← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
What is Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Why Do They Matter (e.g., for teaching about religion!)?
00:42:28
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- [00:00]
Bart Ehrman
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- [00:35]
Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Welcome back everyone to another episode of Misquoting Jesus. Are university professors brainwashing their students to follow a liberal agenda while hiding behind academic freedom? Does the US System of tenure allow professors to say whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that they can never be fired? And what is tenure anyway? Why does it matter? Who better to ask these questions than a tenured professor who has spent decades teaching in higher education? Dr. Bart Ehrman. How are you Bart?
- [01:25]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm well. This is still a future us. My present me while recording this is finished my classes yesterday and so now it's grading time. So I have got essays to grade and quizzes to grade and this is not the fun part, but it's in some ways it's the really important part because I making comments on essays that students have written and to help them understand how to write better. And this semester I decide I was going to have them turn in their essays the last day of class, but I was going to make suggestions for improvement and then they'll turn them in later as a final thing. And so as a way to help them learn how to write better rather than simply getting their final product and giving them the grade with no guidance about how to do it better. It's more work for me, but it's a lot, it's a lot better for the students because writing is such a skill they need to get.
- [02:17]
Megan Lewis
I always found as a student I found that kind of thing much more helpful than either sitting an exam or handing in a paper and then just kind of, well, I'm done now.
- [02:25]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you get the comment back, right? And they say, yeah, nice try, B minus. It's like, well, okay, that's good, but
- [02:32]
Megan Lewis
what do I do to improve it for the next time?
- [02:36]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, right.
- [02:37]
Megan Lewis
But yes, future Megan and future Bart are currently, or at least at Time of airing roaming over the uk.
- [02:43]
Bart Ehrman
How's your present before your future? How are you?
- [02:45]
Megan Lewis
My present before my future is pretty good. I am trying to wrap up various little things before I take all of the kids over. Josh is staying here. He couldn't get the time off work so I'm taking all five kids which will be an adventure because the twins are two and have not been on a plane before. So yeah, our 16 year old is going with us so I have extra semi adult supervision which is, is really nice.
- [03:14]
Bart Ehrman
How long is the flight?
- [03:15]
Megan Lewis
It's 16, seven hours to Heathrow and then we have a three hour layover and then it's another hour and a half to Inverness.
- [03:22]
Bart Ehrman
Wow.
- [03:22]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, it's going to be interesting.
- [03:25]
Bart Ehrman
Wow. Good luck with that. Thank you.
- [03:29]
Megan Lewis
I will need it. But that's a problem for future Megan.
- [03:32]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's future future Megan. You don't have the future, you don't have the past. All you got is now.
- [03:36]
Megan Lewis
Exactly, exactly. Present Megan is not going to fret about this.
- [03:41]
Bart Ehrman
Good, good.
- [03:42]
Megan Lewis
But we should get into tenure and academic freedom and all of that thing you said at the end of the last show that tenure is something that is under increasing attack in the U.S. i think it's a little opaque for people who aren't actively working in it. And there are probably a lot of misconceptions about exactly what tenure is. Could you just give us a Cliff Notes description of tenure as a thing?
- [04:07]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I, I think it's very hard to get your mind around unless you're in the system because it. You don't have permanent employment. And in any other job, I mean, you know, you can get fired and you, you know, and often do, or you get made redundant. But in universities in the U.S. there is a policy of providing tenure for people who have, have been decided worthy of it. And tenure means that the faculty member who's given tenure is not allowed to be dismissed from their teaching position unless they are proved to be absolutely incompetent or grotesquely immoral. And so basically, it's being able to teach what you teach, what your scholarship tells you in your field of expertise, without fear of reprisal from donors, alumni, administrators, in my case at a state university, and by state legislatures or board of governors or board of trustees. They may not like what you say, they may disagree with it, but they have agreed to give you a lifelong position to teach it.
- [05:18]
Megan Lewis
What do you have to do then to be considered worthy of tenure? And very generally, because I know this varies by field and institution, but how long does it take to get there?
- [05:28]
Bart Ehrman
In most universities, a person is hired at an assistant level. They're an assistant professor, which does not mean they're assisting anybody. It's just the title.
- [05:39]
Megan Lewis
That term always confused me and I was like, ah, it's. You're not actually. Yeah, you're, you're a full professor, you're just not tenured yet.
- [05:46]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you're fully professor, but you're not. Yeah, so an assistant does not have tenure. Normally what happens is after three years they're given a review for their performance. And the three categories are publications, teaching and service. Service means serving on university committees or departmental work or public service for, you know, in, in the field, you know, outreach, that kind of things. Teaching is, you're evaluated for how well you teach. And you know, if you're a complete disaster, that's not good. And you're evaluated for your research. Different colleges and universities weigh these three criteria differently. I teach at what's called a research one university, an R1. That means a high level research university. That means the professors are expected to have a high rate of publication. And it also means to accommodate that usually they have a lighter teaching load. At a four year liberal arts college, for example, a private liberal arts college, they might have significantly more teaching and, and fewer demands on the publications. There's an evaluation after three years, if it looks things are okay, they get a report and they're told what they need to do to improve. In the sixth year, there's a tenure review, a very serious process where a dossier is compiled and the person who's coming up for tenure indicates all their research they've done, what they've published, where they published it. They have teaching evaluation from students and from other faculty observers. They note how much service they've done and so forth. They the review involves outside referees who write letters, who've read the work, the publications of this person and evaluate the quality of the work. And on that basis, then usually a department will make a decision that will be passed up to the administration and ultimately a higher up in the university or college administration will make a final decision. And if they're granted tenure, then they will have that position for as long as they remain competent and moral.
- [07:53]
Megan Lewis
It sounds like a very in depth process. Are people often denied tenure?
- [07:58]
Bart Ehrman
Yes, more in some schools than others. And it can be for a variety of reasons. At a place like unc, where I teach, most of the time, teaching and service are taken very seriously. But high quality teaching and high quality service will not earn somebody Tenure, it's a research university and if you do not publish research, you will not get tenure. We have some kind of unspoken guidelines and we have some written guidelines, but basically in, in my, my department, for example, you've got to have a book published and you've got to have, you know, a handful of refereed, peer reviewed articles published and other evidence of academic work given papers at conferences and so forth. Some people don't meet the required level and they don't get tenure. But with, especially with publications, there's not that much mystery about it. You know, if you don't have the book out, sorry, you're just, it's just not, you know, it just isn't going to happen. Most people get hired at a place like this because we're pretty sure they're going to be able to do it. We're hiring them on the assumption it's going to happen. And it almost always does happen, even though it's really hard to get there.
- [09:04]
Megan Lewis
So if, if people don't make tenure, are they given another chance in another six years or is it, thank you for trying, but you need to find employment elsewhere.
- [09:13]
Bart Ehrman
Now the review happens in their sixth year and if they don't get tenure, then they are allowed to teach for one more year to try and find another position, but that's it. After that they're terminated. I should also say that a large percentage of faculty members either don't have tenure and are not on a tenure track. Tenure track means you're on the road to get tenure. Tenured means you already have it. And so the about, I think at unc, probably over half the faculty are not tenured or with tenure track. They're hired out kind of as periodic workers. You know, they get a three year contract or a one year contract or something like that. So it's not that everybody has this tenure option available to them. When somebody does a PhD and they want to teach, this is what they go for. They want a tenure track job, the kind of college or university that they're interested in.
- [10:07]
Megan Lewis
So once you have tenure, it's more difficult to fire you than if you do not have tenure. Does this mean that you're essentially able to teach your students whatever you want? You can say whatever you want in the classroom without repercussions.
- [10:24]
Bart Ehrman
This has become a very tricky issue, as it turns out, within the academy right now, including at my university, UNC Chapel Hill. The basic idea that I think everybody agrees on is that a tenured professor who is teaching in his or her field of Expertise is allowed to teach whatever their research indicates. And so there are no restrictions on what you're teaching as long as it's competent scholarship that is rooted in scholarship. You can't just be making stuff up. If I started teaching that the Gospel of Matthew was handed down to Earth by Martians who, you know, and I seriously was teaching something crazy, then they would evaluate it and decide, this guy's got to go. They can fire you if you're violating standards of academic excellence. But it has to be an extreme case. And I don't, I don't know that I've ever even heard of that happening, but it could happen. The reason I said it's tricky is because there's a movement among academics to say that they should be protected as tenured professors or just as people teaching it. You know, places that believe in academic freedom, which everybody says they believe in, although many don't, but that you, you should be free to say anything you damn well please about anything. And so, like, I could come out in my classes, you know, I could teach about social issues, you know, I could, I could take stands on, you know, governmental spending or abortion or about, you know, nuclear proliferation or about the war in Russia, or, you know, about LGBTQ issues, you know, about, like, I could take issue. I could take a stand and like, spend entire class periods teaching about it. And they, in this view, they can't touch me because I've got academic freedom to say anything I want. Others of us think that that's not right. I don't think that's right. I think that I have tenure that grants me the right to teach my field of scholarship. It doesn't give me the right to state my opinions, even though they're. My opinions are very strongly held. But I, I don't have the. I'm not protected to just spout out my views and expect to be protected because I have tenure. No, no.
- [12:40]
Megan Lewis
So something that I hear semi regularly, people talking against the university system and against tenure. Is that what I said in the introduction, that universities are places where liberal minded academics essentially indoctrinate or brainwash their students to follow this liberal agenda? And that's not been my own experience as a student. Do you see among your colleagues, among, among other faculty members, do you see their own personal politics or social views being very strongly represented in their classrooms? Or is it more usual actually to focus on, on the topic at hand?
- [13:17]
Bart Ehrman
Well, often the topic at hand is relevant to social issues. And so I, for example, I teach classes where I talk about what The Bible says about homosexuality, the answer is nothing. And people don't like that when I say that. But it's true. And so, but it's based on my academic. We've had a session on that and we've had an episode on that. So it's a long time to explain that particular thing. The complaint about liberal professors is in some sense legitimate. Most high level colleges and universities in this country, Ivy League schools, private schools, major research universities, their faculty lean heavily liberal. That's not because of the universities and colleges though. That's because that's how the highly educated people in our country tend to lean. You just get more PhDs, say in the humanities who are teaching, who are PhDs in English and philosophy and in classics and in religious studies and in history, and who tend to be left leaning because for one reason or another, that's the views they've ended up with. Many of us did not start out with left leaning views. I certainly didn't. I started out with very right leaning views. I was the only kid in my high school class who believed in the war in Vietnam. I mean, I really, I believed in the domino theory and I said it. And so, I mean, I started out very pretty right wing. But as it turns out, many people go through their education and they, they discover other ideas and they start thinking about it and they change their views. The universities though, they're not liberal because there's some kind of cabal out there to make them liberal. It's because they're hiring the best, the best scholars in their fields. And people who are conservative in universities are doing the same thing. The people who are liberal in universities, they're teaching what they know. And so it isn't just that liberals do this. I mean, conservatives do it too. I don't think it's a fair evaluation to say that the problem with universities is that they're all liberal. And this tenure thing is keeping liberals teaching. That isn't really how it works at all. What happens is universities hire the best scholars, whatever their political views. And most scholars just teach their stuff. I just teach my stuff. But sometimes you'll get somebody who goes out on a limb and maybe goes too far. It happens on both ways. But since there are more liberals in the world of academia in America right now than there are conservatives, that does lean that way. But getting rid of tenure is not only not going to solve that. Oh my God, is it going to make things awful?
- [15:49]
Megan Lewis
And that's kind of what we're moving on to. Now, you mentioned it A little earlier, academic freedom and how tenure plays into this idea. What is academic freedom?
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Bart Ehrman
So academic freedom applies to people who do or do not have tenure. It means that a institution of higher learning hires experts who teach their expertise without interference from people who don't have that expertise. If you have somebody who is an expert in civil rights, the civil rights movement, and in racism in America and racial tension in America, and they're allowed to teach what they know about the history of slavery, about the history of relations between African Americans and the white population, or what they know about the indigenous populations, they're allowed to teach information and allowed to actually cite facts. And they're not hampered from doing that. Somebody who doesn't like their politics can't say, no, you can't teach that. You can't teach, you know, redlining laws that prohibit black from buying property in some places because it's historically factual. You can teach historical factual stuff and you can interact with, and you can certainly say what your view of the whole thing is. So academic freedom means that outsiders cannot interfere with expertise.
- [17:17]
Megan Lewis
Why is academic freedom important for professors and for research, but also how does it impact the students that you're teaching?
- [17:25]
Bart Ehrman
Academic freedom means that you can, in my view. So it's a debated topic among universities because you have, you have very conservative people who want to argue that these, you know, these universities are liberal bastions and we need to break it up. And you have highly liberal people who do want to use their platform for their social agendas rather than just teaching their expertise. I mean, you, yes, you get, you get both. The question is, what is being protected with academic freedom? And my view about this is that academic freedom means that I am protected in teaching what I'm academically expert in and that nobody can interfere with that. And I have to say it has been a very gratifying career for me because I have always had academic freedom. And without it, I would not be teaching my classes at Chapel Hill because I teach scholarship on the Bible. This is what I'm an expert in. And I've studied these materials for 50 years. I mean, virtually non stop for 50 years. And if there weren't academic freedom, then an administrator or a, you know, a board of governors or a legislature could say, well, that ain't right, you know, and then decide that I couldn't teach that. Well, you know, it's my field of expertise. And part of the problem is that expertise has come under such critique in our world today. Like people think expertise is a four letter word, but they don't mind expertise. When they go to the dentist, you know, they really want an expert there, you know, but when it comes to something like, you know, English or history history or, you know, modern American history, you know, or religion, you know, all of a sudden they think, well, the expertise doesn't matter. So academic freedom, I think, protects expertise.
- [19:15]
Megan Lewis
How would higher education, do you think, be impacted if tenure was abolished? How would that change the face of universities and, and how? Maybe academic freedom was protected.
- [19:27]
Bart Ehrman
So I don't want to overstate this, but I'm not sure how I. How it's possible to overstate this. It would destroy education in America. Seriously. Because suppose you have a very, very conservative state government that's funding the state universities. And that government, the state government that is veto proof, say, decides that they're not going to allow people to teach critical race theory because they don't agree with it. I'll point out that almost everybody I've talked to who disagrees with critical race theory does not understand what it is. They've heard stories about it, but they don't know anything about it.
- [20:07]
Megan Lewis
There was a move in our local educational system to ban critical race theory From K through 12 education. It's not taught in our schools, the schools where I am in kindergarten through 12th grade. It's just not on the curriculum. So you can ban it, but we weren't teaching it to begin with.
- [20:27]
Bart Ehrman
I know it's like banning people from flying to the moon. It's like, what. Why are you passing legislation on this? And so I know it's fear driven. It's fear driven. It's not fact driven in my case. You know, people who teach religious studies teach about religions that people believe in and they're teaching information that may not be exactly what people believe. And if you've got a legislature that is filled with just say, I mean, ours, ours is. And I don't know, I mean, I don't know the personal beliefs of the people in my legislature. But suppose in a legislature, the legislature is predominantly fundamentalist Christian, and they dictate how religion is taught. How do they dictate how Judaism is taught? For example? You know, are you required to teach the Jews are Christ killers? And people like me who teach the Bible and point out that there are contradictions in the Bible, just factually true there are contradictions in the Bible, but they tell me I can't teach that now. What's the role of expertise? What's the role of being educated and having educators? If legislatures can tell you things, but if there's no tenure. I'm not protected. I would have been fired many years ago. And you know, they might have fundamentalists. You might as well just have a preacher teaching this. But it's not just religious studies. It's virtually all the disciplines in the humanities. And what do you do about biology? What if you got a legislature filled with fundamentalists who don't believe in evolution and think that it's from the devil and they vote and the person who's teaching biology doesn't have any protection, they can be fired. What would more likely happen is they'd have a three year contract and conveniently it wouldn't be renewed. And then they'd hire someone else who agrees with them. So that's why maintenance would destroy education, not just in the humanities, certainly in the humanities, but in the sciences as well. Social sciences, anthropology. Oh man, it would destroy higher education.
- [22:21]
Megan Lewis
Would this be a problem just for state institutes that receive federal funding and state funding, or would it be a problem across the board in private institutions as well?
- [22:31]
Bart Ehrman
It'd be a similar problem in private institutions because they too have people who run the show. The faculty don't make administrative decisions. The faculty don't. The faculty can put in requests for faculty positions, for example, that we need to hire somebody new in this field, and the faculty decides who that person is going to be. They make the faculty decide and they vote on it and everything. But then it goes up through the ranks and you know, then a dean approves it, and then it goes to a provost, then it goes to a chancellor or a president, like it goes up to the ranks. And if the upper echelons were the ones who make the decisions on the basis of their own criteria, rather than trusting the faculty to know what they're doing, then if there's no tenure and there's no academic freedom, then it just depends on the constituency of the leadership. Who's on the board of trustees, who's on the board of governors and those things. In my state, the board of governors is appointed by the state legislature and the board of governors make the decisions. So without academic freedom or tenure, they would revamp the university. And they're trying to do that anyway. In my state, my state, there's a bill in the legislature right now to remove tenure from state universities and colleges and community colleges to remove tenure at my, my university, there is an administratively driven development to start a new school within the university that provides an alternative voice, which, which means they want to staff it with faculty members who have conservative views, specifically targeting people who are conservative. Like it's not going to be like, you know, bring in the best scholar of this, that or the other thing. It's going to bring in specifically conservatives so that there's a balance of voices. Let me say I, I am all for a balance of voices. I myself encourage disagreement from my students. I tell my students that their grade is not going to depend on whether they agree with me. I encourage them to disagree with me. I encour them to speak out. Understandably, some students, maybe a lot of students, don't feel like they can speak out their views because they've got all these liberal professors out there. So I understand that there's also a lot of complaints among faculty members who don't feel like they can speak out because, you know, they feel like they're being silenced. And I gotta say, I've got no sympathy for these faculty members. You're a grown up and these are people have tenure, you got tenure. You're afraid to speak your views because like somebody's going to laugh at you. What's wrong with you? Oh well, we need a new school so we can have conservative voices. Well, if you're concerned with voice speak, why not? Oh yeah, because nobody's going to agree with me anyway.
- [25:26]
Megan Lewis
Sorry, I know that's, that's not looking for discussion, that's looking for an echo chamber.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it is scary stuff because you know, there are other states that also have legislation that might pass. You know, states like Florida and Texas right now, but North Carolina is to some extent kind of going that direction. And it is scary for the future of research because if you are afraid that you will get fired for your, the conclusions you draw from your serious research, then you aren't going to publish it. You know, what if Darwin was unable to publish the Origin of Species? You know, what if geologists were not able to publish what they had discovered about the age of the earth? Just think of all the what ifs going back to say, Galileo. What happens if you're not able to do your research and come to your conclusions? Then basically you destroy knowledge. You destroy the ability to acquire knowledge and to spread knowledge. A lot of the feedback is by people who don't have an education in whatever they're complaining about. I'm not saying that everybody who gets an education in biblical studies is going to agree with me on everything. I am not. So I want to point. I am not saying that. I'm not saying that at all. There are large disagreements within my field. But you've got to be Able to voice your disagreements without being afraid of being fired for it.
- [26:48]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. That was clear and helpful.
- [26:51]
Bart Ehrman
Well, and dangerous. I mean, it's just. It's a very dangerous thing. And people don't realize. And of course, you know, people think you got tenure. What's that mean exactly? You mean you can't be fired? Oh, my God. What do you do you, like, sit at home and watch soaps and eat bonbons all day? Well, it can't fire you. And it's not like that. It's not like that. But it is protection. And I understand that it's an unusual protection, but without the protection, you're not going to have the advances of knowledge that we need in order to succeed as a society. One of the reasons that the United States has been great as a nation is because of guaranteed freedom of speech. And academic freedom is not guaranteed in the Constitution. Academic freedom is decided locally in private schools. It's just. It's a policy of private schools. But public schools, it's. It's part of a state. State agreement. And if my state gives up, for example, tenure, which kind of experts are you going to attract to your universities? Exactly. People who know that you can fire them. Whereas they could go to some other state and get tenure. Why would they come here? And so it'll destroy our university system if they go that way. And if it spreads throughout the country, it's going to have the most horrendous effect on higher education.
- [28:09]
Megan Lewis
One final point of clarification before we end the discussion. We've been talking a lot about freedom of speech and, well, academic freedom within the classroom. How does tenure factor into freedom of academic speech within publications?
- [28:25]
Bart Ehrman
It applies very much the same way. If I publish an article that. Which I've done, which says like, that says something like, the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery was not originally in the New Testament. It was added by later scribes. Fine. That's just, you know, that's like, among academics like me, that's kind of standard stuff. And you would never publish an article like that, just arguing that because everybody agrees with it, but you might have some element of it. You know, like I. I wrote an article once that dealt with some aspect of that thing. And if you're afraid that you're in a state with fundamentalists who are going to be really offended that you're taking away part of your Bible and they're going to try and get you fired, you won't publish that. The way knowledge works is people develop ideas based on Their research. The research is always driven by data on some level or another. The conclusions are usually conclusions that are drawn from data. But people can interpret data in a variety of ways. You have disputes in every discipline, whether it's philosophy or history or anthropology or chemistry or physics. There are disputes in all these fields. And some people will state views that others think are crazy and others think are least worth considering and others are convinced by. And you argue it out in the public forum, but the arguments within the public forum presuppose the ability to say what you really think based on your analysis. So if you can't publish, if you can't speak, if you can't teach what you know based on your research. Sorry. We used to have an educational system, and now we have an indoctrination system.
- [30:07]
Megan Lewis
And I think that's possibly the key points to end on here. Universities are increasingly being accused of indoctrination. And what I found, having spent a while as a student in universities in both the UK and the US actually, my professors, by and large, have encouraged debates and alternative points of view. As long as you can back up what you're saying with data, you can argue what you like, as long as you have evidence to back it up. And what you do when you take away the ability to offer alternative points of view because of fear of repercussions is you take away the discussion, you take away the debate, and what you have is an ideology.
- [30:52]
Bart Ehrman
That's right. Well, let me just say, just in connection with the podcast, that I get accused by a lot of people of indoctrinating my students. It's very easy to find, you know, people saying things like, you know, that. That I'm. I'm trying to deconvert people. I'm trying to. I'm an enemy of Christianity. I'm out to destroy Christianity. People say this all the time. It's simply not true. Nobody in my classes who's both awake and sober would say that, because it's. It's just not true. People have such hard, hard views on things, on religion, on what Christianity is and should be, what people ought to believe, on social issues, on abortion, on LGBTQ issues, on governmental issues, on, you know, environment, climate. You just pick your thing. People have very firm views about it, and they think their views are right. Great. But, you know, to tell students that they shouldn't hear another view other than the one that they're being told by their parents is highly problematic. I never get students who tell me that they've taken my class and that semester and they deconverted. I don't think I've ever heard a student tell me that. Yesterday I talked with a student who comes from a conservative Christian household and, and he really thanked me for the class because it strengthened his faith. He was actually Catholic and if I just gave him given him the Catholic line that he'd heard all the way through high school, it wouldn't have had much educational value at all. And so hearing alternative views is good. It is good also to have conservative views represented as long as they're academically responsible. What you don't want are either conservative or liberal views that are just knee jerk views. You want experts to teach their fields and whether they're liberal or conservative, they should be able to teach what they want. And I will agree some teachers probably don't do that. You know, some teachers probably try to indoctrinate their students, I'm sure. I imagine they do. I don't know of any that do, but I imagine they do. But it's not like this is what happens in universities. It's just that students are introduced to things they've never thought of before. I think the legislators would be good to hear things that they've never thought of before and actually consider them instead of just write laws against them.
- [33:04]
Megan Lewis
I think that is a wonderful point. And we are going to finish there. We'll be back in a couple of minutes with some reflections on Bard's life. So please stay tuned. Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar. D Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship. Such why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of John Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the Apostles did not write the Gospels, who did and where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John@Barterman.com Authors. Thank you.
- [34:39]
Bart Ehrman
In this segment, Bart shares insights from his uncommonly diverse experience as a professor and student, husband and father, and evangelical Christian turned agnostic. This is Bart reflects on life.
- [34:57]
Megan Lewis
But what are you going to be reflecting on today for us?
- [35:01]
Bart Ehrman
I'm actually going to reflect on something that's related to what we were just talking about, about the whole tenure situation. You know, I teach at a secular university. I've spent my entire career teaching at secular universities. I started teaching at Rutgers in New Jersey State University in 1984. And so, you know, that's not to do the math, that's 39 years ago. But here's the very kind of funny thing about in my situation. I'm not sure I've mentioned this publicly before. The first time I ever stepped foot into a institution of higher learning that was secular was the day I started teaching in one.
- [35:43]
Megan Lewis
Wow.
- [35:44]
Bart Ehrman
When I graduated, you know, after high school, high school was secular. After high school, I went to Moody Bible Institute, three years fundamentalist school, went to Wheaton College, Evangelical College, two years, went to Princeton Theological Seminary, Theological Christian Theological seminary for a three year master's degree, did my PhD four years. So all of those years I never stepped foot. I had no idea how a secular university classroom worked. I mean, I didn't even know how it worked. And so my entire training for how many years, that is 12 years, was in Christian settings. And in those settings, for example, usually you begin class with prayer. Here I am at Rutgers and I know this is a secular classroom. Like, how do you start class?
- [36:32]
Megan Lewis
Do I pray?
- [36:33]
Bart Ehrman
I don't even know. I don't think I pray. But like, do I? What do I do? And so just like, and so it was very, very strange for me. But it means that I've always been very attuned to these issues of the separation of church and state where I'm not allowed to, you know, I'm allowed to teach my academic expertise, but my personal faith is not part of my academic expertise. It's my personal faith. So I've always been very strongly aware of the separation of church and state and aware of the importance of academic freedom because I'm allowed within the expertise to teach what I want. But I'm not allowed to convert people. That's my interpretation of the, of the Constitution. And so I, or deconvert people. It's not, you know, that's not my mission. It's not my mission. And I don't know, there is nobody in my department of Religious Studies interested in Converting or deconverting anybody. People outside may think it's a liberal agenda. It's not a liberal agenda. It's just teaching what you know.
- [37:31]
Megan Lewis
My husband had, as we've said before, a similar path to you. And until he got to Hopkins, all of his graduate education was through Christian institutions. I have never been knowingly inside a Christian school, not avoided them. It's just not something that I've experienced in my lifetime. So our conversations of our relative experiences have been very interesting and eye opening for me. And something that a relative mentioned, my husband deconverted some years ago. Something that I've had mentioned to me is that, oh, well, essentially, of course, he deconverted. He went to Johns Hopkins. That's what they're there for. Like, no, like, none of our professors ever spoke to us about their religious beliefs, about our religious beliefs. I know that many of them are Christian from conversations in passing because someone mentioned once that they went to a church. But that's the extent of my knowledge. And I was never asked about my own personal faith. We talked about biblical Hebrew and Acadian and Sumerian and the archaeological history of Mesopotamia, because that's why we were there and that is why those people were employed. Religion didn't come into it and was entirely unimportant as far as our professors were concerned. It's not. You don't turn up and they're like, right, we're going to deconvert you now. These are all the reasons why the Bible is wrong.
- [38:55]
Bart Ehrman
No, no, I know. And you know, so as I said, I've taught 39 years in these kinds of. In two institutions. And I also, I have an adjunct appointment at Duke. And so I. In all this time, I don't think I've ever, ever had a discussion about my personal religion or a colleague's personal religion. I've never had the conversation about religion, personal beliefs with a colleague. And people can't believe that you're teaching in a religion department. You don't talk about your religion. No, we don't talk about our religion. Our religion has nothing to do with what we're teaching. You know, you can be Jewish and teach Buddhism. It doesn't mean you're teaching about Buddhism. So, yeah, yeah.
- [39:35]
Megan Lewis
And very occasionally online, because I do this kind of public outreach work elsewhere. Occasionally I'll get people asking about my personal faith. And the first few times it was happened, I was very confused because it's, it's completely separate for me, for my academic pursuits. So I didn't understand why people were interested. Like, that's, that's my business. That's not something that is. Is available for public consumption. Yeah, it's this strange. People expect there to be more of a crossover, I think, especially when you're dealing with ancient worlds and the ancient religions. They anticipate that there's going to be some like, personal religious motivation behind it. And a lot of the time there just isn't.
- [40:17]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's strange because it's, you know, I've got colleagues who teach, you know, European history, 20th century European history, but they never get asked, so are you a Nazi? They teach the history of Germany. Are you a Nazi? Are you a Christian? But it just seems like religion ought to be that kind of thing. Right. But it's. I guess people aren't as used to it being an academic subject, which is a little bit weird because it's been an academic subject longer than any other discipline.
- [40:48]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. So we've gone on a little tangent, but it feels similar here to people meeting academics, women academics, and assuming that they must do some variety of women's studies. Oh, yeah, it's very, very pervasive. It's like, no, actually.
- [41:04]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. You don't get men being asked, do you do men's studies? You're expecting. You've got to be like, if you're not a feminist scholar, Sumerian, what are you exactly?
- [41:15]
Megan Lewis
Just. There is one option open to you as we should finish that. But that was very interesting and I think very important and hopefully, I know it was a little bit of a departure from our normal material, but I hope that people found it interesting and informative. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. And if you did, please subscribe to the podcast. Make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember, you can use the code mjpodcast 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?
- [41:48]
Bart Ehrman
So next week we're getting into something very different. A lot of people watching this will know that the New Testament contains different wording for different verses in different places. We're going to actually now start talking about something interesting related to that. We're going to talk about some of the differences in the Gospel of Luke that seriously affect how you understand this Gospel and its portrayal of Jesus. How different manuscripts portray Jesus differently in Luke and so that. Which ones are actually from Luke and which ones do scribes make and what difference would it make? So we're going to see.
- [42:24]
Megan Lewis
It's going to be a lot of fun and very interesting. So please join us if you can. Thank you again for listening 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.