← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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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. The idea of the Trinity, that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are somehow a single entity, is a central tenet to Christianity. Was it always this way? If not, where did the idea come from? And how and why did it become so important? Before we get to that, Bart, how are you doing today?
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B
Yeah, I'm doing well, thanks. You know, this is a good day for me because you and I are recording a couple of these things. Three of these things today with these things are so much fun for me. I don't know but I just really love doing this kind of thing. But then after, when we're done, I'm off tonight I've got a blog dinner. So we've got the Bart, er, blog and when I'm in different places, I'll get together with people who are on the blog just to have dinner. And so I'm in London, in Wimbledon. I'm getting eight people together and we're going to have, we're going to have a pint and then have a dinner and just talk about blog stuff.
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A
That sounds like a lot of fun
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B
and it's always great because there's such interesting people on the blog and they, you know, there are a lot of people on the blog. I don't get to meet most of them but every time I meet them their stories are just amazing. It's great. I really enjoy it a lot. So how about you, how's your day looking?
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A
Busy. Good, but busy. We've got children's swimming lessons and then taking them to daycare and nursery and then I'm teaching Sumerian tonight so I have a lesson I need to prep for. Yes, it's a, it's a long day, but fun. It's nice to be one of things.
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B
Oh, yeah, teaching Sumerian. I think I'd rather be drinking a pint with my blog people than teaching Sumerian, but maybe, you know, better float your boat.
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A
It's a lot of fun. So we did the very introductory class before I went to the uk, and now once I came back, we got into the more intermediate class. So I teach for half the lesson, and then the other half we just go through translations together, which is. Actually, I'm really enjoying it because we're translating through a Gudea statue that's in the Louvre. And it's been a long time since I actually sat down and translated Gudea, and it's really fun.
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B
Translated what? Gudea.
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A
So Gudea, he was a king of Mesopotamia, but he's very well known, comparatively speaking, because he left all of these statues depicting himself with building inscriptions on, and there are some actually really long texts about him building temples and that kind of thing.
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B
Okay, well, not well known to New Testament scholars, but okay, well, this is true.
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A
This is true.
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B
Wow. Okay, well, good. Okay, well, that does sound fun, actually translating texts.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. But going away from Gudea and my excitement about Sumerian, we are talking about the Trinity today, and I think the easiest place to start is what is the doctrine of the Trinity?
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B
Yeah, it's the easiest and also the most complicated, as it turns out, because I think a lot of people don't really understand the Trinity. A lot of people think that if you say Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that's the doctrine of the Trinity, and it's not. The doctrine of the Trinity does say that there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. But the doctrine has to do with how they relate to each other. Because you could believe in Father, Son, and Spirit without having the doctrine of the Trinity. And many people have, and many people still do. The doctrine of the Trinity is that all three of those figures, God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three of those figures are God. But it's not just that they're God. They are equally God. There's not a hierarchy. They're made of the same substance. They have the same power. They are equal. They are different from each other. There are three different ones who are all God, and those three are one God. So there are three persons in the Godhead, three distinct persons, they are equal. And the three distinct persons who are equal are one God. So it's three in one. And people say, well, wait, that math don't work. Or they say, man, that doesn't make any sense. That's right. The math does not work. And it's not meant to make, you know, Aristotelian sense. It's a mystery. And it is so mysterious that if you think you understand it, you don't understand it. You can't. It doesn't really equate. But that's the affirmation, three persons, one God, not three gods.
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A
Does this idea appear anywhere in the Bible?
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B
Well, short answer, no. You certainly get. You get references to divine being. You get references, of course, to God the Creator, you get references to Christ being God, and you get references to the Spirit as a divine being. So the Spirit of God. But you don't have anywhere in the Bible that says comes out and says that the three are equal in substance. And you don't have anywhere in the Bible that says that there are three of these beings, but there's only one God. The most important passage has been traditionally used to argue that the Bible supports the Trinity. It's in the New Testament, First John, chapter 5, verses 7 and 8. It's called by scholars the Johannine comma comma means a short piece of writing that's not a full sentence. But the Johannine comma in First John in the King James Bible. And Bibles related to the King James based on late manuscripts of the Bible say that there are three that bear witness in heaven. The Father, the Word and the Spirit. And these three are one. So that's pretty close. I mean, it doesn't say the three are all equally God and they're the same substance, but it does say the three are one. And that's the doctrine of the Trinity. The problem is that that verse was not originally in the New Testament. This is not a debated point among scholars. This is one of those textual changes that just about everybody, except for very, very hardcore fundamentalists agree it wasn't originally there. It's only found in much later manuscripts and doesn't start showing up in Greek manuscript for many centuries. Over a thousand years after the book was in circulation, some scribe added that bit. So there's nowhere that it's explicitly stated.
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A
So my understanding is that the idea of the Trinity came about as an answer to a theological question. If God explicitly states that he is the only God, how then do we reconcile that with Jesus, divinity and the presence of the Holy Spirit? Is that a fair understanding or does it need some nuance?
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B
Yeah, well, the nuance takes about three volumes of 600 pages each. It's a very serious issue but the basic point is very important. That idea behind the Trinity is based in the Bible. Even though the Trinity is not found in the Bible, the doctrine isn't found in the Bible. But the doctrine emerges out of certain biblical statements that Trinitarians maintain have to be explained by the doctrine of the Trinity. And it begins with the idea that there's only one God. And you get that. The passage you're quoting, you get passages like that in the book of Isaiah, the second part of Isaiah, where God himself says, I alone am God, there is no other one God. Or in the book of Deuteronomy, sometimes translated chapter six of Deuteronomy, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. So the idea of the oneness of God is central. But also in the Bible, in the New Testament, you have references to Jesus being God, and then Jesus equates the Spirit to himself as an equal kind of being to himself. And so you get these three individuals in the Bible that are all called God. But the very strong monotheistic emphasis that develops within Judaism and Christianity that there's only one God. And so how do you explain it? That's what drives people to try and figure out a way to make it possible for there to be only one God, but to have three beings that
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A
are God and the Trinity was just one answer to this question. How did non orthodox Christian groups deal with the problem? And did they all actually see it as a problem?
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B
Yeah, it's a good question whether they saw it as a problem. Some people did. The thinkers really did. I think probably in the early church, it was like today, most people don't even think much about it. They don't try and work it out. You know, they think that Christ is God and God is God and there's one God. You know, they think like that. But it was a problem early on in Christianity and there were lots of debates about it. There are various ways of solving the problem. One way to solve it is to say Jesus and the Spirit aren't really God, that it's metaphorical language when they talk about being divine. You know, like this sirloin steak is divine. You know, something like Christ is divine. No, it's not. It doesn't mean he's really divine. So you could say that he's not really God or the Spirit's not really God. That's one way to deal with it. But most people by the second century who are Christian, most people are saying Christ is God. And so in the second century, in the early centuries, it's really about Christ and God the Father and the Spirit ends up getting added on because of certain elements within Christianity and in the Bible. But the issue is, how can Christ be God and God be God? But if there's one God. And there were a number of solutions to that in the second century that were propounded and believed by a lot of people who were Christian. So that, for example, there were some people who said that Christ was God because God made him God. This is what I think is probably the very earliest understanding of Christ is that after he died and was raised from the dead, he was exalted up to God's right hand. And in the ancient world, if somebody, if a human is taken up to heaven to live with the gods or to live with God, that makes them a divine being. And so in that understanding of things, Christ was a human who was elevated to a divine status. So he's not equal with God? Oh, my God, no, of course he's not equal with God, but. But he is a divine being, and the Spirit would be a divine being. So that's a kind of subordinationism. That idea is that Christ is subordinate to God but not equal. And so he would have been created at some point and the Spirit would have been created at some point. They're not equal with God.
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A
Are there any other solutions that were thought of to answer this question?
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B
Yeah, some of them were very popular and for a while were the solution. There was a solution that was very common at the end of the second century that was held widely by lots of people, including apparently bishops of Rome. Today we'd call them the Pope. They weren't called popes yet, but these would be the early popes who held this view. We know this because the enemies of this view admit it. And this view is called a number of different things. The term I tend to use is modalism. Modalism. And it's called. I didn't invent that term. That's just the term. The term modalism refers to God existing in three modes, codes of existence. This is a way to solve the idea that the three are one. And the idea behind it is that I myself, Bart Ehrman, I am the son of someone, and I am the brother of someone, and I am the father of someone at the same time. These are three distinct roles, being a son, a brother and a father. But there's only one of me. And so I'm not three different beings and one being in three different roles. And the idea is that God the Father, God the Son, the Spirit are all three modes of God's existence. And so, you know, as Father, he's the Almighty who runs the world, and as the Son, he's the one who becomes an incarnate being for the salvation of the world. As the Spirit, he's the one who's among us now to guide our lives. And so it's all the same God, but it's in three distinct modes of existence. That solves the problem. You got these three people. They're all God, but they're all just modes of the same thing. This view, as I said, was hugely popular, but it got demolished by theologians at the end of the second and into the third century. Demolished, at least in the eyes of people who didn't hold to it. These theologians, especially somebody named. There's a figure named Tertullian who is a very feisty and interesting and witty author who called this view Patripassionism. Patripassionism. It's a great word. Patri from the word pater, father, passion from the word to suffer. And what Tertullian said, look, if you think that these are three modes of existence, you're saying that the Father got crucified, that the Father died. You can't kill God the Father. And so he made fun of these people and called them patripassionist. And he said things like, the Father can't be his own son, the Son can't be his own father. You can have a father and you can have a son, but you can't be the person you have. And so he had all these ways of expressing it. So it ended up losing out. And people started saying, look, these have to be three different beings. They can't be the same being in three modes of existence.
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A
What makes the Trinity different from polytheism?
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B
Oh, yeah, it depends who you ask. I know a lot of opponents of Christianity today. I say, look, I'm sorry, that's three gods. And it makes sense that you would say that because there are three persons who are all God. Christians insisted it was not polytheistic because there's only one God. But God is manifest in three persons. The Christians insisted even more strongly than Israelites and then early Jews. On there being only one God, they insisted that the Godhead is one. And the logic of it is that three, even though they are distinct in number, they're not distinct in essence. They all have the same essence, the same substance. Not in the way that you and I are both human. We have huge differences as well. But the Godhead, the differences are more of function rather than essence. The essence is not different at all. It's all the same substance. So the Godhead is one substance manifest in three persons. So they, Christian theologians absolutely went out, defended monotheism.
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A
Who can we credit with the idea of the Trinity?
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B
Ah, so that's a complicated question. So the first person to use the term Trinity or to come up with that kind of terminology is this figure Tertullian that I mentioned, who wanted to insist that there are three distinct beings but only one God. He was writing around the year 200 or so, a little before, a little after, around 200. He didn't have the doctrine of the Trinity. He used the term and he really did believe that God was essentially one thing and that there were three distinct persons who were God. But he didn't have the fully worked out doctrine as it came to be developed. That didn't happen until later times, until the 4th century.
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A
How was it received then when Tertullian first started talking about this idea? Was it a heresy? Was it pretty widely accepted? How do people respond?
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B
We don't really know. You know, for a lot of these early church theologians, what we really wish is that we had readers, reports on the writings, book reviews and book reviews. We wish they had book reviews and we don't. And the problem is that the ones who were embracing the views that essentially became the established few, they're the ones whose writings were preserved. Tertullian had a lot of enemies and proponents and he names them, but we don't have their writings. And so they obviously didn't agree with him. And they probably said nasty things about him like he did about them. And they probably had very, you know, strong arguments, but we don't have them. So we don't know how they were received at the time. But eventually, for a number of historical reasons and a lot of historical contingencies, one view ended up winning out. And then, then these people who won these debates that we, we call the Orthodox Christians, that in this context, when you say orthodox Orthodoxy, you're not actually meaning what the term technically means. Technically, the term Orthodoxy means the correct belief. And when historians are talking about who's right and who's wrong, they're not really talking about who's right, who's wrong. Historians who are studying ancient theology don't have any particular access to the Trinity other than anyone else. So they're not really saying that that's the right opinion. They're saying that's the opinion that became the dominant view, this orthodox view. And so this orthodox view, as it developed later than people who held that view claimed earlier predecessors and Tertullian would have been. Would have been one of them.
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A
How then did it come to be orthodox teaching?
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B
Well, the big moment in some ways goes back to what we dealt with in our last episode, the Emperor Constantine. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he had no idea how. What he was getting into. I don't think he regretted it ultimately, but he had. He had no conception of the complications involved with Christianity. And one of them was a theological controversy that he got deeply involved with. He did want to have a unified church. And the church was split over this issue about Christ's full divinity. Was Christ fully divine or not? This was a. It was a debate that appeared. Well, it became a really serious problem in the 320s. So, you know, roughly 10 years or so after Constantine's conversion. The deal is that there was a very powerful church in Christianity before Rome kind of was ruling everything in Alexandria, Egypt. Alexandria was understood to be a kind of intellectual capital of the ancient world. And it had an intellectual church there, a large Christian church. And there was a presbyter there, like a leader of the church. One of the church leaders named Arius, A R I U S He had been asked by his bishop. He and the other underlings to the bishop were asked to write, kind of explain their understanding of the relationship with the Father and the Son. You know, how do you explain it that they're both God, but you know, there's one God. How do you explain how they relate, basically? And what Arius argued was what most people probably thought at the time, which was that God the Father, he goes back all the way into eternity. At some point, God begot a Son. The Son came into existence at some point in the past, and the Son is not equal with God the Father. You know, he came into being. There's a time before which he did not exist. And he wasn't as powerful as God. Christ is more powerful than us by an infinity of power and glory. And the Father is separated from the Son by an infinity of power and glory. And so, you know, so he's a created being, came into being at some time. And he's subordinate to God. So they're both God. Christ is God. He created the world. He came into the world, died for the sins of the world. He ascended to heaven. He is completely. He is God, but he's a subordinate divinity. That was a view that was very popular in Alexandria at the time.
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A
How does it go from having this really, really popular view to just the Trinity. What happens to Arian's idea?
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B
So Arius's idea that, you know, God, Christ as a subordinate divinity was, was popular. But there was another popular view that was actually represented by the Bishop of Alexandria that had asked him to do a write up. The Bishop of Alexandria, memorably enough, is named Alexander at this time. And he thought Arius was completely wrong. He did not think that Christ could be seen as a subordinate divine being. Jesus says things like, I and the Father are one in the Gospel of John, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. And so Alexander wanted to argue that Jesus was not a subordinate divinity who came into being at some time. He actually was an eternal being like God the Father and was equal with God the Father in every way. He was as powerful as God the Father and as knowing as God the Father. And he was equal with God, not subordinate to God. So that was Alexander's view. And it led to a big debate in Alexandria, but then it became a big debate throughout the Christian world where people couldn't agree on the relationship between the Father and the Son. And some of the church fathers say this, this argument happened on the streets. And then it's like people are arguing about this issue. And that's what ends up leading then to a council that Constantine calls the Council of Nicaea.
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A
That was actually going to be my final question. What role did the Council of Nicaea play in kind of settling this issue?
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B
Constantine realized that the Church was split over this theological issue. Constantine did not think it was much of an issue. He thought, this is such a petty little thing. We have a letter that he wrote to Arius and Alexander where he says it's a trivial matter. And he says, just, just solve it. Like, are you kidding me? Like, he's God, does it matter? And so either way, he's God, right? And he created the world and he died for sins. Why do you. And so he didn't. He himself. Constantine was not. He was not a deep thinker, he was not a philosopher, he was not a theologian. And he didn't see the point. But the Church was split over, so he wanted the Church unified. So he called the Council of Nicaea. This is the first. They're called ecumenical councils. In early Christianity, there are seven ecumenical councils. Ecumenical means that they involved the entire world. So they weren't just kind of local synods, you know, of one city or another, one place or another. Like bishops from around the world were invited to come to the city of Nicaea in order to debate the issue of the relationship of the Father and the Son. This happened in the year 325, major date of a major event for Christianity. Over 300 bishops came from around the world and they debated these issues with both sides being represented and alternate views being represented, mediating views being represented. Then they made a decision. Constantine called it. He spoke at the conference. He was active in the conference. He didn't make the decision himself. He didn't really care. But the bishops there all cared. And contrary to what everybody hears, I need to clear up a couple of things about the Council of Nicaea. There are a couple things that everybody hears that are wrong. For one thing, just to say this, they did not decide what books would be in the New Testament. There was not a discussion about the canon of the New Testament at the Council of Nicaea. We have the proceedings. And this is not the issue. It's the relationship of the Father and the Son. The second thing is it's not true that this is when people decided that Jesus would be God. Or as Dan Brown says in the Da Vinci Code, claiming it's a historical fact that this is when they decided Jesus would be the Son of God. Dan Brown would read the New Testament sometime like, he's the Son of God everywhere. So everybody knew he was the Son of God, and everybody at the council knew he was God. They believed he was God. The question is, in what sense is he God? And the third thing is that some people think was kind of a close vote. It was not a close vote. Virtually everybody ended up agreeing with Alexander, except for a handful of people. And Constantine then twisted some arms and it ended up just very few couple people thought that agreed with Arius. And so the official decision then was that Christ was equal with God and of the same substance with God. And that initiated then the development of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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A
So after the Council of Nicaea and Constantine has twisted his arms and everyone has made a vote, what happens next?
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B
Well, this is one of the great ironies of history that many people don't know about. Constantine died in 337, and one of his sons became the emperor Constantius II. And Constantius II was an Arian. He agreed with Arius. And then all these churches started becoming Arian again. And so that later the church father drew up Rome at the end of the fourth, beginning of the fifth century, said that the world woke up and found itself Aryan. So there's back and forths. There continued to be back and forth until finally toward the end of the 4th century, there's another council that's called. And at that council, they, they make a definitive ruling and that becomes a thing that they're two are equal. And eventually then, you know, people start wondering about the Spirit as well, because in the New Testament, Jesus says that he's going to leave and another comforter is going to come. So that sounds like this is going to be. And the spirit's going to come. He's going to, he's coming from God. And this is the spirit of God. And so people thought, well, spirit as well as God. And so they ended up then with this idea that, that you've got these three, they're all God, they're distinct, but you can only have one God because the Bible says there's only one God. And so it's a way of reconciling the Bible with itself. Right? Bible says there's one God. The Bible says God is God, Christ is God, Spirit is God. So how do you reckon this is the doctrine of the Trinity? And it is not meant to be a mathematical equation and it's not meant to make logical sense in the way we normally do. It's one of the mysteries of God.
- [25:14]
A
Well, thank you very much. I'm going to end it there with God's greatest mystery, possibly humanity's most interesting incorrect mathematical equation. We're going to take a brief break and then we're going to be back with more information about the upcoming conference and we'll finish up with some listeners. Questions have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers to these questions may surprise you. In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth, then you won't want to miss 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, if the apostle. 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. Okay, so we are back at New insights into the New Testament conference time. We're going to talk about a couple more presenters that will be there. If you're not familiar with the conference, we've mentioned it a couple of times on the podcast. It's going to be on the 23rd and 24th of September, entirely online. So you can sign up and kind of watch from the comfort of your own home. There will be 10 fantastic speakers. We went over two last week. Dr. Candida Moss and Hugo Mendez. And today we're going to be talking about James Table and Jodi Magnus. Dr. Tabor is talking about moving the goalpost. Mark's sign of the end as a failed prophecy.
- [27:33]
B
This conference. If you haven't heard the full spiel on this thing, you really need to look at it because these are 10 top scholars in the world who are presenting their scholarship at a layperson's level. And there's nothing like it. There's never been anything like this that I know of. And so it's going to be really good. And so you got these presenters. I mean, so James Tabor is for anybody who's interested in the Bible and New Testament studies and things. You should have heard of James Tabor because he's a very, he's a well known figure in this field and has been for a very long time. I've known him for probably almost 35 years and he's written really interesting and important work on Paul and on Jesus and the Gospels. He's an archaeologist who digs in Jerusalem. And he, and he's a controversial figure. He was very involved with the Branch Davidian thing at Waco. He wrote two books about that because he was involved with trying to negotiate with David Koresh. I mean, it's like, oh my God. So he's a really interesting guy. So again, I don't know the content of what he's going to say, but it sounds like the idea is that Mark's gospel is responding to the fact that the end didn't come. Because even in Mark, Jesus predicts the end is going to come within his own generation and that his disciples will see the kingdom of God arrive. Go in Mark's writing. It hadn't arrived yet. How does Mark deal with that? How do you write a gospel about Jesus recording his words when you know that his words didn't come true? What do you do? And so it sounds like this lecture is going to be about that, which will be interesting because James is a smart and intelligent guy who comes up with creative solutions to things. So we'll see.
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A
He's a fascinating speaker as well. So I think that one's going to be. Well, they're all going to be excellent. But no, that sounds very interesting. And then we've got Jodi Magnus as well. Her title is in the Footsteps of Jesus Exploring Jerusalem's Sacred Sites.
- [29:18]
B
So I could put in a whole episode talking about Jodi Magnus. She, she's an amazing person. She's my, she's my colleague at UNC Chapel Hill and she's, she's arguably the best known archeologist of Israel from the time of Jesus in the world. And she has an annual dig, she's actively digging still in, in Israel. And every summer, every year, National Geographic covers her work because of this amazing synagogue that she's found. She's written three award winning books. One on the Dead Sea scroll place Qumran, where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, one on Masada and one on Jerusalem. So she really knows all of this stuff. One of her expertise of course is Jerusalem in the days of Jesus. She teaches an entire semester class on this at Chapel Hill, very popular class. And so she's going to talk about some of the real site, the very interesting and important sites because a lot of people have miscomprehensions, misunderstandings, what these sites really were, what they are and you know, how significant they are and why. And so she's also, she's one of these really dynamic speakers. Very, very. Everybody comes away from her and say, wow, that was amazing. So I think that'll be good.
- [30:24]
A
I think it's, it's really nice to see that being an archaeological component because I feel that a lot of the time with Biblical studies, Old Testament as well, you get this laser focus on the text texts which are, don't get me wrong, obviously very important. But these were written in and about real places and we have a lot of evidence and the archaeology is just so fascinating. I think it's really, really important to try and have a good understanding of the sites that people are working with.
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B
Absolutely. It makes a huge difference. And so, yeah, it's important. Really, really important.
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A
So the conference is New Insights in the New Testament. It runs 23rd and 24th of September. There will be 10 fantastic speakers. The cost is $59.95 but you can get the early bird pricing of $49.95 up until August 26th. You can learn more and buy your tickets at www.ntconference.org and we will be going over a couple more of the speakers next week. But before that, we are going to do some more listeners questions.
- [31:29]
B
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 visit bart erman.com Ask Bart
- [31:46]
A
okay, we have a nice varied selection this week, Bart. First up, what evidence is there for the Catholic Mass in early Christianity? What form did it take, and do we know when and why Christians started to perform this ritual?
- [32:01]
B
So the Christian Mass refers to the celebration of the Last Supper, the Lord's Supper as it developed later in Christianity, where it came to be thought that when people eat the bread at the meal and drink the wine at the meal that they are consuming the body and blood of Christ. And so in the Catholic Mass, for example, this is, this is what happens. The question is, what's the root of that in the Bible? The Bible doesn't have any theology about this event per se, but the celebration of the Lord's Supper in commemoration of the last meal of Jesus with his disciples is in the New Testament. It's discussed in several places. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have an account of it before them. Paul has an account of it in 1 Corinthians 11. There are lots of debates between theologians about the significance of the meal for these early Christian authors, because the authors don't come out and say anything about the transformation later called the transubstantiation, in which the elements are transformed into Christ's literal body and blood. And so the debates have long been carried out between Protestants and Catholics, especially where Protestants would say that these elements are commemorating Jesus death, Catholics saying, no, they actually become Jesus death, they become his body and blood. And that's the big debate. My view of it is that the Mass itself and the theology connected with the Mass with transubstantiation and everything connected with it is a much later development that you don't get until the early Middle Ages, but that the earliest understanding was that this was a commemorative meal to remember Jesus death.
- [33:49]
A
Thank you. The next question is about the writers of the Gospels. Are the writers of the Gospels each from separate communities? And do we have any information on where these communities were geographically based?
- [34:01]
B
Almost certainly they were from different communities. They didn't know each other. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whatever their actual names were, they didn't know each other. They almost certainly lived in different communities. And we don't know which Communities. They were. Scholars have long speculated about one or another. And so, for example, you know, people will often say things like, Mark was written in the city of Rome, you know, or that Matthew was writing in the city of Antioch, or John was writing in the city of Ephesus. So they have these speculations, and scholars come up with arguments for why this place or another place. But basically, it's just guesswork. And, you know, when people state these things assuredly, you think really, you know, like you say, for example, Matthew shows that if you read Matthew's gospel carefully, and this is true, that there's a real conflict between the Jewish synagogue and the Christian community. So where would there be a large Jewish and a large Christian community? Antioch. Okay, Antioch. Or other places. And so I. I don't think we actually know other than they were all outside of Israel and it's somewhere in the Roman Empire where they were speaking Greek. It had to be in an urban setting, but we don't know where.
- [35:12]
A
Thank you. We've got a fun one. Up next, which Bible scholars, living or dead, would you invite to a dinner party?
- [35:19]
B
I don't need invite living ones because I have dinner with them all the time. I don't mean it.
- [35:24]
A
So that's just a Friday night.
- [35:26]
B
So in terms of dead ones, man. Yeah. Well, okay. How about Albert Schweitzer to begin with? That would be good. So there are a lot of big names. That would be great. I mean, Rudolph Bultmann was probably the most important New Testament scholar of the 20th century. He was quite amazing. My two heroes in the faith are not ones that normally come to mind for biblical scholars. I became enamored in graduate school with Fenton, John Anthony Hort, and Brooks Westcott. And so Westcott and Hort were the ones who developed our Greek New Testament as we have it today? Pretty much. So they were scholars of manuscripts, and so I'd love to have dinner with them.
- [36:05]
A
Thank you. And final question. Fittingly, talking about manuscripts, the New Testament seems to have a richer and more complete set of manuscripts than any other text. As an Assyriologist, I'm taking issue with that statement. Do text critical scholars use patterns in New Testament copying as a template for predicting how other ancient texts with a sparse manuscript record would likely have been altered by copyists?
- [36:29]
B
That's an interesting question. You can detect scribal habits in the New Testament texts because you can see what kinds of mistakes repeatedly get made and figure out probably why they were made. I suppose in some ways, the study of manuscripts did come to prominence among scholars because of the New Testament. With the invention of printing in the 15th century, you started having Bibles being produced, and Bible publishers had to choose which manuscripts to put into print. And so once you realize that this manuscript and that manuscript were these differently, then you have to decide which manuscript. And eventually you get enough of these. You have to decide, well, okay, you're not going to choose one manuscript. You're going to figure out what the original wording was among these various manuscripts. And so that develops into this field of textual criticism. But, you know, there's a lot of work that's been done as well. Every literary field has textual criticism. The classicists deal with this kind of issue all the time. Sometimes I'll have a debate with an evangelical scholar who's convinced that we know what the words of the New Testament Testament are, and I'll explain why. Some places we just don't know, we can't know because of the confusion of the evidence. And they'll sometimes say to me, these are scholars who will be saying this in public. And they'll say, well, yeah, but if you say that, you'd have to say the same thing about Homer and Plato and Euripides. And I'm thinking, are you kidding me? Of course we say the same thing about Homer, Plato and Euripides. Don't you realize this? Scholars devote their entire lives to this kind of thing. Some of the tendencies we get in the New Testament manuscripts are absolutely like what you get in other manuscript traditions, especially accidental mistakes. The kinds of accidental mistakes get made. The difference is that with the New Testament, the copyists were people who believed in these books for religious reasons and sometimes altered the books because of their beliefs. And that doesn't happen very much with other ancient authors. So that would be a difference, and that'd be a place where the New Testament stuff doesn't really affect the other kinds of textual criticism that gets done.
- [38:35]
A
Wonderful, Bart, thank you so much. And before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about?
- [38:41]
B
So the topic today is, you know, arguably the. The most interesting and misunderstood and important doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity. There are Christians today, of course, who don't subscribe to the doctrine of the Trinity, but the traditional doctrine is very interesting to see how it progresses. The way it's not found in the Bible, it develops later, and it doesn't come to complete form to kind of its final crystallized form for centuries after the New Testament. But already in the second century, some, almost all Christians are calling Jesus, God. And so Christians had to decide, how could Christ be God and God be God? And eventually they thought, well, they're equal to each other. Then the Spirit is added in. You got three equal beings. But they wanted to insist there's only one God. And so we were talking about how that happened, how you end up with a doctrine that's a mystery, that doesn't really make sense, logical sense. They've got three persons, all of whom are God, and yet there's only one God.
- [39:36]
A
Thank you so much, Bart, for your time and expertise. As always, this was a fascinating conversation. Audius, thank you so much 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 also that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barturman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Barth, what are we talking about next time?
- [40:01]
B
Right, so next time we're going to have kind of a logical follow up for these last two episodes we've had. We had one on Constantine's conversion, one on the development of the Trinity. And the question we're going to be dealing with is how did Christianity take over the Roman Empire? Because it's connected with both of these things. And it's inherently an interesting question for me because it looks like according to the New Testament, Christianity started out. We have a very small group of people who believe Jesus got raised from the dead. 11 disciples, a handful of women say 20 people believe this at first, and within 300 years there are 2 or 3 million of them. And by the end of the 4th century, it's 30 million. How'd that happen? That doesn't happen every day. And literally, how did it happen? That's what we were talking about.
- [40:48]
A
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.