← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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El reesgo de encendios for estales nos
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affecta todos y protejera las comunidades and Pacific Power Podemus interruptacion. Sobre PSPs and Pacific Power Punto net
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barra Wildfire Many modern Christians think that being a Christian makes them inherently more moral than those that aren't, something I'm sure many atheists and members of other faiths would probably disagree with. Was this also true for the ancient world? What view did early Christians have of themselves and how different was this to how they were viewed by the non Christian population? Join us today on Misquoting Jesus to find out why early Christians were actually viewed as moral reprobates rather than pillars of the community. 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. So, upstanding members of the community or the local weirdos. How we view ourselves is often at odds with how others view us. And the ancient world was no exception to this. So how did early Christians actually see themselves and how far did the rest of the community agree with that? But before we get into all of that, Bart, good morning. How are you today?
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B
Doing well, thanks. Not feeling like a moral reprobate. So that's good.
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A
Well, that's excellent news.
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B
How's your self image?
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A
Yeah, pretty good actually. Pretty good. Not sure other people would agree. I have weird hair and weird glasses, but I like it.
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B
It's not, not a sign of being a reprobate. It's a sign of being like funky.
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A
Well, thank you. It depends who you ask. I'm sure some people would view me as definitely a moral reprobate, but I know that you spend a lot of your summers over in the uk. You have a place in London. How difficult do you find it acclimating when you switch back and forth? Does it take you a long time or do you kind of get off the plane at Heathrow and you're like, good, I know what I'm doing now.
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B
Yeah, it doesn't take much to acclimate. The big problem that I have is trying to remember always which way to look when I cross the street. First time I went to London, maybe Sarah and I had just gotten together or something. I got nailed 12 times. It's like, oh my God. And so luckily in England, the crosswalks in major cities has Written down, look right, look left. It's for dumb tourists from everywhere else. Like, oh, my God, they had too many. And so that part's hard. I'm pretty used to it now. I've been going over for years now. I'm even kind of used to driving on the other side of the street, which was also a big problem to start with. But now it is absolutely fine. I mean, you're from there, but you don't go over as much. And so I assume it's more like home than anything else.
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A
Walking out of the airport is. I kind of have a big sigh of. Not necessarily relief, but it's nice to be home.
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B
Yeah. You know, the funny thing is that when you travel to some country that is completely different from your own, you're expecting it to be weird. Even if you go to Europe, you know, if you go to Italy or someplace and you're not never been there and it's. It's like, it's hard to kind of get adjusted and you expect it, but since you expect it, you know, it's okay. But when England, like, things just come out of you from the blind spot because you think it's all going to be basically the same and there are things that are slightly different, like it just. Oh, my God, like, you don't realize. And so that still happens to me sometimes, like, wow, I didn't see that one coming. Both in, you know, you know, words that are being used and stuff, but also customs and things just like. Yeah.
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A
So I think it took me nearly two years after I moved to the US for culture shock to properly hit me because coming from the uk, obviously the language is the same. So much of the culture is, if not the same, comparable. And we're so familiar because we have so much American media on the tv, in the, like, the cinemas. I felt like I kind of knew what was going on. And then two years in, it just kind of hit me very suddenly a massive amount of culture shock. And it took me a while to kind of process everything. I was very sad for quite a while.
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B
Yeah. And we obviously get much less English TV and English movies here. And so the kind of daily. The quotidian stuff isn't as obvious to us. English rock was fine when I was a kid. We handled that fine. But like some of the other stuff, it's just we weren't used to it. So it's funny, I mean, being so similar and so so different. Especially as, you know, being married to one of the. From the opposite side of the.
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A
The ocean Absolutely.
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B
Yeah.
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It's an experience.
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B
Yes. Right.
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A
Okay. We should get into today's episode. So I wanted to ask, or open by asking, why the reputation of early Christianity is something that we should be talking about and thinking about?
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B
Well, you know, in our world, at least the world I live in, in the American south, it's often thought by people who are, well, meaning that being a Christian is a key to morality. It's not that they think that everybody who's not a Christian is a moral reprobate, but they often think, you know, there's no way, kind of no constraints on their behavior and that those who are Christian, you know, are intent on obeying God, even if they're. Even if they have problems. But it's kind of the mindset here that being a Christian is what promotes morality. And so it's very interesting in that light to see if Christianity has always been seen that way, especially from the outside.
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A
And I suspect people will have a vague idea of where we're going with this, given my introduction, looking at how people did in fact view early Christians. But before we get to that, what historical sources do we actually have that help us understand this question? How ancient people, non Christian ancient people, viewed.
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B
There are two main sources of information. One would be Christian writings. There are a number of Christian writings, starting in a big way in the second century that are called apologies. These are defenses of Christianity against the charges of those who oppose them. You can sort of read these in a mirror way where you see what's on them. Then you get kind of the mirror reflection. What is it they're arguing against? So by reading these things in a mirror where you can see what they're defending themselves against. And by that, then you can intuit what people are saying about them. That's one thing. The Christian apologies, the first apologies we have start in the second century with, say, Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century. And then we get apologies by Tertullian and Origen. And so these are helpful works for us. And some people have noted apologetic tendencies within the New Testament itself, for example, in the book of 1 Peter. And so that that's helpful. The other thing is we start getting some writings by pagans against Christians. These writings start showing up in the second century. We don't have any actual writings until the end of the second century. But in some cases these are quite graphic in how they describe Christian practices and rituals and behavior. And they attack Christianity. So they can't. They can't be trusted as being, like, particularly reliable historically, like Christians really were doing this stuff. They may have been, some may have been, but they certainly tell us how people were seeing Christians. And so those are the two main sources.
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A
So most Christians today understand that their beliefs are good for the well being of society and they help make our world a better place. Was that view shared widely among Christians in the Roman Empire?
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B
Yeah. No, not at all. Christians were from the beginning really seen as troublemakers and as in some sense dangerous on two levels, really. One that's not as relevant to what we want to talk about. But maybe the key level is that people throughout the Empire were polytheistic and they understood that there were many gods and that all of these gods deserved to be worshipped. Nobody thought that only their God should be worshiped. But you have to worship the gods and everybody, virtually everybody, did. The people in the Roman world weren't that concerned about Jews not worshiping their gods because Jews had these ancient traditions and they were strange. But since their traditions were so ancient, they were an exception to the rule. Otherwise everybody was expected to worship the gods and Christians did not. Christians, by and large were not Jewish. They were Gentiles who were raised in pagan settings, most of them, and they refused to worship the gods. And that was dangerous because the gods are what make life possible and they allow us to survive. We have state gods who are helping the Empire thrive and we have city gods that take care of our city. And if somebody doesn't worship the gods, the gods get angry about that and it could lead to disaster. And so whenever disasters would happen, according to our ancient writers themselves, people would say, it's those Christians in our midst, they won't worship the gods and the gods are ticked off about it. And so that's one of the main things that leads to Christian persecution. So in that sense, they're not good for society. Just the opposite. They're a threat to society. But the other thing is that Christians were understood to engage in dangerous practices and very obscene ethical practices, practices. And so their behavior was highly suspect. There was the general thought then is now, you don't want that kind of behavior in your community because it might spread and it might lead to people getting hurt or even killed. And so you don't want moral reprobates in your midst. And so that was a problem. And there's talk about that in these sources.
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A
What kinds of things were Christians accused of doing?
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B
Yeah, well, it's kind of beyond belief really. I mean, generally they were thought to be kind of, in general terms, they were thought to be standoffish and sectarian, you know, not fully engaged with their communities. And of course they couldn't be because to be engaged in the community meant things like attending city sacrifices and festivals and things in honor of the gods. And that's why you had festivals in the ancient world and Christians wouldn't come. And so they were thought to be kind of both snobbish and, you know, and again, it's a form of not worshiping. But there are also stories about what Christians actually were all about. And some of the stories we get are just, they're really hard to believe that people thought this about Christians, but they appear to have done. Christians were known to meet in secret. Their meetings were not open. And so it wasn't like you have the Baptist church on the corner you can go to if you feel like. Their meetings were for Christians, to support Christians and to teach each other how to live and how to behave. And the meetings were often held in the early stages, were held when people could come, which would be, you know, after work. And so usually after dark. And there was thought to be nefarious activity going on in these communities. You have these secret meetings in the dark. People calling themselves brother and sister, engaging in acts of love together, having love feasts together, and abandoning their families for these other people and abandoning. And so it was thought, you know, that whatever's going on in there can't be good. And so there. So rumors started floating around and some of them rather specific and graphic.
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A
So what kinds of rumors were flying around about these early Christian meetings?
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B
We have a few sources that talk about things. There's one source, it's actually in a Christian book. It's a book called Octavius. It's an apology by a fellow who lived in North Africa, Manutius Felix is his name and he's a Christian author. He actually quotes an important Roman author named Fronto. He's apparently giving Fronto's version. Fronto was the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, the emperor Marcus Aurelius. So Fronto's a very high level person who passed on, according to the Octavius, this report, that Christians, they met in secret and they met when it was dark and they were having this love feast. And according to Fronto, there'd be a gathering of men, women and children and they'd have a sumptuous feast. And then after the feast they would put out the lights. So in the ancient world you don't have electricity. So how do you put out the lights? And he tells us how. So you need lights so you have torches on stands. And he says the way they put out the lights is they'd have a dog leashed to each of the light stands with torches on them. And when time came, they take a piece of meat and throw it beyond the reach of the leash. So the dog would run after the meat and knock over the torch and put out the lights. And when that happened, they started engaging in random acts of copulation with one another. Just pick your partner in the dark and have sex with them. And this is what's happening at their weekly meetings that they call. Christians did call them agape meals or just agapes. Agape is the word for love. So these were love meals in the Christian tradition. That's because they're showing their Christian love for each other, just as Christ showed his love by dying. They have a Eucharist, a communion meal together to show their love for each other. But for the outside rumors, for people are hearing this stuff, this is what they say they're doing.
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A
That sounds like quite the weekly party.
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B
Yes, it's quite a weekly party.
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A
Do we see other rumors or is this the most extreme?
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B
Yeah, there's a more extreme one. So according to Fronto, there's an initiation rite to get into the Christian community. And it's really quite gory and disturbing. He says that they take a young child and they cover the child with flour and they get loud music going. They have like a. They have music players playing loud music. And this child is in a kind of. In a container of some kind.
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A
And.
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B
And the participants who are being initiated into the community are told to beat this object, this flower covered child. They kill it and they consume its limbs. This is the initiation rite to join the Christian community. There are debates about this. I mean, there are a few scholars who say, yeah, you know, maybe that happened and I don't think so. But there are two kind of schools of thought on this. One is, it's probably the dominant one now is that this kind of accusation that you kill babies and eat them was commonly thrown out about people in the ancient world that you didn't like. It's just kind of a standard trope to think of the worst thing you can come up with to say how awful somebody is or a particular group was, and you talk about them killing babies and eating them. And so a very common view is that this is just that kind of polemic leveled against the Christians. That may be right. The other option that is a little more scintillating and interesting is that it could be based. Based on Christian actual practices where Christians are known to have these secret meetings where they drink the blood of the Son of God and they eat his flesh. And so they're drinking his blood and eating his flesh, the Son of God. And that somehow that's transmogrified into the idea that they're actually killing babies and eating them. It could be a combination of the two. It could be one or the other.
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A
Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break and then we'll be right back to talk about what impact these kinds of rumors would have had on a community and how Christians responded to these accusations.
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B
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 check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you 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.
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A
And we are back. So I know that there were other kind of mystery cults that met in secret and had initiation rituals, like Mithras and Isis. Both had these kinds of groups. Were these viewed with the same suspicion as Christianity, or was Christianity set apart because of this insistence on monotheism?
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B
There were occasions when one of these mystery groups was opposed and seen to be a threat. The most famous one is an account that's described by the historian Livy that happened in Rome a couple hundred years before Jesus, where there's a group of worshipers of the God Dionysus who engaged in very similar practice to these being described by the Christians according to the sources. But the Roman Senate found out about it and quashed it rather severely. And so this group of people, they were expelled or some of them were executed for this kind of reprobate activity. Most mystery cults did not have this kind of reputation. We call them mystery cults. The word mystery actually means comes from the Greek word meaning an initiation. You had to be initiated into these groups. You couldn't just go to their services. You had to have an initiation process. And so they were called mysteries. But they're mysteries in a sense. That makes sense as well because we don't know much about them. We don't have a lot of written material. You mentioned the Mithrists, the follower of Mithras. In the Roman world. We don't have any written texts that give us much information about what they were actually doing. But These other cults were not suspicious because they were, even though they were secret, they were open to anybody. I mean, some of the biggest ones were like you'd have thousands of people join at a time and you just decided to join, you know, and you're going to worship this God or this goddess and there's, there's initiation rights, but it's perfectly open and above ground. And the insiders knew what it was all about and they knew there was nothing crazy going on. So in that sense, Christianity is more like these Dionysiacs in the Livy reports. And so there were some groups, most groups weren't treated this way.
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A
Thank you. Did these rumors have any bearing on the early Christian persecutions?
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B
Yeah, they appear to have. I mean, it's the kind of thing where the persecutions started out at the ground level. The early persecutions of Christians were not sponsored by emperors or officials for the most part. You don't have empire wide persecutions where you have an emperor saying, look, we got to get rid of these people until toward the end of the third century. And by that time there had been local opposition against Christians as far back as the New Testament. Our earliest writer, Paul, faced local opposition. And so when you're talking about ground level opposition, then rumors obviously are a very dangerous thing because it only takes a small group of people to think that these Christians are a problem, to set one of their houses on fire and that kind of thing. And so they did have an effect. And then as time went on, more people started to think they might be right. And so it did have some effect on persecution. Although I think the main reason for the persecutions had to do with failing to worship the state gods.
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A
So how did these early Christians respond to the accusations being levelled against them? Really? What is the comeback? You can't invite people to come and witness your ceremonies for themselves because they're not Christians, they're not allowed to be there.
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B
Yeah, well, you insist on your high morality and you explain what really happens and you hope that does the trick. And so that's what they do. You have someone like Justin Martyr, who wrote two apologetic works that we have, and they're usually just called the first and the second apology. But in the first apology, the longer of the two, he describes what actually happens at the sacred meal and he talks about how they give, you know, kind of prayers of thanks they give for the bread and the wine, you know, and how it happens. And it's completely innocent and above board. And one of the things that happens in these meetings is that they take vows with one another to be ethical and to be moral human beings. So you have descriptions of what actually happened, but then you have these apologists who really insist that we are so much more moral than anybody else in the world. And they go to some. They take some interesting tacts to do this. So they'll say things like, you know, you're opposed to adultery. Of course we're opposed to adultery. Our rule is you can't even lust after another person. That's way beyond what you've got. You know, you say you can't even murder. I mean, our leader said you can't even get angry. And you kind of go down the list of how we're far moral than you. But then they ratchet it up a notch and they say, man, we are so much more moral than your gods. So they start telling these myths where Zeus came down, you know, and raped some woman and then ran off with her. And somebody gets really ticked off and someone else and murders them. It's like all these stories about the gods, and this is what your gods are doing, this is what we're doing. And so. And they end up saying, you know, we're the most moral people. And some apologists start saying it's precisely because we are moral that God has decided not yet to destroy the earth because there's still something good in it, because if we weren't here, it'd be rotten to the core and God would just wipe you all out. They insist on their high morality. And that in some ways leads to Christians actually adopting views that would have been extreme in the ancient world, where they say things like, you know, you practice exposing children. If a family has a child that they can't support, they would leave the child out, hopefully to be picked up by somebody. Often they get picked up as a slave, but at least the child survives. And Christians said children would die. Christians would say, you commit infanticide. We don't even not commit infanticide. We don't allow abortions. And so this is when the kind of Christian opposition to abortion starts up to show that the one upmanship, you know, we not only don't do infanta, we don't even kill fetuses. And so it's a one upmanship. And that becomes then the kind of the Christian message, we're more moral than anyone else.
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A
It strikes me that this kind of proclamation of one's own moral superiority, even over and above someone else's deity, is maybe not the best way to make friends. Did this approach actually succeed in changing their public perception.
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B
You know, it's interesting, these apologies are almost always addressed to a high ranking Roman official. Justin Martyr addresses his to the emperors. So the idea that a book like this is going to be actually handed over to an emperor who's going to sit around some Saturday afternoon and read it is ridiculous. There's no way. These books really seem to be written for the same reason that modern apologists write their books. And so Christian, especially evangelical Christian apologists, write their books to show the superiority of Christianity, to show that it is philosophically sensible to make arguments for the existence of God and arguments for the resurrection of Jesus. And so these books are addressing outsiders, but in fact they're written for insiders. And so it's the insiders who read these books, but the reason they read them is to have ammunition to use against the outsiders. It's really hard to believe that you can convince somebody that Christianity is superior simply by detailing your ethical, you know, greatness. And so I don't think it probably had an effect that way. What ended up having an effect was that Christianity spread over these years and grew and grew and grew. More people joined the community and then it became more obvious that in fact it wasn't a bunch of just crazy moral reprobates that, you know, your next door neighbor, the guy who's, you know, practicing law or something, he's, he's a Christian. So that's really what ended up convincing people, I think.
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A
And do historians think that the Roman world became more moral once it became a Christian empire?
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B
No, not really. One way that's been studied is by looking at imperial policies before and after the emperors became Christian. There's one author who's a, he's a social historian at Yale who did a study of this. His name's Ramsay McMullen. And he wrote a really interesting article about what difference Christianity made after Constantine converted. What kind of impact did it have on things like sexual ethics or on, you know, kind of go down your list of various kinds of forms of morality, like injustice or, you know, harsh penalties and things like that. What kind of difference did it make? And in fact, it didn't make much difference at all. Like slavery, for example. What kind of impact did it have? It didn't really have one. And so there wasn't a lot to show that Christians were morally superior. And I think that that's probably right, that most pagans were like most Christians today. They had a sense of right and wrong and pretty much they tried to do the things that were Right. There are many, many, many exceptions to that. But basically, that was the sense is that society needs ethical people, and so we encourage ethical behavior. Society did that. And by and large, the pagan community was no less ethical than the Christian community, and vice versa. There were different standards, and some of the changing Christian standards actually improved the world in some ways. This is the thesis of the book I'm writing right now. I'm trying to argue that, at least in one significant way, Christian altruism was very different from altruism you'd find in the greater world. And it made a huge difference on social agendas and on institutions and governmental spending and things. But in terms of personal morality, pretty much, you know, people were as moral then as they are now, or immoral.
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A
Well, thank you very much for that, Bart. We're going to take a very brief break and then be back with more information about an upcoming event. So please stick with us.
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B
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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A
Okay, and we are back. So this is people's last chance to sign up for When Does Life Begin? Which is your course that will be recorded on June 2. I wanted to ask what kinds of passages you'll be addressing for this question.
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B
Well, one thing I'm going to do is talk about passages that people use to say that the unborn is a full human being. They often involve things like passages where a poet will praise God for, you know, that you formed me in my mother's womb, or you knew me before I was in my mother's womb. And to see what we can actually say about those metaphors and what they show us about the status of the unborn. But then I'll also look at a couple passages in Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, which are particularly relevant. These are passages that are found in the law of Moses that involve women who are pregnant, who are forced to miscarry. And what these passages say about what they indicate about whether the child that is prematurely born and dies, whether the child is considered to be a human or not. That and other passages including the creation of human beings, Adam and Eve, that also, as it turns out, has some relevance to it. So I'll go over the passages and I'll try to do it fairly, because I don't have a particular stake in what the Bible considers to be the beginning of human life, because I base judgments about that myself on more things like science than I do on the Bible. But it is worthwhile knowing what the biblical view is because I think that if people want to quote the Bible, they ought to at least quote it correctly.
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A
Thank you. Now this, for people who missed our announcement last Week, is a one hour lecture that will be recorded live on June 2nd. The recording will be available afterwards for people who can't attend. Virtually, as it were. It costs a whole $14.95, so it really is not terribly expensive. And if you are considering purchasing more of bart's courses, I think this is probably going to be an excellent taster for you to see if it's something that you would find useful and interesting. You can Register over@barterman.com forward slash life. And as ever, the podcast code is MJ Podcast, which will get you another discount from the course price. We are now going to go to an Outsmart BART bonus round. So a listener will send in three questions about the New Testament, preferably to try and catch Bart out and test his knowledge to. So we will get to that.
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B
Dr. Ehrman has written six New York Times best selling books and holds a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. It's not often you'll see him made a fool, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's time for Outsmart Bart.
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A
We are back. Okay everybody, welcome back to outsmart Bart. Question 1. What does Jesus promise the disciples in John 16:12-14?
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B
I don't know. I'll tell you what I do know. I don't know the exact verses. John 16 is part of the farewell discourse in the Gospel of John. It's an extended speech of Jesus. That's the longest speech of Jesus in the New Testament. It begins in chapter 13 with Jesus washing the feet of the disciples to show that they're to be servants. They're supposed to serve others as slaves, the way he's doing to them by washing their feet. But then he launches into this talk in chapter 13 that goes through chapter 14 and chapter 15 and chapter 16. And then he breaks into a prayer in chapter 17. And this entire five chapter thing is one thing with Jesus talking the whole time. One of the tricky things about this whole thing is that in chapter 14 and 16 the message is basically the same. So much so that scholars have suspected that there were two versions of what Jesus said at this occasion that were in circulation. And the author decided just to include both of them, even though it's the same thing in different words. And so what's going on in these chapters, including in chapter 16, is Jesus says that he is going to be leaving the world, but they are not to fear. The world hates them. But the Holy Spirit is going to come as a replacement for him. The comforter, the Paraclete, the advocate is going to come in Jesus steady. The Spirit will empower them to do great works and he will comfort them. And even though the world hates them, this will show that they're on the side of God and so they're not to fear because this is what's going to happen. So boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He does that in chapter 14, he does that in chapter 16. And I assume those verses are somewhere in there.
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A
They are. The answer provided by the listener is to send the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth. So I'm going to take your answer as correct because it's sending the Holy Spirit to them after Jesus demise. Okay, question two. What does it say at the beginning of Serapion's quote in Eusebius that you discussed in an earlier podcast?
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B
What does it say at the beginning of Serapion's quote? I don't know what the question means.
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A
No, that's fair. See, when I don't understand questions, I just assume it's because I don't have the knowledge.
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B
It would be a very good question, but I'm not quite sure what it's asking. I will say what it's talking about, which is kind of what I did the first question, but what it's talking about is this. Eusebius is dealing with the issue of a church father named Serapion who is a bishop of Antioch in Syria. The episode about Serapion that Eusebius is talking about involves a Gospel of Peter. Eusebius, for those who don't know, he wrote the first history of Christianity in the around the year 300 early 4th century. Eusebius is called the father of church history because he wrote this 10 volume book about the history of the church from Jesus day up to his own. And so he has lots of episodes. Lots of episodes. And this one about Serapion is about the Gospel of Peter because Serapion was the bishop who went on a tour around the various villages and towns that were under his jurisdiction. And one of the towns was a place called Rosus. While he was there, he found out there was a division in the church because some people in the church thought that they should be able to use a gospel that they had written by Peter for understanding the truth and in their worship services. And another group in the church said, no, you shouldn't be Using that. So there were debates. And Scrapian said, look, if you've got a gospel written by Peter, it's fine. Why wouldn't that be a. That's no problem. So he said, just let them use it. He went back home to Antioch and some informers came and told him that in fact, this Gospel Peter is a docetic book. It's used by people who don't believe that Jesus was an actual human being, but there was so much God that he wasn't fully human. And so Serapion read the book and he realized it could be used for false purposes, for heretical purposes. And so then in this letter, he forbade the book. Eusebius quotes the letter, he tells the story, and he quotes the letter. So that's the story. But I don't know when he says at the beginning what he means.
- [34:19]
A
The answer provided is that the words of the apostles are received as Jesus himself, but those falsely inscribed are rejected because they were not handed down.
- [34:27]
B
Yeah, that's right. So he's saying that because what he's going to argue is that the Gospel Peter was not really written by Peter. If it had been written by Peter, then you would accept the words as Jesus own words. But since it wasn't, it's falsely authored, it's a forgery, then you can't trust it.
- [34:44]
A
The final question is also on Serapion. What dubious assumption is Serapion making here about the text?
- [34:52]
B
Eusebius doesn't say this, but this is what I think is the dubious assumption. What he's done. What Serapion's done is he's read the book, he's read this Gospel of Peter. By the way, I should point out, we appear to have this Gospel of Peter. Now. It was discovered in the 1880s. We don't have the whole thing. We only have 10 pages of it. And it's 10 pages that deal with Jesus, trial, death and resurrection. So it's a key part, but it's just a fragmentary part of it, just 10 pages of it. What happened was Serapion read this gospel, he would have had the whole thing. And he decided that, in fact, it could be used for docetic purposes. It could be used to argue that Jesus wasn't really a human being. And so he decided that Peter could not have been the author. And so it cannot be seen as an authoritative book. The mistake he made, or the problematic thing, is that he assumed that if the gospel embraced a theological view that he, Serapion, disagreed with, then it could not have been written by an apostle Serapion letting you know at the end of the second century is assuming that Peter would have had his own Serapion's own theology. And so if there's a book that doesn't have his theology, it could not have been written by Peter. So he's making a decision about the author based on his own theological views. That's a mistake. And nobody's even noticed that mistake until, like, modern times, recent times. And so it's a categorical mistake.
- [36:13]
A
And that is indeed the answer that the listener provided. So I am sorry, dear listener, you did not manage to outsmart Bart this week. Bart got two out of three questions. So I'm giving this round to you. If you have questions, if you want to try and outsmart Bart, you can go to www.bartehrman.comaskbaht to submit your questions there. Now, before we finish for the week part, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about?
- [36:39]
B
Yeah, we're talking about the ethics of early Christians and how they were perceived by outsiders today and in antiquity, people who are Christian assumed that Christianity brings a high level of morality with it. In early centuries, there were pagan opponents of Christianity who did not think so. They thought, in fact, that Christians were engaged in practices that were quite nefarious and dangerous to society. So we talked about what those views were, why they had them, and how Christians responded.
- [37:10]
A
Thank you Barthes so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Barthes courses over at www.barturmon.com. misquoting Jesus we'll be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [37:31]
B
Yeah, well, next time we're talking about the modern view that many conservative Christians have that the Bible is inerrant, that there are no mistakes in it. And we're going to be seeing whether that view can be supported from within the New Testament itself or whether the New Testament refutes the idea of inerrancy, not just whether there are contradictions, but whether there's some way of seeing there's an actual refutation.
- [37:55]
A
Remember to join us next week and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.