← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
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But how are you doing this week?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I'm not doing too bad. I was on leave last semester and one would think that that would allow one plenty of time to do everything one wants. Most people think that, you know, you're an academic, right? You get the summers off, you get these sabbaticals. I'm like, it's like no. And so now I'm going back into the classroom so I'm getting ready for classes basically, and which is great. I love undergraduate teaching, but it's going to be a bit of a shock to the system trying to do everything I was already doing, plus now my day job. I love the undergraduates and I love, I love the teaching. And so for me, teaching undergraduates is really one of the perks of the job. And weirdly so. How are you? Have you, you survived the Christmas season?
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, I did, I did. We're all good. Everyone's healthy, happy and running wild.
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Bart Ehrman
Did you get a rock or did you get some presents?
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Megan Lewis
I got some presents actually. Although I would not have been surprised at rocks. I have a couple of fish tanks and I'm always collecting interesting looking rocks for them. But no, I did not get rocks.
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Bart Ehrman
What kind of fish do you have?
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Megan Lewis
We have a couple of batta fish, some angelfish, quarry catfish. There are some platys as well. And, and I'm going to get an axolotl as soon as I've got the tank set up.
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Bart Ehrman
Wow.
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Okay.
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Good on you.
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Megan Lewis
Oh God, yeah, lots of fish.
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Bart Ehrman
Okay.
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Megan Lewis
My son really wants a dog, but fish are considerably easier to care for.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, they are. We have a much beloved dog. But they're boy. Especially when they're puppies. Oh my God. It's a lot of work, so. But still, you know, come on, go for the dog one day.
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Megan Lewis
I think I've told him when the babies are not babies anymore, we will revisit that particular conversation. Okay, but the thought of potty training a puppy and having 18 month old twins is just. I am not strong enough for that particular set of challenges.
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Bart Ehrman
No, I get you. Puppy's a lot more work than you think it would be. It's obviously your children, but it turns out it's true of dogs too.
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Megan Lewis
So our topic of conversation today is the King James version of the Bible, which I think is probably one of the most well known English translations of the Bible. We're going to look at how it came into existence, some problems that exist with it, and we might talk about why it's still so popular. I have to say that I grew up with the new international version and it's still the one that I typically use when I use a Bible. But the King James Version does still hold a special place in my heart. My childhood church was a very, very small church. And when I say small, I mean small. The congregation doubled every time my family attended. And one of the other regular attendees was a lovely man called Miles, who, fun fact is the Earl of Buckinghamshire. And he has this really strong, sonorous voice. And when he gave readings for church, he always used a kjv. So as a child that you have this like wonderful voice and this grand, eloquent language, I just remember it sounding very, very, very, just impressive. So I like it. I know there are problems with it, but I think as a work of literature, maybe it's very special. But do you remember your first exposure to the kjv?
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Bart Ehrman
I do. When I was growing up, my family was fairly religious, but we weren't really, you know, we went to church, but we weren't like Bible people. And so we had Bibles in the house, but we didn't really read them much. When I became a, an evangelical Christian in high school, I started reading the Bible. I think I probably started reading the living Bible, which is not even a translation, it's a paraphrase, but it's one you can really understand. And I remember the first time I tried to read the King James Version, the kjv. I had been reading something in kind of modern colloquial English and I started reading the King James. I had no idea what it was talking about. Like, oh my God, I do not know what these words mean. This is like, this is hard. Bible shouldn't be hard. I didn't grow up with that kind of reverence for the King James just because it wasn't part of my world. Although I agree and will be agreeing throughout this episode that the King James, Now, I know it's one of the great classics of the English language and is a book that very much deserves to be read and experienced, but yeah, my first encounter wasn't good, I have to say.
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Megan Lewis
I've never actually sat down and read sections of it. I've had it read, small sections read to me in church. It wasn't the standard version that was used in my church. It's just Miles liked the King James, so if he was reading, that was what was being read from. And actually, until I started researching this episode, I really had very little idea of what the King James Version actually was, except, you know, just an archaic sounding translation of the Bible. So for those who are similarly bereft of knowledge, could you give it like a brief explanation of what it is and why it's an important thing to have an awareness of?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. As I said, it is one of the great classics of English. It was a translation that was sponsored by King James of England in 1611. It had been commissioned in 1604. A lot of people today, especially conservative evangelical Christians and especially fundamentalists, who think that the King James was the first English edition. And many of them think that it's the inspired edition that you can't use anything else because the King James was the one that God inspired. What I'll say about that is that it was not the first edition of the English Bible at all. And people don't realize this. So just to give you a little bit of historical background, throughout the Western world, of which England and America are part, throughout from the 4th, 5th century onward, people read the Latin Bible. The Latin Bible was translated from the Hebrew and the Greek starting in the second century. But the Latin Bible people used is called the Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate, and that was started by Jerome, who was this 4th century scholar, who was a brilliant scholar, who could read Hebrew, unusually in the west, and could read Greek. He translated the Gospels into Latin and then people did different parts. And so you get the Latin Bible for hundreds and hundreds of years and that was understood to be the sacred Bible in the West. The first time there was an English translation, a full English translation of the Bible was actually not from the Greek and the Hebrew, but was from the Latin. And it was done by Wycliffe. Wycliffe's Bible came out in 1382 and a translation from the Latin. So what ended up happening is that a lot of the hierarchy in England, it was all Catholic and the Protestant church Hadn't started yet. But the English hierarchy in the church didn't like the fact that the Bible was available in English. Because if you let people read the Bible in their own language, you're gonna
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Megan Lewis
get all kinds of ideas.
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Bart Ehrman
Yes. You know, they'll misinterpret it and they'll come up with crazy ideas. So it's really better for us to experts to explain it to them rather than have them read it on their own. They passed a law in England in the early 15th century that made it illegal to translate the Bible into English as a result of Wycliffe. And, you know, back then, of course, the church and the state were not like two separate entities like they are in America. And so it was punishable by death. The big change came in the early 16th century with somebody named William Tyndale. T Y N D A L E. He is arguably the most important figure for the English language after Shakespeare. And people don't know about him. He was Protestant. So this is after the Reformation started. And in 1525, he had translated the Bible from Hebrew and from Greek into English. In 1525, he had to move to Germany because there was a death warrant on him for doing this. And the Bible was circulated then. Serendipitously. Serendipitous.
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Megan Lewis
Serendipitously.
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Bart Ehrman
Thank you. Tito's most famous for coming up with English words that have survived all these years. And that's one of them I missed. So anyway, he ended up getting betrayed and was captured and was burned at the stake in 1536 for translating the Bible. But after he translated the Bible, other Bibles started showing up. And finally, by the early 17th century, King James of England, who had been the king of Scotland, and then he was Protestant, he wanted a translation of the Bible that could be used in the churches. And so he authorized a committee of mainly Oxford and Cambridge scholars in England in 1604, and they. He commissioned them to translate the Bible. Back then, some of us are New Testament scholars who read Greek, but In the early 17th century, if you read Greek, you read it like the newspaper. These were highly, highly skilled linguists. They spent seven years and they translated. But the thing about it is, just in terms of the. This will be the end of my background story. The thing about it was that what they basically did is they took Tyndale's translation and tried to improve it in plagias so that the best count is that the King James Bible's words, 92% of them, are taken from Tyndale. Wow. And so Tyndale is really the one responsible for what we have as the King James Bible. And the translators. The King James Bible admitted it. I mean, they said so in the preface, they said, you know, we've taken a good translation to try to make it better. And they really just took over the Tyndale and updated it.
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Megan Lewis
When they said they tried to make it better, did they have access to different manuscripts that Tyndale didn't, or was it more trying to make it more understandable?
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Bart Ehrman
Maybe to the audience, it's mainly making it more understandable. The way Tyndale had dealt with the Greek New Testament was by using the printed version of the Greek New Testament that had come out a few years earlier. The first edition of the Greek New Testament came out in 1516. So for those who are not quite sure what I'm talking about here, throughout the centuries, the New Testament, as every other book, had to be copied by hand. And so the word manuscript means a book written by hand. And it wasn't until the invention of printing by Gutenberg in the 15th century that people could print books. And it wasn't until 1516 that anybody took a few manuscripts and compiled them and published, printed a Greek New Testament. So that was Erasmus in 1516. The problem was that Erasmus didn't have access to a lot of manuscripts. There are some books of the New Testament where he only has three or four manuscripts and some books where he only has two. The Book of Revelation, he basically had one manuscript that he was basing his thing on, a handwritten copy from earlier, centuries earlier. And unfortunately, the last page of the Book of Revelation was lost. He didn't have the last page. So when Tyndale translated, he had to translate this edition that Erasmus, and the King James translators used a later edition of Erasmus. So the text isn't very different. The Greek form that they're translating isn't very different. So it's not. They're making it better for that reason. They're making it better because they think they can improve on the language in places and make it a little bit clearer.
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Megan Lewis
I see. So the immediate thing that jumps out to me is that this is a very early translation in terms of English translations of the Bible. It's one of the first. It's reliant on an even earlier, the first translation, which itself, the Greek side at least, is reliant on someone else's translation. So it seems a little bit like a game of telephone, which leads me to suggest maybe there are some translation inaccuracies there, because you're not working with the original manuscripts. You're translating and reworking to other people's work. But my main question is, if the King James Version is this old and reliant on so few manuscripts, given that there have been so many more manuscripts discovered and translated and worked on, why is it that some people think the King James is still the authoritative English translation?
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Bart Ehrman
When I was in the Episcopal church in the 1970s, the Episcopal Church had come up with a new prayer book, Book of Common Prayer. And people in my congregation were really split. Some liked the updated language. Some people just said, you know, this just ain't right. You know, this ain't. This is not how it's worded. Because they were so accustomed to the prayers being in this kind of older, more liturgical language. And they just didn't like the this sounded like popularizing it or paraphrasing it or just kind of dumbing it down. They just didn't like that. And that's how people felt about the revisions of the King James. There are a number of revisions of it. There continue to be new revisions. There's a new revision that came out several months ago that's called the nrsvue, the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. So that is a updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version. When the New Revised Standard Version was a product of many years of work that my mentor, Bruce Metzger, he was the chair of the committee. And for several years I worked for him two years full time. I worked for him on that, on the translation, on the NRSV, their committees were translated and they were revising the NRSV as a revision of the revision that happened in 1952, which was the Revised Standard Version. And people got really upset. When the Revised Standard Version came out in 1952, my grandfather went through the roof because they translated passages, you know, in ways they weren't used to, including Most famously Isaiah 7:14. In Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah tells the king, who is afraid that things aren't going well, he's going to defeat it. Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. And Isaiah tells him not to worry about it. And he says, that going to be fine. A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. And that was used then to refer in the Gospel of Matthew to the birth of Jesus born of the virgin. Well, the 1952 revised standard version didn't translate it that way. It translated Isaiah 7:14, As a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and you call his name Immanuel. A young woman? No, it's a virgin. They've taken the virgin birth out of the Bible. My grandfather was completely incensed. So something changes and you don't like it. The Revised Standard Version was a Revision of a 1901American revision of 1982 Revision of the King James. So, like, these are all the revisions, all the way down.
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Megan Lewis
That's interesting. So I assume, given that it's such an old text, that there are some problems with using it in a liturgical context, in a theological context?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it kind of depends who you ask, of course. I mean, in a liturgical context, if you mean like in a church service, I think a lot of people are completely wedded to it still. And even people who are not like fundamentalists find that its language, its rhythms, its vocabulary are just so powerful and resonant with them that for them, that's the Bible. And I get that. I personally think that for reading and for thinking of a translation of the Bible as a piece of an English classic, that the King James is the book. It's the book. And there are passages in the King James Bible that are just so memorable. And not just passages, but they're phrases. You just think of phrases like the patience of Job or the powers that be, you know? So actually, I wrote some down here. Am I my brother's keeper, the salt of the earth? These are things that come from the King James Bible into the English language. So that's great. And you read passages like Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or John 1. I mean, these are powerful language in the King James Bible. I really don't want to minimize that at all. But if you talk about a study Bible, like, you really want to know what the authors said as closely as you can, it's not a good Bible for that. It's great for as a literary classic, but it's not great if you want to study Bible. And so in my classes at Chapel Hill, I don't let my students use the King James. I encourage them to read it, but not to use it. If you want to know what the
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Megan Lewis
author said, what kinds of things, if you could give us some examples, are either misrepresented or not not as accurate as you would want them to be for a study Bible.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, there are a number of things when it comes to the King James. One thing is that the English language has changed a lot since 1611. And as I said, they're using a lot of words that were used in 1525. And so there are a lot of words in the King James that we don't know what they are. I mean, the normal reader. So I wrote some of these down, too, because I don't remember. These are words in the King James Bible. Almug, chod, habergaon, hosen, ligure, ouches, ringstraked, sycamine. It's like they're just used as words. You don't know. What's it mean? I don't know. But then you not only get that, but you get certain kinds of phrases. Like in Genesis 5, we're told that Jacob sawed pottage. Jacob sawed pottage means he was cooking oatmeal.
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Megan Lewis
I kind of knew what pottage was, but I didn't know what that verb was.
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Bart Ehrman
Thou shalt destroy them that speak. Leasing.
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Megan Lewis
Don't know what that is.
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Bart Ehrman
You're to execute liars. Okay. Or the words of the wise are as goads and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. What's it mean? I don't know. You know, that's kind of the fundamental problem that people might know about. Another big problem. That's the problem I had when I was reading the First Eye. I had no idea. But there are other. A bigger problem in some ways is that there are words that make sense to us, that make sense in their context in a sentence that don't mean what we think they mean.
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Megan Lewis
That's a problem.
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Bart Ehrman
It's a big problem. Just. It's one example. We were talking last time about the book of Revelation. There's this vision in Revelation where the author, John, goes into the wilderness, and he's taken into the wilderness, and he sees this wild image. There's this woman that he identifies as a prostitute, the whore of Babylon, who's sitting on this beast with many heads and many horns. And. And she is grotesquely dressed, and she's. She has a cup of the blood of the martyrs in it, and on her forehead says, babylon the Great is her name, and she's drunk with the blood of the martyrs. Is this horrifying image, this woman on this wild beast. And in the King James version, when John explains that I looked upon her with great admiration. Right. You're admiring her. So, yeah. Admiration meant astonishment. And so he was astonished. He wasn't, like, admiring her. He was astonished by her.
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Megan Lewis
That does certainly change the meaning of the passage if you're reading it in modern English.
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Bart Ehrman
So that's part of. There are other problems, including the opposite. Theological biases. In places, they included passages that weren't originally, as you were saying. Earlier badges that weren't originally in the manuscripts. And so a number of problems.
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Megan Lewis
Does it also include mention of unicorns, or am I making that up?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, that's it. In addition to words we don't know, it used words that we do know, it does mention unicorns. It mentions satyrs, it mentions arrow snakes. Nobody knows what that is. At least we know what a unicorn is, and we know it doesn't exist. But they're treating these things as if they did exist. And so that's part of the problem. You know, I think a bigger part of the problem is that translation in places puts in verses that weren't originally there. And we only know that because we've discovered manuscripts. So as I was saying, this is based on just a few manuscripts. For the New Testament, we have something like 5,600 manuscripts today. Most of them are not complete manuscripts, most of them are just little fragments. But we have thousands of manuscripts. And King James is based on a few. And the few it's based on were very late manuscripts. Many they're into the deep Middle Ages. And now we have ones that are really early fourth complete ones from the fourth century. And so, like this is one example, kind of a famous example. There's only one verse in the New Testament that explicitly affirms the doctrine of
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Megan Lewis
the Trinity, which is pretty important for general Christianity. Yeah,
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Bart Ehrman
there are places that mention Father, Son and Spirit. But the doctrine of the Trinity is not just that you have those names because it also has Father, Son, Spirit. They have angels, they have all sorts of spiritual Bibles. But the doctrine of the Trinity is that there are three members of the Godhead, Father, Son and Spirit. And the three are one. It's one God in three persons. That's the doctrine of the Trinity. So it's not just that the three of them. It's not just that there's one God. It's like the three are one. And you find that nowhere in the New Testament except for First John, chapter 5, verses 7 and 8. And that verse says. It doesn't quite say, but it comes pretty close. It says that there are three that bear witness in heaven. The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, King James, the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. So it's in the King James because it was in the edition of Erasmus Greek New Testament that they used. So I said that Erasmus publishes Greek New Testament in 1516. His first edition did not have that verse.
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Megan Lewis
I imagine that caused some problems.
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Bart Ehrman
It did cause problems. Theologians went nuts. You think my grandfather went nuts. About the virgin birthday. You left out the Trinity. What are you doing? And so Erasmus said, look, it wasn't in my manuscript, but it's in the Latin Vulgate. It's scripture. Yeah, but I'm doing a Greek New Testament.
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Megan Lewis
It's not there.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's not there. So there's an anecdote about this that some scholars have challenged, but if it's not true, it really ought to be true. The anecdote is that Erasmus told his opponents, look, if you can produce a manuscript that has it in a Greek manuscript with it in and out, put it in my next edition. And they produced a manuscript. They literally produced a manuscript. Somebody copied out the Greek and then at that point they took the Latin and translated into Greek and put it in the manuscript. And it's true that the manuscripts that were available to him, I mean, they were 16th century manuscripts. So for whatever reason then Erasmus did come upon a manuscript that had it in them and put it in, even though none of the earlier manuscripts have. I mean, it doesn't show up for centuries and centuries and centuries. Somebody stuck it in, but it's in the King James. And so if you're studying the Bible and you want to know about the doctrine of the Trinity, you would naturally go to that, but that one isn't going to help you because it wasn't originally there, it was added by scribes. And so you have to do it some other way then.
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Megan Lewis
Do you see similar theological additions or results of theological commitments in the King James?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you see a number of these things. And sometimes the theology involves the way it's actually translated in a way that's biased. Like one example is we've talked in previous podcasts about the Book of Daniel. So the Book of Daniel, the first six chapters, are really interesting stories, narratives about this young man, Daniel. All the Jews are told that there's this big statue of the king. They've got to bow down in reverence before of the statue. All the Jews do it except for Daniel and his buddies. And so Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, those three, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego don't bow down. And so the king, Babylon takes them and he throws them into a fiery furnace, so huge furnace with a big opening. And they're thrown in. And it's going to be like it's going to kill them instantly. But then the king looks in and he sees them walking around, and they're walking around with the fourth figure called the Son of God. And so they're walking around with the Son of God. And so that's what you find in the King James. And they survive then. And they survive because they're with the Son of God. So naturally that means Jesus. And so Jesus then is with them in the fiery furnace. And it was always interpreted that way. But it actually, that isn't what. It's Aramaic at this point in Daniel. It's not Hebrew. The Aramaic says they were with a son of the gods, which means an angel. They're with an angelic being. But by translating it the Son of God, they've made it into the. Into Jesus. And so you have problems like that. But one of the problems with translation is how to keep translators biases from getting in. And it's why translations are almost always done by committees now, so that like an individual's bias doesn't creep in. But the problem is the committees tend to be self appointed.
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Megan Lewis
So you get group biases.
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Bart Ehrman
You get group biases. I mean, when you mentioned the new International version of the one you grew up on, it is the most popular translation in English today. The new international version. It reads very well. It's very idiomatic. The translating committee, though, were a group of committed evangelicals who were committed to the idea of the inspiration of scripture. Scripture. And it affected their translation. They translate out contradictions by the way they translate things. And it's a problem when you're pointing out a student. Yeah, look at this verse, look at that verse. That's a contradiction. They say, not my Bible. Oh, God. What are you reading? Cim.
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Megan Lewis
Okay, well, yeah, that is definitely a problem. We should do an episode on, on translation and, and biases and exactly how
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Bart Ehrman
I think, you know, I'm going to do some of these podcasts. I'm going to be interviewing people and I've asked actually one of the translators from the NRSV updated edition to join us.
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Megan Lewis
Wonderful.
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Bart Ehrman
Where I'll, I'll interview her. And so I hope she does it. I think she probably will.
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Megan Lewis
No, that sounds wonderful. I enjoy that. So obviously, academics and historians and text critics know about the history of the King James Version and its kind of storied creation and exactly which manuscripts and which translations it's based on. And this information is not prevalent amongst congregations especially, I imagine, congregations who habitually use the King James Version. Why do you think that is? Is this a deliberate attempt to not question the biblical translation that's in favor, or is this more a failing of academia in disseminating important information?
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Bart Ehrman
My sense is that most people in the pew are not intentionally ignorant. Some are. Of course, they don't want to hear it. But I think it is a failure of the academy and a failure of the pastors. I mean, the problem is the pastors who are using the King James themselves are convinced that it's the superior translation. Fundamentalist pastors are convinced that it's inspired by God. There's no way an academic can refute that in a satisfactory way. But I think people don't know about the King James just because, you know, academics haven't talked about it much. I'd say most New Testament scholars don't know much at all about the King James because academic scholars, real, I mean, serious biblical scholars, you know, we don't much use English translations anyway. We read. You know, if you're a New Testament scholar, you're working with the Greek, and if you're a Hebrew Bible scholar, you work with the Hebrew. You know, we know these translations. Of course, we use them for other things. But the history of translation is not a big topic among most New Testament scholars. I would imagine that if you ask most colleagues about the King James and its history, they wouldn't be able to tell you very much about it. They would know that it's published by King James of England in 1611. They would know you, but they wouldn't know the whole history behind it. And they wouldn't be able to detail a lot of the problems. They would know that the problems exist. And so part of it is that people just haven't had that much interest in it. And it's too bad because, in fact, it's important. When my students, for example, at Chapel Hill, when they want to show me that Jesus must be the Messiah because he's predicted in scripture. So that's a common apologetic move because you say, well, you know, you have things predicted in the Bible, and then Jesus fulfilled those predictions. And, you know, when I was an evangelical, I did that too, and I knew all these arguments. But, for example, just sticking with his Isaiah passage, they'll say, look, Isaiah says that he'll be born of a virgin and Jesus was born of a virgin. How can you not see that this is a fulfillment of Scripture? And, you know, it sure looks like it if you're using the King James or other translations. But then when you try to explain to them, actually in Isaiah 7, in. In the Hebrew, it doesn't use the word virgin. We'll conceive. So the word for virgin in Hebrew is bethalah. And the Hebrew word for young woman is Alma. And what the verse actually says is that an Alma has conceived a child. In the context of this passage, as I said before, Isaiah is telling the king of Israel of Judea that he doesn't need to worry about that. The city's under siege, but it's not going to last long. And Isaiah is saying that God's going to dispel this enemy. This woman is pregnant, and by the time her child is very old, the kings will be gone. You won't even think about it. That doesn't make any sense. If it's a prediction of the Messiah, it's not that the virgin will conceive and bear a son, it's that there's a woman who has become pregnant and before her child gets very holy. So that's the whole point. Point. You know, when you use a translation that isn't accurate, you can use it for all sorts of things that aren't. Aren't helpful.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you very much for explaining. That's. I don't think people really understand. I certainly didn't until I started looking into it. I don't think people understand the intricacies behind the translations, the different translations of the Bible and the New Testament specifically, and quite how many little problems maybe there are that you have to resolve to put together an English language translation. And when you're presented with the finished product, with all these resolutions, it's like, oh, well, it's written right there. And actually it's taken seven people a couple of weeks to kind of work through all of the different manuscripts for that particular passage and come to a conclusion that is the best they can do, but may not be entirely accurate.
- [32:11]
Bart Ehrman
Even deciding which words to translate is a problem because for the New Testament, you know, there's a committee that decides which Greek words to put in at places. And they have to vote because they can't agree. And then when the translators translated, I was the secretary for this committee for several years and I would sit in there and there'd be like, you know, seven translators in the room. And they've done a verse and they're voting, they vote how to translate and they'll come down to four to three. You know, if they're five, come down to three to two, that's the one that gets in. You know, how else are you going to do it? But it's not like the certitude. And in some places now I was talking about how the King James has these words that people don't use anymore. The Hebrew Bible has words. So we don't know what they mean. They'll be like, it's clear it's an animal of some kind, and it sounds like it's probably a mammal of some kind. What is it?
- [33:00]
Megan Lewis
I don't know.
- [33:00]
Bart Ehrman
We don't know. The word doesn't occur anywhere else. We don't know. So you get all sorts of problems with translation, but if you don't have a modern translation, you don't have modern scholarship behind it, which means, you know, you don't have the best Greek or Hebrew text available and you don't have people who've done research on this particular word or that particular word. And this is where your ancient near east language just come in. Because there are ancient languages, not Sumerian, but there are other ancient Near Eastern languages that are like Hebrew, they're Semitic languages. And that's how translators figure out what Hebrew words meant in the ancient world. Because they have these languages that are like Hebrew that you can tell what the root word was and you can tell you what the word probably meant.
- [33:40]
Megan Lewis
That's another point that I'd like to bring up. I assume since the King James Bible was put together, scholars understanding of Koine, Greek and Biblical Hebrew has improved. So the way something would have been translated for the King James Version is most likely not how we would understand it today. Because we have a better knowledge of the language that you're translating.
- [34:07]
Bart Ehrman
Well, absolutely. I mean, with the Hebrew Bible, there have been discoveries of other texts, not your Sumerian text, but other texts from Ugarit or whatever that are using Semitic languages. The problem with the Hebrew Bible is that when you're translating a book like the Greek New Testament, the Greek New Testament was written in the first Christian century, and we have Greek texts from 700 years earlier than that and from hundreds and hundreds down to today. So we know what Greek words mean. Because you find a Greek word, you find a word erkomai, and it gets used a billion times in other contexts. And so you know what the word has, has to mean because you can see how it works in different contexts. For Greek and Latin, that's great. For the Hebrew Bible, that Hebrew in the Hebrew Bible is the only Hebrew we have from the period. You don't have other literature to help you know what the words mean. And so that's why the discovery of these other languages has been so important. And why Hebrew Bible scholars who are translators, they have to learn a bunch of these other ancient languages. Someone who's really good at this, if you get a Semitic philologist who really knows These other languages. I've got a colleague like that in my department at Chapel Hill. Man, it's impressive what they can do. When I was on the translation committee for the nrsv, we were sitting there translating some passage from someplace or other, and they came across the word cucumber. Yeah, well, in the Ugaritic text, it says this. And then it's like they come up with all these like. And so they know what the word means because of that. And the King James translators didn't have that advantage. And so you do learn more. And with the Greek language, we know a lot more now than they knew in the 17th century.
- [35:54]
Megan Lewis
That's actually why my husband went into assyriology. He was fundamentalist Christian and he went through seminary and he wanted to get a better understanding of the Hebrew. So his. His seminary advisor told him, you should do a near Eastern Studies PhD because you'll learn Acadian, you'll learn Ugaritic, and it will give you all of this extra knowledge to better understand the Hebrew Bible. And of course, his first semester, he took Syra Palestinian history with Karl MacArthur and promptly deconverted because you've learned that actually serial Palestinian history as we know it from archeology is not what's. What's in the Bible, but the languages is exactly why he got into assyriology.
- [36:32]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, I think it's true of a lot of students who are. Who are evangelical, who are like the really bright evangelicals who really want to search the truth. They're sent off someplace and they start studying the history as well as the language, and they, oh, my God, this is what I thought.
- [36:47]
Megan Lewis
This is not what I signed up for.
- [36:49]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, and some people then just close their mind to it. And some people, you know, just completely leave the faith. And other people just, like, become a different kind of believer, you know, but, you know, usually has some kind of a. Effect.
- [37:01]
Megan Lewis
Well, this has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you. We will wrap that section up here and take a very brief break. We will be back with Bart's weekly update. And our bonus segment today is Bart Gets on His Soapbox. So stay tuned for that. I'm interested to see what Bart is going to be soapboxing about today.
- [37:21]
Bart Ehrman
If you're interested in the gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible, you should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more.
- [37:38]
If you'd like to learn about the
- [37:40]
courses, check them out@barturman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you a curious person with a passion for learning but don't want to go back to school? You need to take a look at Wondrium, the streaming service that provides classes on just about everything of interest. The Crusades, neuroscience, Beethoven, photography, travel, and lots else, all presented by true experts in accessible terms. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription, and you'll be supporting our show.
- [38:37]
Megan Lewis
Welcome back, everybody. We are going to have Bart's Weekly Update.
- [38:42]
Bart Ehrman
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.
- [38:57]
Megan Lewis
Bok, what do you have for us this week?
- [38:59]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, it's actually not just this week. It's like this ongoing thing I've been doing for several years now. I decided a few years ago that I don't have a good education. Can you believe that? Oh, no, I do. Oh, boy. I went to Bible college, and then I was like, you know. You know, the first time I stepped into a secular classroom institution of higher learning, first time I stepped in one that was not a Christian classroom of a college university, was the day I started teaching at Rutgers.
- [39:32]
Megan Lewis
Wow.
- [39:32]
Bart Ehrman
I had never been in a secular class, so I don't have a good education. I learned a lot, but it's not a great education. So I have. A few years ago, I started getting up in the morning before I start reading my homework or my green. Whatever I'm doing in my languages. I read sciences. And so for a long time, I've been reading astronomy and cosmology and physics. But now I'm onto my current passion, which is evolutionary psychology. Oh, my God. Is this interesting? It is fantastic. And it's just I've always been somebody who's interested in the truth and seeking the truth, trying to understand what it means to be human. You know, you really have to. You have to know what we know in order even ask the question. It's great. And so every morning, I read a little bit of evolutionary psychology.
- [40:15]
Megan Lewis
That sounds fascinating.
- [40:17]
Bart Ehrman
Great.
- [40:17]
Megan Lewis
You have, like, a favorite quick fact you can share.
- [40:20]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. So for you, as a. As a mother, you know, there's a big question about where disgust comes from, like why you're disgusted in certain things. And women tend to be more disgusted at things than, than others. And the things usually involve feces or rotting food. Those are the kinds of things that bring about disgust. Disgust is universal across the world. I mean, doesn't matter what culture. Even people who are blind show facial expressions of disgust. And it's really interesting. And so one evolutionary psychological explanation of that is that disgust is. It's a food avoidance. It's what you want to avoid consuming. And it's a reaction so you don't eat the wrong things because they're filled with parasites and with bad bacteria and things. And so that's why you feel disgust. And it's why women tend to have a higher, higher reaction to that. The evolutionary theory is because they have to protect their infants. And so, so they're, they're more cautious than the men because the men aren't taking care of the kids. Interesting. It's just stuff like that. It's like it's.
- [41:26]
Megan Lewis
No, that is interesting.
- [41:27]
Bart Ehrman
And what they have to do then is test it. Right. It isn't just like coming up with some wild idea. You have to. This is where scientists have the advantage over us religious scholars because I can't test whether the resurrection happens. But you know, you end up with evolution, then you have hypotheses, then you have predictions that come out of these hypothesis. Well, if that's true, then this probably would have been you tested. Oh my God. That does. And so you do enough of that and looks like. That's right.
- [41:54]
Megan Lewis
That sounds absolutely fascinating.
- [41:56]
Bart Ehrman
It's great. It's great.
- [41:58]
Megan Lewis
And now we are going to go on to Bart on his soapbox.
- [42:05]
Bart Ehrman
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [42:20]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what are you on your soapbox about this week?
- [42:24]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we were talking about, you know, the King James and how people are so some evangelical, not very many evangelicals, but some evangelicals and especially fundamentalists are so bound to the King James translation as the inspired word of God. And most of the rest of us think that this is, you know, I don't want to attack people personally, but this is rooted in real ignorance and ignorance is not good. You have to understand where Bible translations came from and how the process works. The King James Bible was not handed down from heaven. It was done by us through a series of cultural accidents and serendipitous events. And there was so much chance involved with the translation, just constructing the Hebrew and the Greek texts from which this thing is translated took a lot of chance and serendipity. And so the idea that this translation is the translation, what does that even mean? What does it mean for somebody who lives in France, they don't have the word of God or somebody who lives in Brazil? And so, you know, you just think, are people not thinking? And my soapbox has to do with thinking. You know, people need to use their intelligence. And part of that involves understanding the history of why we think what we think. Our thoughts were not given to us at birth. If we have an opinion about something, whether it's about philosophy or religion or politics or social whatever, if we have opinion, we have inherited those from somebody who inherited them from somebody who inherited them from somebody that didn't just snap out, come out of the blue. If you really want to know what this idea contains and what it involves, you need to know where it came from. And that can change how you understand it. If you don't do that, then basically what you're doing is you're denying the importance of history. Most people aren't interested in history because they think it's a bunch of dumb names and dates. Okay, fair enough. But if you ignore history, you're ignoring why we think what we do, and you're ignoring the only way we can evaluate many of our truth claims. I get very upset because it's all part of willful ignorance for many people. And willful ignorance is leading to horrible things in our world right now where we just don't care what the factual information is and we don't care what the history is. And so those who support the King James as the inspired word of God, I'm sorry, it's just historically ignorant. And people who think that often engage in other forms of historical ignorance. Their support of the King James Bible in itself doesn't do much of anybody any harm. But then they started adopting social policies and politics and other philosophical views and child rearing and church politics, just everything based on that. And it leads to huge problems. Look, here's my view. Even if you are a fundamentalist, you believe that God gave you a brain. And if he gave you a brain, he wants you to use it. He doesn't want you to stick it away someplace. And so I'm a big believer in using your head. And that means being willing to accept views that you don't find palatable at first. And you know, if you're a King James believer, that's a good place to start with trying to understand where the King James came from and to see whether really it makes sense that it's the inspired word of God.
- [45:54]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. And I think that if you hold a view, it is good to interrogate that view and understand both where it came from and why you hold it. And if you still hold that view at the end of your interrogation, okay, you go for it. But holding it and being scared to interrogate it because you might change your mind, you owe yourself and you will owe the world better, I think.
- [46:16]
Bart Ehrman
And it's true, not just of conservatives, true of liberals as well.
- [46:19]
Megan Lewis
Oh, absolutely.
- [46:19]
Bart Ehrman
Just as guilty. Not all liberals, not all conservatives. But I mean, you have to be willing to change your heart, as painful as it can be.
- [46:27]
Megan Lewis
Well, thank you everybody for watching. I hope you enjoyed as ever. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any 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 going to be talking about?
- [46:48]
Bart Ehrman
So next week we're going to do something different. I'm going to be interviewing somebody as I want to do on occasion for the podcast. So I've invited Jennifer Knust. She's a scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity at Duke University. She's a prominent scholar in the field and is an expert in many, many areas of ancient Christianity. She was a member of the committee that translated the nrsvue, the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. I'd like to interview her about problems of translation. What kind of issues do translators have to face when they're taking the Bible and trying to put it into modern English? There are a lot of problems that you could imagine, and there are some you would not imagine, and so we'll be talking about that.
- [47:36]
Megan Lewis
Well, that sounds absolutely wonderful. I can't think of a better person to interview on that topic. I'll be listening, even though I won't be participating. Thank you everyone for joining us. I hope you can join Bart next week. And goodbye.
- [47:51]
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.