← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Was Peter a Rock or Shifting Sand? Jesus' Closest Disciple in History and Legend.
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B
one of Jesus disciples, Simon Peter is a prominent figure in the New Testament. His prominence has always seemed to be a bit of a contradiction to me. He's rash and impetuous and famously denied knowing Jesus, but at the same time performs miracles and goes on to be a very dedicated missionary. So how do we cut through the legendary accounts of him to understand who Peter really was? And given his importance, why would early Christian writers continue to portray him in a less than stellar light? Join us this week on Misquoting Jesus to find out. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. This week we are talking about the Apostle Peter and for a man nicknamed Rocky by Jesus, he seems to have been less than reliable. But should we understand his flawed character as a reflection of an historical man or is it a literary invention? Before we get to that, Bart, good morning. How are you?
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A
Yep, doing fine, thanks. Yep. Life's good. Personally, not in terms of the world, but personally it's going fine. How about you? How are you doing?
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B
Same actually, very well. The world is burning, but everything else in my personal life is going quite nicely. I wanted to ask because we've spoken several times about teaching and how much you enjoy it and how much fun undergraduate students are and it's been kind of rolling around in my head. What do you dislike about academic academia?
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A
Oh yeah, no, it's. Yeah. I'll leave aside the kind of the structural issues, because the way the university system's going now I think is really quite problematic. But so I'll just talk on kind of the personal level, something I really don't like, which is what every professor I know doesn't like, which is grading. So it is an unpleasant job. And the thing that drives you is knowing that it's a job that's worth doing. I never ever give like multiple choice exams or, you know, true false exams like that, you know, which are just so easy to grade. I always ask like, I have papers, I have two page papers due every week from all my classes that are response papers where I give them like an assignment controversial, where they got to do something where there'll be different opinions about things based on the evidence. And then we get together and we discuss those things once a week. And so I have to grade all those. And then, you know, there'll be a term paper, you have to grade those. And you've got midterm exams and final exams and quizzes and you got to grade all this stuff. And it's not fun. But if you provide some feedback for students, it can make a huge difference in their education. And so you, you feel obligated that you really, really have to do it. So some things I, you know, I take more seriously than others. So like, for one thing I do is I have my students turn in a completed absolutely as good as they can. Make a draft of their term paper a few weeks before the end of the semester. And then I mark it up and I tell them what they could do to make it better. Then they submit a second draft. That's a lot of work because if you just have them turn into paper at the end, you just give them a B minus. You don't have to say anything, they're not going to pay attention. But if you like their finer grades dependent on them improving it pedagogically, that's smart. But personally, it's hard. It's like, oh God, here we go.
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B
Do you have teaching assistants to help with it or is it just all on you?
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A
So for many years, what I did is, would teach a large undergraduate class with 300, 400 students. And I'd have a small army of teaching assistants. And they would do all the grading. But I would meet with them to talk about the rubrics for the grading. And any student who was given an F, I would ask to look at those to determine what level of F it is. Because most grades, like if you're B, they're like in a 10 point scale, you have 10 possibilities of B. If the F starts at 60, there are 59 possibilities of F. And so someone gets a 5. It's quite different from getting a 55 for their final score. So I would grade all the apps and I would grade anything. If a TA couldn't figure out is this brilliant or just really chaotic, I can't figure it out. I'd look at. Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, this one's chaotic. So yeah, so I still had to do grading even with that, but it was so much easier. These days I'm not having teaching assistants. I've decided just to teach small classes. And at a research university like UNC, a small class would be more like 25 students as opposed to, you know, 400. But that means 25, you know, papers come in every week for both classes and 25 quizzes for each. You know, so yeah, so I do, I do all that myself.
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B
That is a lot. I have graded papers precisely once and the poor professor who I was taing for had to go back through all of them because I graded far too harshly. Oh.
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A
Oh, yeah. No, graduate students are the worst. You fit right in the mole. I'm telling you, somebody who's first year of teaching, oh man, look out. They are. Man, it was hard for me. I'm going to make it hard for you. I know, I know. Yeah, I get it. I'm a hard grader too. But there's nobody above me to make me change.
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B
And you've taught them, so you know what they should know. So I feel like it's a little.
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A
Yeah, right.
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B
Okay. We should talk about Peter. Why is he an important figure for New Testament and early Christianity studies?
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A
Well, I mean, he's kind of an unexpected figure to be someone important for the history of Western civilization. He's just in the New Testament, he's a lower class, uneducated fishermen. People seem to have this idea of this being like this kind of middle class occupation. And it was not. The cultural elite despised the occupation, even though they would eat the fish and they didn't think much of fishermen. So he wouldn't be expected to be. So the reason he is of any importance, the reason anybody even knows his name, is because Jesus chose him to be one of his disciples. And in the Gospels, he appears to be the one who is closest to Jesus. Jesus, right hand man. So that's why he ends up being important in the gospels. And then after Jesus dies, it kind of makes sense that his right hand man becomes the leader of the group. In Jesus absence. And so he appears to have been the first leader of the Christian church.
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B
What are our main sources of information for Peter and his life?
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A
Well, we have nothing outside the Gospels except for books based on the Gospels or on Christian storytellers. And so it's only the Christian tradition, principally the gospels, because he's a main major figure in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He's also mentioned by Paul. Paul actually knew him and spent time with him and had some disagreements with him. And one big question is how deeply these disagreements went, because they're very different people with very different backgrounds and very different sets of assumptions. But apart from the Gospels and Paul, those are our main sources of historical information. We have a number of writings that claim to have been written by Peter. And so we have to evaluate those claims. Is it probable or even possible that Peter did write them? And there are later traditions, including a very interesting book from the second century, which is called the Acts of Peter, which describes Peter's missionary activities, converting people after Jesus death. A highly legendary account that includes some material that people would be familiar with, including his execution, being crucified upside down. That's a very interesting story. And other interesting stories that people might have some familiarity with.
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B
So when we have so many legendary accounts and even accounts that are not wholly legendary but contain legendary material, raising people and fish for the from the dead, for example, is having a legendary act enough to automatically discredit everything else contained in a source, all other information?
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A
Oh, no, absolutely not. And there are a lot of people who get this one wrong, I'm afraid, especially today, for some reason, people think that if you've got an account of somebody that is filled with legendary materials, therefore you can't know anything about them. And it's like saying, yeah, well, if Abraham Lincoln didn't really walk on the ceiling, you know, upside down, you know, and leave his footprints up there, or if he didn't really follow this woman to give her back her chain for miles, and that didn't really happen, then there was no Abraham Lincoln. We don't know anything about him. No, it doesn't work that way. Sources of information, especially from the ancient world, are usually filled with material that's not historically correct. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing that's historically correct. There often are things that are historically correct. I think you can certainly say things about the historical Peter based on the gospels, based on Paul. And I guess I forgot to mention the Book of Acts. He's a major figure in the Book of acts, the first 12 chapters especially. And so these do contain materials that almost anybody's going to look at and say, yeah, that didn't happen, not so much in the New Testament. People who believe in the New Testament would say, oh, yeah, that definitely happened. It's in the New Testament, it happened. But once you get outside the New Testament and start reading the things that Peter allegedly did and the things he allegedly wrote, almost everybody's going to say, yeah, no, that didn't happen.
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B
So in the same sense, the absence of resurrections and miraculous healing doesn't therefore make a source inherently trustworthy. How do historians distinguish between non legendary but implausible reports and something that's more likely to be historical fact?
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A
Well, you know, we treat Peter and Jesus and everyone else that we're concerned with who are interested in Christian history the way we treat anybody in any historical source whatsoever. And historians have to try and analyze accounts in order to distinguish what probably happened and what probably did not, whether you're talking about Alexander the Great or Peter. And so the criteria are not distinct for Christian figures. They're the same kinds of criteria. There are some accounts that have all the earmarks of being non historical, including, for example, the one that you referred to that people may not know in the Acts of Peter. At one point, Peter raises a fish from the dead. So he's preaching to these crowds and he's trying to convince them that Jesus is the Messiah and they're not buying it. And he's standing by a body of water and he says, a tuna fish hanging in a fishmonger shop behind him smoked tuna. And he says, well, if I bring this tuna fish back to life, will you believe me then that Jesus is the son of God? Oh, yeah, we'd believe you then, Peter. So he goes over and grabs his tuna, takes it off its hook, throws it in the water, and commands it in the name of the Lord Jesus to come to life. And it comes to life and it stays alive, and it's alive now and they all convert. So did that happen? Yeah, I don't think so. And so you get obvious things like that. You get obvious things like that, but there are other things that are not quite as obvious. Did he get crucified upside down? How would you know? What kind of criteria do you use to establish that? And the kinds of criteria you use are like you'd use for anyone else. Are there, are there independent witnesses that all say the same thing? They didn't get it from each other, but they say the same thing. Is there an account that doesn't really seem to kind of make sense that a story maker would make up about this person. So like, if you've got a story and you can't imagine a Christian making it up about Peter, then, well, okay, maybe it's there because it actually something that actually happened. You know, you try to see, is there stuff in here that just doesn't make sense historically, like what we know about the time and place when Peter lived. Does this make sense? I mean, for example, you could ask, does it make sense that Peter wrote the Aramaic speaking, uneducated, lower class fisherman from Galilee? Does it make sense that he wrote lengthy epistles in high level, rhetorically effective Greek? Well, if you think it makes sense, you better explain it because, you know, on the surface of it, it doesn't make sense. So that's where the arguments are about what seems within the realm of possibility, what might be right and what doesn't seem. And so you have gradations of probability.
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B
So as with many topics that we talk about, and regular listeners won't be surprised by this at all, there are discrepancies between the different books of the New Testament. When it comes to details about the life of Peter, could you tell us about maybe the different stories around how he became a disciple and when he first realized Jesus was the Messiah?
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A
Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, we mentioned this briefly in our previous podcast and it's worth mentioning again because I can go into a little bit more depth because the, you know, the Gospels themselves of course, tell lots of stories about Peter. And it's not. I mean, sometimes you can get like two accounts that really just completely seem to be at odds. And sometimes you get things that are kind of complicated. Like here's an interesting complicated one. It's like, it's a little trivial thing, but it's kind of interesting. In all the Gospels, Peter denies Jesus three times. So in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus at the last supper tells Peter, he says, tonight, before the cock crows, you'll deny me three times. And then it happens in Mark's Gospel, Jesus at the last supper is talking to Peter and he says, before the cock crows twice, you'll deny me three times.
- [14:25]
B
Huh?
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A
Okay, is it before the cock crows or before it crows the second time? So when I was in college, I bought a book that was called the Life of Christ in Stereo. And it should have been Quadrasound, Life of Christ and Quadrasound. Because the idea is you get these four gospels and you need all four of them to get the quality of the sound and so you take them all. And so what this author did is he took the four gospels and he put them together into a unified gospel to show kind of the unity of the gospel story. And in this account, Peter denies Jesus six times, three times before the cock crows, and three more before it crows twice. Okay, good. Interesting. Yeah. So you get. You get stuff like that. They're little things, but then you have big things, like what you're asking, how did Peter become Jesus disciple? Well, if you read Mark, you get one answer, and if you read John, you get another. In Mark's gospel, Peter is completely, you know, just this unknown figure, and he's out fishing. And Jesus, after he's baptized, is walking along the Sea of Galilee, and he sees Peter and his brother Andrew. By the way, his name is Simon Peter. Peter is the nickname that Jesus gives him. So he sees Simon and Andrew fishing, and he calls him, says, come and be my followers. And they drop their nets and they follow him. Boom, Just like that. Just out of the blue.
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B
I'm convinced.
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A
Well, I mean. And Mark is trying to show that when Jesus speaks, he speaks with authority. And people do what he says. Follow me. They follow him. He commands demons, they come out, tells people to rise from the dead. They rise from the dead. He's like, he has all of this authority in his speech. And so that's Mark's call of Peter. When you get to the Gospel of John, it's not that at all. There's nothing about the fishing expedition or follow me and I'll make you fishers of men kind of thing. It's Peter, Simon and Andrew are. They're followers of John the Baptist. And John the Baptist sees Jesus and says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And Simon goes up to Jesus and starts talking to him. And so he approaches Jesus because John the Baptist mentioned him. And so he decides to follow Jesus. And right off the bat in John, Jesus says, peter said you are the Messiah. This is in chapter one. And in Mark's Gospel, you don't get Peter saying that you're the Messiah until halfway through the ministry. And at that point, he still doesn't understand what he's talking about. They're very different portrayals. And so if you're a historian, you could ask, is Mark's account of the call of disciples, is that how Peter became the disciple? Or is John's account correct? And your options are that Mark is correct, John's wrong, John's correct, Mark's wrong, or they're both wrong? In other words, it might not have been either one of those, but it's hard to see how it could be both because they're different from each other.
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B
So what things then do the sources agree on and can historians really say anything at all about this man with any degree of confidence?
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Yeah, I think we can say some things. So I have a book, actually this is the only book I ever wrote that I wrote because I wanted to use the title. I had the title before the book. The book is called Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. So I have six chapters on Peter in this book. The first six chapters are on Peter, about the sources and what we can say historically, and then a lot of the legendary stuff that's really, really interesting. So I think we can say things historically because we have multiple witnesses that are independent of each other that provide us with information. And there's a lot of coherence among these, these sources. And there's some things in them that wouldn't be the sort of thing somebody would have any reason to make up, so far as we can tell. So there certainly was a Peter. He certainly was one of Jesus followers, probably was one of his, if not the first follower of Jesus. He was almost certainly from Galilee, which meant that he spoke Aramaic. He was a fisherman, which is a lower class occupation, completely hand to mouth kind of job eking out in existence. He followed Jesus around during his ministry. He appears to have been Jesus right hand man. And so, you know, there are a number of things like that that we can say about him during his life afterwards. It's pretty clear that he became the leader of the church right after Jesus death. But eventually he was replaced in that role by James, the brother of Jesus. And Peter himself appears to have gone on missionary journeys because Paul talks about Peter as a missionary. But Paul considers him to be one of the three main figures in the Jerusalem church years after Jesus death. There are a range of things that we can say, I think historically about this person. He almost certainly believed that Jesus got raised from the dead. And Paul indicates that he was the first one to see Jesus after his death. And so I think with some plausibility we can say that Peter probably had some kind of visionary experience after Jesus death where he thought that Jesus had come back to life. And he may have been the first to have that experience. Possibly.
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B
Now you've said that Paul knew Peter and writes about him in his letters. What reasons do we have for thinking that he and Paul did not get along terribly well?
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A
Yeah, because of Paul's letters. So there's a particular incident that I'm going to be going to greater length in this course I'm doing. Did Peter hate Paul? But for now, I can just kind of summarize the basic situation Paul indicates in the book of Galatians, where he's talking to Christians in the region of Galatia, which would be, if you imagine Turkey today and you go to the center, it'd be like north, south, central was the area of Galatia. It was a region, it wasn't a city with lots of churches. And Paul had converted people there and started churches in some of those cities. And he's writing back to them in the letter to the Galatians to explain to them that salvation comes only by believing in Jesus death, not by keeping the Jewish law. And this is important to him because there are other missionaries who have come, not Peter, but other missionaries have come to say, no, you have to keep the law if you're a Gentile, you need to get circumcised if you're a man and you need to start following the Jewish laws of kosher and Sabbath. God's the God of the Jews, and if you're going to worship the Messiah of the Jews, you need to be a Jewish. And so Paul disagrees with that view. But in the context of talking about his disagreement and how he thinks this is a horrible idea, he tries to show that the other apostles before him, especially Peter, James and John, agree with him on this point and that he actually went to Jerusalem and he met with Peter for a couple weeks and that Peter was on board about this. But at a later point, Paul relates he and Peter were together in the city of Antioch and there is a division in the church between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. So there are some Jewish followers of Jesus who thought that if they're going to maintain their Jewishness, they can't be eating meals with Gentiles because Gentiles eat non kosher foods. So you just, you can't have your meals together. And it appears that Peter agreed with that group or came to agree with that group. And Paul thought that was hypocrisy. So it's not that Peter thought that the death of Jesus didn't matter for salvation or anything like that. The death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, those are essential for salvation. But Jews can maintain their distinctiveness. And Paul thought, no, because if you say that Jews and Gentiles are different in Christ, then Christ doesn't unify his own body and the body has to be unified. And keeping the law sure, that's fine if you're a Jew, but you shouldn't impose it on others and you shouldn't do it to the extent of breaking apart the body of Christ. And so they had to follow calling out. And it might not sound like a significant things to us, but Paul is really quite vehement about it. And there's no indication that they ever made up. They apparently had a public argument about it. And yeah, Paul reports the argument. Paul only reports his side of the argument and he never says, yeah, everybody there agreed with me. So like he just reports it then, like it's one of these one liners that ends the conversation. And so I guess he wants you to think, yeah, so I came out on top of that one. But we don't hear the other side.
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B
Interesting. Are there any records or reports of some Christian sects kind of splitting away and following Peter or Paul, or were they unified by the later Christian believers?
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A
Yeah, well, just, you know, again, it depends what source you read. In the book of Acts. In the New Testament, Peter and Paul are on the same page, up and down the line about everything. That seems to stand at odds with what Paul himself says about the same time period and the same relationship. But in the book of Acts, Acts is trying to show the apostolic band was completely on the same page about everything. As history went on, there were groups who thought that there was a split. And these various groups that thought that Peter and Paul were split took different sides. There were groups of Jewish Christians into the 2nd 3rd century and later who thought that Peter emphasized the importance of Jewishness for the followers of Jesus and that gentiles who come to follow Jesus have to adopt the Jewish law. And they claim Peter as their hero, as the one who represented that view. They produced writings. We only have a couple of these writings where you find this. But it looks like it was a bigger movement than we know about. The reason we don't have more writings from that group is because it's the group that lost. And so there were other groups that thought that Paul was the one who really understood the Christian message and that Peter got it completely wrong. Peter and the other apostles. That was a view that was very popular in parts of 2nd century Christianity where there were churches established by a teacher named Marcion who thought that the apostles, especially Peter, got everything wrong and that Paul was called to be an apostle precisely because none of the others got it. And God had to start all over again with the new apostle. And so Paul is the one who gets it. And so that was A prominent form of Christianity that in some parts of Christendom in the second century was the majority view. But eventually the view emerged, of course, that Peter and Paul were on the same page. And that affected many of our writings, not just the Book of Acts, but many of our other writings as well, that try to show that there's empatico.
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B
So given how important Peter came to be in the foundation of Christianity, is it surprising that he continued to be depicted by writers as this kind of rash, impetuous peasant?
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A
He certainly has a reputation in the Gospels for being rash and impetuous and not getting it, being a bit thick at times. And he says things without thinking, and they don't make, you know, Jesus is sometimes kind of rolling his eyes about things that Peter's saying and stuff like that. And so it actually makes it kind of interesting why Jesus gave him his nickname. One important point is that the name Peter was never a name before Jesus gave him this as a nickname. In other words, if you look at ancient writings, Greek, Roman, Jewish, any, there's no name Peter. Peter in English comes from the Greek word rock, Petros in Aramaic. The language Jesus spoke and Peter spoke word for rock is Kephos. And so in the New Testament, sometimes he's called Cephas, Kephos, rock, and sometimes he's called Peter. But it's a nickname, the rock. And it's kind of an interesting designation for Jesus to give Peter because Peter seems anything like a solid rock. He seems more like shifting sand. And so you kind of wonder if Jesus is being funny here. There are indications in the Gospels that Jesus had a sense of humor. And maybe he's like, yeah, Peter, you're a rock. He's all over the place. But the thing is that that portrayal of people, Peter, which is exemplified, of course, of him being unsteady, is exemplified by his denial of Jesus three times. Three times he denies Jesus in the Gospels. That though there's a way to understand that that makes sense, that the Christians wanted to maintain that understanding of Peter as very, very human and acting not like you really would expect somebody who is really solid to act. And it's because so many people are like that, that Peter was a model of what it was like to be shifting sand. And yet for Jesus to love him and to give him authority and to elevate him and to forgive him. One interesting contrast is between Peter's three denials and Judas betrayal. In some ways, they both betray Jesus. But Judas doesn't come back for forgiveness, and Peter does. And Jesus forgives him. And so I think this image of him as somebody who is highly imperfect and often publicly so and even toward Jesus himself but is forgiven was an image that Christians held onto because it gave them hope that they too, you know, even though they mess up a lot here, Jesus right hand man was like that and you know, Jesus forgave him. Anyway, thank you.
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B
Final question. Is it possible to see Peter as the one who started Christianity?
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A
Ah, yeah, right. You know, I've sometimes talked about is it possible that Mary Magdalene started Christianity? And you can ask the same question about Peter and people may not know what I mean by all that. And so this idea is predicated on the historical conclusion that I think is probably right, that Jesus himself was not planning on starting a new religion. Jesus himself was Jewish. He was raised Jewish. He became a Jewish teacher. He taught the Jewish law. He thought he had the correct understanding of the God of Israel and what that God wanted and how that God would bring salvation by people who turned back to him. And so he understood himself to be having the correct understanding of the Jewish faith that had been around for all these centuries. After his death, his disciples came to believe that he was the key to salvation, that his death and resurrection is what brought salvation. Not keeping the Jewish law, not just doing what the God of Israel says, not even just keeping Jesus teachings, it's believing in his death and resurrection. And that became originally that was a sect of Judaism. It was just a different way of being Jewish saying, I mean a very different way of saying that our Messiah has come and he's died for sins and raised from the dead. But these earliest followers still understood themselves to be Jews who had this view. But eventually it becomes a religion that's non Jewish and it becomes Christianity. So that rather than being the religion that Jesus himself preached, it's the religion that preaches about Jesus. So instead of the religion of Jesus, it becomes religion about Jesus. And the question is, when does that start? Well, you know, you could have different ways of understanding it, but in my view is that it's the beginnings of it are when people started thinking that the death and resurrection of Jesus are what matters for salvation. That's what becomes Christianity. It's about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Well, if Paul is right that Peter was the first to see Jesus alive after his death, which means that Peter would be the first to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. If that's the case, you could make the argument that Peter's the one who started what became Christianity. Yeah, I think it's a plausible reconstruction. The thing about Mary is in the Gospels, Mary is the first. And interestingly, there's controversies between Mary and Peter in early Christian texts. We have a number of early Christian texts that show Peter and Mary at odds with each other, and it's probably because of this old tradition. Which one was first? Was it the woman or the man?
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B
He didn't go around making friends, did he?
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A
Apparently not. And at the end it wasn't good. He ended up getting crucified too. So yeah.
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B
Yeah. Never a good ending though.
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A
No.
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B
We are going to take a very quick ad break and then we'll be back with Bart's Weekly Update.
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A
If you're enjoying the Misquoting Jesus podcast, you'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out@barturmman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast. 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.
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B
So Bart, on the 30th of March, we've already mentioned you're going to be doing a couple of live lectures on Peter and Paul and their relationship. These are free to attend. You can sign up@bartolman.com PeterAndPaul There's a question and answer session and if you can't attend the live recording, you'll be able to access them after the fact. What writings do we have in Peter's name that kind of give a hint as to that relationship?
- [32:02]
A
Yeah, so this is going to be one of the interesting things about the course. Most people would know that in the New Testament there's books first and second Peter. There are very genuine questions about whether Peter could have written either one of them. But one of the interesting features of both of them that people haven't noticed is how the author goes out of his way in order to show that he is on the side of Paul, that he supports Paul. In some ways, the letters are functioning to show the tight connection between these two apostles. And one reason that's interesting is for another thing that people wouldn't know about, which is outside the New Testament letters, writings allegedly by Peter that Take the opposite point of view where Peter attacks Paul. And it's pretty clear Peter doesn't think Paul knows what he's talking about. So there's tension of are they unified or are they at odds with each other are reflected in books that claim to be written by Peter. And you know, of course, one issue is did he write any of them?
- [33:04]
B
Always a good question. So all of that and more in the lectures on March 30th. We're going to go to some listeners questions now, so please stick with us.
- [33:15]
A
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit barterman.com askbart
- [33:33]
B
and we are back with some fantastic listeners question. First one, the Greek word porneia is translated as sexual immorality or fornication. Many conservative Christians interpret this very broadly to mean any sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. What would the word have actually meant to a first century Christian writer?
- [33:56]
A
Yeah, now this is a good question. You know, part of the issue is what English words mean. And so fornication, okay, sexual immorality, if you understand those two synonyms, that would refer to any kind of sexual activity outside of kind of legitimate bounds. And you're saying that evangelical Christians who understood the term broadly to mean sexual activity out of heterosexual relations. Okay, yeah. Actually the term is even broader than that. It has to do with sexual irregularities, period. And it includes heterosexual activities. And so there's an article about this that was written by a couple friends of mine. Actually three people, Dale Martin and Jenny Knust are friends of mine, have wrote a very important scholarly article on porneia to show that in fact, sexual activities in the privacy of your room with a heterosexual partner can be porneia, for example, oral sex or anal sex or various kinds of sexual activity that most people say, well, you know, it's none of your business. Well, right, but those things were considered porneia. So there were certain kinds of sexual activities that were considered to be legitimate and others not. So the evangelical position on this is really, in some ways it's kind of a homophobic position because the porneia isn't just about heterosexual sexuality at all. It's about any kind of sexual deviance in the opinion of the ancients. And you say, well, their opinion doesn't matter that much, you know, well, if it doesn't, then why are you against gay sex? It either does or it doesn't.
- [35:30]
B
Thank you. Amongst progressive Christians, there is a body of believers who buy into Jesus message and ethics, but are uncomfortable with his divinity. They see him as a great leader, teacher, and an exemplary human being. Do you think that these secular Christians should organize themselves separately from the church? Church. And do you think they could develop a modern, inclusive movement that could challenge traditional Christianity based on the Trinity, the Creator God, and Jesus dying for the sins of mankind?
- [35:58]
A
Well, I wouldn't be in the business of saying what they should do. I think having Christians like that in the churches is a very good thing, too. In other words, I don't think it would be helpful for Christianity to have churches that excluded people with a diverse view of understanding Christology, of understanding who Christ really is. I think that that can be a healthy thing. These kinds of people would probably be in more liberal churches to begin with. In my experience, liberal churches tend to have a lot of people like that. I think it's a healthy thing. It would be useful if there were alternative groups as well. I think the big problem that many people have who leave the faith because they no longer believe that Jesus is a divine being. They don't believe in the Trinity. They're not sure about whether God actually intervenes in the world, and so they leave the Christian community. A very big problem is there are very few alternatives where you can come together with people that you don't hang out with normally come together regularly. You share your thoughts and your ideas and you think together and you're concerned about similar issues and you can discuss them. The church provides that for Christians. It'd be better if there were other institutions that would provide that for people who don't identify with the doctrinal side of Christianity. Some people would point out that we do have some things like that. I mean, the Unitarians have something very, very similar to that in many the Unitarian communities. And so. But I think something that would be great, but I don't think it's something that, you know has to happen or something that, you know, that people should do in the sense that, like they're morally obligated to do. But I think it would be a good thing if they did.
- [37:37]
B
You have argued that Jesus did not historically claim to be God. Did the earliest Gospel writers not show Jesus as believing himself to be God? Because early Christians, including the Gospel writers besides John, believed that Jesus was only exalted to a divine being after his death and resurrection.
- [37:57]
A
So it's a complicated question. This is the topic of my book, How Jesus Became God. For many years, I maintained that Matthew, Mark, and Luke did not see Jesus as a divine being. And I ended up changing my views of that. I do think that Matthew, Mark and Luke do understand that Jesus is divine in some sense and not always in the same sense and not in the same sense as John. And then John doesn't have the same sense as Paul. And like I think there are different ways of understanding what it means to call Jesus a divine being. I do think, though I'll put it like this, John thinks that Jesus was a divine being who existed before he came into the world and was incarnate as a human being and then returned back to his divine status. Matthew, Mark and Luke don't think that. Matthew and Luke appear to think that Jesus becomes a divine being when he's conceived. This is explicit in Luke that the reason Jesus is conceived by a virgin is because God is really the Father, but there's nothing about him pre existing at that point. He becomes a divine being at his birth because he's literally the Son of God. Mark doesn't have that. So Mark doesn't have John's view or Luke's view. Mark's view seems to be that at the baptism is when Jesus has declared the Son of God and there's nothing to indicate that he was the Son of God before his baptism. None of those views is probably the original Christian view, which I think is the view that when Jesus died, God raised him from the dead. And it's not that he just reanimated the corpse. He brought Jesus back to life and took him up to heaven to live with him there in heaven. In other words, Jesus was exalted to become a divine being. I think what happens is that that view ends up becoming the view that he became a divine being at his birth, which he became a divine being at his baptism, which became until you end up with him being the member of the Trinity for all eternity past.
- [39:57]
B
Thank you. And final question. This is not biblical related, but it's come through a couple of times on the question form, so I thought we should go for it. How did your collaboration with Megan come about?
- [40:12]
A
Right, so some of you know that Megan hosts an entirely different entity from this digital Hammurabi. She and her husband, Joshua Bowen are both interested in Ancient Near Eastern materials and they have projects connected with trying to spread knowledge about what happened in the ancient Near East. Both the history of the ancient near east, the literature of the ancient near east, you know, religion, origins of the ancient near east, and that's digital Hammurabi, which you can find by just looking it up at one point, unrelated to much of anything that I can think of. Digital Hammurabi was wanted to interview me. So Megan interviewed me for. I don't know. What was it, Megan? It was a course or a book or something. I don't even.
- [40:55]
B
I think it was for a course. I think Derek got me on the affiliate program. So we spoke about one of your courses.
- [41:02]
A
Yeah, so Megan had interviewed me a couple times before, and I did. She mentioned this affiliate thing. So I do these courses. I do these courses. Courses. And I do podcast to explain what the course is going to be so we can get the word out a little bit. And Megan did some of these. And so when we decided, in addition to doing courses, that I wanted to do a podcast, I had to figure out what kind of person I wanted to interview me. And I was thinking about all the people who had interviewed me before, and I always liked Megan a lot. You know, I like Megan. And, you know, I thought, you know, what I want for this podcast is I want somebody who's highly intelligent, who asks really good questions, who's an expert in history but is not a New Testament scholar. Like, who's an expert in some other kind of ancient history, because if it's a New Testament scholar, we'd be down in the weeds the whole time. And I didn't want that. I wanted somebody with a British accent and, you know, if they've got interesting hair and glasses, even better. And so, like, you know, so it was a close call. But no, so. So, yeah, in the end, I was
- [42:05]
B
the only one with all of those
- [42:06]
A
requirements you put all together. And I. Well, Megan, you know, I mean, people really like the kind of combination that we've got here. And I. I have noticed that people don't comment much on my hair or glasses or my British accent. So. No, it's a good question. And I was pretty clear about. That's what I wanted. And I'm just. I think it's worked out really well. So, Megan, I hope you've. I hope you think so.
- [42:30]
B
Oh, I absolutely do. I am incredibly grateful that you asked me to do it, and I have a lot of fun, and I learn an awful lot, but it's definitely wonderful experience.
- [42:39]
A
Well, it's great fun, and it's. I just think this thing is great fun, and I hope people kind of enjoy the fun it is because it gets information out, but it's also. It's just kind of enjoyable to do. So, you know, you and I will do a stretch. We'll do. We'll record two or three of these things at a time. It's just like the time flies by and it's just, yeah, it's good, it's good.
- [42:56]
B
And then you realize, oh, we should eat lunch or something at some point today. Yeah.
- [42:59]
A
Like, like now. Yeah.
- [43:03]
B
Well, before we go and eat lunch and finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about?
- [43:09]
A
Well, we're dealing with the important topic of what we know about Peter. The figure who is in the Gospels is Jesus, right hand man and in the book of Acts is the first leader of the Christian church. But there are a lot of legends that have sprung up about him. There are inconsistent accounts of who he was and what he did. And so can we know anything about the man himself? And if so, what would that be? And so that's the topic leading into this course that I'm going to be doing on whether did Peter hate Paul? Which is an interesting topic on its own.
- [43:42]
B
Bart, thank you so much. Audience. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be Back next Week. Bart, what are we talking about next week? Time?
- [44:02]
A
Yeah, it's going to be a little unusual. Next time we're going to be talking about the discovery involving Jesus miracles that unravels a lot of what people have thought, scholars have thought, what we've all thought about Jesus miracle working activity based on this discovery. So that's, that's next time.
- [44:20]
B
That's going to be a good one. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ernest. 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.