← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:00]
A
Those familiar with Dr. Bart Ehrman's career trajectory will know that he attended Moody Bible Institute, where he received his early training in textual criticism. But what is a Bible Institute exactly? And why do people attend them? Today we're talking about what Moody Bible Institute didn't prepare Barth for. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is listeners Questions where I'll be asking Barth, among other things, exactly what Jesus meant when he talked about the unforgivable sin. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus podcast with Bart Ehrman. Now, Bart, when you were in high school, what did you think your options would be for college?
- [00:39]
B
Well, I definitely was going to go to college. My parents were first generation each college students and they emphasized education a lot. But in high school, I had no clue what I was going to do do with my life, do with anything else. I was kind of a moment by moment kind of person. I did well in high, but, you know, I wasn't a superstar or anything. When I was a senior, my, I realized my two options basically were to go to Kansas University. I had been on the debate, debate team in high school and enjoyed debate and thought maybe I would be on the debate team at ku, which had a very fine debate program. But my other option was I had about a year before I had become a born again Christian. And the person who was in charge of all of that, the group that I was in, involved with, had gone to Moody Bible Institute. And he basically convinced me that if I was going to be a serious Christian, I wouldn't go to some secular college. I would go to Moody Bible Institute. And knowing virtually nothing about the world or the world of higher education or the world at large, but, well, that sounds good. I want to be a serious Christian. And so instead of going to, you know, a secular major university, I, I went to Moody.
- [01:58]
A
So what is Moody Bible Institute for those who don't know?
- [02:01]
B
Yeah, well, most people won't know. We used to say Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is our middle name. And so it was, it's named after Dwight Lyman Moody, who was a very famous evangelist at the end of the 19th century. And so he's kind of a 19th century equivalent of Billy Graham. He had started this institute to train young people to be evangelists and missionaries and pastors. And it was to be focused on, of course, learning about the Bible, but also learning about Christian theology from that mode of things, from what we would today would call probably fundamentalism. It was a fundamentalist school. And to learn about the Bible and Learn about theology, how to preach, learn how to evangelize, learn how to, you know, convert people, learn how to defend the faith. With apologetics, it was a, when I went, it was a three year degree. They didn't have a bachelor's degree at that point. They do now, but so you would go for three years and if you wanted to continue your college education, then you would transfer, you try to transfer some of your credits to a, to just some other kind of school. So basically it was a post high school training in being a Christian leader and a knowledgeable about the word of God.
- [03:31]
A
So what kinds of courses were taught there?
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, well, you know, so with my, my friends from high school, I had a range of friends from high school and they're off. The ones who went to ku, for example, you know, they were taking classes in geography and, you know, European history and calculus and I was taking classes on the Gospel of. It's like every semester is like that, you know, gospel John, you know, exit the book of Exodus and a book on evangelism, a class on evangelism or class on church music and things like that. And yeah, so it was, it was very Christian oriented, obviously. And all of the classes were taught from a very conservative evangelical point of view. And all of them were designed to train you for a life of ministry.
- [04:23]
A
It sounds very different from a, what I would understand a typical US University experience to be like, oh boy, was it.
- [04:33]
B
Well, you know, the thing was it wasn't just, just that the classes were different. The whole environment was different there. It was, it was designed for kind of training in Christianity and in a way it was kind of a Christian boot camp. They had strict rules about what you could and could not do. I mean, most universities have rules about, you know, like you shouldn't be smoking pot and stuff in your dorm room. But, but for us, the rules were really quite strict. I mean, and we just, I just thought, well, okay, those are the rules. That's what it takes to go here. But our rules included things like not, you know, you couldn't smoking marijuana. Forget about like smoking. You couldn't smoke, you couldn't, couldn't drink alcohol. You were not allowed to engage in social danc, could not play cards, could not go to the movie theater. And there was something that was called the six inch rule, which was that if you had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, you could not be closer than 6 inches of physical contact in public. And it was definitely not in private.
- [05:44]
A
Sounds like the daylight rule we had at high school dances the day oh, yeah, yeah, okay.
- [05:48]
B
Yeah, right. The daylight rule. Yeah, that's like permanently all the time. And we couldn't have dances, so that wasn't.
- [05:56]
A
Were you allowed anti social dancing?
- [06:01]
B
That's the only kind of dance I could do. Anyway. It wasn't much of a dancer, so. But those are, you know, those are the rules. And then the, you know, the question was, do you have to follow those rules when you go home? You know, and some people thought, yes, and some of us thought, yeah, no way. And so, yeah, so it was. So it was. It was. It was meant to be kind of formative of the. Of the Christian character and to. And to train people to. To live in ways that the founders and the. The. The, you know, the administration of this school thought were. Were appropriate for those who were going to be committed, committing their lives to Christian service.
- [06:43]
A
What kinds of students went there? Was it just people like you who were looking to kind of deepen their faith and get training in Christian life and career paths?
- [06:55]
B
Yeah, it was a range of students. I would say most students were not. Were not overly academically interested, per se. They. They were interested in learning about the Bible and learning about good Christian theology for their. For their own personal Christian experiences, their Christian lives. A lot of students were going there in order to be trained for ministry. A lot of kids were missionary kids whose parents, you know, grew up overseas in some mission field. I dated a woman from Zaire who has actually been raised in California, but had spent, you know, high school in Zaire with her family. Her father was an airplane missionary. He would fly into places and try and convert people. And she. She was actually pretty cool. She. Except she, you know, growing up in Zaire, she could speak Swahili and she. She ate termites. So. So, you know, that helped enforce the 6 inch rule. So. But, yeah, so. But I think most people were going there to go into some kind of Christian training. And for many people there, that was their. The extent of their higher education. You know, they learned to be a missionary or something. Then they did it.
- [08:11]
A
Okay, did Moody require their students to have specific religious views? Was there a statement of faith you had to sign or anything?
- [08:17]
B
Oh, yes, you had to. You had to be a. They wouldn't have put it this way, but you had to have a conservative evangelical view of the Bible. You'd had to have a. Some kind of commitment to Christ. They probably expected a born again experience. And it wasn't simply that. You actually, on the, on the application, you had to indicate whether you had been engaged in any really quite sinful activities in your life. And. But I think that, you know, any, like, serious moral infractions that like, could have gotten you in trouble one way or the other, and they, they took those into consideration when I left a few things off.
- [09:06]
A
I'm sure you're not alone in that.
- [09:08]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I definitely was not alone in that.
- [09:13]
A
So I'm assuming no secular students.
- [09:18]
B
No, no, no, no, no, no. There was no. Everybody was a gung ho Christian, or if they. Or they were supposed to be. You know, I think most people wanted to be. Some succeeded less than others. We. But they, but everybody was absolutely a committed evangelical Christian. And you had to, you know, we. That was required attendance, had to sign in to go to chapel five days a week. And everybody was engaged in. One of the requirements was not just taking classes, but also you had a kind of a practicum. I forget what they actually called it then, but it was. You had to be engaged in some kind of ministry every semester. So that one semester you were required to do door to door evangelism, knocking on doors. And they take you out to some suburb of Chicago and start knocking on doors and try and convert. One semester I was a assistant chaplain at Cook County Hospital. Way over my head on that one. One semester I was a radio advisor for a Moody Bible. Moody Radio. And I was like a counselor. I was like, God, I must have been 18. And I was getting phone calls from people with serious problems. I mean, there, man, there's one night I spent two hours talking this guy out of suicide. I was like 18 years, 19 years old. I knew nothing.
- [10:43]
A
I'm assuming they didn't give you training for any of this.
- [10:46]
B
No, man, you knew the Bible. What else do you need to know? And so, and you know, there's one that was good. People call and ask, you know, for interpretations of a Bible verse. Okay, I could do that. But sometimes it was serious stuff. It was like, oh, my God. Oh, yeah, that.
- [11:04]
A
Wow.
- [11:05]
B
Well, it was not like my friends who were going to secular colleges, let me tell you.
- [11:12]
A
So did you enjoy your experience there?
- [11:14]
B
I loved it. That was the thing. I loved it. And, you know, I, I've often, you know, I've often tried to go into kind of a psychoanalysis of it myself, trying to figure out what that was all about. And, and you know, and I have kind of negative views about what I was really doing and positive views about it. You know, I think for me, in part, knowing all the answers to the big questions in life kind of put me A cut above most of the human race. Although I, you know, I. But I. I didn't consciously try to brag about that or anything. It's just. It made me feel like, you know, it made me actually want to go on, you know, to convert people, because then they too, could see the truth.
- [12:02]
A
Truth.
- [12:02]
B
And I had the truth. And so a lot of people still like that today, but I think it's intensified at a place like. Like that where you just, you know, and you're, you know, your classes. I mean, I'm studying, like, my. My first semester, I'm taking a class on the Gospel of John. First semester, 17 years old, start out, and this professor seems to know everything about the Gospel of John. And I thought, this is just amazing because, wow, this guy. I can't believe this. And so it was actually that first semester when I was 17, about three weeks in, when I decided, I want to do that. This guy's getting paid to know about the Bible. Oh, my God. How good can it get? And so at that point, I decided I wanted to become a New Testament scholar when I was 17, and I've done it ever since. So it's a very, very, very different environment.
- [12:56]
A
What did you value the most about being there?
- [12:59]
B
Well, at the time, I just loved it because I was really. I had never had. I had intense interest when I was a kid. I mean, I. I really liked playing sports. I was. I really liked playing baseball. I really like playing tennis, you know, through high school. And then I really enjoy. In high school, I really was passionate about the debate, about being on the debate team, but I didn't. And I. And I read a lot. You know, I read things, but I wasn't an intellectual kid at all. You know, I'd read science fiction and stuff or whatever, but I wouldn't. I didn't have, like. I did well in school, in high school. I mean, I did well in school, but I didn't have any kind of academic passions. And the Bible thing became an academic passion starting in my latter half of my second year, my senior year in high school. But here I am doing this thing, and the passion just grew and grew, and I just. I. More than. More than anyone I knew at Moody, I was just throwing myself into this. I just. I'd pull all nighters just to study because I was just so passionate about it.
- [13:59]
A
That's fantastic. It sounds like a really special experience for you.
- [14:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, it was special. Yeah. I wouldn't do it now.
- [14:12]
A
No. But at the time it met you where you were and yeah, it provided what you were looking for. We are going to take a very quick break. I want to give everyone one last reminder that early bird pricing for this year's New Insights into the New Testament conference ends August 22nd. NINT or NINT 2026 takes place on September 26th and 27th. And this year's theme is Apocrypha and Canon, Lost Scriptures and the Making of the New Testament. We'll be exploring fascinating questions like why some early Christian writings, why were some early Christian writings included in the New Testament and others were left out? What do texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of People, Peter or the shepherd of Hermas tell us about early Christianity and how the canon actually formed? But I think that most people interested in the Bible assume that in early Christianity the writings that we have in our New Testament were really all that mattered and possibly haven't heard of other gospel gospels or other epistles and assume that they didn't make it in because they just weren't that important. Could you tell us a bit about why these apocrypha matter and what they have to do with the formation of the canon?
- [15:23]
B
Well, you know, I think, I think people start, you know, I think until like the late 1970s, every, no even thought about it that I had ever heard. You know, and in the 70s, late 70s, Elaine Pagels published her book the Gnostic Gospels, and people started realizing, oh, you got these other gospels. What, wow, those sound interesting. And, and she kind of popularized that. And now. So I think, but you're right, most, most church people haven't really thought about it much. But it really is important because you get these other of Jesus, for example, where he says and does things that are not like the New Testament. And what, you know, who, who decided that these four Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are right, these others are wrong. Who decided and how did they, how did they know and what was their grounds? And, and why is it some of these books almost got in? We have, we, we, you know, we don't have a finished canon for centuries where basically most people agree what they are. And so why is that? What were the debates about? And, and so we'll be talking about. We're going to have eight presentations on eight different books that, that are really, really interesting. And people may not even know about some of these books and people may have heard some of these books or not know what they are, but they, you know, they include things like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, you know, which some people thought were scripture or the Gospel of Judas Iscariot or I'm giving a paper on the first guided tour of heaven and hell, the Apocalypse of Peter, which almost made it in. Seriously almost made it in. And it wouldn't made life very different for Christians if it hadn't made it in. So I think it's going to be exciting. Really good.
- [16:59]
A
This year's conference features presentations from scholars, including our very own Dr. Bart Ehrman, Mark Goodacre, Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Craig Evans and others, along with live Q A after every presentation. And again, the early bird pricing ends on August 22, so if you want the discounted rate, you've got about one week left to sign up. Just head to bartiman.com forward/n I N T and use the code MJ podcast for an additional discount. All right, back to the episode and back to Moody. Was there anything that you regretted while you were still a student there?
- [17:36]
B
Anything I regretted? Well, I had really kind of signed on to it and so I was, I was pretty, pretty happy about it. I think there were moments when I was a little bit jealous of my friends who had gone to other colleges and universities that weren't like this especially, maybe because I was really interested in English literature and humanities and things. I got, I got interested in that and I wasn't studying any of that. I felt sometimes a little bit resentful about some of these rules. Some of them seem silly to me, but I, you know, I thought, well, okay, that's, this is the deal. You know, you sign, this is what you chose this school, this is what the school is. And so you do it. But for the most part, I, I, I bought into it. And it wasn't until after I graduated that I started sort of doubting it and second guessing. It's kind of thinking maybe, you know. Yeah. And, and it was only later I started having a real serious knee jerk reaction, but not, not so much at the time.
- [18:39]
A
Now, obviously you ended up becoming a Bible scholar and you said that this was something that you wanted from like the third week of your first semester before you entered. Was that something that you expected your, your life would, would take you to?
- [18:53]
B
No, I didn't know. And I, even during it, Moody, I wondered, you know, should I become a missionary? Should I become an evangelist? Should I become a pastor? And I, you know, I thought seriously about all those things and I looked into them and I was a youth pastor. I started being a youth pastor in a church in Chicago my last year at Moody and for my following two years when I, I transferred over to Wheaton College after I finished Moody and I. So I was a youth pastor for three years. I saw what ministry really was like on the ground, and I just. All these other things I thought maybe I wanted to do. But then as I thought more and more about it, I thought, you know, my. I, you know, I would really like to be a Bible, a biblical scholar. And when I. About my senior year or so at Moody, I decided what I really wanted to do is to go off someplace and get really high level training so that I could be employed at a top level secular university as an evangelical, because I knew, I knew a lot of evangelical scholars who had become professors at places like at Moody or Wheaton or Christian colleges. So these were, these were, these were scholars among the evangelicals. I wanted to be an evangelical among the scholars and used like a secular classroom as a way to talk about the New Testament in a way that would attract people to become Christian, of course, knowing nothing about secular universities, never having set foot into one. But that was that. That was the. That was the idea.
- [20:26]
A
Excellent. I think, I think Josh had a similar plan actually, when he started assuriology. Did Moody prepare you for the things that you actually do now as a scholar and how you have done in. As a scholar in secular settings?
- [20:41]
B
Well, I'll tell you, Moody, my. My life as a fundamentalist, I suppose I'd be. I would have classified myself. I would classify myself as having been a fun fundamentalist starting from when I had my born again experience when I was about, you know, when I was 15, probably up to my early 20s, so maybe like six or seven, where I was really kind of six years, probably when I was really a fundamentalist, believing the Bible's inerrant. No problems, nothing, you know. And so the thing about looking back at Moody is I have. I have two reactions to it. One, of course, is, you know, man, that was. In some ways, I really regret not having a liberal arts education or a university education, not having much of any education in the sciences in. In things that now I find really interesting and things I've really committed my life to, the humanities and understanding literature and philosophy and cultural history and things like that. I regret that I don't. Didn't have a good foundation in that, you know, so. And I feel like I was misled, not necessarily by people who were being deceitful. I think everybody was completely honest and sincere and people were lovely at Moody. I mean, they were lovely up. They were literally loving and kind and caring and concerned about other people. And so all of that, all of that was good, but I do feel like I was completely misled in terms of what is actually true about the Bible and Christianity even. It may not have been their fault, but I feel that way. And so I do regret kind of the lost time and having to make up so much ground on my own when it comes to getting an education. But there's another part of Moody that I really, I really look back on and think, you know, actually I shouldn't be too resentful about the whole thing because I was. It's, it's what, it's what started my, my knowledge of the Bible and like, learning the Bible really well, even though, like, what scholars know about the Bible, none of that came into view except when you show why they were wrong. Right. Like you'd hear, oh, yeah, those liberals, they say this, and here are the three reasons why they don't know what they're talking about. So we were, so we were good at that, but we didn't really know anything about scholarship. But I did learn the Bible, and even when I wasn't taking these classes, you know, like, okay, this semester I'm taking First Peter or something, you know, even without those classes on my own, I would, I, I realized that it'd be important for me to know the Bible well, and so I would memorize entire books of the New Testament word for word in my spare time. Part of that was a pedagogical decision. I did, I decided, without knowing anything about science, that if you memorize, if the more you put into your brain, it, it's, it's not like a barrel that gets filled up, it's a sponge that expands. And I, I, so I thought, you know, if I keep, if I memorize a lot of things, I'll have more room for other things. And so I, so I started, I memorized some of the books of the New Testament word for word, and, and, and that put me in good stead when later, as I moved away from an evangelical understanding of things, I knew the Bible intimately, as, you know, as well as I could for somebody at that age. And I better, better than most people at that age by far. And I also, it's been a benefit to me. Several things been a benefit to me. But another thing is that I learned what the evangelical arguments are for their views. And I was very interested in apologetics and how to defend the faith. And so I, I, I understand when evangelicals, you know, think that I'm wrong today about things, because typically what evangelicals say about what I think, and what I argue are things that I would have said back then. And so I understand it. And I think that gives me a kind of way to talk to people that, that other scholars don't have. Like, I know a lot of biblical scholars who simply cannot figure out any way to talk to a fundamentalist because they don't get it, you know, and, and so. Whereas I do. And so I think that, I think that's been helpful for my career.
- [25:03]
A
It's a very specific mindset.
- [25:05]
B
I think, you know, it's an interesting mindset because it's a completely closed system. It isn't that, you know, it's internally coherent as a system. This, the fundamentalist view of things. And so it's very difficult to take apart, for somebody to take it apart, because it coheres and, and so, and it's internally consistent. That's what I mean about it. So the only way to challenge it is to put a little, little sticks. Little. There's a little hole there that you can stick something into, you know, in the armor. Like, there's a little hole in the armor. And you, and once, once you, you see the chink in the armor, then you can, you know, you can. But it, it, it's usually not because of the big things that, that are wrong. It's usually just because little things that are wrong. You realize, oh, that's a chink. And, and that can explode the system. That's what happened with me, as we've talked about before, and I think it's typically what happens. But you can't put that chink in there unless you really understand the system.
- [26:07]
A
Well, you mentioned earlier that you had a bit of a knee jerk reaction after you'd left. Can you tell us about that?
- [26:15]
B
Yeah, well, you know, when I, so I graduated from Moody in 1976, and I'd been there for three years, and I wanted to, I wanted to, you know, have a higher education. The next thing I needed a bachelor's degree. Wheaton College is an evangelical school in a suburb of Chicago. And so I decided it was the best evangelical liberal arts school in the country. Probably still is. It's a very fine school. It is evangelical, but it's, you know, it's, it's a college. It's not like taking, you're not taking classes on, you know, the Gospel of Luke. You're taking. You could, I suppose, but. So I took Greek there, and I hadn't taken Greek at Moody because I just wanted to take as many Bible and theology classes as I Could. So I didn't take Greek, but I took Greek at Wheaton. And I started. So I started. And it turned out I was pretty good at it, you know, comparative to other things like tennis. And so I. And so I. I ended up doing the Greek. And I got me even more intensely involved in studying the Bible. But now I'm doing New Testament in the original language. Later I learned Hebrew at Princeton Seminary. I could do the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. And studying it that way, I started. I started realizing, as we've talked about before, there are mistakes and things. And when, as time went on, I started finding more mistakes in the Bible, I started finding contradictions. And then I started seeing implausibilities and historical errors. I just realized the Bible is a very human book.
- [27:39]
A
Book.
- [27:40]
B
And I started feeling like I had been misled, and I was upset about it and kind of angry about it. And I think that typically is what happens when. When somebody moves away from that kind of faith. It's really a knee jerk reaction. And I have friends today who are I. And I know a lot of people today who have moved away from an evangelical form of Christianity whose knees are still jerking. They can. They cannot get over it. And my knee isn't jerking nearly as much anymore. But it was because you feel like, you know, you're so committed to something that now you realize it's false and you just, man, I was just misled.
- [28:20]
A
That's a really difficult thing to process.
- [28:22]
B
I think it is. And it's hard for people in that situation to be sympathetic with those who have not similarly left where they were. I have. I keep in touch with just a couple of people from Moody, and we're friendly, but most. I hear through the grapevine that most of the people that I was with at Moody really despise me. There was a pastor in a church in Chicago who was associated with Moody, who tried to set a movement to deprive me of my diploma for Moody. And people say very nasty things about me, and I don't like that. But the people I keep in touch with and I'm sure other people are loving, but, man, some of them who are my friends just became very, very hateful and said, you know, they. They wouldn't communicate with me, but I'd see things they'd post online or an email and, you know, saying nasty things about me. I just, you know, I don't like that. I don't. I don't really say nasty things about them. But. But I get it. I get it. But it is it does make it kind of hard.
- [29:32]
A
Do you feel that Wheaton filled in some of the gaps that Moody left in your preparation for, for life and for academia?
- [29:41]
B
Absolutely. For one thing is, the Greek was important to me. Taking Greek. My professor was fantastic. He was, he was an evangelical, but he was really kind of open minded and, and struggled with some of the evangelical views of things and would. I didn't mind admitting it, but I took classes. You know, I took classes. I majored in English, English Literature, and for a while there, I thought about going on to do the PhD in English rather than in New Testament. Then I took the GREs, the Graduate Record exams, which are the things to get you into graduate school. And I took the one in English and decided, you know, I think I'll do New Testament. Yeah, I took, I took that exam, like after one semester of taking English classes, like, oh, my God, I didn't know anything. And so, so. But then I took history classes and especially cultural history classes, and I just got interested in liberal arts, in learning about the history of thought. I was especially interested in intellectual history and how it developed over the centuries. And it opened up my world in a way that hadn't been opened up before. And when you start realizing how big a place the world is and how many cultures and how many views, how many philosophical views there were in the world, it just, it changed it from kind of caricaturizing everything outside of Christianity as being obviously false. And so, like, at moody, you know, if you, if somebody talked about Plato or something, you know, or if somebody talked about a modern philosophy, it was kind of like raising your eyebrows and kind of laughing at it. And so that was. So that was a change for me, and it introduced me to real scholarship. Even though it was in a Christian environment, it was very interested in the scholarship. And based on that, I decided, okay, I want to. I want to go on and do this, but maybe not in the moody mode. And so that's why I went to Princeton Seminary.
- [31:30]
A
Thank you very much. Bart, we are just about out of time. Is there anything else that you wanted to add before we move on?
- [31:37]
B
Well, it's just that, you know, when people. I think I'm one of these people who's changed seriously in my life, and some people find that a flaw, you know. You know, why are you changing your mind so much? Well, it's because I'm following what I think is true, and I think that it's an important thing to do. But it can be really gut wrenching, especially if you're dealing with some kinds of truths or some kinds of views that you think are really important for the world and for you and for your eternal life. And if you change your, you change your mind about something, man, it can just wrench, it can be very wrenching, but it's worth it if you are really convinced that you, you now, you know, you've, you've, you've been willing to change your mind about something that's really important. And I know, I know a lot of scholars who are, continue to be evangelical Christians who will never change their minds about anything. They, it's, and it's clear they just can't do it. They can't. And, and I'm not saying that they should realize I'm right and they're wrong. I'm not saying, you know, you know, I sometimes say that, but I, but, but I, but I'm not, but I'm not saying that. I'm saying you need to really, really be honest about what you think and, and be willing to change it even if it's a drastic change. Because if you're following the truth, you know, there's nothing better you can do.
- [32:58]
A
Thank you very much, Bart. We are going to move on to this week's bonus segment, which is Listeners Q A. And we are starting with Jesus in the synoptic Gospels. And the question says, in all the synoptic gospels, Jesus says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only unpardon pardonable sin. What did he mean by this and what is the context of the statement?
- [33:21]
B
Well, the context is everything for understanding this statement because this is, this is a verse that has caused a lot of upset over the years and serious psychological damage to me, to many people, because at different periods of history, different things would be identified as the unpardonable sin. And including, I mean, I think even when I was in high school, I heard people say that masturbation is the unpardonable sin. Sin. Where'd you get that from? It's like what you know, or, you know, you just come up with something. Adultery, suicide, murder. You know, people would like identify things and they're just like, they're just coming up with stuff. The way to figure it out just to look what it says in the context. And so, for example, if you look at it, it stated most strongly in the Gospel of Matthew. And what's happened is that Jesus has healed a, healed a person with his supernatural powers, healed the person. And the Pharisees claim that he's able to heal people because he has Beelzebub in him. It's through the power of Satan that he does it. And according to Jesus, he's doing it through the power of the Spirit of God. And he says, you know, you can blaspheme God the Father, you can blaspheme me, you cannot blaspheme the Spirit it. And if you do, then there's no forgiveness. And the logic of this is, if that you believe that the work Jesus is doing is from Satan, you cannot be saved. The work he's doing is from God. And so this is about accepting the fact that Jesus is doing what he did, including for the gospel writer Matthew, the resurrection, that this is all evidence of the power of God. And if you assign it to Satan, then it's not just that you kind of misunderstand it. You've absolutely rejected God by doing that. And so it's none of these other things. It is rejecting that Christ is the Son of God, who does things through the power of God.
- [35:23]
A
I see. Thank you. Forty years after the death of Jesus, we find the Gospel of mark, which contains 18 miracles. If Mark is the first and possibly most reliable gospel, who did you think added these miracles, assuming they were added to prove he was divine?
- [35:41]
B
Well, they weren't added to Mark. Mark wrote them. And so Mark had heard stories of Jesus miracles. Everybody in early Christianity who became a follower of Jesus, somebody who was a Jew who heard that Jesus is the Messiah, somebody who is a Gentile, who's convinced that Jesus was the way to the only God, who, whoever somebody was who became a Christian, in my view, almost certainly had to hear about Jesus miracles. Because why would you give up your religion to worship somebody else unless there's some indication that this person really was the one representing God? And how do you know that Jesus is the one representing God? It's not because he tells the parable of the mustard seed. It's because he did things that show that he's God or that he's the Son of God, or that he's some, you know, he's some guy inspired by God. So there's got to be something about Jesus that convinces you that he is. He's the one you're willing to give up everything else for, as people had to do. And so these stories are circulating in Christian communities, and Mark had heard a bunch of them. He wrote 18 of them. I assume that he heard more. But he, you know, he picked the ones that he thought were most relevant for his purposes. Matthew and Luke had others, John has others. And you know, and others are told still later. So I think that's where the miracle came. Miracle stories came from. So you say, well, who came up with them? Well, that's a great question that we don't have an answer to. But, you know, even today, there are all sorts of stories about all sorts of people who allegedly can do miracles. Where do these stories come from? Well, people come up with them, and sometimes they come up with them honestly, like they've heard something and they've repeated it, but exaggerated without knowing they're exaggerating it. Or like rumors start and gossip starts and things happen, and it just, you know, it isn't like necessarily frau or deception. It's just that people hear these fantastic stories and they retell them. And I think it's something like that with Jesus.
- [37:37]
A
Is John 1:1 meant to read that the word, the logos of God, was God or was divine? Is the lack of the definite article, from what little I know, a connotation of being the deity or merely possessing the quality of a deity, presumably given from the gods of the Gospel of John's theology. Right, I should have reread that. And.
- [38:00]
B
No, I. I can explain it. I can explain.
- [38:02]
A
Okay, good.
- [38:03]
B
NRK ain't Halagas. In the beginning was the Word. The word was with God, and the word was God, capital G, God. The word was God. The problem. The problem in the Greek is that it's a complicated problem. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna do this as simply as I can. When you've got. When you've got a noun and a. Another noun connected with word is. So Trump is president, okay? So that. That's the. Is is called a copulative and the. Now the one noun is the subject and the other is called the predicate. So it's saying something about Trump is President. So it's defining Trump. Okay? And in English, you know, which is the subject and which is the predicate, which is kind of defining. It's not an adjective. So it's not adjective. It's not an adjective. President. Because they're nouns. Okay? So if you say Trump is president, then you have this is thing in Greek. In English, you know, which is the subject, which is the predicate because of the word order. In Greek, the word order doesn't matter. You could put president is Trump or Trump is president, and it means exactly the same thing. Okay? So the problem is in this, in this first verse, it says in the beginning was ha. Lagos. The word ha is the ad. Was is the. The. It's the definite article. The now in Greek complicate things. There's no indefinite article in Greek, so you cannot say a God by say using the word A. There's no A. Okay, so there's not. There's. You can't say a God if you don't want it to be definite it. Then you just don't use the article. Okay? So in the beginning was ha, lagos. The word has the word the and at the end it says and theos. God was lagos. The ha does not go with theos. Halagos ain't theos or theos ain't halagas. So it's got the word ha, lagos, the word definite article. But God is without an article. It's not the God, which is normally what you mean with capital G. God. So the question is, does it mean that the word was God, capital G. Or does it mean that the word was a God, a divinity, a divine being? And theoretically, the text could go either way, the grammar could go either way. But there is this rule that is often cited, that is that in a predicate sentence like this, when you've got the subject and the predicate, if the and since the word order doesn't matter, then the. The subject has the article and the predicate doesn't need an article. So it can also mean the word was God, capital G. And because of contextual reasons, it looks like that's the meaning. Are we gonna. Are we gonna cut that entire thing? Are we gonna play that
- [41:00]
A
up to you, son?
- [41:01]
B
Let's leave it. Why not? Sorry about that. You thought it was a complex thing to describe, right?
- [41:12]
A
Final question for today. You've said your scholarship led you to reject the doctrine of inerrancy while remaining a Christian for a very long time. In the light of errancy, what can we know about Jesus that would still affirm theological faith? In other words, if we didn't have the Bible, would anyone know the name of Jesus, much less believe in him being divine? So if the Bible's credibility, therefore is undermined, how can we know or believe anything about him?
- [41:38]
B
Well, yes, absolutely. Of course, there'd be Christianity without the Bible, and people would believe that Jesus was God without the Bible. We didn't have a. We didn't have a New Testament until, you know, the end of the fourth century is the first time anybody mentioned these 27 books. So for 300 years, people were believing in Jesus without the Bible. They had biblical books. They had books, but we could still have books. And so the reliability of the Bible has no bearing on whether Jesus is divine or not. And, you know, I'll tell you, the only reason it seems that way to people, and it used to seem that way to me, too, is because fundamentalists have insisted that if the Bible has errors, Christianity can't be true. That's their argument. And the fundamentalists have won that argument, even among the general populace. And it's a crazy argument. Of course you can have Christians without the Bible. There are Christians throughout the world today, billions of Christians, who cannot read the Bible. And just because the Bible says something, that isn't what makes people believe. So I think it's a faulty argument that if the Bible has errors in it, therefore nobody would think Jesus is God. Of course they would. Paul thought Jesus was God. He didn't have a Bible. Well, and he converted people. They didn't have a Bible. They converted people. They didn't have a Bible. So it's just this kind of modern error because of the way. What way? Fundamentalists have talked about the Bible as having to be accurate or we just couldn't know. And I, I think it's, I think it's wrong and I think it's hurt, it's harmful. I, I gave up on the inerrancy of the Bible while I was still a Christian. I mentioned during our talk I was probably a fundamentalist for about six years or so, and I was, you know, I was a Christian for decades after that. And the errancy of the Bible had no bearing on whether, you know, on, on, on any of that. So, so, yeah, so I don't think, I don't think it would have any bearing, any effect.
- [43:38]
A
Thank you. But before we finish for the week, could you just remind us what we spoke about today?
- [43:44]
B
Well, we're talking about my, my experience at Moody Bible Institute, which is a fundamentalist Bible college, and you know, how it affected my life. And, and it's, it's, you know, the reason we have an episode like this is to let people kind of know what the fundamentalist experience can be like. But also, you know, how important is it. It. And, you know, does it. Is there anything good that can come out of a fundamentalist experience and, and, and, and that kind, and that kind of thing.
- [44:10]
A
Thank you so much, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Week. But what are we talking about next time?
- [44:31]
B
Oh, next time we're talking about Satan. And where'd Satan come from? Doesn't seem like he's in much of the Hebrew Bible. He is in the New Testament. What happened? Where'd he come from? We'll talk about that.
- [44:45]
A
Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Er. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.