← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
Dr. Hugo Mendez
When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that.
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Megan Lewis
My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing.
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Discover what BetterHelp Online Therapy can do for you and visit betterhelp.com today.
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Megan Lewis
As an historian, I'm pretty much always interested in ancient writing. Give me a document written a few thousand years ago and I will be entertained for hours. My guest today is similarly minded, except his passion is for the Gospel of John and that has sustained him for not only a few hours, but the last decade. Today, Dr. Hugo Mendez joins me to talk about why he thinks the Gospel of John was written and discuss the ways in which the author tried to achieve his goal. 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. Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today I am joined again by Dr. Hugo Mendez. Hugo, how are you?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
I'm doing all right, making it through the very hot summer we're all getting through in the United States.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, I think, I think most people are in the same boat there. It's, it is happening. We're all alive so far. Now for those who missed here, Hugo, last time I have a little introduction. So you know who he is and exactly why he's here. But Dr. Mendez is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and he specializes in the New Testament and its early reception. He has research interests in the Gospel and Epistles of John and the reception of biblical texts, figures and images in late antiquity. His book, the Gospel of John A New History came out last month and that book is what our conversation today is going to be based on. I'm very excited about it because the Gospel of John is one of those just, it's just a fascinating, fascinating piece of writing. So Hugo, again, thank you for joining me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, thanks. And it's hard to believe actually. I guess the book is already pre order kind of out there. So yeah, please look for it. Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It's been priced really well at like $35 or so. It's great.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, that's awesome. I love it when the more academic leaning books are priced at a level where actually everyone can access them and get to the research.
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Thanks.
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Megan Lewis
Now, as I said, we're talking about the Gospel of John today, specifically why it was written and how the author gets his message across. But before we get to John, I wanted to ask what gospels were already in circulation when this was being composed.
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, this is a question on which the scholarship has changed quite dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years. So, you know, for a very long time, scholars wondered whether or not John was aware of other gospels. It was kind of unclear which other gospels the author of John might have been aware of. I think today there's a pretty clear consensus emerging among scholars who actually work on the Gospel of John that the author of John knew the Gospel of Mark and probably also the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. There are several good books that are out there. There's one, John's Transformation of a collection of essays that was edited by Helen Bond this very year. My colleague at Duke, Mark Goodacre, has just come out with his book, or is about to come out with his book, the Fourth Synoptic Gospel, which looks at John's knowledge of Mark, Matthew and Luke. And that's where my book takes its starting point, too. From the idea that, yeah, actually the author of John, who is probably writing around the end of the first turn of the second century, is writing at a time when he knows Mark, he knows Matthew, and he knows the Gospel of Luke, probably all three as gospels that have been circulating for at least a few years, where he's located. As scholars, we're very interested in places in John that seem to reflect knowledge of even individual characteristics of Mark, Matthew and Luke, and let alone global characteristics of them. We think that it's pretty clear that the author of John knows these gospels roughly simply because he's composed a gospel that is very much like them on a global scale. This is a text that begins roughly with the baptism of Jesus, that ends with his empty tomb that devotes half of its content to the last week of Jesus life. This is the way that Mark told that story. Matthew and Luke, both gospels that know Mark, also tell the story the same way. And we don't think that all these authors are simply reinventing the wheel, and we don't think that John is doing it either. It's likely that John now has been exposed to multiple texts that are telling the story of Jesus in this way, and he's decided to go into this tradition and make unique moves within it.
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Megan Lewis
So what are those unique moves that he's making? Why does he need. If there are already three gospels and probably other texts circulating that tell these stories, why do you think he needed to add his own voice in?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, you know, fundamentally, I think that the author of John clearly must be writing because he sees some sort of gap in the existing Gospel literature. And one of the things that I argue in my book is that fundamentally the author sees a kind of theological gap in Mark, Matthew and Luke. If you read those three synoptic gospels, right, Mark, Matthew and Luke, you'll see a great deal of common theology between all these texts. You'll see Jesus talk about the coming kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven, speak in parables, really hit on some very similar themes. But when you walk into the Gospel of John and begin reading, you find Jesus articulate a very precise, complex theology that isn't fleshed out in Mark, Matthew and Luke. Which suggests to me and to other scholars that central to what the Gospel of John is trying to do, the author of John wants to communicate this specific view of Jesus, this specific theology to his audience. He wants to take the story of Jesus and offer a new message in the middle of it.
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Megan Lewis
So what is this new message that he's offering then?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, so we can break this down in kind of different ways, right? This is a complex message, but fundamentally it begins with the idea that human beings, though they are born of flesh, though they have physical, material bodies, can become pnevma or pneuma, that they can become spirit. So In John chapter 3, Jesus sits down with Nicodemus, and he says that, you know, that which is born of flesh is flesh, but that which is born of spirit is spirit. And you must be born from above born of this nature of spirit. Now, this expectation that human beings would experience a transformation from their physical, material lives into one of spirit is one that's laced throughout Christian literature, Jewish literature more broadly. And John has a very unique way of putting this together that will be influential for later centuries. John will claim here in this Gospel that fundamentally this change happens in this life, that we ourselves as humans might be born in bodies of flesh, but that we will end up having inside an implantation of this life as spirit, that we will now be able to commune with a God that is spirit in spirit. And then John takes this theology further. So a second major part of this, not only the transformation of spirit, but this idea of celestial access and divine indwelling becomes very important for John. So if human beings now can acquire a nature as spirit, the gospel teaches that these human beings can now, also, as spirit in spirit, rise up to the God who exists in heaven. They can experience the indwelling of God within them. They can commune with God in this relationship that is mediated in spirit. And so this idea of kind of a spiritual resurrection and a spiritual ascent into heaven, a spiritual ability to cross between heavenly and earthly realms, is seeded across John, especially in chapters 14:15. The gospel teaches as a third kind of facet, that if one is transformed as spirit, and if they now have this new indwelling presence of God and ability to access God, they also possess eternal life. Now. So in the synoptic gospels, there's a notion that human beings can have eternal life, that they can become immortal. But in the synoptic gospels, it's an idea that is very strongly associated with a physical future, physical resurrection. You know, in gospels like Mark and Luke, you'll hear Jesus say that in the age to come, one receives eternal life. But in the Gospel of John, there's the notion that one can receive eternal life now, that already by possessing this inner nature as spirit, human beings are now immortal, even if their bodies should pass away, you know, enter into corruption, die. Nonetheless, the spirit that pneumma lives on and continues to abide with Jesus, dwell with Jesus in the celestial realms, even beyond death. There's also a fourth major facet to John's theology, and this is probably the one that is most startling on some level. It's one that scholars have only really begun to appreciate in the last 10 years of scholarship. It seems very clear that John has a concept of deification, of human exaltation written all across the gospel. So, you know, in the ancient conception, human beings lived on a ladder of life, right? There are beings lower than us, There are supernatural beings higher than us, and. And those supernatural beings can, on different levels, participate in the attributes and nature of God. One of the ideas that's central to the Gospel of John is that human beings can do the same, that through the coming of Jesus, as human beings are born as spirit, as they have the indwelling presence of God within them, as they acquire eternal life, they also begin to acquire a divine status and divine attributes. Jesus in the. In chapter 17, for instance, mentions that he has this glory that he had as the Father's only son. We first read about this, actually, in the prologue, that he has this unique glory as the Father's only son. In chapter 17, he says that the glory that the Father has given him, I have given to them, to those who believe. He says that the oneness that he has with the Father he now gives to human beings, that they may be one even as the Father and Son are one. And in John, chapter 10, and in other segments of the text, we get very clear intimations that Jesus also understands and is teaching in the Gospel that human beings can ultimately possess a divine nature, that they can be, in some subordinate participatory sense, gods with a small g. In chapter 10, he builds this argument where he cites one of the Psalms where, you know, the voice of God is. Is saying, you are go plural. And he uses this to confirm his own divinity, but in ways that scholars are beginning to appreciate. Also seems open to the idea by that language, gods plural, that human beings can acquire a divine nature and attributes. This is an idea that's actually going to become a very important one in the history of Christian thought. Catholic and orthodox Christians have notions of theosis, of deification or divinization. And one of the arguments that I make in my book is that at least some expression of that kind of idea is very much present in the Gospel of John. So those are the four big moves that John is doing.
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Megan Lewis
That's really interesting. Thank you. You said at the beginning of your answer that John is building partly on what we see in other Christian literature, Christian thinking. Where else do these ideas seem to be developing from in Greek, Roman thought and philosophy?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, I think it's clear that whoever wrote the Gospel of John is an individual who is very conversant with not only a number of philosophical currents floating around his world, but also different trends in Christian literature, various Christian literatures that survive today. You know, we mentioned the Synoptic Gospels as certainly giving the author of John a kind of template to work with. But the ideas that the author of John includes in his Gospel, those have much more eclectic origins. So we know, for instance, right from the beginning of the Gospel that the author of John must be familiar with streams of Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, like those that we find in the writings of the 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo. Something perhaps akin to Philo, perhaps Philo through some intermediate nodes, something like that. At the beginning of the Gospel, the author calls Jesus the Logos, the word of God. And this idea that the transcendent God creates the world through a Logos, through a mind or reason, that roughly functions as this kind of second entity that mediates the relationship between God and the world, that's something that you find widely represented in Jewish sources. And really robustly articulated in writings like those of Philo. So it's very clear just from the outset that the figure who wrote John must be conversant with these kinds of trends. If you start to posit, of course, that John knows these sorts of currents, you can actually make sense of other aspects of his thought. There have been great arguments, for instance, by David Litwa, that the author that Philo himself parted had notions of deification that he articulated around Moses that I think have interesting tantalizing links to what we find in the Gospel. Some of the imagery that we find in John, several Philo scholars have noted, are images that kind of recur in different ways in the Gospel of John. And so that's one place where he's probably drawing inspiration. But another key one, and one that I'm always really shocked as scholars, we don't talk about is Paul and the writings of Paul. So by the time that the Gospel is written, the author is writing about a half century after Paul had written the bulk of the letters that survive for us today. This author is probably also writing in a predominantly Gentile part of the empire. Scholars historically placed him in Ephesus, which is a city that Paul worked in. I don't know necessarily about that theory, but suffice it to say, I think there's every reason to think that this author has read some of the writings of Paul, or at least very much swims in theological streams that come from Paul. Well, in that case, it's really interesting to note that this text again talks about how God, how Christ can dwell in a person, and how a person can dwell in God and in Christ and access celestial realms. These are themes that we find in Paul's genuine epistles, where he talks about how human beings can live in Christ and can have Christ in them. And also in the deutero Pauline texts, in those texts that were attributed to Paul, pseudonymously written in the name of Paul, we also find concepts, like in Ephesians, of the idea that Christians are now seated in heavenly places, spiritually in Christ. So I think there's some very clear Rivlet from Paul that actually is shaping a lot of how this author is thinking about ideas like celestial access, ideas like divine indwelling. It's also probably not an accident that there is a robust literature about Paul and deification. Pauline scholars talk quite a bit about the idea that Paul seems to have concepts of how human beings are acquiring divine attributes and traits. And I think this is something else that is probably shaping the author of John.
- [18:23]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful thank you. We are going to take a very brief break. We'll be back in just a minute to talk about exactly how John uses language and how he gets his point across in his Gospels. The BSA is a constant source of inspiration and motivation compared to studying on my own.
- [18:42]
Dr. Hugo Mendez
Once I heard that this was starting, I knew I had to be a part of it. It's been phenomenal. I really wasn't sure what I was
- [18:49]
Megan Lewis
getting into because I'm not a biblical scholar and I am so glad I did.
- [18:54]
Podcast Narrator/Promoter
It's called the Biblical Studies Academy or bsa. It's an online learning platform that offers comprehensive biblical scholarship training inside of a members only community. In the Biblical Studies Academy, you'll get access to interactive courses and a vibrant online community where you can discuss with others, ask questions and get feedback from experts.
- [19:22]
Dr. Hugo Mendez
The courses are great and there's a lot of things included, but what really amazed me is how great the community is. They've got sort of a social media type thing, but it doesn't feel like social media.
- [19:34]
Podcast Narrator/Promoter
Let me highlight the value of the bsa. Everyone who is a member will receive three university length courses every year, along with all of our courses in How Scholars Read the Bible series that we've already recorded, plus two new ones every year along with a monthly webinar with me called Barth's series. Everyone in the BSA will get all of that.
- [20:05]
Megan Lewis
I finally have the right space for these discussions in my life that nowhere else serves.
- [20:13]
Dr. Hugo Mendez
I'm loving it. It's a wonderful opportunity both to learn from others and to learn from scholars.
- [20:20]
Megan Lewis
You can also sign up for a 14 day free trial@bartdelman.com the essay and welcome back everybody. Before the break, Dr. Hugo Mendez was talking about why the Gospel of John was written and exactly how this complex theology drew on pre existing ideas, philosophies, theologies from other writers, other cultures. Now we're going to get into some of the nuts and bolts of this. So Hugo, I wanted to ask if you could talk about some of the language that the writer of John has Jesus use and how this language fits in with his theological agenda.
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, yeah. So probably the first observation that any scholar makes when they sit down with the Gospel of John, if you've read Mark, Matthew and Luke, is that the language of John is on the one hand very evocative of those Gospels. You can find shepherd imagery and harvest imagery. You can find, you know, sheep, all these sorts of different images, fruits, things like that that are part of the parables of Jesus. The sermons of Jesus and the synoptics. You hear them in John, but then there's this entire sort of group of heavily emphasized words, phrases, idioms, ideas that just have no cognates in these other texts, right? So Jesus will talk about the need to walk in the light and walk in the day. He will stress the need to dwell and abide in him and say that he dwells and abides in the human person. There's just this different vocabulary that Jesus uses in the Gospel to articulate his thinking.
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Megan Lewis
So would the theology that the writer of John is. Is trying to get across have been recognized, understood, if not maybe advocated for by the historical Jesus?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, now that's. That's the big question, right? This is the challenge we face as scholars. And I think the simplest answer to that, the answer that I think most scholars would give, critical scholars, is no, probably not. This is probably not a theology that Jesus himself articulated in his life. So, you know, when you read Mark, Matthew and Luke, again, there's a very consistent set of ideas and emphases, themes, themes that characterize Jesus teaching. When you open up the Gospel of John, you're seeing Jesus hit repeatedly on concepts, on ideas that don't appear in the other gospels. He does this in private context. He does this in public speeches. And again, they're ideas like the idea that he will dwell spiritually in human beings, and human beings will dwell spiritually in him. If this was an idea, for instance, that characterized the teachings of the historical Jesus, the question you would have to ask yourself is, why doesn't Mark contain this teaching? Why doesn't Matthew contain this teaching? Why doesn't Luke contain this teaching? Why is it that no early Jesus source prior to the Gospel of John has Jesus articulate these ideas, let alone in the very specific ways, the very specific terms and idioms and phrases that he uses to articulate these ideas? That difference for us means that as scholars, we're inclined to think that what we have in Mark, Matthew and Luke, this repeated emphasis on the kingdom of God, kingdom of heaven, is probably one that's very close to the original teachings of Jesus, that captures them fairly accurately, at least in their core. But that when we are working with the Gospel of John, we're hearing something that seems very much shaped by a later author and by the theological interests of a later time. Now, this would not be the first time that this happened. You know, so if you read a lot of gospels that are written in the second century, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, many of These non canonical, so called apocryphal Gospels, you will see very familiar moments in the life of Jes. Jesus be the occasions on which Jesus will then say some very unfamiliar things, unfamiliar ideas that aren't found in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. We think that those are instances in which those second century authors actually, if you will, planted ideas onto the lips of Jesus, their own distinctive theologies. Right. Kind of making Jesus the mouthpiece of their views. I think that there's every reason to think that the author of John, who is writing, you know, right about the turn of the second century, is actually one of the very first figures who seems to be making that move. This author knows earlier traditions of the life of Jesus, but he has a distinctive theology. It's a theology that probably has been incubating for years or decades in different Christian circles, but that he has probably synthesized in a very unique way. Again there, there's distinct influences from Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, from Paul, but this is a theology that the author has given a lot of shape to in a probably very unique way. And what the author does is the author plants this teaching on the lips of Jesus and makes Jesus the mouthpiece of this view. You know, what's the author thinking? Is the author thinking that potentially this is the real meaning of what Jesus says? The real core is the author trying to respond to the fact that perhaps Mark, Matthew and Luke don't have these very central Pauline ideas like the in Christ motif or becoming spirit, and he thinks that they need to have these really to express the fullness of a message of Jesus. You know, that's kind of hard to say, but I think that what the author of John, what the author of John is doing, is actually very recognizable to us. When we set John in conversation with gospels that didn't make the New Testament, then you have, I think, a very similar way of working with Jesus tradition.
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Megan Lewis
And you describe in the book, we've gone kind of through how the writer of John uses words and puts words in Jesus mouth to get his point across. But this, this point, this theology is woven symbolically through the narrative of John. Would you be able to give an example of two of how that works?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, so. So this is one of the most brilliant things about John. So remember that the Gospels are literature, right? Fundamentally they participate in the same kind of literary devices that we find in Greco Roman literature broadly, and those include symbolism. If you open up the Gospel of Mark, there are a few scenes, very few, but a handful of them, where the author of Mark clearly seems to be building symbolism into his text where Jesus will do something. For instance, he will curse a fig tree in Mark. And then the very next scene, he will essentially predict the temple's destruction. And you're supposed to understand as a reader that the cursing of the fig tree is a symbol of his cursing of the temple. You know, so this kind of thing appears in earlier gospels. John clearly seized upon this particular device. And what he did in the estimation of John scholars. John scholars have been recognizing this since the 1980s, is he's roughly built an entire gospel of symbolic images. What I do in my book is I argue that, you know, if we can understand the theology of the Gospel of John, if we can understand these ideas of, for instance, becoming spirit, celestial access, you know, the idea of eternal life now, and ideas of deification, you know, once we apprehend those ideas, we actually find that they light up even more passages of the book than earlier studies of the symbolism of John have seen. Some of the most central terms that one finds in John to communicate these ideas. Words like see, come, dwell, follow, words that actually play a significant role in shaping Jesus's teachings in the book are also laced across even the actions that Jesus performs. The episodes, narrative episodes of the Gospel. So, you know, here's a really wonderful example, kind of great. You bring that out, right? Chapter one. In chapter one of the Gospel of John, the very first scene where you find Jesus actually presented in the text is the scene where he walks by John the Baptist. John the Baptist is standing there with two disciples. They see Jesus walk by, and John testifies to who Jesus is. He says the famous words, behold the Lamb of God, right? And it says in the Gospel that at that moment, essentially the two followers of John break off from John and they decide to follow Jesus. They want to come to where Jesus dwells. They want to see where he dwells according to the text. And Jesus, when he's presented with this, tells the disciples, well, come and see. Well, this episode is just the first of actually really dozens of episodes we can do this with in the text. It's not an accident. I think that the first time we see Jesus in the text, he's using this kind of vocabulary. The narrator is using this vocabulary that will shape his teachings later in the book. In the image of John the Baptist testifying to Jesus and making disciples follow Jesus. We have one of the central ideas in the book that is, we need to follow the testimony of those who testified to Jesus up to and including the author himself in the gospel. The disciples follow Jesus and come to the place where Jesus dwells. This is vocabulary that in chapter 14, will be used to express the idea of celestial access, of this idea that Christians can now live and dwell in heavenly places. They will come to those heavenly places, spiritually follow Jesus to the heavenly places, and dwell there with. With Jesus, while Jesus dwells with them in the image. In the vocabulary of coming and seeing, Jesus says that those who dwell with him will be able to see him, see him there in the special revelation. So, yeah, all across the text, you're going to find that the vocabulary of Jesus teachings is echoed in these stories that are meant to symbolize these themes. And that's really the fun, I think, of where my book goes in chapters two and three, breaking open the theology of John and then helping you see all of the hidden symbolism across this gospel.
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Megan Lewis
Now, I have one final question before I let you go, and that is, if John used the Synoptic Gospels as sources, did he adapt passages within them at all to suit his own theological purpose, or were they more just a template, a framework for him to go off?
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Dr. Hugo Mendez
Yeah, no, there's a much more intimate relationship here. Yes. On the one global level, the author of John knows what a gospel should look like in this period and write something that looks like Mark. Right. Starts with the baptism, ends with the empty tomb, half of it being the last week of Jesus life. But again, there are also places where the author of John has taken over specific images, vocabulary, you know, sheep, shepherd. Right, harvest. And he bends those towards his particular theology. And I bring out a lot of examples of that kind of thing across the text. But even more so, the author of John seems to be very actively even borrowing entire episodes from the Synoptics and reshaping them for his purposes. So a great example of this is found in John, chapter four. So if you read the Synoptic Gospels, and specifically the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, there's an episode where a centurion has a servant that has fallen ill, and the centurion begs Jesus to heal his servant. Now, John has a story that's very tantalizingly similar to that. It's a story in which an official comes to Jesus because his son is ill, and he begs Jesus to heal his son. Now, what happens in John's telling of this very similar story is that John laces the story with all of the key terms and expressions and that will shape Jesus's teachings a chapter later in chapter five, when he talks about ideas of spiritual resurrection and, you know, all these kinds of things we've been talking about. So in the story, we hear, for instance, that this, you know, son is on the verge of dying. Jesus says the words, your son will live. We hear that the Father believed, and it was at that, that hour that the Son lives, that the Son finds all of this kind of, you know, is saved essentially from this illness and doesn't die. When you turn to chapter five, the very next chapter, you will see Jesus go into a lengthy discourse or speech, the same kind of speech he'll do across John, where he hits on the very specific theological themes that are unique to John among the New Testament gospels. And there's the same constellation of vocabulary. He'll talk about how the Son has received the power to say to others that you will live, that he will proclaim you will live to the dead, and that the dead will live. This will happen according to Jesus in John 5, 24 and 25 at a certain hour. That is when the dead live. And so you're meant to read this story. This, if you will, remixed story, this story, probably borrowed from the Synoptics, but now recast and infused with all of this new vocabulary as a symbol of the ideas that Jesus brings out in the very next chapter in, in the third chapter of my book, I do this with every single chapter virtually of the Gospel of John. I show how story after story is completely configured to refract earlier, you know, themes or later themes that Jesus will bring out. And one of the things that I do throughout is to show how the author seems to be taking so many of these episodes from the Synoptics, sometimes very much in an intact form, sometimes by creating a story that's like one he's found in the Synoptics, but that's doing this very specific way work.
- [35:58]
Megan Lewis
Hugo, thank you so much. That was an excellent example. And I have to say I've read the majority of the book in preparing for this podcast. If people are interested in the Gospel of John, it's an excellent read. It's not like super heavy jargon, a lot of academic stuff, but it is very solid, solid scholarship. Try saying that 12 times fast. And is is very, very engagingly written. So you can buy that now. It came out to at the end of last month. Hugo, again, thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure.
- [36:29]
Dr. Hugo Mendez
Thank you so much for having me. Megan, Good to talk to you. Ken.
- [36:32]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. 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.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week along with Bart. So thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.