is supposed to go to the ends of the earth. I don't think Paul had in mind Antarctica. But you know, I had to lecture on something. I decided I'm not going to lecture on penguins in the Bible. So I think I'll do the ends of the Earth. Yeah, so should look for that one because it's going to be a really good boy. That one's going to be good.
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Megan Lewis
No, we'll have more information about that as and when we can. But thank you for filling us all in on that. I am very sorry I'm going to be missing the Western Europe cruise. Those lectures sound wonderful but we must move on to listeners questions.
- [30:37]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
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 askbart
- [30:55]
Megan Lewis
alright then, so first up in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul claims to be a Roman citizen, though none of Paul's letters make that claim. Is it possible he was a metic, a non citizen who enjoyed some of the privileges of citizenship?
- [31:10]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I think any of the possibilities is possible. In Acts he really means citizen and that's the basis for his appeal to Caesar. Because he's a Roman citizen, if he's condemned to death, he's allowed to have an audience before the Caesar. And so that's the basis for it. The questioner is completely right that there's nothing in Paul's letters about being a citizen or being a medic or anything like that. So my sense is that Paul almost certainly was not a Roman citizen. If he had been a Roman citizen, he would not have been able to be subjected to Roman corporal punishment three times as he was being beaten by rods that he himself talks about. He says nothing about being a citizen and there's no reason really to think he was a citizen. ACTS wants to build up Paul's profile and does it in a number of ways, saying things about Paul that Paul himself never says, including for example, being born in Tarsus. I mean, there's nothing in Paul to suggest he was from Tarsus. He may have been. So I don't think the citizenship thing is plausible, but I also don't think that, you know, I don't think there's any kind of mediating alternative that's probably any more plausible either. Personally.
- [32:23]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Is it likely that Jesus was a nationalistic apocalyptic Jew whose message of radical inclusion was retroactively inserted as the number of gentile Christians increased and Jews were increasingly marginalized?
- [32:37]
Bart Ehrman
That's a complicated and sophisticated question. What the person's asking in case somebody didn't catch all this was that is asking, was Jesus actually in favor of a military overthrow of the Romans? But as time went on, the followers of Jesus became less concerned about nationalistic concerns of Israel and the Romans and so started changing his perspective. So he's no longer in favor of a violent overthrow? I don't think so. There are arguments you can make and some good arguments that Jesus may have been in favor of taking up the sword against the Romans, but I don't find these convincing and I think most people don't. The pacifist message is much more prominent in Jesus teachings. It is true that some apocalypticists did have a military view, a military outlook where they thought that there was a war with the enemy coming and they would participate in it. This is the view that you find in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the war scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But there are other forms of apocalypticism than that. In that version where you take up the sword, the idea is you're going to fight the war, but God's going to enable you to win. The other view of apocalypticism, one of the other major views is that God's going to do the whole thing himself, that God doesn't need your help. Thank you very much. God's going to overthrow the enemy. And I think that's the view Jesus had because it's well attested throughout the tradition. And so I don't think that his message was softened to a non violent view. I think he had a nonviolent view to begin with.
- [34:07]
Megan Lewis
What do you think is the origin of the account of the temple curtain being torn after the crucifixion of Jesus? Was it meant by the author to be taken metaphorically and not as most readers take it, as actual fact?
- [34:19]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we don't know what the author had in mind because we can't get into his head. The author who first says this is the author of the Gospel of Mark writing years later, 40 years later, the curtain in the temple historically was absolutely not ripped, it is not destroyed. Josephus would have mentioned that little bit. It didn't happen. Mark, he is using it symbolically. It's a complicated passage. And I've got a course where I spend a lot of time on this. One of my courses is on the Gospel of Mark. It's an eight lecture course where I spend a lot of time talking about this crucifixion scene and the symbolism in it. One of the major points in Mark is that nobody throughout this entire gospel can understand that Jesus has to die. His disciples don't get it, his family doesn't get it, the Jewish leaders don't get it. I mean, they understand he's got to die, but they don't understand that he's like the Messiah who's come, who's got to die. He's the Son of God who has to die. Nobody understands his identity, nobody realizes who he is. Especially when he starts saying, I got to die. People are saying, well, how's he the Messiah then? And so what happens though is that he dies in Mark and the curtain rips in half. That shows that his death has broken the barrier between God and his people. The curtain that separates the holy of holies has been torn in half. Now God's available to everybody through the death of Jesus. And the next thing that happens is the centurion says, truly, this man was the Son of God. Finally, somebody gets it. They get it. And so the ripping of the curtain is being used for symbolic purposes in Mark. But that doesn't mean that the author thought it was purely symbolic. People often take events and they see them for their broader significance. And so my suspicion is Mark thought it really happened. And at least in early Christianity, everybody who comments on it thinks it really happened. So I don't know if that demonstrates that Mark thought so, but it doesn't make it implausible that he thought so. And I think he probably thought so.
- [36:23]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. The next questioner says, I'm deconstructing my faith after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses. One particularly harmful topic of the theology is shunning or excommunication. First Corinthians 5, 9, 13 is often cited as proof for the need to completely shun sinners as well as those who leave voluntarily. Is that how Paul meant for his words to be understood? And how has shunning and excommunication evolved since early Christianity?
- [36:52]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, it's obviously a horrible practice. The passage this person's talking about is one that we mentioned actually in the previous episode. It's this passage where there's a man in Corinth who is sleeping with his stepmother. And Paul says, even the Gentiles don't go stoop that low, which of course is not true, actually. But even so, that's what Paul says. And so Paul says that he's corrupting the body. When you have an infection in the body, you got to get rid of it. And so Paul tells them to deliver him over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. And so you're supposed to get rid of him, kick him out. And it's not quite clear if this is a death curse or the guy's going to repent later or what. It's not clear what Paul has in mind, but somehow this is going to help him have salvation. So the Jehovah's Witness practice of shunning people could be rooted in that. You know, if you're not really sure about the faith anymore, it's really not the same thing as sleeping with your stepmother. And so I'm not quite sure that's a very good use of this passage. But if a community, it might make sense that they ask you not to come anymore, I guess. I don't know. It's up to them. But, you know, in the sense of shunning in the traditional sense of like not even talking to you. That's. Yeah, that's not good.
- [38:10]
Megan Lewis
And our final one of the arguments for the existence of Jesus is that Paul says he knew Jesus, brother. How can we be reasonably certain that Paul didn't just make this up, making his writing seem more fact based?
- [38:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's a good question. And the reason is because Paul doesn't use it to go anywhere. He's not using it as an argument for anything. When he mentions it, he actually mentions it as an aside, kind of embarrassed, because he says, when I went to Jerusalem, I didn't meet with anybody but Cephas. Then he says, oh, well, yeah, I did meet briefly with his brother James, the Lord's brother James. So it's like he has to. He's kind of conceding it. It's like, oh, yeah, I forgot that one. And so it isn't that he's like saying, oh, you know, I know Jesus, brother. So, you know, like, I'm the authority. Because I can just tell you James thinks that, you know, he doesn't use it that way. And so that's why it's just an off the cuff comment. He mentions him a couple of times and he mentions him as a leader of the church. And he also, he indicates that James didn't agree with him and he had to twist James arm to agree with him. And so it doesn't look like he's really getting a lot of purchase out of this. So it looks almost certainly like he's not making it up.
- [39:22]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about this week?
- [39:27]
Bart Ehrman
We're talking about John the Baptist, who in many respects could be seen as a pivotal figure in Christianity, even though he wasn't a Christian, because the Gospels begin with Jesus associating with John the Baptist. And. And Jesus apparently was one of his disciples at one point before he branched out on his own mission. And it shows that Jesus was apocalyptically inclined because that's the Jewish movement. He joined with an apocalyptic movement that was headed by John the Baptist.
- [39:56]
Megan Lewis
Thank you, Bart, so much, 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 Barth's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time.
- [40:17]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So next time, we're returning to something we talked about in this episode, which is the writings of Josephus. Josephus not only mentions John the Baptist, he mentions Jesus twice. We're going to be talking about whether those passages in Josephus were originally there, whether Josephus originally wrote them or not. And if so, does that give us further evidence for historical Jesus?
- [40:38]
Megan Lewis
Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel, so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis,
- [41:00]
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