Was Jesus a False Prophet?

Summary

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman – Episode Summary
Episode Title: Was Jesus a False Prophet?
Date: April 25, 2023
Host: Megan Lewis
Guest: Dr. Bart Ehrman

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Overview

This episode tackles a foundational and controversial question in biblical scholarship: Was Jesus a false prophet? Dr. Bart Ehrman and host Megan Lewis delve into the historical context of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, examine the scholarly consensus on his predictions about the imminence of God's kingdom, and wrestle with the implications when such prophecies did not come to pass. The discussion is wide-ranging, covering early 20th-century scholarship, varieties of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, the evolution of gospel narratives, and how both ancient and modern believers handle Jesus' apparent calendrical mistake.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Discuss Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet?

[04:41]

• Dr. Ehrman sets the stage: For centuries, it was assumed the Gospels straightforwardly described Jesus’ life and teachings.
• Albert Schweitzer’s work (early 20th century) revolutionized understanding—arguing that Jesus must fundamentally be seen as an apocalyptic prophet, predicting an imminent cosmic end and new kingdom.
• Schweitzer’s view became—and remains—the scholarly majority, though it “continues to upset people because that prediction of Jesus did not come true.”
• Quote:
  “Schweitzer argued that Jesus is best understood... as an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that the world as we know it was soon to end with an intervention of God.” (Bart Ehrman, [05:23])

2. What is Apocalypticism?

[06:53]

• Apocalypticism: A worldview from 200 BCE–1st century CE Judaism, seeing history as a battle between cosmic good and evil.
• Life on earth is under evil’s sway, but “God is very soon going to intervene and destroy these forces of evil,” inaugurating a just kingdom on earth.
• Most apocalypticists believed the end was truly imminent.
• Quote:
  “Most apocalypticists thought that the end of time was upon us and that it’s going to happen very soon now.” (Bart Ehrman, [08:09])

3. Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet—What Did This Mean?

[08:25]

• "Prophet" in Jesus’ time wasn’t primarily about predicting the future, but rather about declaring God’s will.
• An apocalyptic prophet specifically preached the soon arrival of God’s kingdom—in opposition to evil—within their listeners' lifetimes.
• Quote:
  “To call Jesus a prophet means that he believed that he was speaking God’s message to his people, and it did have future implications... If he’s an apocalyptic prophet, then... [he] understands that God is going to destroy [evil] and that it’s going to happen pretty soon.” (Bart Ehrman, [09:17])

4. Other Apocalyptic Prophets of the Era

[09:31]

• Jesus was not unique:
  • John the Baptist—Jesus’ immediate predecessor—preached imminent judgment.
  • The Essenes (Dead Sea Scrolls)—anticipated a final battle.
  • Pharisees had an apocalyptic worldview.
  • Josephus, the historian, records other named Jewish apocalyptic prophets (e.g., Theudas, “the Egyptian,” and another Jesus, c. 66–70 CE).
• This was “the zeitgeist”—many expected end-times soon.
• Quote:
  “He [Jesus] definitely was not a one-off... This was a widespread and popular view in Judaism at the time.” (Bart Ehrman, [13:50])

5. What Made Jesus’ Message Distinct?

[12:01]

• Jesus’ core message—imminent end—is consistent with his peers, but a few points stand out:
  • He believed his own role as Messiah/anointed king was connected to the coming kingdom (“he would himself be the king of this future kingdom”).
  • Emphasis not on ritual or purity, but on actions towards others—especially in helping those in need—as key for entering the kingdom.
• Quote:
  “What mattered were your actions toward others... If you ignore those in need, it doesn’t matter what your sacrifices are, what your purity is, you will be cast out.” (Bart Ehrman, [13:29])

6. Were Apocalyptic Prophets Taken Seriously?

[13:40]

• Mixed reception: Some were seen as crackpots; others gathered large followings perceived as threatening by authorities (sometimes resulting in violence).
• This world-ending expectation was “a widespread and popular view in Judaism at the time, at least in Israel.”

7. Did Jesus Expect to Be Crucified?

[15:05]

• Unlikely. Ehrman argues Jesus expected God to intervene in his lifetime, to bring the kingdom, with Jesus as its ruler—not that he would die and be resurrected.
• The reinterpretation of his death as sacrificial comes after his crucifixion, as followers sought to make sense of the failed apocalyptic expectation.
• Quote:
  “I don’t think Jesus was anticipating being crucified. I think he was anticipating that the kingdom would come. But after his death, his disciples had to make sense of it... and they developed this idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed for sins.” (Bart Ehrman, [17:10])

8. The Evolution of Gospel Narratives

[18:14]; [23:32]

• In the earliest (Mark, Q), Jesus explicitly claims the end will come within his generation (“some of you standing here will not taste death…”).
• Over time, later gospels (Luke, John) water down or avoid such statements—culminating in John’s gospel, devoid of the apocalyptic urgency.
• This shift reflects the delayed Parousia: as time passed and Jesus did not return, Christians modified the narrative to fit new realities.
• Quote:
  “When you get to the Gospel of John, the entire idea is that eternal life has started now for people who believe in Jesus. So there’s not an apocalyptic message.” (Bart Ehrman, [24:53])

9. Is Jesus, Then, a False Prophet?

[19:40]

• Ehrman addresses the loaded nature of the phrase “false prophet.”
  • If predicting something that doesn’t happen is the criteria, then yes—but the term unfairly implies malice or delusion, which isn’t appropriate in context.
  • “I think Jesus did anticipate that this was going to happen within his generation, and it did not happen. And so he was wrong about that. I mean, I think he was mistaken. But I don’t like the term false prophet for that. I prefer to think of it as a calendrical mistake. He got the calendar wrong.” (Bart Ehrman, [22:57])
• Early Christians also rationalized the delay (e.g., 2 Peter: “with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day.”)

10. How Did Early Christians Explain the Delay?

[23:15]

• As the expected end did not occur, the church evolved its teachings:
  • Early texts predict it in “this generation.”
  • Later texts become vaguer or spiritualize the expectation.
  • By the 2nd-3rd centuries, imminent apocalypse drops from mainstream teaching.
  • Modern scholars recover and underscore the originally apocalyptic Jesus.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the shock of Schweitzer’s thesis:
  “This portrayal [of Jesus as failed apocalyptic prophet] upset a lot of people and continues to upset people because that prediction of Jesus did not come true.” (Bart Ehrman, [05:34])

• About gospel evolution:
  “So you see, you get from an apocalyptic message in our earliest sources to a kind of a modified not really strictly ‘it’s going to happen soon’ kind of message to a non-apocalyptic message of Jesus.” (Bart Ehrman, [24:53])

• On applying “false prophet”:
  “I don’t like the term false prophet... although I do think Jesus was mistaken about when this was going to take place.” (Bart Ehrman, [35:11])

• On how belief adapts:
  “…since the end doesn’t come, people change Jesus’ teachings. So much so that eventually... the idea that the judgment day is coming soon according to Jesus is no longer the teaching of Jesus.” (Bart Ehrman, [25:46])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Apocalypticism defined: [06:53] – [09:17]
• Other apocalyptic prophets: [09:31] – [13:40]
• Was Jesus expecting crucifixion?: [15:05] – [17:10]
• Was Jesus a false prophet?: [19:40] – [23:15]
• Evolution of the gospels: [23:32] – [25:46]
• Final summary of topic: [35:30] – [36:34]

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Tone and Flow

• The tone is lively but scholarly, accessible for non-specialists while precise for academics.
• Ehrman is clear, sometimes wry or gently humorous, especially when discussing “calendrical mistakes” and the recurring logic used to explain away missed prophecies.

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Further Reading & References

• Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet for a New Millennium
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus
• D.L. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth
• Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews

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Upcoming Episode Tease

Next, Bart will discuss the deaths of the apostles and whether we really know how they died—a key apologetic point in resurrection belief debates.

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Summary prepared to preserve speaker language and logical flow, and to serve as an in-depth guide for those who haven’t heard the episode.

Transcript

[Bart Ehrman]

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[Megan Lewis]

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.

[Podcast Co-host]

Welcome back everybody to Misquoting Jesus. Today we are going to be talking about Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, which we spoke about I think two weeks ago because last week was your interview with the Ukrainian gentleman, which I'm sure everybody enjoyed very much because it was fascinating. We should kind of talk about how you are. We haven't spoken for a couple of weeks.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I'm doing well. I'm doing well. We're barreling now to the end of the semester and it's always the best of time and worst of times for professors because you're not only trying to get to the end, but you're thinking about all this grading you got to do. And so every colleague I know in the universe, even the ones who really, really love teaching, do not like the grading. But the grading is really important because if you, if you take it seriously, it's a way of trying to guide students into how to, to develop their intellectual skills, their communication skills. And so it's important to take what they hand in seriously. But in this particular case for me, this semester I'm teaching this class on Jesus in scholarship and film. And one of their final writing assignments is so just to explain this, they're reading a bunch of gospels from outside the New Testament and inside the New Testament they're seeing a bunch of films about Jesus and we're analyzing all these. But their final writing assignment is they have to write their own gospel. And it's to be a kind of a fictional account taking the viewpoint of somebody within the gospel story and developing their own ideas about Jesus through this gospel. And so that kind of grading is fun to do.

[Podcast Co-host]

That sounds like a really fun assignment. Actually. I used to when I was a student. I really enjoyed it when instructors were a little bit more creative with what they assigned to test our knowledge. That's awesome.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, well, I wish I had come up with it myself. There's a novelist in the south named Reynolds Price that some people will have known. He was a great novelist and a great man, but he gave me this idea, and he was a creative writer, so. Yeah. How are you doing?

[Podcast Co-host]

Yeah, okay. Doing pretty well, actually. It's been a bit of a whirlwind. I think I've mentioned before that I run a small nonprofit called Humans Against Poor Scholarship, and April is the really busy month for me because we interview the shortlist that we put up of PhD students who are competing for funding for their summer research projects. So I've got two more sets of interviews this weekend, and then I think the voting will start to choose who gets the funding. It's a lot of fun, but I am a little bit tired.

[Bart Ehrman]

You get a lot more applications than you have funds to distribute.

[Podcast Co-host]

Yeah. This year we had 30 applicants. We got the shortlist. This is the first year we've actually done a shortlist. Ordinarily, we interview everyone, but last year it was. It was just too much. I have help for the interviews, but there are only so many people who are willing and able to sit down for an hour and talk to a bunch of grad students about their work. So we got the shortlist down to 20, which is still a pretty impressive number of people to interview, but we only have. So we give $2,000 to each student, and this year, we only have two grants available.

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, dear.

[Podcast Co-host]

So it's. It's a little bit of a bloodbath.

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, you know, if they would just watch the Misquoting Jesus podcast, they would know how to interview.

[Podcast Co-host]

Exactly. Exactly. So, yes, busy, but looking forward to today's conversation, which is Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. Did he believe the end of the world was coming? What did the gospel say on his thoughts? And given that the end of the world did not come, if Jesus was preaching the imminent end of the world, does that make him a false prophet? This is going to be fun, I think. And we've covered different aspects of apocalypticism since we've started the podcast. It's been one of the recurring themes this year. I think every episode we've touched on it. We've said we will focus on Jesus and apocalypticism at a later date. So here we are. We did not lie to you. But before we get into my questions, why is this important to think about and to discuss?

[Bart Ehrman]

People, of course, have different ideas of who Jesus was. Not just regular old folk, but regular old scholars who've long debated what Jesus was like and what he said and did. For centuries, of course, everybody just assumed that what the gospels said is what happened and that there's not much mystery about it. Jesus is said to do this, that, and the other thing. And he did this and the other thing. This is what he taught. And. And with the Enlightenment, scholars recognized that the Gospels were more problematic than that as historical sources and had to develop ways of using them to establish what Jesus really said and did. In the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer wrote his classic work, which is arguably the most important book about Jesus written in modern times or ever, the Quest of the Historical Jesus, where he went through what every scholar had said about Jesus since the enlightenment, since the 1770s, and he tried to show what the problems with their portrayals were. It's a very witty, great book still to read today, even if it does get in the weeds in places. But it's superb book. And Schweitzer argued that Jesus is best understood not just as a kind rabbi who's teaching about love. He specifically an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that the world as we know it was soon to end with an intervention of God. And this portrayal upset a lot of people and continues to upset people because that prediction of Jesus did not come true. And so how could it be? Right? But that view of Schweitzer's caught on and has been the majority view among critical scholars over the last hundred years or so. So it's an important view. It's a view that many people don't know about. They certainly don't know the evidence for it. And it causes problems for many people for trying to understand Jesus because they believe in Jesus, and so how could he be wrong about that? And so there are a lot of issues tied up with it.

[Podcast Co-host]

Thank you. And regular listeners will be very familiar with this concept of apocalypticism already. But for those who are maybe new to the show, could you give a very brief description of what that is?

[Bart Ehrman]

So apocalypticism is a term that scholars have invented to describe a certain way of looking at the world in ancient Judaism from around the time of Jesus. This view, apocalypticism, started about 200 years before Jesus life and became a dominant view in Judaism in his day. It's called apocalypticism from the word apocalypsis, which means a revealing or an unveiling. And the idea is that God had revealed the secrets that can explain why this world is such a mess. The secrets are that this world is divided roughly into two categories. There are the forces of good and the forces of evil. And these forces of good and evil are doing battle with one another, with God, who is in control of the forces of good, with his angels and his archangels and other powers. And the devil having his own resources, and they're battling it out. And the world is controlled now by the forces of evil. But God is very soon going to intervene and destroy these forces of evil so that the suffering people are experiencing now with wars and starvation and earthquakes and natural disasters and just everything that's making people suffer will be taken away. And God will introduce a new world, a new kingdom on earth that he will rule, rather than the forces of evil. And most apocalypticists thought that the end of time was upon us and that it's going to happen very soon now.

[Podcast Co-host]

So what does it mean then when we say that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet?

[Bart Ehrman]

To say that he's a prophet means that he understood himself to be speaking God's word. People misunderstand this term prophet because of modern connotations. And in modern connotations, a prophet is always somebody who's making specific predictions about the future. And prophets did do that. But in the Hebrew Bible tradition that Jesus was standing in, prophets were not. They weren't focused on the events to come so much as on trying to declare God's will for his people. And in almost every case, people were messing up in one way or another. And prophets were speaking forth God's word. And so they, rather than being foretellers of the future so much, they were mainly forthtellers telling forth God's word. So to call Jesus a prophet means that he believed that he was speaking God's message to his people, and it did have future implications. If he's an apocalyptic prophet, then he's a prophet who is standing within this apocalyptic tradition who sees the forces of evil and understands that God is going to destroy them and that it's going to happen pretty soon.

[Podcast Co-host]

Were there other apocalyptic prophets in the ancient world or was Jesus a one off?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, no, no, it definitely was not a one off. Even in the New Testament, there are other apocalyptic prophets, including for example, Jesus. Predecessor. This is a fairly important point. John the Baptist begins the Gospels. Jesus gets baptized by John at the beginning of his ministry in the Gospels. And we know something about what John the Baptist was doing and why he was baptizing. He was proclaiming that God's judgment was soon to arrive and that God was going to destroy those who were opposed to him. And so John the Baptist was urging people to repent and turn their lives around and return to God and to God's ways so that when this coming judgment arrived, they would survive it. It's significant that Jesus is associated with John at the very beginning of his ministry, before his ministry because it shows that he's aligning with his apocalyptic message that John is proclaiming. At the same time we have other apocalyptic groups in Jesus world. The group that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls is usually thought to have been a group of Jews called the Essenes, who also were anticipating an imminent judgment of God. An arrival of going to be a major battle that's going to be fought and God's going to destroy the forces of evil. We know that there were Pharisees. Pharisees subscribe to this apocalyptic worldview. And even though they're Jesus enemies in the Gospels, but they had the basic worldview of an apocalyptic sense of things. And so we also know of apocalyptic prophets by name outside the Bible. Josephus mentions several of them. He named one named Theudas, for example, one that he calls the Egyptian. And these are people who are proclaiming the coming end. And it continued after Jesus Day. Josephus has a long story about somebody else named Jesus, a guy named Jesus Van Denis, who about 40 years after Jesus was making a specific prediction that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed in the Roman war. And he was a real pain in the neck for Jewish authorities in Jerusalem who, who arrested him and, and flogged him and punished him and because he was saying that the end was coming soon and, and for him it did. During the siege of Jerusalem, apparently a stone catapulted into the city, killed him.

[Podcast Co-host]

Was there anything different or new about Jesus message compared to his prophetic peers?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, of course everybody has a different message. Nobody's saying exactly the same as everybody else. The basic message of Jesus would have been consistent with other apocalyptic prophets, that the end is near, God is soon to intervene. God will destroy the forces of evil. God will bring in a good kingdom, a utopian kind of a kingdom. So that would have been consistent. There are several things that Jesus preached that appear to have been distinctive to him. One thing is that he appears to think that he would himself be the king of this future kingdom, that he would be the future anointed one, which is the term for Messiah that Jesus appears to his followers appears to appear to have thought that he would be the Messiah. Some of them did. And he may well himself have thought that he would be the Messiah. He wasn't unique, but he was distinctive in emphasizing that in anticipation for this coming kingdom. What mattered was not the sacrifices that you performed to God in the temple or keeping the rituals of Judaism. And it was not personal purity. It wasn't purifying yourself of either of sin or of uncleanness. What mattered were your actions toward others. How you behave toward other people who are, especially people who are in need, will be determinative of whether you enter into the kingdom or not. Jesus even taught, it's not about following me, it's about following my words. But you don't have to know me to know my words. What matters is that you help those who are in need. And if you do, you will enter the kingdom. If you ignore those in need, it doesn't matter what your sacrifices are, what your purity is, you will be cast out.

[Podcast Co-host]

Thank you. Do we know how these apocalyptic prophets were viewed by the general population? Were they taken seriously or were they more people on a street corner with the end is near signs?

[Bart Ehrman]

There probably were a bit of both. I mean, one of the funny scenes in the Life of Brian is you have this lineup of these apocalyptic preachers who are just saying kind of weird, wacky things, and a couple people are looking at them at the time, you know, kind of askance, like, oh my God. So there may have been people like that. We know though, of others that did have large followings because this was a widespread and popular view in Judaism at the time, at least in Israel. Josephus mentions a couple of apocalyptic prophets with large followings that were seen to be a threat by the authorities. And in most instances, the authorities come out and get them. Sometimes there are massive slaughters that Josephus mentions about these people. So I think this was kind of the zeitgeist. It was. The people were feeling like, you know, they were living at the end of the age and that God was soon going to do something about it. Not everybody was, but I mean, enough of the population that these, some of these people made a difference.

[Podcast Co-host]

If Jesus was anticipating, as these other apocalyptic prophets were, that the kingdom of God was going to be a physical reality before the end of his life, is it fair to say that then he wasn't expecting to be crucified?

[Bart Ehrman]

This is a very big question, and I have to say that a lot of people get upset with me when I tell them what I think about this. I think that Jesus really did anticipate that he would be the Messiah of this coming kingdom. I've got reasons for that, that it'd be fun. We'll do a whole episode on that. Did Jesus think he was the Messiah? I think the answer is yes. But he didn't think that he was going to be the political ruler who was going to drive out the Romans with the sword. He wasn't a messiah that people were expecting to Be like a warrior king, like David. He had an apocalyptic view. God was going to destroy the enemy. And that God would appoint him to be the ruler. And so Jesus, I think, certainly expected that much. So since Jesus thought that God was soon to intervene within his generation. He tells his disciples that some of them will live to see it and they'll be alive. And that his generation is going to see it. I think that's what Jesus anticipated. He went to Jerusalem the last week of his life. In all the Gospels. And I think this is historically completely credible. That he had been preaching up in Galilee, which is a remote, rural area. He could not have had large crowds. Because there weren't large crowds up there. And he isn't spending any time in the maiden cities in Tiberias or the places where people would have amassed. He didn't spend time in the cities. He spent time in the countryside. And so he probably didn't have large crowds. But he decided the end of his life. To take his message to Jerusalem that people need to repent. Because this kingdom is soon to arrive. And he took his message to Jerusalem. Thinking probably that people will repent now, that the message will take hold. So I don't think he went to Jerusalem to die. I don't think he went to be rejected. I think what happened is he got on the bad side of the authorities. Largely because of his proclamation that God was going to destroy the powers of evil. And he identified the Jewish leadership as among those who would be destroyed. And that the temple itself would be destroyed. And they didn't like that. And it ended up leading to his death, I think. So I don't think Jesus was anticipating being crucified. I think he was anticipating that the kingdom would come. But after his death, his disciples had to make sense of it. Because they thought he's the Messiah. He'd be the future ruler of the kingdom. But instead of taking over the kingdom, he was destroyed, publicly humiliated and tortured to death. And once they became convinced that he had been raised from the dead. Then they redefined things. And they said, well, that must mean that he had to die because God raised him. God must have wanted him dead. And why would God want him dead? It must have been a sacrifice. And if he was sacrificed, there must be a sacrifice for sins. And they developed this idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed for sins. And once they developed that idea, very quickly they started saying that's what he had in mind all the time, all along. And that's why in the Gospels, then you have Jesus predicting that he's going to be crucified because that's how the later followers understood him. But I don't think that was the plan for Jesus himself.

[Podcast Co-host]

Do we see much variation in how the gospel writers deal with Jesus? Somewhat unexpected death, or is it relatively

[Bart Ehrman]

homogenous once you get to the Gospels? Our first gospel is Mark probably. It's written about 40 years after Jesus death. In Mark, Jesus anticipates his death. As we said in an earlier episode, the whole Gospel of Mark is trying to show that this is what the Messiah has to do and Jesus knows it. That view is accepted and even more pronounced as you go through the gospels chronologically. It's really the entire point of Jesus life is his death. All four gospels have a portion, the first portion of the gospels on his entire ministry, which for example, in the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John, the ministry takes three years and that's narrated in 11 chapters. The other 10 chapters are about his last week. They're really focused on the passion narratives and that's the point for them. I don't think it was the point for Jesus that he was going to be crucified, but it's understandably the point for the Christians because he was crucified. And if he's the Son of God, he surely knew he had to be crucified and it meant that he had to be crucified. And so that becomes the point then of the Gospels.

[Podcast Co-host]

If Jesus believed the end of the world was coming before the end of his lifetime and he was obviously then crucified, does this make him a false prophet?

[Bart Ehrman]

Right. This is a difficult question for many people to ask. So part of it is it depends what one means by false prophet. If you mean simply that they predicted something that didn't happen. Well, yeah, and that means we're probably all false prophets. But the term false prophet tends to have this very highly, highly derogatory character to it. Like there's something kind of wicked about them or just they're so thoroughly self deceived, you know, or they, they're big on themselves. And I don't know if that's appropriate for a figure living 2,000 years ago that we can't really even talk to, to question, to find out what they were saying or doing. What I will say is that I think it is clear that Jesus was predicting that the end was going to come within his generation. We have sayings to that effect by people who are writing after his generation and that indicates they didn't make it up. This has been a Tradition that is floating around for a long time. And since it's the idea that you can find in Jesus predecessor John the Baptist, the saying of John the Baptist that is really interesting is where John the Baptist is recorded as saying, before Jesus starts his ministry, John is preaching to other Jews. And he's saying that the axe is already laid at the root of the tree. Every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire. Okay, so this is that old image that you find in the Old Testament, that God's people are to bear fruit. They're to do what he wants them to do, and if they don't bear good fruit, they're going to be destroyed. So John is saying this, which is said throughout the prophets of the Old Testament, you need to shape up or you're going to be wiped out. But John says the ax is already laid at the root of the tree. That means the chopping is ready to begin. It's ready to start. And so John said that after Jesus death, the apostle Paul expects to be alive when it happens. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, he says Jesus is coming back in judgment. And Paul expects to be one of those alive at the time, says that in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4, he includes himself among those who will be alive when Jesus returns. So this was the prediction of the people before Jesus that he followed, and it's prediction of Jesus own followers afterwards. And so I think it is something Jesus said. So are they all false prophets? Well, you know, I guess you could say everybody's a false prophet, but it doesn't really get you very far. I think Jesus did anticipate that this was going to happen within his generation, and it did not happen. And so he was wrong about that. I mean, I think he was mistaken. But I don't like the term false prophet for that. I prefer to think of it as a calendrical mistake. He got the calendar wrong. He's off by a few millennia. And of course, Christians have great ways of kind of dealing with that. Right? Already in Second Peter in the New Testament, you have an author who claims to be Peter, who probably wasn't Peter, who's trying to explain, you know, well, yeah, we said it was coming soon, and everybody's making fun of us now because it didn't come soon. He said, look, with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day. So, you know, you can't do this by a human calendar, which I'VE always thought is kind of a funny rationale. Because, I mean, it's not a funny rationale. It's an understandable rationale. But today, you know, we have people today say the end is going to come soon. It's coming very soon. And I tell them, that's right. You know, if it's coming in three days, you can start looking for it around 5023. It'll be soon.

[Podcast Co-host]

That kind of leads into my very last question. Do we see divergent ways of explaining the lack of the end of the world in early Christian cults and sects, or does everyone kind of go with, oh, it's coming, we just got the date a little bit wrong?

[Bart Ehrman]

No, they actually change it. And it's interesting. It's very interesting to see how it happens. You can line up the Gospels chronologically, just which was written first, second, third, fourth, and onward. And just within the Gospels, the gospel writers over time start changing how Jesus describes it. And so when you set up the Gospels chronologically, you're not doing it on. On the basis of this. You figure it out on other grounds. But once you set them up chronologically, it's very interesting. In Mark's Gospel, our first gospel, and in what is considered the Q source, that that's the source of sayings that you can find in both Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark. And the idea is that they got these from another source that scholars call Q. Mark and Q would be our two earliest sources. And they are thoroughly apocalyptic in their understandings of Jesus. They portray Jesus making apocalyptic claims, including the idea that people alive in Jesus day will see it happen. Jesus tells his disciples, some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power. Mark 9. He says, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. When he's on his trial before Caiaphas, the high priest Caiaphas, Jesus tells him that he, Caiaphas will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to judge the earth, that he Caiaphas, will see it. So in Mark, our earliest gospel, Jesus is definitely proclaiming this get to Luke written later, these sayings all get changed so that Jesus is not quite claiming this anymore. Jesus is saying, it's going to come soon. But he's not saying, like in my generation, you know, you all aren't going to die. You all will be alive when this happens. He doesn't say that anymore. Why would Luke get rid of them saying that anymore? Well, Luke's writing about 80 or 85. It's been 50 years since Jesus death. You get to the Gospel of John and there is no proclamation about it coming soon. In the Gospel of John, the entire idea is that eternal life has started now for people who believe in Jesus. So there's not an apocalyptic message. And so you see you get from an apocalyptic message in our earliest sources to a kind of a modified not really strictly it's going to happen soon kind of message to a non apocalyptic message of Jesus. When you get to later gospels like the Gospel of Thomas outside the New Testament, it's probably written about 30 years or so after John, we'd guess. In the Gospel of Thomas you have sayings of Jesus where he preaches against an apocalyptic message where Jesus declares that the apocalyptic message is wrong. And as time goes on, things change. And since the end doesn't come, people change Jesus teachings. So much so that eventually, of course the idea that the judgment day is coming soon according to Jesus is no longer the teaching of Jesus. When you get into the second and third centuries, it's like it's, there are a few people who still think this, that it's going to be coming soon, but it virtually dies out. And it's not until modern times that scholars have recognized that this is in fact what Jesus taught. But these teachings got muted in large part because his followers didn't think that he could say something that was wrong. And so they, they changed what he said.

[Podcast Co-host]

Thank you so much. I think that's an excellent place to stop. For this week. We are going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back. Bart is going to share his weekly updates and then we have another round of Outsmart Barthes.

[Bart Ehrman]

If you're interested in the gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible, you should, you should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them [e-mail] you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast.

[Podcast Co-host]

Welcome back, everyone. We now have Bart's Weekly Update.

[Podcast Announcer]

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.

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I'm, I'm having a great time right now working on my next book. I'm, I'm doing Something I've never done before for a book. I mean, I, you know, I've written a lot of books and I always do it the same way, which is I just read massively. I read massively. And scholarship, I read scholarship, you know, and I take notes and I take notes on everything I've written, read and stuff. And ancient sources, modern sources, this time I thought, you know, I'm just going to read. And so I've been reading, I mentioned this before, I've been reading ancient moral philosophy, Greek and Roman moral philosophy. And so I'm, you know, from Plato and Aristotle up to the Stoics and the Epicureans and the skeptics and, and I'm just reading both secondary literature and primary literature. And it is fantastic. Just understanding how ancient people understood what it means to live a good life, how to be virtuous, how to be a good person, how to live. And the reason I'm doing this is because I'm realizing this is so different from the teachings of Jesus. And so my next book's going to be on the radical intervention that Jesus makes in the ethics of the day. And all you have to read is a bunch of this stuff. And you realize, you know, you read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and you read all of these ethicists and realized, man, this is not what Jesus said. So anyway, so I'm just, it's great. And so my update is I'm just reading moral philosophy.

[Podcast Co-host]

I think I've probably mentioned this too. I have read zero moral philosophy. I did a lot of classics in my undergraduate degree and never took any of the philosophy or ethics classes. I was firmly in the literature camp, but it sound very interesting.

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, you know, the deal is it's turned around a lot now, but a lot of classics, people don't go into this later period and what's for them a later period. But Epictetus, I'm telling you, Epictetus's discourse is you want something that will just change your life. Epictetus, he had been a slave to one of the main henchmen for Nero and he's all about how you can't let external circumstances affect your inner well being. And man, it is powerful.

[Podcast Co-host]

That sounds like a good lesson to be going on with, really. Well, thank you for sharing. We are going to now have a round of Outsmart Bart where we test the limits of Bart's knowledge of biblical trivia.

[Podcast Announcer]

Dr. Ehrman has written six New York Times best selling books and holds a PhD from Princeton. It's not often you'll see him made a fool, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's time for Outsmart Bart.

[Podcast Co-host]

You ready, Bart?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I've never been yet as ready

[Podcast Co-host]

as you'll ever be. So this week's questions are coming from Chipago, Monguela. I am really sorry if I mispronounced your name, but thank you so much for sending in your questions. Question 1. What does the name Melchizedek mean?

[Bart Ehrman]

What does the name Melchizedek mean? Okay, so Melchizedek does show up in the. In the New Testament in the Book of Hebrews, but it's because of a. It's a reference to an Old Testament passage where Abraham, who has been off fighting the people who have taken his nephew Lot captive, he wins his battle, and he comes back and he meets with this king of Salem, town of Salem, who's named Melchizedek. Melchizedek means literally king of righteousness. And this is a very interesting passage because Abraham makes an offering to Melchizedek, gives him a tithe, gives him a portion of his spoils. And the New Testament writer thought that this was very interesting because Melchizedek came to be a kind of a symbolic figure for Jesus, because in the Old Testament, Melchizedek, he doesn't mention anything about his lineage. And so the Book of Hebrews says he didn't have mother or father like Jesus, and he's the king of righteousness, like Jesus. And Abraham, the father of the Jews, gave offerings to him to Jesus. And so it becomes an important, important figure. I'm sorry to give a long answer, but I had to kind of extend it so I could remember what Melchizedek meant.

[Podcast Co-host]

And context is always welcome. So, okay, king of righteous, Question two. What was the name of the high priest's servant whose ear Peter cut?

[Bart Ehrman]

Oh, God. Was it Melchizedek?

[Podcast Co-host]

Close. It does begin with M. It begins

[Bart Ehrman]

with an M. It's Malchus, I think.

[Podcast Co-host]

Yes, absolutely.

[Bart Ehrman]

It's interesting because it's a he. It's a Roman name. It ends with us. If it were a Greek name, it end in Os. And so that's a little bit weird because he's a servant of the Jewish high priest. So why does he have a Roman name? This is a puzzle. I hope the next question is not to solve the puzzle.

[Podcast Co-host]

It's not. It's not. I feel like this last question is a little bit tricky as opposed to the first, possibly a bit cheeky on the part of our listener, by which Agents, did Martin Bodmer procure most of the Bodmer Papyri?

[Bart Ehrman]

Through which agents did Martin Bodmer acquire most of the Bodmer Papyri?

[Podcast Co-host]

I don't even know what the Bodmer Papyri is, so you're already one ahead.

[Bart Ehrman]

The Bodmer Papyri was a discovery made in Egypt of ancient papyri that included biblical texts that were published in the early 1950s. And they included some of the oldest New Testament manuscripts that we have. And so they were an enormously significant discovery for. So the deal is just for readers who aren't quite familiar with this whole thing. So the King James Bible is based on handwritten copies of the New Testament that were available at the time when the King James Version was done in the early 17th century. But since then, we've discovered earlier and earlier manuscripts. And in many places, these earlier manuscripts of the New Testament we discovered are different from the later manuscripts. And scholars tend to think these earlier manuscripts give us a more accurate understanding of what the authors actually wrote. The Bodmer Papyri include a couple of manuscripts that are really fantastic, especially P.75, which is a copy of portions of Luke and John, which is one of our oldest manuscripts. And it's an excellent text. It looks like the scribe is preserving things fairly accurately. And so it was a major discovery. And so the question is, what agents did Martin Bodmer use? And I used to know the answer to that back when I was a manuscript guy back in my early career. This is the kind of thing I worked on a lot were these manuscripts, especially p.75 and p.66 and such. But I really used to know this because it was an interesting answer. So remind me.

[Podcast Co-host]

I have never known the answer to this question, but it's Phocion Tano might not be saying that correctly.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I forget. There's something significant about it, too. That's the name. Yeah. So sorry.

[Podcast Co-host]

Well, thank you. Thank you for taking such a valiant stab at all of these questions. And again, two out of three. I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

[Bart Ehrman]

No, no, look, if I were playing baseball, man, I'd be in the workplace.

[Podcast Co-host]

Absolutely. Before we finish for the week, could you just summarize what we spoke about and let people know where they can find more if they're interested?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah. So one of the prominent discoveries of modern scholars about the historical Jesus is that it looks like these passages in the New Testament are correct when they indicate that Jesus thought that the end was coming within his own generation. He was an apocalyptic prophet who understood that the world was controlled by forces of evil, but that God was ultimately sovereign and would destroy those forces of evil to bring in a good kingdom on earth. Jesus thought this was going to happen in his lifetime, or at least in his generation. And so we've been discussing whether that makes him a false prophet or not, because it didn't happen. And I indicated that I'm not comfortable with the term false prophet because of its negative connotations, although I do think Jesus was mistaken about when this was going to take place. And that over time, when Christians realized that it wasn't going to happen right away, they started changing how Jesus talked about the kingdom and about God and his role in it. And these changes reflect the fact that what Jesus anticipated actually didn't happen.

[Podcast Co-host]

Thank you so much. And you mentioned, I think, the last time we spoke, a book that you'd written about this Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet for a New Millennium. Did I get the title right?

[Bart Ehrman]

You did, yeah. So this book came out almost 25 years ago now, but it was. I wrote it 25 years ago. I wrote this book because there had been a lot of scholars writing books about the historical Jesus in the late 1980s, 1990s, and almost all these books were arguing that Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet because that had been the majority view forever. Well, since the early 20th century. And I thought, you know, the reality is, most scholars think he was, but these books are being written by people who say he wasn't. And the reason is because nobody writes books to explain what everybody knows. And so what you know, you don't. You don't back up something that people just know is right, I thought. But the reading public out there doesn't realize that, in fact, this view of the apocalyptic prophet is still the dominant view by a long shot. I thought I better explain to people what the view is and why scholars hold it. And so that was why I wrote my book, Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet. But at the same time, other people started writing books that have very similar views in broad contours. I mean, like D.L. allison's book on Jesus and Paula Fredrickson's book on Jesus. And people realize, yeah, this still is the dominant view.

[Podcast Co-host]

Thank you so much for your time and expertise, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. Episodes. Remember also 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. Bart, what are we talking about next time?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, we're moving on from Jesus and the crucifixion of Jesus to the death of his apostles. How did they die? Do we know what happened to them? The reason this is important to me is because all the time I have people tell me that the apostles of Jesus believed he got raised from the dead and they were martyred for believing it. Well, they wouldn't have died for a lie. So that shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead. And my question to them is always, how do you know how they died? Exactly. How do you know what happened to the apostles? And I always get hit with a blank stare. So we're going to talk about how did the apostles die? And do we know? And how would we know?

[Podcast Co-host]

Bart, thank you so much for that audience. Thank you again for listening. I hope you can join us next week. Thank you, everybody, and goodbye.

[Megan Lewis]

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.