← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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- [00:32]
Megan Lewis
Just over two years ago Roe v. Wade was overturned leaving abortion access in the USA in the hands of individual states. Since then, many states have restricted access to medical care, with anti abortion advocates often citing so called biblical morals in favor of their position. Do the Old and New Testaments actually say anything about abortion? And was abortion even a procedure that ancient peoples would have been familiar with? How about the beginning of life? What does the Bible say about that? Stay tuned for that and much more today.
- [01:05]
Podcast Announcer
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.
- [01:26]
Megan Lewis
Modern legal and political decisions in the USA often make arguments using the biblical texts, often misrepresenting or misunderstanding what the text is actually talking about. The abortion debate is no issue for both sides and today I'm going to be talking to Bart about what the Bible actually says about the issue before all of that. How are you today Bart?
- [01:46]
Bart Ehrman
Yep, doing well, thanks. Things are clicking along. I've got this view that if you keep busy enough, you know, you don't really notice. So. But you know, actually one of the things I'm liking about these podcasts that we do is that we get so intensely into this thing. Like I forget the rest of the world and this time we're going back and forth and it's kind of pleasant actually to forget about the world for a while. How are you doing?
- [02:09]
Megan Lewis
No, I entirely agree. Like I don't have to worry about do I need to do laundry? Do I need to sit down and read or write this thing? I'm just sitting and talking to you about a specific topic. It's really, really enjoyable. Yeah, I am good. I am good. I'm enjoying. We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. We're nearly up on two years now of Doing.
- [02:29]
Bart Ehrman
I know, yeah. Who would have thought?
- [02:32]
Megan Lewis
I know.
- [02:33]
Bart Ehrman
I was hesitant. A lot of people said, yeah, don't do that. When I was thinking about doing a podcast, it's. Oh, it's too much work. But I'm thinking, man, it'd be so much fun. You know, you could talk about things you're interested in and other people are interested in, and you can't go into it. I'm really gratified with how well it's gone. And so we'll probably do something. Are we going to do something special for this?
- [02:51]
Megan Lewis
I think we're going to try to.
- [02:52]
Bart Ehrman
Okay.
- [02:53]
Megan Lewis
All right, everyone, watch this space. We'll let you know when we have more news. So my question to open today was you spend a lot of time abroad, either in the UK visiting Sarah's side of the family, or doing your cruises and tours and things. I wanted to know, when did you first go abroad?
- [03:10]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, okay. So that's a really interesting question. So. God, I was in my early 30s before I ever got out of the US at all. I remember the first time, actually, the first time leaving us, I went to Canada and the road signs were in both French and English. Oh, that is so cool. I think the first time I came overseas, came to England and had a. Oh, no, no. False, false. I went to France. I took my kids to France. I had a conference, a conference on a particularly important manuscript of the New Testament, a single manuscript called Codex Bize. And there was a conference in a little town called Lunel, which isn't too far from Montpellier. And my then wife and I went over and took our two young kids. We had a great time, went to Paris, and the kids wanted to go to the Louvre, and they wanted. And then we went. And my daughter was speaking French pretty well at that point already. And then we. Then we went over to Italy for a few weeks in. To the Lake District, and. Oh, my God, yeah, that was good. That was the first time. So it was an academic excuse to
- [04:15]
Megan Lewis
go overseas, the wonderful excuse to do it.
- [04:18]
Bart Ehrman
But I mean, if you were living in England, you were probably going, like, in foreign countries all the time. A lot of people in England, like, don't go to England. They go to. They go to France or something.
- [04:26]
Megan Lewis
Pop over the Channel. We didn't go a lot. We just didn't have the money most of the time to spare. But we had a couple of camping holidays in France. I have very fond memories of walking down to the bakery and getting croissants for everyone in the morning, spending time on the beach. And then When I was 10, I think I was 10, my primary school did an exchange trip with a school in Romania. So I went and spent a week in Romania, first time on a plane. It was really, really exciting and really, really interesting because a lot of the areas in France we visited were more urban. It felt different, but it didn't feel as different. But then when we were in Romania, we were in a really, really rural area, and it was completely different to anything I'd ever experienced. It was wonderful.
- [05:13]
Bart Ehrman
Wow, that's amazing. I mean, the biggest trip I did in school growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, was going to the art museum in Kansas City. Not exactly like spending a week in Romania.
- [05:25]
Megan Lewis
Not quite. Yeah. One of our teachers had a personal connection with, I think, one of the teachers over there, so they kind of just arranged it. It's not a standard thing in the UK to send your children to. To Romania for a week.
- [05:35]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Sounds great. Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, it was fun. Now, today we are talking quite a heavy topic. This is the Bible and abortion. And when I say the Bible, we're going to do Old and New Testament. Before we get into the specifics, though, Bart, why is this important to be discussing?
- [05:54]
Bart Ehrman
Well, as you pointed out in the intro, I mean, this is a huge topic in the United States and in other countries in the world today about the rights of a woman to have an abortion. And the Bible gets invoked frequently in these discussions, my experience, principally by people who are opposed to abortion and believe that it's murder and that this is what's taught in the Bible, that many of these people want us to be a Christian nation. But even those who don't, you know, are not like that. They just think we want the ethics that are promoted in the Christian scriptures, you know, and fair enough. So the Bible gets invoked, and one of the things we want to talk about today is whether it's invoked appropriately or not.
- [06:34]
Megan Lewis
So we'll start with a pretty basic question. Do we know if abortion was either permitted or a regular occurrence in the ancient world?
- [06:43]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, and yes, it certainly occurred. They knew how to procure abortions, or they had ways of procuring abortions in the ancient world. And they were ways comparable to the ways we do today, only without our advances in medical technology. They could apply poisons to kill the fetus, or they could have operations where a doctor would go in and try and remove the fetus with medical instruments. It was not a much debated issue so far as we know, in the Greek and Roman worlds, in pagan populations, it was practiced, it was dangerous, and there's not a lot of ethical discourse about it in Judaism. At the time of early Christianity, there were various views about it that are fairly comparable to the views that people have today. So I'm not talking about the Bible now. I'm talking about, like, what Jewish people thought at about the time of Christianity. Some thought that it was permissible, and some thought that it was only in rare cases. And some people thought, no, you really shouldn't ever do it. And so those kinds of views were around then in Judaism, in the wider world, it really wasn't much of an ethical issue.
- [07:51]
Megan Lewis
Do either the Old or New Testaments actually talk about abortion directly?
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Bart Ehrman
This is the thing that people, many people wouldn't realize. The answer is no. The Bible says nothing about abortion. You know, I suppose we need to define our terms a little bit because people mean different things about everything. But if you just look up definitions of abortion, like on the Internet, if you look at Britannica or you look at Yale Medicine, or you look at Harvard Medicine, you know, you come up with definitions. But a basic definition is that what we're talking about is the induced termination of a pregnancy before the fetus is able to survive, so before viability. And usually it's either done medically or surgically today. So that's what we're talking about. What does the Bible say about this? Does it explicitly talk about abortion and say, for example, abortion is always allowed or you cannot permit abortion? No, there's no legislation in the Bible, either the Newer Testament or the Old Testament about abortion per se.
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Megan Lewis
We're going to get into some of the passages that people use to talk about abortion in a couple of minutes, but we have a very brief break before then.
- [09:02]
Bart Ehrman (Conference Announcement)
I'm Bart Ehrman and I'd like to announce a new conference this coming September, a conference to promote biblical knowledge among those who are not scholars. We did a conference last year called New Insights into the New Testament, a biblical conference for non scholars, and our topic was the Gospels. This conference was a huge success, and so we've made it an annual event. But this year we've added some exciting new features. Besides the talks and the Q&As. As I'll be explaining in a minute, our theme this year is Paul and his Letters. The conference will involve 10 scholars, each of whom will be giving a lecture with Q and A to follow and much more. To find out more about the conference, you can go to www.barterman.com. nick, I want to say I couldn't be more excited about this particular conference. Next to Jesus, Paul is the most important figure in the history of Christianity, but he's widely misunderstood by the general public, but also among many scholars. Many of us. These lectures will not be at a technical scholarly level, but they will be addressing key issues in the understanding of Paul. And many of them will be presenting views that even scholars could learn from. We have a fantastic lineup of internationally known scholars. All of them are superb presenters to non scholarly audiences. Some of these talks will be presenting alternative understandings to Paul that is alternative to what most of us have long thought and even taught. Well, as you can see, this is it's quite a lineup with very interesting topics and superb scholars and good speakers. There are other features and benefits besides each lecture with Q A that will go over the course of two days. Everybody who signs up will have access to a pre event attendee mixer. Everyone will have immediate access to the Historical Paul course which will act as a kind of a prequel to the event. This is a course that I myself did. I did a 50 minute lecture with Q and A. Everybody will get that automatically even before the conference for free. Everybody will get lifetime access to all
- [10:57]
Bart Ehrman
of the event recordings. So when you you come to the
- [11:01]
Bart Ehrman (Conference Announcement)
conference, you'll get the whole entire conference as a recording for life. The event passes to join the conference will be only $99 for all of this. And there are other additional options that you can you can get. We're going to have some scholars meet in a VIP mixer with those who want to come. We're going to have an exciting roundtable discussion among the panelists. After the conference we're going to have a hot topic discussion between two of them. They're going to be dealing with a particularly hot topic not dealt with in the conference itself. After the event you'll get more details about all this and the entire conference if you go to the conference page. I realized last year when we did this thing that there's nothing like this conference available. There are Bible conferences and Bible studies available for denominational groups and people of various Christian theological persuasion. There is nothing out there that is done by scholars for non scholars explaining scholarly views in understandable terms. Terms in a setting where you can watch it from the comfort of your own home without any travel expenses and have lifetime access to the recordings. There's nothing like it if you can't attend, by the way, you can still register for this and get the full lifetime access to the recordings. Well, it's a lot and I hope that you can Come and join us because I think this is going to be extremely good. Again, if you want to learn more, if you want to sign up, simply go to bart herman.com Nint N I N I hope to see you there.
- [12:24]
Megan Lewis
So before our break, Bart, you said that there were no passages in the Old or New Testament that explicitly talk about abortion, either permitting it or denying it. What are some of the passages then that people use to quote, unquote, show that the Bible is either for or against abortion?
- [12:39]
Bart Ehrman
Well, there are passages that people quote or at least have in mind, or at least have heard of. The passages are actually all in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. People will invoke the New Testament. But if you're going to talk about abortion in the New Testament, it really is almost always about Jesus. Agreed that you should obey what God says in the Old Testament because Jesus never talks about it and neither do the other writers. But in the Old Testament there are passages that people appeal to. And I would agree with those scholars, which is the vast majority of scholars who say that in fact these passages are not talking about that. And so I can just give you a few. I mean, One is Jeremiah 1. This one is very widely quoted. Jeremiah 1, 4, 5, where Jeremiah says, the prophet says, the word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations. And so people say, look, it says right there that he knew him before he was in the womb. He knew him before he was born. That means he existed, Jeremiah existed, and God knew him before his birth. And so he really was a human being in the womb. And it kind of makes sense until you look at it. God doesn't say, I knew you when you were in the womb. He says, I knew you before you were in the womb. So if you want to take this passage literally, and these people do take passages literally, it literally is not talking about a fetus. It's talking about God knowing Jeremiah before he was conceived. So if you want to take this literally, it would mean you have to believe in the pre existence of the soul. So do you believe that people exist before they're conceived? Well, no. Most people say no, no, you come into existence when you're conceived. Well, okay, but that's not what this passage is saying. This is a metaphor. It's symbolic language for saying you were always destined to be a prophet. This is what you were set out to do. And so it's using metaphorical symbolic language it can't be using literal language unless you believe in the pre existence of the soul of all souls.
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Megan Lewis
Could you give us another example?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, there are lots of other examples like that, where, like, for example, there's 1 in Psalm 139 that people often use because it sounds more kind of like what you're, you know, what people are saying that conception, a person's a human already at conception. And so in Psalm 139, I think it's like verses 13 or so, and following, it says, this is praising God. You were the one who formed my inner parts. You. You knit me together in my mother's womb. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. And there again, it sure sounds like this is somebody who's known to God, who's actually made by God in the womb. And it does sound like that, unless you look at it closely. Again, the psalmist again is using metaphor to praise God for always being sovereign. God is ultimately in control, not just of the world, but of this person's life. You knit me together even before I was born, he's saying. But then notice what it says, the parallel to that where he's saying, like, he says it in one way in one line, then says the same thing in another line. This is the way Hebrew poetry works. You say one thing in one line, say the same thing in a different line. The different line is when you made me in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Well, do you think that humans are created in the depths of the earth, somewhere in the middle of the earth? Well, no, of course not. Well, okay, he's using metaphorical language. He's not talking literally about when life begins. You can go through passage after passage, and you'll have exactly the same problem that never. Are these talking about what we think of as life beginning at conception?
- [16:42]
Megan Lewis
When does the Bible consider life to have begun?
- [16:45]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it looks like the assumption of the biblical authors who have anything much to say about that, assume that life begins when the child is viable, when the baby is viable. There are several passages that seem pretty clearly indicating that, you know, we can talk about these. I mean, one of them comes right after the Ten Commandments. You know, a lot of people who read the Ten Commandments, don't keep reading. But that's in chapter 20 of Exodus, the Ten Commandments. But Exodus 21 is pretty interesting. There's more legal issues coming to the fore. Once we get to chapter 21, and one of the issues is, you know, if this happens, then what's the penalty? If that happens, what's the penalty? Okay, so here's a situation that they lay out. Suppose two men are fighting. They're fighting, and there's a pregnant woman standing nearby. And one of them accidentally hits the woman. And he's either like with a club or maybe his fist or something, he hits this pregnant woman and she miscarries. What's the penalty for that? And so this is in the law of Moses. And so it turns out that it goes on to describe, if the woman dies, then it's a capital punishment, and the person who's injured her is to be executed. It's eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life. And so if she dies, it's the death penalty because you've killed her. If she miscarries and the fetus doesn't survive, then it's a fine to be paid to her husband. In other words, it's not murder. Murder is life for life. It's a death penalty. The fetus is the property of the husband. And so it is not murder. Which means it's not considered to be a human being yet with human rights. If there's a miscarriage, in this case, it's induced. Not intentionally, but accidentally induced. And so it's comparable to an abortion. You've induced birth.
- [18:41]
Megan Lewis
Are there other passages that talk about the beginning of life and when a person is really considered a person?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, there are others that have the same thing, and they're a very similar thing. There are a couple that are particularly relevant. One that everybody will know, but one that probably they don't so much. There's this passage in Numbers five. It's one of the peculiar passages in the law of Moses. The situation in this case is that you have a man and woman married, and the woman gets pregnant, but the husband doesn't think that he's the father. He suspects that someone else has gotten her pregnant, but he's got no proof. And so there's a ritual that is prescribed in Numbers five that tells people what to do in order to find out whether in fact she has committed adultery or not. And the way the procedure works is the man is supposed to take his wife, then to the priest at the tabernacle, this is before there was a temple. They have a tent that they worship God in. And the priest in the tabernacle is told what the situation is, and he suspects his wife of adultery. So the ritual is the Priest takes some water and he mixes it with the dust on the floor of the tabernacle. This water now is called the water of bitterness. And the woman then is to drink the water. And if she drinks the water, the result determines whether she committed adultery or not. If she has defiled herself, if she's committed adultery and she's been unfaithful and someone else got her pregnant, it says that the water that brings the curse will enter into her. It'll cause her bitter pain, and her womb will discharge, her uterus will drop, and the woman shall be in execration. Okay, so she discharges what's in her womb. She miscarries. But then it goes on to say, if, on the other hand, she's innocent, then none of that will happen. And, in fact, it's his child after all. I guess that's a happy ending. She's been put to this humiliation. But at least the guy knows that it's his child. That, again, this is a divinely prescribed abortion. In other words, if the woman was made pregnant by somebody else, the priest carries out a procedure that leads to the induced abortion of the child. This is in the law. And so again, this child is not a human being. Yet. It's not murder for them to do this. This is just. It's a test. Okay, well, all right. Yeah. So, okay, she miscarried. So, yeah, okay, so she gets stoned to death, but the child isn't really in the issue.
- [21:15]
Megan Lewis
Are there any pastors that are used to argue in favor of abortion?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I wouldn't say there's any in favor of abortion because, you know, the reality is, as we all know, nobody's in favor of abortion. But the question is, is this unborn fetus a human or not? And, you know, one passage that I think people, you know, everybody will know this passage, but that people haven't thought about it like this at the very beginning, when God creates Adam and Eve, I think it shows when the human being begins. It's at least worth thinking about, especially in light of these other passages. But remember when he makes Adam in Genesis, chapter two, God's ready to make a human being. And he makes this clay in the dirt, and it's like this humanoid figure. It's like a little statue lying on the ground, made out of clay or mud. And it's this thing, it's just dead. And then God breathes into it. God breathes his breath into this dead thing, and Adam comes to life. And then Adam becomes a human being. So the question is, when does human life begin in this creation story? It begins when the human being can breathe. That's what makes it a human being. It has the breath in it. And we've said before, the term breath and the term spirit are the same word in Hebrew. You have your breath in you. You have your spirit in you. When you get the spirit when you breathe, and when Adam stops breathing, he's no longer a human being. And so I think that this shows that human beings are human beings in the Bible. I'm not saying this is my personal view. I'm just talking. What the Bible's view is consistently in all three of these passages is that the person who is not viable is not a human being yet. And so there's nothing contrary to this in the Bible. There's nothing on the other side of this. You know, this is the biblical view. These are all written by different authors. And I think it's, you know, I think it's just the biblical view.
- [23:13]
Megan Lewis
Do you think it's possible, using the biblical texts and the passages we've talked about, to say whether biblical writers would prioritize the life of a fetus or that of a pregnant woman?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I don't think there'd be any doubt if they're taking the law of Moses seriously, which the entire Bible does. Jesus, of course, never says, you know, stop following the law. Jesus believed in the Jewish Torah and he kept the Jewish Torah and he taught the Jewish Torah and the Jewish Torah is pretty clear that the woman is a living human being, and if she is killed, it's murder. If the fetus is killed, it's not a human being. If anything, it's the property of the husband, the wife. And so one is murdered and the other is not. And so I think that it's clear that you saved the life of the woman because the fetus is not a human being yet.
- [24:02]
Megan Lewis
Do you think it's reasonable for us to be using the Bible to make any kind of argument for or against within this debate?
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Bart Ehrman
So that's a much bigger issue, isn't it? Because people use the Bible for all sorts of purposes. They often misuse the Bible. They often weaponize the Bible. They weaponize the Bible to win an argument. And sometimes it can be a very serious thing, such as in this abortion debate, when people use the Bible to prove their point of view. I myself do not base my view of when life begins on what the Bible said any more than I base my view of anatomy on the Bible or my view of evolutionary biology on the Bible or My view of astrophysics on the Bible, I mean, I just don't, I don't base modern questions on the Bible, but including ethical questions. We live in a very different age from the Bible and we understand human psyche more, we understand the human condition more. And so I personally, you know, and plus I'm not a Christian, so I don't really base my views on the Bible. And I think that if people do base their views on the Bible, if they insist they do. Okay, if you want to insist that you follow the Bible, then I want to see you follow the Bible. And I don't know anybody who does. I know many conservative Jews try to keep the Torah strictly and they probably succeed. As far as I know. Christians are in a bit of a mess because they say that the law doesn't apply anymore, but they insist that parts of the law are applicable. And so when the law says that a man shall not lie with a man, they love that part, but they don't love the other parts that talk about things that they do, like wearing shirts made of two fabrics or whatever. So I think Christians are in a kind of a stickier situation, especially since the New Testament doesn't say anything about this particular issue about the status of the fetus. The New Testament is silent on this issue. And if you turn to the Old Testament, the Old Testament presupposes the fetus is not a human. So if you're going to use a Bible, then you ought to use it for what it says. And in this case it is not against abortion. I don't think that that demonstrates one side or the other. I'm just saying don't use the Bible for it unless you want to misuse the Bible. And if you think the Bible does begin at some other time, then the Bible thinks that's fine. You should have a reason for that, preferably a scientific reason for that other than just something that seems to you right. But whatever your reason is, don't quote the Bible if you're misquoting it.
- [26:30]
Megan Lewis
So the final question for today, we've kind of covered what is and is not in the Old and the New Testaments. When did Christians start to condemn abortions?
- [26:41]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, now this is an interesting question. I guess I should say we didn't point this out, but I've done a two lecture course on this topic where I got into a lot more depth on all of these issues that is on my site When Life Begins, because I go into this at some length. And so I just kind of briefly can say a couple of things about it, because it is extremely interesting. Right after the New Testament, early Christians started condemning abortion. It's absolutely true, they did. It's not biblical, but they did. You get it already in the book called the Didache, written probably around the year 100, maybe even before a couple of the New Testament books were written, but it didn't make it into scripture. And then later in a book called the Epistle Barnabas from About the year 135, these passages both explicitly say that you're not supposed to commit infanticide, so you're not to kill a child and you're not supposed to commit an abortion. They're clear about that. And so. And after that, you know, it wasn't always the only view, but it became the standard view for most of Christendom.
- [27:43]
Megan Lewis
Do we know what prompted this shift in doctrine?
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Bart Ehrman
Ah, well, I think we do. This is why it's a long story, but I'm not going to go into all of it. But right when these early texts were coming out condemning abortion is right when the early Christian church was expanding and starting to face persecution and opposition within the Roman world. And one of the standard accusations that Romans used against Christians is that they were highly immoral, with all sorts of strange stories about Christians were doing about killing babies and eating them. And there were these rumors about them. That's precisely the time Christians start saying we don't commit abortion. And when they say that, when they start using this in discussions with pagans, the way they use it is they want to say, look, we are more moral than you pagans. We're more moral than your gods. Look at your myths. Your gods are doing all these crazy things with adultery and killings and things. We don't do any of that stuff. You know, we are so much more moral than you. You know, you say, for example, that you're not supposed to commit adultery. We say you're not even supposed to look at a woman with lust in your heart. Whoa, that's serious. Yes, well, you say that you're not supposed to murder. We say we don't even expose our children. In fact, you know, we don't even perform abortions. So in other words, it's a one upmanship to show how extremely moral the Christians are. And so they go to greater extremes than anyone else, even doing things that aren't really thought of as important in the environment at large. But it shows, of course, we don't murder, we don't even take fetuses. And so I think that's the reason it comes into Christianity early on as a defense against pagan charges of immorality and a demonstration that the Christians were exceedingly moral. They did not have biblical support for these views, but it became their views.
- [29:43]
Megan Lewis
Well, thank you Bart for walking us through some of the evidence there. We are going to take a very brief break. We'll be back with news on upcoming events and some fantastic listeners questions.
- [29:55]
Bart Ehrman (Weekly Update)
This is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagement, urbanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [30:09]
Megan Lewis
Now, Bart, before we went to our break, you mentioned that you actually have a two part course lecture course on this topic called when does Life Begin? And for people who are Interested, that's@bartlohman.com courses and you can just scroll through until you find the correct one. It is a whole $24.95 for lifetime access and you can use the MJ podcast code for a discount. What kinds of additional information do you go into that course?
- [30:36]
Bart Ehrman
This is one of those courses that is dealing with a very serious issue. But the course itself was a lot of fun to do for me. For one thing, I start out in the course talking about people weaponizing the Bible and how that's happening in our political situation now in ways that are just completely demonstrable. You can just show people are just, they're just quoting the Bible to say things, man, it doesn't say anything like that. In fact, it often says just the opposite. So I start off on that. But I deal with a number of the issues we've talked about without myself taking a stand on my personal views about abortion. I'm happy to tell people my views. I have very strong views, as most people have, but that isn't what the course is about. So it doesn't matter what your view of abortion is. What matters is are you interested in the biblical perspective on these things? And so I go into depth onto a number of verses, more than we've talked about, a number of topics related to it. And so it's over two parts. It's focusing on this issue. You know, when does the Bible imagine life begin? Beginning because if life doesn't begin until the fetus is viable, then it's not murder. And so it's not appropriate to call taking a fetus murder. And so it's the kind of thing we've been talking about. But it's expanded over to 50 minute lectures with Q and A. I think
- [31:55]
Megan Lewis
I hosted that one. I remember it being very Very interesting and illuminating and I suspect there are probably going to be some people listening thinking, oh yeah, of course, your personal views don't play into it. Actually I think Bart does an excellent job at sticking to what's actually written in the biblical text and addressing that as opposed to trying to use it to argue for one position or another. There's really no discussion of is abortion right or wrong. It's what does the Bible say about this? And what does the Bible say about the beginning of life?
- [32:26]
Bart Ehrman
No, you know, and the thing is, I mean it's fine for me to express an opinion about things I don't because like, you know, it's my opinion about things. I'm an authority on the Bible. I'm also an authority on my opinion, but I'm not authority on anybody else's opinion. People can believe what they want. My view is you can believe whatever you want as long as you're not hurting someone else. And that is the issue with abortion. Where is the harm being done? If the fetus is alive then you're murdering. If the fetus is not alive then you're really doing harm to a woman's life and possibly her partner's life and society. And so, boy, it's a tough one. So I'm a Bible scholar and I talk about what the Bible has to say about it.
- [33:05]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. And if you would like to hear what the Bible says about that you can go to bartehrman.com courses to find out more. We are going to go to listeners questions now.
- [33:17]
Bart Ehrman (Weekly Update)
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com askbart
- [33:35]
Megan Lewis
alright four as ever, excellent questions from our wonderful listeners. First up, the epistle of Philemon would have been the perfect place for Paul to condemn slavery. Yet he did not do so. Why do you think he didn't?
- [33:48]
Bart Ehrman
Well, I'll tell you, I have a view of Philemon that is not widely shared, at least among the people I talk to. So for people who don't know the letter, Philemon is Paul's shortest letter in the New Testament. It's just basically one page long. He's writing to an individual rather than to a church. And the person he's writing to is Philemon. And you learn from the letter that Philemon had a slave named Onesimus who has run away and he's found Paul and Paul is intervening on Onesimus's behalf so that Philemon will not punish him. Onesimus goes back. Paul does not come out against slavery in this letter, doesn't talk at all about the morals of slavery as no one else does in the New Testament. But he does ask Philemon not to punish Onesimus. But there's a passage in there that's very subtle that I think is interesting because Paul says, you know, I've done you a lot of favors. Now he says, I'd like you to do me a favor. I'm sending him back to you. I want you to do me a favor. And it sounds like he's asking that Philemon will give Onesimus to Paul as his slave. So he's not only condemning it, he's probably. I think he's likely participating in it. I mean, it seems strange to people that Paul wouldn't be opposing slavery, but nobody was opposing slavery in the ancient world except for some slaves who didn't. But slaves didn't like it, but they didn't like themselves being enslaved. There was no discourse against the phenomenon of slavery in the ancient world.
- [35:23]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. I've heard others attribute the development of apocalyptic thought in Judaism to the influence of the dualistic Zoroastrian religion of Persia, which occupied Israel for approximately 200 years shortly before the Greeks and the Romans. Do you think the absorption and reworking of ideas from Zoroastrianism had a strong influence on the development of apocalypticism in Jewish thinking?
- [35:45]
Bart Ehrman
I've thought about this issue a lot because I used to think that it did. Zoroastrianism is a very dualistic religion where you have two forces of good and evil that are eternally fighting each other. And then in Judaism. So Zoroastrian is Persian, and Israel was controlled by Persia for a couple of centuries. And after that is when Jewish apocalypticism developed, which has the forces of good and evil and conflict. And so it seems kind of likely that they got this from Zoroastrian religion. And I used to think that after I did a lot of work on the question, I ended up thinking, in fact, no, I don't think that it did. It did, or if it did, it may have done, but it's not obvious to me that it did. One reason for doubting it is that the rise of apocalyptic thinking in Judaism postdated the Persian period. In fact, it wasn't for over a century before Judaism started embracing apocalypticism. So if you think it came from Persian influence, you would think is when the Persians were around and controlling them. But it wasn't. The other problem is that it's very hard to date the Zoroastrian texts. People come up with these summaries of what Zoroastrianism was in the days, say in the first century or something bce but we don't have good sources of information. And the best information is the actual text we have are from hundreds of years later. So I'm not completely confident that we know there are. I would say a large number of scholars continue to think the Zoroastrianism was influential on apocalyptic thinking in Judaism. And I think it's possible, but I don't think at this point it's demonstrable.
- [37:27]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Was Jesus the only prophet, teacher, messiah figure running around the Holy Land during his time, or did he have competition? For instance, is it possible that there were other people claiming to be prophets, but for some reason their story just didn't gain traction and so wasn't recorded?
- [37:43]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, I'd say it's highly possible. Highly. It's probable. I would say that there were. I think there were a lot of people who had this point of view. We suspect there were because the people that we do know about this apocalyptic worldview is held by Jesus and it was held by his disciples probably before they were his disciples, is held by John the Baptist, is held by the people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, is held by the Pharisees. It was a widely held view. And we actually do know of other prophets predicting that the end was imminent. And we have names of a couple of them. Well, names of one of them, Theudas, from roughly around the same time, another person who's just called the Egyptian Josephus, the Jewish historian, mentions these two. So I think there must have been others that we just simply have never heard of.
- [38:29]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Final question for what do we know about the latest common ancestors of all discovered manuscripts for the books of the Old Testament? Are they the original books, or is it possible for some books of only one branch of early copies survived, and the latest common ancestors of all known manuscripts is much later than the original?
- [38:48]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, so this is a complex question and it would take a while just to explain it what the question is before giving the answer. But the basic question is that if you got like a manuscript that's copied in another manuscript and then someone else copies that manuscript and someone else copies that manuscript, then you can, in theory, you can draw a genealogical line among these manuscripts like a patrilinear genealogy, like you would with a human genealogy. In the case of manuscripts, you wouldn't have all of the missing stages. You wouldn't have all the parts of the family tree of the genealogy. You'd have like a manuscript here and then another manuscript here. There might be three or four manuscripts in between. And it's asking whether they all go back to kind of a unified manuscript or if there are different kinds of transmission for the various books. And so so we're really hamstringed when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, because the Hebrew Bible we have today basically comes from a single manuscript from around the year 1000, Codex Leningradensis. We don't have the earlier manuscripts to compare it to to know whether Jeremiah came from a different line of transmission or Isaiah. That was one of the reasons the Dead Sea Scrolls were so important. One of the kinds of books among the Dead Sea Scrolls, just one of the kinds of books. Books were biblical manuscripts. And in some cases the biblical manuscripts and the scrolls, the text is very similar to the one in the form of text we have now. For example, the book of Isaiah, very, very similar. Others were hugely different. The book of Jeremiah is 15% longer than in the one we have now. So there are huge differences. But we can't really go book by book to say what the individual transmission history was for each one. It's hard to know whether this Codex Leningradensis came from a single earlier manuscript. It. So how much earlier it was. We don't have the data to be able to do that.
- [40:38]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much, and audience, thank you as always for your wonderful questions. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [40:46]
Bart Ehrman
Well, today we're talking about the Bible's view of abortion. One major point is the Bible never talks about abortion per se. It never says that it's right, it never says that it's wrong. It doesn't talk about what we think of as an induced procedure, surgical or medical procedure to bring out the fetus before it's viable. We do have several passages in the Bible, though, that do give a pretty clear indication of when the biblical authors, at least the ones who wrote these passages, thought about when life begins. And in every case, it appears to begin when the child is viable. If the fetus is not viable, it's not considered a human being yet. That's not necessarily determinative of what people should think about abortion, but the point of the episode really was that you shouldn't quote the Bible as saying that abortion is murder or that abortion is wrong, because the Bible doesn't say anything about it.
- [41:36]
Megan Lewis
Thank you, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Barth's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?
- [41:56]
Bart Ehrman
Well, it's a fun topic. Next week there's a book that did not it into the New Testament which is called the Acts of Pilate and it is a later account of Jesus trial before Pontius Pilate that presents an alternative version to what happened, including a couple stories that were very popular throughout Christian ages. And so we're going to talk about this Acts of Pilot then.
- [42:18]
Megan Lewis
Thank you all and goodbye.
- [42:22]
Podcast Announcer
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.