← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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- [00:30]
Megan Lewis
Before I became acquainted with the various permutations of evangelicalism and long before I became host of this podcast, I was quite confident that the definition of Christian was a straightforward one. Naive, most definitely. Now it seems as though there are at least as many definitions of the word as there are Christian denominations. On this week's show we're talking about what it really means to be a Christian. When did Christian become a religious identity? Have members of different groups always had such trouble on agreeing a definition? Or is this a new feature of Christianity? Stay tuned for all of that and so much more.
- [01:09]
Podcast Announcer
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis.
- [01:28]
Megan Lewis
Let's begin. Disagreements between the faithful often result in one or both sides asserting that real Christians agree with their position and their position alone. Today we're exploring why Christianity has difficulty with difference and what being a Christian actually means. Before we get to all of that though, Bart, how are you doing today?
- [01:49]
Bart Ehrman
Yep, doing well. Life's hopping along. Seems like time goes by so faster when you get older and then, you know, it just whizzes by. You can't even remember what happened yesterday. Why'd I bother to live yesterday? How are you doing today?
- [02:03]
Megan Lewis
Also good. And similarly, with the time brushing along thing, my children are starting obviously the next grade in school. I have a middle schooler, my high schooler is a senior now and it's moving very fast. So I'm trying to stop and enjoy the bits that I enjoy while it's still happening.
- [02:23]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, okay, do it because otherwise it just slips by you.
- [02:27]
Megan Lewis
I have heard that my mother, obviously that's the kind of thing parents say to you when you're growing up. And I was like, ah, that's exaggeration. It's absolutely not exaggeration. You blink and like Five years has gone by, so not sure how that happened, but never mind. I wanted to ask for a question today. What nonfiction you're reading at the moment?
- [02:45]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, yeah, no, it's a good one because I try to read nonfiction every morning. First thing when I get up, I get up and get a cup of coffee and read something. And I decided I'm 68 now and I'm old enough to read Nietzsche. And so I'm actually reading Nietzsche right now. And absolutely brilliant. I know. Obviously time has moved on since him, and he had a lot of problematic things. Man, this guy is so brilliant. It's the kind of thing where you just want to take it very slowly and understand it. It's not the kind of thing like sometimes you read a book just kind of get through so you could say you read it and it is not like that at all. It is like, you know, read it and reread it and think about it. Because even if you disagree with it, it is a very. Just incredibly insightful, interesting point of view. And so, yeah, I'm enjoying that a lot. You know, it's not the easiest thing to read first thing in the morning, but it's. It's great, great to do. Yeah.
- [03:38]
Megan Lewis
When you're choosing your nonfiction picks, do you try and get something that's related to whatever it is you're researching or writing about, or do you choose something different, or does it really not matter?
- [03:48]
Bart Ehrman
I do both things. So Nietzsche has one of his famous books is the Genealogy of Morals, which is three essays on where modern morality came from. It's related to the book I'm doing on the ethics of Jesus and how they transformed our moral conscience. That was the first thing. But often I'll just read something just because it's something I'm interested in that I know nothing about and I'm not. 19th century Continental philosophy isn't one of my long suits. I've read a good bit of it, but it's not really an expertise of mine. You know, for a long time I was reading astrophysics, you know, I was reading anatomy, you know, just things I'm interested in. Do you read non fiction?
- [04:27]
Megan Lewis
I don't do a lot of reading generally at the moment, which is unfortunate. I used to read voraciously when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels, but not so much since first, since grad school and then children have kind of stymied that a little bit. I read some for the other podcast projects I do, because if we're reviewing a book, obviously I should probably read it before we talk about it, but nonfiction, I do, but it tends to be like teaching me how to do something, like perform a skill or improve on something. I've got books on quilting from the library that I'm slowly working my way through.
- [05:05]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, that will never be on my list.
- [05:08]
Megan Lewis
It's not, but it's. I enjoy them.
- [05:11]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Okay. Okay, Good.
- [05:14]
Megan Lewis
Today's topic of conversation is what it means to be a Christian. And I wanted to ask, before we get into any really, the details of it, why this is an important subject of discussion.
- [05:25]
Bart Ehrman
It is important, and it's very interesting because over the years I've heard lots of different people tell me what a Christian is, and often they'll disagree. And I remember when I was an evangelical Christian, we basically didn't think, you know, Roman Catholic people were really Christian or Greek Orthodox people were Christian or even especially liberal Protestants. They weren't Christian. They said they were Christian, man. They weren't Christian. And so for us, it was kind of a territorial battle. That may not matter in kind of the broader scheme of things in terms like, you know, in terms of the kinds of things we're dealing with now, like politics and culture and things. But. But, you know, people who are involved in Christianity are. Many of them are very committed to it, you know, and many people think that they've got the right. That's been a long time, a distinction of Christianity, that Christians think they've got the right view. So if you've got the wrong view, but you call yourself a Christian, are you really a Christian?
- [06:17]
Megan Lewis
Can historians say when Christian really became a religious identity in and of itself?
- [06:23]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, it's actually debated. Interestingly. You might not suspect this, especially about the early period of Christianity. Many, many scholars. Now, many of my colleagues object rather strenuously to using the term Christian for people in the New Testament who are followers of Jesus. And so they preferred saying something like the Jesus movement. And so when Paul converted somebody, it wouldn't be to be a Christian. Their logic is a good logic. I don't agree with them, but it's a good logic. What became traditional Christianity, standard Christianity with the Christian creeds and, you know, the canon or like, a certain set of beliefs where there's, like, a understanding of the faith didn't exist in the first century. And so it's not really appropriate to call these people Christian. The reason I disagree with that rather strongly, actually, even though I know it's good logic, but the reason I disagree with it is. At what point does Christianity ever come to be a thing where now it's Christianity? When would that be exactly? Middle of the second century. Didn't have a doctrine of the Trinity yet or a canon of Scripture. Middle of the fourth century? Well, why then? Why not? Why the beginning of the fourth century? I mean, how can you possibly draw a line? I mean, you will get more into my ideas about it. But basically when I'm teaching my students, I say, look, for this class, when I use the term Christian, I'm just saying anybody who understands that Jesus Christ in some way is the way of salvation, whatever that means.
- [07:48]
Megan Lewis
If you had asked one of Paul's converts in those early days, how do you self identify? Not that they necessarily would have understood the question, but if you asked them, would they have said, oh, I'm a Christian, or would they have given a different answer?
- [08:01]
Bart Ehrman
Well, in Paul's early days, probably not. We don't know for sure. Paul doesn't use the term Christian. It does occur twice in the New Testament. That's one of the reasons I'm not overly persuaded that it makes no sense to call first century New Testament time people. It makes no sense to call them Christians. It occurs twice and people say yeah, yeah, but it's just, you know, it's outsiders calling them that and so it doesn't really apply. Well, you know what does apply? And so, you know, today, I mean, Hinduism is a made up category. You know, Hindus don't go around talking about being Hindus. It's a Western category put on, on Hinduism. You still have departments of Hinduism talking about Hinduism. And I think that any term needs to be defined in order to be useful. I don't think that you can assume that everybody knows what the term Christian means. But if you mean something like, you know, follower of Jesus, then Paul's converts wouldn't have said they're Christian. For one thing, it's an English word. They didn't use the Greek term for that. You know, they'd call each other brethren or something. They'd say they were followers of Jesus, but I'm not sure they'd have like a single thing. Sometimes in the New Testament the group of Christians is called the Way, or they're called the Church, the Ecclesia. They usually are not called with that term Christian.
- [09:15]
Megan Lewis
When do we start to see the term Christian being more of a commonly used word?
- [09:21]
Bart Ehrman
So it does show up in the Book of Acts, in the New Testament and in the book of First Peter, but already it appears to be a concept already at least in the 60s of the common era. We have this report actually not from a Christian source, but from Tacitus, who was a Roman, a Roman historian who is describing events in one of his books, the Annals of Rome, he's describing the events that had happened when Nero was the emperor. And he talks about how after the fire in Rome in 64, Nero decided to scapegoat the Christians because they were the hatred of the human race, says Tacitus. And it's not quite sure if that means the human race hated them or they hated the human race. It could be either one. Most scholars today seem to think he means that the Christians hated the human race. But Tacitus, already in the year 115, uses the term and he applies it to Nero's day. But we don't know if Nero used the term Christian in the second century when we start having persecution narratives. Even the accounts written by non Christian Romans who are on the side of the persecutors, they use the term Christian as a technical term when somebody's put on trial. Actually, already in the year 112, a man named Pliny, who was a governor of a region of what's now Turkey, writes about persecuting people for calling themselves Christian. And if they called themselves Christian, he executed them unless they could prove they weren't a Christian. And so the term already in the early second century, I think, is becoming widely known even to outsiders, as a self designation for Christians.
- [10:56]
Megan Lewis
So if you had asked members of different Christian groups what it meant to be a Christian, would they have then given different answers? So would a Gnostic have said something that was different to a follower of Marcion? Or would they just all have said, oh, well, a follower of Christ, that's really all you need?
- [11:11]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, you know, it's hard to know what terms these people used for themselves. So when you have these various groups of Christians that eventually came to be known as heresies, so different groups of Gnostics seem to be heretics, and the followers of Marcion were understood to be heretics, and the followers of the Ebionites were understood to be heretics. It's hard to know what they called themselves because we don't have any writings from Marcion or the Ebionites. We do have writings from Gnostics, but Christian isn't like an overly common word. It does occur in some of the materials called Gnostic. I think the more important thing than the specific word is what it meant for them to be what we would call a Christian. You see What? I mean, we would label together groups of people who are followers of Jesus and think that Jesus is the way of salvation. And just for a kind of easy summary of things so people know what we're talking about, we call them Christians. What would the Marcionites think about that? What would the Gnostics think about that? Would the Ebionites think about that? They would think different things. So that just as an example, I mean, the Ebionites would say to be a follower of Jesus and so to be a Christian, you have to keep the Jewish law. And if you're not a Jew, you need to convert to Judaism and become a Jew. And Marcion had the opposite view. He would say, to be a follower of Jesus, you cannot follow the God of the Old Testament. That's a different God. So they'd have different understandings of what it means, whether or not they actually use the word.
- [12:35]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. We're going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back in a minute to get into some of these arguments about what exactly a real Christian is.
- [12:44]
Podcast Announcer
Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? From Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar. Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last it if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john? @barterman.com Authors thank you.
- [14:05]
Megan Lewis
So when we start to see this kind of splintering off of different groups and people throwing the term heresy around, is this kind of a fight to try and nail down the definition of how one correctly follows Christ?
- [14:20]
Bart Ehrman
Absolutely. The thing that is distinctive of almost all of these early Christian groups is that all of them agreed that there's Only one correct way, and they had it. And so you have, you know, the Marcionites, the Evenites, various Gnostic groups, the Sethians, the Valentinians, you have all these Thomasines, they have all these groups. We give them titles, we give them titles because we're just trying to, trying to categorize things so that they make sense. And you've got these groups of people and there are people that today scholars often call the Proto Orthodox. The term Orthodoxy means something like correct belief. And so people who were on the side of things within Christianity that ended up winning these various debates about what's the, the right thing. When that whole thing was over, they called themselves the Orthodox. We're the ones who are correct and all the others have false beliefs. The Christian teachers and leaders and church people who held views that were the ones that eventually became dominant. Scholars often call them the Proto Orthodox. So that before Orthodoxy won out in the 4th century, these are proto Orthodox. They certainly thought they had the correct opinion or the correct belief and that everyone else was wrong. And so they would have claimed for ourselves Christian and they would have called these Marcionites are not Christian.
- [15:37]
Megan Lewis
So this kind of infighting doesn't seem to have been a feature of pre Christian religions. What do you think it is about Christianity that has created this idea of there being only one right way to follow God?
- [15:50]
Bart Ehrman
No, this is the really interesting thing because you may not expect it, but when you get outside of Christianity in the ancient world, with the partial exception of Judaism, there are no religions that are saying we're right and everyone else is wrong. It just doesn't exist. And I say Jews are a partial exception because for the Jews, they were right for themselves. They understood what their religion was to be for themselves, the Jews. But they didn't want somebody else to be following the religion. They didn't care about what somebody else did. It's our religion. You know, you can join us if you want, but there were no eternal repercussions for it. They didn't believe that you're going to go to hell for it. Christians were exclusivistic as far back as we can determine. They thought that they were exclusively right and everybody else was wrong. And I think the logic of it is that within Christianity, from the beginning, it was understood that everybody had sinned against God and that people needed to have their sins taken care of and that it's Christ's death that atones for sins. Christ's death is what removes the barrier between humans and God. And so the only way to Be right with God. God is by accept the death and resurrection of Jesus. It's the only way. But once you say that, once you say that Christ's death is the only way, then you have to ask, well, who is Christ and why is his death the only way? And what does it mean to say that salvation happens when you believe? And so you have to define these things. Well, who is Christ? Well, he was a nice guy. Okay, he's a nice guy. But why does that bring salvation? Oh, well, actually he never sinned. Never sinned. Okay. And then you say, well, he was the Son of God. Okay, is he God? Well, you know, and so you have to debate these things. But since the salvation comes from having the correct belief about Christ and God and salvation, you've got to have the correct belief. Early on in Christianity, as far back as we have records. In other words, starting with the writings of Paul, our very earliest writings, you have different groups who disagree about fundamental things. In Paul's letters, his harshest enemies are fellow Christians that Paul thinks get it exactly wrong. And so, you know, you can't get it wrong in Christianity because you've got to get it right if you want salvation. That's carried down to the modern day where you have people say, well, you know, they're not really a Christian, or those people aren't. It's only my, you know, denomination that's really Christian, or people who believe like me are Christian, the others aren't.
- [18:20]
Megan Lewis
Is this exclusivity something that we see in the teachings of Jesus, or does this come into the picture later on?
- [18:25]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you find it in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. Whether it's what Jesus really taught or not is a different question. The religion about Jesus became an affair of believing the right things soon after his death because his followers came to believe that his death and resurrection were the way of salvation. Jesus during his lifetime, as we've talked about in previous episodes, was not arguing that people had to believe in his death and resurrection for salvation. He was telling them they needed to repent and return back to God and that anybody who does that will be saved when the kingdom of God arrives. And anyone who refuses to do that, God's not going to forgive them unless they repent. So they will face judgment. Jesus certainly thought that people outside of Judaism could be heirs of salvation by living in the ways that the God of the Jews wanted them to. And he says explicitly that there are others that will come into the kingdom because they behave the ways that God demands, even though if they don't have the law. Christians though, because they were focused on the death and resurrection of Jesus, said no, you've got to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that's one of the reasons why Paul's mission was so urgent for him. He thought the end of the world was coming soon, the judgment day was near, and people need to be told so that they can repent or not for Paul's case, not so they can repent so much as so they can believe in Jesus for salvation and because if they don't, they'll be judged. And so I think this exclusivistic thing comes in very early and it seems to affect virtually all the strands of Christianity that have a variety of ways of understanding how it is Jesus brings salvation.
- [20:05]
Megan Lewis
Apart from turning toward God and repenting, what did Jesus say about how he wanted his followers to behave?
- [20:12]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, a lot of his teachings in the New Testament, at least in Matthew and Luke, are ethical in nature. The three synoptic gospels, these three gospels that are so similar to one another that we call them Synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke have broad overview, a very basically similar understanding of who Jesus was. And Jesus does teach, of course in the Gospel of Mark and does teach some ethics in the Gospel of Mark. But Matthew and Luke expand Jesus ethical teachings significantly, probably because they had access to a different source of information about Jesus teachings that wasn't available to Mark. So in Matthew, for example, you get the Sermon on the Mount, the three chapter sermon found only in Matthew. But much of the material in the Sermon on the Mount can be found scattered throughout Luke's Gospel in Jesus teachings. So that Jesus will teach the Beatitudes in both places and he'll teach the Lord's Prayer in both places. I think the best way to consider Jesus ethical teachings are not that he was trying to teach people how they can get along in the long haul so that society will thrive and so forth. Jesus wasn't really teaching about behavior to guarantee a happy long term society. He didn't think there was going to be a long term. He thought the end was coming soon. And so he was teaching people what they needed to do, how they needed to live in order to enter into this imminent kingdom of God. And so his ethics are directed toward this is what it means to love God above all else and to love your neighbor as yourself. It means doing this, this and that. So it's not that it's like a strict legal code. It's about treating others the way you want to be treated and with lots of specific instances of it.
- [22:01]
Megan Lewis
Do these ethical teachings seem to have any bearing on how Christians define or historically have defined themselves?
- [22:09]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I would say so. One of the big issues that has been long term issue within Christianity is if people engage in certain kinds of behavior, can they really be Christian? And this was an issue early on because there were even in Paul's writings we have evidence of people who had become converts to be followers of Jesus, who were behaving in ways that Paul thought were inappropriate. And you get a whole string of them in 1 Corinthians, I mean a whole string of ways that you should not behave. Probably the most radical one for Paul's view is in 1 Corinthians 5 there's a man who is apparently living with, sleeping with his stepmother. And Paul thought that was outrageous. And so he told the Corinthians, kick him out of the church, basically exclude him from the church. And that's usually taken to mean at least that he's going to be losing his salvation now. So action was always an important thing. And when you get to something like it's important for Paul, Paul's letters, sometimes people think that Paul taught a lawless gospel and he didn't really care what you did as long as you believed. And that's not Paul at all. His books are filled with exhortations about how you really have to behave when you get to somebody like the book of James in the New Testament. He's all about, you've got to be a good person, you've got to do good things or you're not really a follower of Jesus. It's not good enough to say you have faith. Faith without works is death. This became a theme and there have been many times in Christianity when specific sins were designated as making you a non Christian. And still today, for example, you'll hear people say that if somebody is gay or lesbian or trans or whatever, they can't really be a Christian because the Bible's against that. Normally these people who say things like that ignore the fact that the Bible condemns things that they do too. I mean, the Bible's against gluttony, for example, it's against lying, it's against adultery. You frequently have, you know, people who are coming down on those who are gay because, oh, you know, God's opposed to that. You know, they're out, you know, sleeping with their neighbor's wife or whatever, you know, and it's like they might feel bad about it, but they don't think, well, you know, I'm therefore not a Christian. And so it ends up being this kind of thing where these ethical rules of the Bible come to be used as weapons to attack people you don't like for some, some other reason that you've got. It can be a rather nefarious affair deciding who's a Christian and who's not.
- [24:43]
Megan Lewis
How has what it means to be Christian changed over the centuries? And do you think a modern evangelical would be recognized as a Christian by the early church fathers?
- [24:53]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, that's a good question. Oh boy, I wish I knew the answer to it.
- [24:58]
Megan Lewis
I should say that it could apply equally to like a modern liberal Protestant, which is the category I would fall into, like any modern denomination.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, a modern liberal Protestant, a Roman Catholic, a Greek Orthodox priest. I would take your pick. Mormon, Jehovah's Witness. Would an early Christian recognize that person as a Christian? It's a really good question. And my sense from talking to roughly 29 million people about their Christianity over the years is that almost everybody thinks who identify as a Christian think that they are a Christian. And many of these people think that other people are not. But almost all of them think that they're Christians in the sense that Jesus own disciples were. They know, yeah, okay, you know, they might have had, not have had church buildings and pews and hymnals, but basically we're doing the same thing they were doing. And it's never the case. I used to belong to churches that were, you know, they call themselves kind of New Testament churches, which were trying their best really to implement what it was like to be a Christian in the first century. And you know, they just had no clue. They just, they didn't, they thought they did. Most people don't. So I, Paul wouldn't recognize most Christians today. Jesus certainly would not recognize Christians today as his followers. It's like, wow, that is not at all what I was talking about. So I think the answer is that no, but still the interesting thing for me is how insistent some people are. A lot of people, you know, look, there are millions and millions of Christians who are not out there, you know, pounding the desk about how you've got to believe, believe this, that or the other thing or a lot of Christians are not like that at all. But some are. My dad knew a guy, a business partner, business associate of his who said that if you are not baptized in my church, you cannot be a Christian. And he didn't mean his denomination, he meant his local church. Wow, that's just about as extreme as you can get and he really believed it. He's an intelligent guy. But he said, look, you know, if you're not, then you don't understand really what Christianity is. You got to be baptized in my church. And everybody realizes, well, that's, you know, that's, that's a little nuts. But, you know, why is it any more nuts than saying, you know, if you're not a member of my 500,000 person denomination, you can't be a Christian. Or if you don't say this thing, you can't be a Christian. If you can't do that thing, you can't be a Christian. You know, who's making these rules up anyway? And people think, oh yeah, but it's all in the Bible. No, it's not. Your denomination is not in the Bible. I'm sorry, we're going to be getting some email from people telling us, oh yeah, but mine is
- [27:31]
Megan Lewis
with chapter and verse, I'm sure.
- [27:33]
Bart Ehrman
Exactly, yeah.
- [27:34]
Megan Lewis
So my final question for today before we move on. What do you think it means to be a Christian? And does what you think now differ from what you thought when you were in evangelical?
- [27:43]
Bart Ehrman
I've had to wrestle with this personally because I left the church probably 30 years ago or so. I considered myself leaving Christianity. And so I had to come to a deeper realization. What does it actually mean not to be a Christian anymore? And my view of it is different from a lot of people. I have a lot of people who I know who think that I am a Christian. I assure them that no, I'm not. I try to be. I sometimes do call myself, I try sometimes call myself a Christian atheist because I do try to follow the kind of, the basic teachings of Jesus. I don't come anywhere near actually following them, but I don't think I know anybody who actually comes near. But a lot of people come nearer than I do. But I try to follow his teachings about loving my neighbor and helping others in need and caring for the poor, but I don't do it very well. I haven't sold all my goods and given to the poor. But I don't think you have to do that to be a Christian. But in my view, my personal view, the reason I don't go around still calling myself a Christian is because I think to be a Christian, number one, I think you have to believe in God, and I don't believe there is a God. And I think you have to believe that somehow to be right with God, you have to have some connection with Jesus. It's either that you think by following the teachings of Jesus or following the model of Jesus, or following a belief in Jesus believing in his death and resurrection. I tend to think deep down it's probably because of my Protestant bias from when I was growing up. I tend to think that if somebody doesn't believe in Jesus death and resurrection, in my view, I don't know if they're not the resurrection. But if they don't believe that somehow Jesus death puts a person into right standing before God, or if something Jesus said doesn't put them in right standing, if that isn't their issue, then I'm not sure they're really a Christian. So I think there are a lot of people like me who do try to love their neighbor and to try and do good for other people. And many of those people would call themselves Christian. And I have no problem with that. I have no problem with that at all. It's just I don't feel like I can do that myself because of the God thing.
- [29:49]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much for sharing your information and your thoughts with us on this. We are going to go to some news on upcoming events, but please stay tuned for our listeners questions this week.
- [30:01]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
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.
- [30:17]
Megan Lewis
So we have some more information for you today about the new insights into the New Testament Conference. I do want to say at the outset, the early bird pricing of $79 does end on August 24th. That's this Week. So if you want to get that price and again, use the Code MJ podcast for an additional discount, then you can sign up@bartiman.com 9th if you missed the early bird registration and you still want to sign up, the MJ podcast code is still good. So that will still get you a little bit of money off. But that's happening on September 20th to 21st. Yes, good. I usually write this stuff down and I didn't, but I remembered. And today we're going to just talk briefly about two of the presenters. So first up, I wanted to ask about Paula Fredrickson. She is talking about Paul and the many gods of ancient Jewish monotheism, which sounds, I just, I love talking about monotheism and polytheism and the whole intersection there. So I'm interested in that. But what can you tell us about Dr. Fredrickson?
- [31:17]
Bart Ehrman
She's a real international superstar in the field. I don't say that about everybody, but she really is She's a top scholar of the New Testament generally and Paul especially, but also on Augustine. She has this range. Very few people are actually experts on the early 5th century, Augustine and the New, but she is. She wrote a book like in 1988 or something called From Jesus to Christ. And many people saw the TV series From Jesus to Christ. It was based on her thing, on her book, ultimately. So she's really, really bright and she comes up with ideas that people wouldn't have thought of. And she has some interesting ideas about monotheism and polytheism in both the broader world and in Christianity and Paul's relationship to that. So this is going to be a very intriguing one because I have a feeling she's going to be saying things that would not have occurred to me, but she's a real authority.
- [32:12]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. And the next person is Dr. James Tabor, whose talk is entitled Paul's Greatest Idea and How It Was Superseded.
- [32:20]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I want to listen to this one because I want to know what it is.
- [32:23]
Megan Lewis
Me too.
- [32:24]
Bart Ehrman
I don't know what he's going to say. James Taber, he's been a friend of mine for over 30 years. He did the first new insights into the New Testament last year. And people really loved his talk because he's got such interesting takes on things and he's a very creative thinker and he's been very active in the field, well, for many decades. He has a huge following on social media and when he gives talks. And so he's always good. So, yeah, this will be a good one because I don't know what it's going to be. I should probably, should bet these. Right? Do I agree with that? Yeah, it'll be good. Whatever it is, it's going to. This whole conference is going to be good. I keep saying that, but, you know, the last one was fantastic. And we're adding goodies to this one for people who come. We're just expanding what people will get when they come. And so I think everybody's going to be happy with this one.
- [33:14]
Megan Lewis
It's going to be wonderful. And there are more details on the website. That's bartiman.comnint so we are now going to go to some listeners questions.
- [33:26]
Bart Ehrman Weekly Update Host
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please please visit barterman.com askbart
- [33:44]
Megan Lewis
all right, as always, and I say this every single time, some fantastic questions from our wonderful listeners today. How much influence or dialogue did early Christians have with rabbis in the second century?
- [33:55]
Bart Ehrman
It's debated. It's hard to say. That's why it's debated. We have one book by Justin from the year 150 or so. Justin Martyr is his nickname from Rome. That's called the Dialogue with Trypho, which is a discussion with a Jewish teacher, like a back and forth debate. Justin wrote the book and so he kind of comes out on top. It's the kind of thing which suggests that there might have been dialogue going back and forth. There's some indications that Origen, I guess that's early third century, had numerous discussions with rabbis. Most Christian writers that we have seem to have no time or interest in what Jewish teachers were actually saying. They're more interested in maligning Judaism than having any kind of dialogue with Jews. And so there are some exceptions, but generally it doesn't look like most Christians were that interested in what was going on in the synagogue and what their Jewish teachers were saying.
- [34:53]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. What do you think of the idea put forth by John S. Spong in his book Jesus for the Non Religious, that the Gospels were written as liturgy? They were written by Greek speaking Jewish Christians outside of Judea, but inside the synagogue and were designed to step the congregation through the calendar year similarly to the way that the Torah is used.
- [35:14]
Bart Ehrman
So John Spong was. He was a real gift to humanity. He was one of these people who took biblical scholarship and presented it to a wider audience before very many people were doing it. He was a very, very kind of critical scholar of the Bible. He wasn't a trained scholar of the Bible, but he accepted critical scholarship. But he remained a bishop in the Episcopal Church. And so he was speaking from the inside where a lot of us speak from the outside. So he was a terrific presence and did a lot of good for the world. I think this theory of his is completely wrong. It has inspired some people and made some people very interested, but it's wrong on a number of levels. One is we don't know what Jewish liturgy was like in the first century when these Gospels are being written. Spong is basing this on later liturgical information that we get from later Jewish sources. We simply don't know what the liturgy, let alone liturgical calendars and the readings of the Gospels that are based on liturgical calendar, I think are superficial and really forced. And so I don't agree with that particular theory. But it's one of those things where I kind of thought over the years that even though I don't agree with him on this, that or the other thing. I'm sure glad he's writing it because he's reaching a lot of people that I never would reach.
- [36:28]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. In John 10:30, I and the Father are one. The word one is written as neuter hen, just like the one tohen from Plato. Does this suggest that Jesus was part of the One, like in Platonism?
- [36:43]
Bart Ehrman
So a couple things to say about this. One is that it's a complicated question. Another thing is there are debates about how much philosophy the author of the Gospel of John knew. My sense is that he had never read Plato, let alone Plato's Timaeus. I think this question is referring to Plato's Timaeus, which is one of his most Plato's most difficult dialogues. It's a fascinating and became a really important one later on, after Plato's day. But try reading it. It stuff going. It's about basically how the world came into being. The One is a important feature in parts of Plato Will, but I don't really think that's what's going on in the Gospel of John. This verse is a very important verse. I and the Father are one. One of the really important things to point out about it is that the verb there is plural. We are one. It's not that I and the Father Am 1. So in other words, he's not claiming to be the Father, he's claiming to be united with the Father in a kind of oneness. And so it's usually taken to be a neuter because he's talking about oneness and unity. He's not talking about a masculine person. What he's claiming is that he and God the Father are on the same page about everything and that we agree on everything and that so if you disagree with me, you're disagreeing with God. And so I think it's far more about that than a Platonic philosophical understanding of Tahen the one.
- [38:08]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Final question for the day. If Jesus didn't believe in and preach an eternal hell of fire and torment, how did such an unpleasant idea gain the level of acceptance that it has? And so early on in Christian history,
- [38:22]
Bart Ehrman
this is the subject of the book that I wrote recently. This is the very subject of the book. My book is called A History of Heaven and Hell, where I try to explain that our modern Christian understandings and Christian understandings have been around for centuries and centuries, that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven or goes to hell for reward or for eternal punishment, that that's not found Anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. And it's not what Jesus taught. And so the question is, where did it come from? It's a complicated issue, as it turns out. That took me an entire book to explain, but it's an easy reading book. I try to make it pretty interesting. The short story, oddly enough, I guess this is the same questioner and it sounds like this questioner is really into Plato, because in some ways, this Christian notion of, of hell and of heaven presupposes a Platonic understanding of the human being as having a body that is temporarily inhabited by a soul. The body is mortal and dies and doesn't exist anymore. I mean, it deteriorates. The soul never dies. It lives on. It has to die. It doesn't die. It has to go somewhere. And in Plato, in a couple of Plato's dialogues, not the Timaeus, but a couple of the other dialogues, the soul either goes for a reward or goes for a punishment. And so you get that in the Republic, for example, and so the book 10 of the Republic. So it's a separation of body and soul. Jesus didn't have that view because Jews at the time of Jesus did not believe in the separation of body and soul. The body and soul were one thing. And so when the soul leaves the body, the body's dead and the soul doesn't exist anymore. I think on this podcast I've said before that ancient Jews understood the soul to be like the breath death that's in you. Well, the soul dies. It doesn't go anywhere. So he didn't have that view. And what ends up happening, It's a long story. But part of what happens is most of Jesus followers by the 2nd century are Greeks in the sense that they're trained in Greek thinking rather than in Jewish thinking. They're Gentiles and they bring their understanding of the afterlife to their beliefs. And they start developing the idea that in fact the body and soul can separate and the soul will live on and has to go one place or the other.
- [40:33]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about?
- [40:39]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we've been talking about this kind of controversial and interesting question. What is a Christian? I mean, and who gets to define it? And why do some people insist that it's got to be this one thing and other people have a kind of a more lax view about it? And how appropriate is it even to use the word Christian broadly for various kinds of Christian groups, not just today, but in antiquity, this is important. Because it's a matter of how people identify themselves and how they understand themselves religiously vis a vis Christ. And so it ends up being a pretty important matter.
- [41:10]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. and that includes registration for the New Insights in the New Testament conference, which is bartiman.com 9th misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [41:37]
Bart Ehrman
So next time we're talking about one of the most intriguing discoveries of Christianity in the 20th century, allegedly a secret gospel written by Mark that turned up in 1958. Mark wrote a second gospel, a second version of his gospel, and it was discovered. Or was it is this a real deal or is it a forgery? And scholars are divided on the issue.
- [42:04]
Megan Lewis
And join us next week to find out what Bart thinks about it. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [42:11]
Podcast Announcer
This has been an episode of Misquoting
- [42:13]
Megan Lewis
Jesus with Bart Ehrman.
- [42:14]
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We'll be back with a new episode
- [42:16]
Megan Lewis
next Tuesday, so please be sure to
- [42:18]
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subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.