← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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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.
- [00:56]
Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we're going to be talking about Mary Magdalene. But before we get into that, Bart, how are you? How has your last week been?
- [01:06]
Bart Ehrman
My last week has been crazy. Like most of my weeks. I was thinking, I was talking to somebody the other day, I said, look, everybody I know complains about how busy they are and it's all boring to everyone else. You know, my view is, look, we've got 24 hours in the day and each of us has 24 hours in the day and all of us fill those 24 hours. So like, what does it mean to be too busy? You just like, y' all do something. It's, it's always fun to figure out how you're gonna. For me, it's always fun. The thing is that there are a lot of people who are bored. They don't have anything to do and they don't know what to do with their time and they, you know, they complain about and it's, I understand that it's got to be awful really, just to not to know what to do with your time. What I've always thought is that we ought to figure out some way to work out a time exchange. Somebody can give me like four or five of their hours, then they're happier because they're not bored and I'm happier because I got four or five more hours. But we haven't worked out a way how to do it. So. Yeah. So Megan, how are you doing?
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Megan Lewis
I'm good. And I am 100% on board with this time exchange idea. If someone out there can work it out, I would be very interested in taking advantage of that. I Was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, I think the week you. You did one of your guest interviews, I was in Vancouver for a conference workshop run by a group called People in the Past. So that was fun. I've never been to Canada. Yeah, it was exciting. And it was my first time away from my twin babies since they came home from the nicu. So that was a bit of a milestone.
- [02:31]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Canada has a lot of amazing places, but if you have to pick a good one, Vancouver is one of them. That's. That's fantastic. So this is. What is it? Is this about people in the Past?
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Megan Lewis
Yes. The group is called Peopling the Past, and they do a podcast and a blog as well. And I was taking part in a workshop on alternative careers for academics.
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Bart Ehrman
Oh.
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Megan Lewis
Which is a thing I love talking about. So it was a lot of fun. And I got to meet a lot of people that I only know through Twitter. So it was. It was really good.
- [03:01]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I hope you could use, like, long sentences if you're talking to them, not on Twitter.
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Megan Lewis
Yes. Didn't have to limit myself.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. Well, that sounds great. Sounds great.
- [03:13]
Megan Lewis
Today we're going to be talking about Mary Magdalene. Her name is very familiar to a lot of people, regardless of whether or not you were raised in the church. But reliable information on her is kind of hard to come by. Who was she? What role does she play in the Bible? And was she a prostitute, Jesus wife, or something else entirely? So that's the topic we're delving into today. But why do you think it's important to talk about this kind of marginal figure?
- [03:37]
Bart Ehrman
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I think in the. In the Bible, she's fairly marginal, but in popular imagination, she's fairly large. I mean, some. Some years ago, when Dan Brown published his Da Vinci Code, everybody read the book. I mean, it was one of these books that just everybody read. A lot of people got their understanding of early Christian history from the Da Vinci Code because it was about Jesus. And it's a modern murder novel, real page turner. But the premise behind it has to do with Jesus and Mary being married and having a child, and that their line continues down till today. And so this is kind of a climax of people for a long time saying that Mary Magdalene is really important. People today, I'm still today, people tell me they think that Mary Magdalene was Jesus closest disciple and that there must have, you know, there might have been something going on there between the two of them and. And that kind of thing. And so that's, it's one of these interesting things where there's really not much in the Bible about it, but it's, there's a lot in the popular imagination.
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Megan Lewis
Then if there isn't an awful lot in the Bible about her, what is there? What kind? Like when does she appear? What kind of roles does she play?
- [04:45]
Bart Ehrman
Jesus, of course, has 12 disciples in the New Testament. 12 men that he's chosen who are his closest disciples. And there are other people who follow him around in the New Testament, including a group of women. Mary Magdalene appears to be one of these women who associates with Jesus in some way. Her main significance in the New Testament is that she's one of the women of, who discovers that Jesus tomb is empty on the third day. And in some gospels she's the primary one, she's the main one who finds the empty tomb. And so she's hugely important in the New Testament, but she's not important in the ministry of Jesus. In the entire New Testament, like all four gospels put together, Mary Magdalene is mentioned one time in association with Jesus during his ministry. There's a passage in Luke chapter 8 where we find out that Jesus and his disciples are being supported by Joanna, Susanna and Mary Magdalene and a group of other women. That's it. That's all it says. I mean, it does say that she had seven demons cast out of her. It doesn't say that Jesus cast them out. You could assume that, I guess, but that's it. That's. That's the only association. So the idea that they're hanging out together the whole time or maybe having, you know, maybe having a romantic relationship is just completely made up.
- [06:07]
Megan Lewis
Do we know anything about her life prior to following Jesus or do references to her just kind of start when she meets Jesus and there's no background at all?
- [06:15]
Bart Ehrman
There's no explicit background. There are some things that we can infer. One is her name. So she's named Mary Magdalene. There are debates, ongoing debates among scholars about what that might mean. Magdalene. The first point to make about it though, is that she's given this kind of second name in order to differentiate her from other Marys. In ancient Judaism, normally people did not have a second name. They had a name. And so Jesus didn't have a last name. You might have been called Jesus, son of Joseph, or might have been called Jesus from Nazareth, something like that. When you have people in a text who have the same name, you have to have some way of differentiating them or you don't know who's who and so in the New Testament, for example, you get three different people named Herod. And so you have to identify, you know, is this Herod the Great? Is it Herod Antipas? You get several people named James, you get several people named Jude or Judas, and you get several people named Mary. And so with the Mary's, in order to know which one it is, the author will tell you that it's Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary from Bethany, Mary Magdalene. So the first thing is that the moniker is some way of identifying her. And the question is what, what does it mean? The standard interpretation is that it comes from the, from the name of the town that she came from. There's a town on the Sea of Galilee called Magdala. Magdala is an Aramaic word that means tower. This was a town that was famous because it had a large tower in it. And so Mary Magdalene in this understanding is Mary who comes from the, from the town of Magdala, as opposed to Mary Bethany or Mary the mother of Jesus. So that's not something.
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Megan Lewis
Do we know anything more about her background or is it just we know where she came from?
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Bart Ehrman
If these stories are historically credible, then there are several other data that would be important. One is that she would be a woman of means. She would have resources, she'd be fairly rich because for one thing, if she were married and had children and no money, she wouldn't be able to leave home to follow anybody around. Women normally had to work in the home. And the only, the only women who didn't have to really were people who were women of leisure. And so she and these other two women would be women of means, possibly not married, possibly widowed, but we don't know about that. She is said to have, have resources and she's somebody who's following Jesus to help him out. Because Jesus and the disciples don't work, they don't have jobs. And back then there were no such things as bank accounts. They didn't have savings that they were living off of. The only way to survive is to beg or to have people, you know, support you. And so the idea is that these are, these women are supporting him. And the other tradition about her is that she had seven demons cast out of her. We're not told what that means. We're not told what the situation was. We're not told that Jesus did it, although it's a likely surmise given that it's in a story about Jesus. And, you know, we don't know. I7 we don't know anything about it. We have nothing about it. It's just that that's how she's identified. The only other thing we know about her is that she went with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem. She's so. She almost certainly is from Galilee. So a woman of means from Galilee who had some connection with Jesus is about all we can say.
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Megan Lewis
So she appears also in the apocryphal gospels of Mary and of Philip. How do these sources add to our understanding of the historical Mary and augment what we see in the canonical Gospels?
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Bart Ehrman
The later gospels start what became the obsession among some modern people which is thinking about Mary as a very important person. And of course, she is a very important person. If she's the one who discovered that Jesus tomb was empty, that would make her important. But these other gospels portray her sometimes as being important in Jesus ministry. One of the really interesting gospels from early Christianity is the Gospel of Mary. Mary in this case is Mary Magdalene. It's unfortunately only preserved in a fragment. We don't have the entire thing. It was discovered in the 19th century, took a long time to be published because of a lot of very strange circuitous incidents that happened. But it ended up getting published in the middle of the 20th century. And it's been subject to a good deal of analysis. It's one of these gospels that scholars call a Gnostic gospel. It presents a form of Christianity that was not orthodox, that was considered gnostic. And we'll have an episode or more on Gnosticism because there's a lot to be said about it. The basic idea is that Jesus reveals his secrets and these secret revelations can explain how salvation works. And in this particular gospel of Mary, what's interesting is that it begins in the middle of a sentence and Jesus is talking to his disciples and he's finishing up some kind of statement to them. And when he's done the part that we have, Peter turns to Mary and he says, so Mary, we know that Jesus loved you more than all of the women. He revealed something to you. Can you tell us what he revealed to you? She starts in on giving the revelation that Jesus gave. And right then we have a gap in the manuscript. Goes for several pages, like we're missing it. Oh my God. But when it picks up, Mary's explaining about how the soul is ascending up through the heavenly realms in gnostic thinking. The people who have a spark of the divine within them, some people have a spark of divinity. I, I, Megan, I think you're probably one of them. And so you have a, you have a spark of the divinity and the idea is to escape your body, that you're trapped in this prison of a body, and Jesus tells you how to do it. And so this is describing how the soul is ascending through various levels of heaven that are occupied and controlled by evil forces. And the soul is ascending and these evil forces can't stop it. And so Mary gives this revelation, and we get it right. We start. We're right in the middle of things when it picks up. But then she ends it. She finishes. And the disciples start looking at each other and saying, jesus told this to a woman. Surely he wouldn't tell it to a woman. He'd tell it to us. He tells us men. And they start having this argument and saying, yeah, we don't believe it, Mary. And Peter says that. And the disciples start kind of saying, yeah, we don't buy it. And then finally, one of the disciples stands up, says, levi stands up and says, look, Peter, you're always been a hothead, and just, you know, back off because he loved Mary more than the rest of us. And then they decide that, okay, he did get this revelation. Then they go out and preach the Gospel. One of the reasons it's really. This is really interesting is because it shows a conflict between Peter and Mary about her authority. And that's interesting not only because of the. The gender dynamics, but precisely because even in the New Testament, there is a difference of opinion about who discovered Jesus tomb. Was Peter the first to realize that Jesus was raised from the dead, or was Mary the first? And you get different accounts in the New Testament. The Gospels have Mary first. Paul says that Peter was the first. And so this conflict is continuing on into early Christianity. Kind of a conflict between Peter and Mary.
- [14:04]
Megan Lewis
That's very interesting. And I think, please correct me if I'm wrong. The language that you were speaking about there, about a disciple saying Jesus loved Mary more than them, is that echoed? I think that's echoed in the Gospel of Philip where a disciple asks Jesus why he loves Mary more than he loves the rest of them. Am I right on that?
- [14:24]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah. The Gospel of Philip. That's another one. That's a really interesting one. This one wasn't discovered until the middle of the 20th century. It was discovered in a collection of writings that scholars call the Nag Hammadi Library. It is a collection of Gnostic texts that were discovered in 1945 by accident by several field hands who were just digging in a wilderness area outside of a village called Nag Hammadi. They were digging for fertilizer, and they uncovered A jar that had old books in it is a collection of writings and they're gnostic. Most of them are gnostic writings and most of them are ones we didn't know about before this. One of the non commodity texts is this Gospel of Philip, which is one of the more bizarre texts from early Christianity. It is very difficult to understand. I highly recommend people try to read it. It is the easiest way to blow your mind and stay within the confines of the law. It is very interesting and very peculiar. Peculiar. But at one point you have a discussion in the Gospel of Philip about Jesus relationship with Mary in a couple of points. And people have cited these passages as an indication that Jesus had something more than a Platonic relationship with Mary. One of the passages unfortunately is very, scholars would say lacunos. It has lacunae in it, which means that it's. There are holes in the manuscript. It's been eroded away or eaten away by worms. And so there you got the page, you got holes in the page where you're missing words. And it looks like what it's saying is that Jesus loved Mary more than the others, but there are gaps. So you have to supply words along the way. But it looks like he's saying that he loved Mary more than others and that he frequently used to kiss her on her. Then there's a gap.
- [16:21]
Megan Lewis
What one of the joys of studying ancient texts.
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Bart Ehrman
And so it's usually, it's usually thought to be mouth. And so people say, so you know, they're kissing. Oh, there it is. But in fact, this is not a romantic gesture in the Gospel of Philip. And the Gospel of Philip deals with this early Christian ritual of kissing. In early Christian churches, when you'd have your service and you'd have the, like that moment of welcome, you know, when before you take the offering where you all greet each other, they would greet each other with a holy kiss. This is found in the New Testament. And then in early Christianity, kissing was involved in the Christian ritual. There were times when it got so involved that church leaders had to say, okay, back off a bit. Okay, enough of that. You know, just with a chaste mouth, please. They would say in the Gospel of Philip, the idea of a kiss, it's a kind of an exchange of soul and an exchange of meaning. And it's the way one person gives a revelation to another because it's exchanging through the mouth. And so when it says that Jesus is kissing Mary, it doesn't mean that this is a romantic gesture of some kind. It means that he's giving her a revelation. So it's very easy to misread unless you. You have some kind of sense for how the Gospel of Philip itself works.
- [17:41]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. So she's not named in the gospels as Jesus, wife or a prostitute. She's. She's a lady who. Who supports him financially. Are these ideas of being a prostitute or the spouse of Jesus, do you see them in the apocryphal sources? I know we've just talked about Philip and how that's misread, or do they come from somewhere else entirely?
- [18:03]
Bart Ehrman
All right, so these are. They're actually two separate questions. I'll first deal with prostitute, and then we can deal with wife. In apocryphal texts, the prostitute business is fabricated, but we know exactly when it was fabricated and by whom. It wasn't somebody meaning to fabricate it. It was one of the early popes, Pope Gregory the Great, just before the year 600 or so, gave a sermon about some of the women who are in the New Testament who have connections with Jesus. And what he does is he takes these various women and he combines them, saying they're all the same woman and that it's Mary Magdalene. We have a passage where this unnamed woman comes up to. To Jesus near the time of his death and anoints him with oil and cries and wipes his feet with her hair and touches him. And Jesus says, this woman has anointed me for my burial. But some of the onlookers are upset because this is a sinful woman. And since she's a sinner, Jesus shouldn't be having any contact with her. That is today often taken to mean that she's a prostitute, that she's a woman of ill repute, so to say. But the text actually doesn't say that. It says that she's a sinner. And when Pharisees would say that somebody is a sinner, what they simply meant was that this is somebody who does not try assiduously to follow the Jewish law. It's not necessarily sexual, but people read a sexual meaning into it because of how she's kissing Jesus feet and so forth. So Gregory talks about that, and then he talks about the passage in the Gospel of John of the woman taken in adultery. And this woman is caught in the act of adultery. And the Jewish leaders think that she's to be stoned to death. And they ask Jesus what they should do. And he says, the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. This passage was not originally in the Gospel of John. But by the time that Gregory the Great was giving the sermon, it was widely. It was in the manuscripts at this point. So he assumed it was an authentic story. And he thought it's the same woman who had wiped Jesus feet, who was a sinful woman. And he also talked about Mary Magdalene, this woman who had seven demons cast out of her. And so here you go again. Another woman connected with Jesus who is a prostitute and an adulteress, and who had seven demons. And so the seven demons must have been driving her to commit prostitution. It's this combination of things. So the reality is all three of these are separate women. In the New Testament, the woman anointing him is not said to be a prostitute. The woman caught in adultery is actually not originally in the New Testament. And Mary Magdalene, there's nothing that connects her with any sexual sins at all. And people say, well, she had seven demons in her. Well, yeah, okay. So in the New Testament, there are lots of people who have demons in them, and none of them is being driven to sexual excess or sexual sin. It's got nothing to do with sex. And so this is just popular imagination. But once the Pope associated Mary with these others, then she came to be thought of as a prostitute. That's the tradition then. That's been handed down till today.
- [21:12]
Megan Lewis
I see. Thank you. So one of the arguments that is often seemingly cited for Jesus and Mary being married is that it's unheard of for people in the ancient world to not be married. Everyone got married. It was a social obligation. So Jesus must have been married. And there's this woman following him around, and we have her name. So she was. She was probably his wife. Is this idea about moral, social obligation to be married accurate? Is it weird for Jesus to be an unmarried man?
- [21:40]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So this is a very common argument, and it's especially applied to the men, that men had to be married. And that this was the rule. You had to be married. And, you know, who better than Mary Magdalene? So. Yeah. Well, first of all, if Jesus was married, why Mary Magdalene? And why. Why in the New Testament is she not identified as his wife? I mean, his mother's identified, his brothers are identified, his sisters are identified, his father's identified. Why would you identify his wife? Especially if she's in the story someplace? So that doesn't make any sense. But the idea that every man had to be married is nonsense. I mean, it's literal nonsense. I mean, how. How does that work? Exactly? So what most people don't think about is demographics in the ancient world. Unless it was a time of war. A society, every society, had more men than women. They had more men than women because women died in childbirth with some regularity, some scary regularity, and men didn't. So unless, except for times of war, in times of war, the men would go. But apart from times of war, then. Then there'd be more men than women. So they can't all be married. I mean, you can. It cannot happen. So there's that. The second thing to point out is that we actually know of Jewish men in the time of Jesus who intentionally remained single and celibate. And the men we know about like that are Jewish apocalypticists, people who believe that the end is coming soon. And so, for example, there's a community of Jews that we know about from Jesus time called the Essenes. They're mentioned by Josephus, and we've discovered their writings. The Dead Sea Scrolls are written by. Apparently written by Essenes. And some of these Essenes formed monastic communities in wilderness areas and remain single and celibate in expectation for the coming of God's kingdom. And these are before Jesus and at the same time as Jesus, Jesus also was an apocalyptic Jew. I don't think he was a member of the Essene community or that he himself was an Essene, but he had similar apocalyptic views. So there's nothing weird about him not being married because this happened. And by the way, it also happened in Jesus wake. The Apostle Paul started out as an apocalyptic Jew, and he tells us that he's single and celibate. And so it's not. It would not be unusual at all for a Jewish man, especially an apocalyptically thinking Jewish man, to be single. There's nothing really to suggest that Jesus was married. There's actually a pretty good argument that Jesus was not married. I think it's a good argument. I'm not sure everyone will think this is a good argument. Let me tell you what the argument is. Jesus has this controversy with. He has controversies with various Jews and Jewish leaders, Jewish teachers, and at one point in the Gospels, a group called the Sadducees are trying to confront him. The Sadducees don't believe in a future bodily resurrection of the dead. They think people are dead, they're dead, and that's it. So you live your life for God because this is all you've got. But Jesus, like other apocalyptic Jews, thought there was a resurrection. The Sadducees come up to him in the Gospels and they say, look, you believe in a resurrection. Okay, what do you do about this? In the law of Moses, we're told that if a man is married and he dies and without a child, his brother is supposed to marry his wife, the man deceased man's wife, and then produce a child. So what happens is, suppose you got these seven men. First one is married to somebody, dies childless, and so the second brother marries her, dies childless, the third marriage, and goes through all seven, they all die childless, and then she dies. Whose wife is she going to be in the resurrection? And Jesus says, no, you don't get it. He says, in the resurrection, it's not going to be like that. People will be like the angels. They will not marry or be given in marriage. So in the kingdom of God that's coming, people will not be married. The reason I think that's an interesting argument for Jesus not being married is because most of his ministry is meant to show what the kingdom is going to be like. He's preaching about the coming kingdom and he's telling people they need to start living the life of the kingdom now. There'll be no war in the kingdom, so you're supposed to be a peacemaker now. There'll be no injustice in the kingdom, so you're supposed to take care of the oppressed now. There'll be no homelessness in the kingdom, so you're supposed to house people now, clothe them and feed them. You're supposed to implement the ideals of the kingdom now. And if one of the ideals of the kingdom is not to be married, then it would sound like Jesus would probably not want to be married.
- [26:20]
Megan Lewis
Now that's really interesting. Thank you. Final question before we we wrap up this portion. If we know so little about Mary Magdalene and she features so minorly in the Gospels, why is it that you think she's been latched onto by various storytellers throughout the centuries? Do you think maybe it's because there's so little information, it leaves a lot of space for more creative interpretations?
- [26:43]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's certainly. That's certainly true. And. But you do wonder why they didn't latch onto others as well, like Joanna and Susanna and things. I think the sole reason is that Mary is the one who's said to discover the empty tomb sometimes in the Gospel of John, she's the main figure in it. Even in early Christianity, this was seen as highly significant. The disciples of Jesus after his death came to see Jesus in the Gospels, and then they sort of shift from being disciples of Jesus to being apostles of Jesus. So these two different terms mean something different. A disciple is somebody who is A learner, somebody who's being taught by someone, someone being trained by someone. An apostle is somebody who is sent out on a mission. It comes from a Greek word that simply means to be sent out. And so apostles are sent to spread the word of Christ. And so 11 of the disciples become apostles. And then Jesus appears to Paul. He becomes an apostle. And so these apostles are the ones who are commissioned with the mission. Even in early Christianity, starting at the end of the second century, some church fathers pointed out that Mary is the first one to carry the message. She's told to tell the disciples that Jesus has been raised. And so she's the first apostle. More than that, she's the apostle to the apostles. And so that gives her a kind of priority. And even apart from that, as I mentioned earlier, if it's true that Mary was thought to be the first one to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, if that is true historically, and I think it may be true historically, I think there might be a woman, Mary, who is the first to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. If that's what we think historically, then you can make really good argument that Mary is the one who started Christianity. She's the founder of Christianity. She's the first, and she convinced others. And so she's hugely important. I mean, how important can you get? She started the biggest religion in the world for his. And. And so hugely important. That doesn't mean, though, that she and Jesus were, you know, sexually involved or
- [29:01]
Megan Lewis
that she had a child and moved
- [29:02]
Bart Ehrman
to France, she had a baby, moved to France, and, you know, the line is still surviving today. That's got nothing to do with it. It's not. It's not about their intimate relationship when they were alive. It's that she's the one who came to think that he was raised. And if that is true historically, it would mean that she would have had some kind of. She was a very devoted follower of Jesus during his lifetime, as were obviously other people. It would give her that kind of special status, but not a special status in terms of being intimate with him, let alone married to him. And certainly, you know, not the status of, you know, the kinds of things people. People say about her as being the most important disciple during his lifetime.
- [29:44]
Megan Lewis
I don't think that's true, but thank you so much. That was very interesting. This is probably a good place to stop. And before we have our little ad break, I know you have another course coming up. Do you want to tell us a little about that one?
- [29:58]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So you Know, I have this, I have this book that just, just came out called Armageddon, what the Bible really says about the end. And one of the issues I deal with in the book is this popular Christian understanding, popular conservative, evangelical Christian understanding of the future Rapture, the Rapture is in this line of thinking, the moment when Jesus comes back from heaven and takes his followers out of the earth prior to a period of horrible suffering on the planet, terrible devastation. But the disciples, the followers of Jesus don't have to experience it because Jesus comes back and takes his followers out. This was a very big issue when I was in, when I was in college, I believed in it. I thought it was going to come before the end of the 1980s. I thought the people, you know, that I would be taken out and all of my evangelical friends were really committed to it and we really did not want to be left behind. The Left behind series that came out in the 90s is all about this, which sold many tens of millions of copies. So my lecture is going to be on will you be left behind? And it's about the history of the Rapture. Where did this idea come from? Because people think or people say that it's in the Bible and it's not. And I'm going to be showing how these passages that get interpreted as referring to the Rapture absolutely have nothing to do with this doctrine of the Rapture. The doctrine, the Rapture in fact was invented in the 1830s. We can pinpoint it. And so I'll be talking about where it came from and how it's not in the Bible and whatever else our future holds for us. And it may not be good, but it's not going to involve being left behind.
- [31:47]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. And the live recording I think is April 15th and I assume people can, if they buy the course before then, they can come and watch you speak about this via Zoom.
- [31:56]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so it's going to be a. It'll be a one lecture course, you know, 50, 60 minute lecture with, with Q and A. It's for anybody who wants to purchase it. They can come and participate in the Q A and, and hear me give it live. And then after that we'll be producing it as a course and it'll all be available on my website along with my other courses ated barterman.com and if
- [32:18]
Megan Lewis
you are interested in that, the early Bird pricing is available until March 31st. That's $9 and that gets you like lifetime access. You can watch the live recording, then you can come back and watch it afterwards. And if you miss the early bird pricing, then it will be $14.95. And like Bart said, you can sign up or learn more on his website and the web address for that is Bart ehrman.com left behind.
- [32:43]
Bart Ehrman
Can I just say that, you know, 9.95 is not very much to guarantee that you're not left behind?
- [32:50]
Megan Lewis
Yes, I think, I think it's worth it just to make sure that, that you actually are raptured. I think that's, it's a bargain.
- [32:57]
Bart Ehrman
Really good deal. Yeah, it's a good deal.
- [32:59]
Megan Lewis
Well, we're going to take a brief break and we will be right back with Bart's Soapbox.
- [33:06]
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 choose. Check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them out@barturman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast.
- [33:38]
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.
- [33:53]
Megan Lewis
And we are back. But before your soapbox, what do you have going on this week?
- [33:58]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'm really getting deep into my, my research on the ethics of Jesus and moral philosophy in the ancient world. And you know, I set aside tasks for myself or what I want to do next. And one of my favorite philosophers from the ancient world for 30 years has been a stoic philosopher named Epictetus. He's a fellow who says that you can only control the things that you can control and anything you can't control, you can't be. There's no reason to be upset about because you've got no control over it. He had been a slave, you know, he knew there were things he could not control as a slave. But, but he disciplined himself not to be worried about things that he couldn't control. And he's very witty about it. And he's got the, so he has a volume of his, I've got a volume of his writings and I've always loved it. I've set aside this, this coming week. I'm just going to read through these things. I've got the Greek text and I'm just gonna, gonna go for it. And this for me. This is great. I'm really looking forward to this, that
- [34:56]
Megan Lewis
sounds like a lot of fun and I like that message very much. I think Epictetus would have got along famously with my mother, who holds exactly the same point of view. Okay, we are going to be right back with Bart's Soapbox
- [35:13]
Bart Ehrman
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [35:29]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what are you soapboxing about today?
- [35:31]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it actually, as it turns out, it has to do with Epictetus in a really indirect way. You know, right now we are all experiencing a major culture war, especially in America, as the polarization is reaching just about everything. It's certainly reaching the university campuses right now where the polarization is becoming more and more extreme. There are a lot of protests in the country right now about how liberal university professors are and how the faculties are so liberal and their attempts to kind of squash that from by legislatures and by governors who are trying to make universities more open to various ideas. Let me just say I am completely, completely open to having various ideas represented on university campuses. I myself am fairly liberal. I am liberal, but I want to hear other voices. I tell my students to disagree with me. I tell my students to take a stand and that it doesn't matter if they agree with me. I want them to think. But there's this been this recent development. I don't know how recent it is, but it's coming to a climax now with faculty members complaining that they aren't allowed to express their views. Faculty members. And in a lot of cases, it's because they feel like other faculty members will gang up on them, that they won't be respected if they say what they think. And so they have to self censor. And so faculty members complain about self censoring, that it's not right. They have to self censor. My view of this is that especially for somebody who has tenure, who cannot be fired for taking a stand on, say, a social issue or a political issue, if you're just expressing your views, they can't fire you for it. I mean, you've got tenure. People who self censor, I think, really need to think about this idea of blaming others because you're afraid to say what you think. Self censoring just means you have chosen not to say something that you think is important because you don't want somebody else to ridicule you or to say something against you or you think you might be embarrassed. And really, I think that you need to stand up to the courage of your convictions. If you think something is true and you think it matters, you should speak out. And so I really have very little sympathy for this. Frankly. I'm not a particularly courageous guy, but I'm frequently speaking to an audience of 300, 400 people, all of whom think not only that I'm dead wrong, but that I'm going to roast in hell for it. Many of them are eager that. For it to happen sooner rather than later, before. Before I mislead too many other people. And that's just, you know, because I. I want to tell people what I think is right. And again, it's not because I'm courageous. Last week, I talked with a Ukrainian fellow who had to flee to Poland because he was outspoken against the Russian government, you know, with the invasion. That's courage. That's courage. And for faculty members to complain that somebody might make fun of them. I mean, just, you know, if you've got something important to say and you believe it's important, then say it. You know, don't be so worried about that somebody might make fun of you. That's my. That's my view. A lot of faculty members don't want to hear that, and they, you know, they just want to complain about it. But I think that really, you just need to speak up if you have firm convictions.
- [38:45]
Megan Lewis
I agree with you wholeheartedly, and thank you very much for sharing that. Before we finish out for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about today and suggest where people can learn more if they're interested?
- [38:56]
Bart Ehrman
Right. So there's this controversy still today about how the. How significant is Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus. And what I was pointing out is that she's scarcely mentioned at all in Jesus ministry in the New Testament. She's never portrayed as one of the disciples, let alone the most important disciple. She's important in the New Testament because she's the first to discover the tomb of Jesus. And that does make her hugely important for the history of Christianity. But it doesn't mean that she was particularly close to Jesus. And it certainly doesn't mean that they had an intimate relationship or that they had a baby, as people say today. So I think it's important to understand really, her role and her significance in the New Testament, but not to overplay it and over sensationalize it, as many people do today.
- [39:42]
Megan Lewis
And you've written a couple of books on this particular topic.
- [39:45]
Bart Ehrman
Well, as it turns out, you know, I've always been Kind of interested in Mary Magdalene. But my. The first one was, you know, when Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code came out, there were roughly about 6,842 of us who wrote books about it. I was one of them. You know, a lot of people had things to say. I wanted to talk about what he got historically wrong and not just so about the Gospels and about Jesus and about the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. And I just went through and talked about just factual mistakes in the Da Vinci Code. Some of them had no bearing on the plot. He just got things wrong. He didn't know. So I wrote. I wrote this book called Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code, which has a. Has a chapter on Mary Magdalene and Jesus. But then later I wrote a book. I was interested in the three disciples, the three followers of Jesus that I'm pretty sure said they saw him alive afterwards. The apostle Paul says that he saw Jesus alive after his death. And in the New Testament, Peter is said to be the first to have a resurrection appearance of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is said to be the one who discovered the tomb and proclaimed him raised. I think all three of these had some kind of visionary experience, independent visionary experiences. And so I wanted to write a book about them. And I called it Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. So beautiful. And Mary. And in that I have six chapters devoted to Mary Magdalene and about what we know about her historically, but also what kind of legends sprang up about her later.
- [41:14]
Megan Lewis
Well, thank you so much, audience. You can go and find those books for yourselves if you are interested in getting more detail about this. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Subscribe. Remember also that you can use the code njpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [41:40]
Bart Ehrman
Next time we're talking about my favorite gospel and in fact, my favorite book of the New Testament, my favorite book of the Bible, the Gospel of Mark, a completely underappreciated book by people who think it's just kind of a nuts and bolts approach to saying the things Jesus said and did. And oh boy, is that wrong. And so we're gonna. We're gonna talk about the genius of the Gospel of Mark.
- [42:01]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. And hopefully everyone else appreciates the genius of the Gospel of Mark and we spread some of that appreciation around a little bit. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [42:13]
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.