Where Was Christianity on its 100th Birthday?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Where Was Christianity on its 100th Birthday?

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman | Episode 100 | September 17, 2024
Hosts: Bart Ehrman, Megan Lewis

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Episode Overview

In celebration of their 100th episode, Bart Ehrman and Megan Lewis explore the state of Christianity exactly 100 years after the death of Jesus, circa 130 CE. They analyze how Christianity had grown, diversified, and evolved from its origins as a small Jewish sect to a multifaceted movement within the Roman Empire—while remaining a tiny minority. The episode delves into beliefs, practices, geographical spread, early church writings, internal diversity, and the reality of persecution at this dynamic point in Christian history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The Roman World in 130 CE

[03:50]

• The eastern Mediterranean—including Judea, Galilee, Syria, and beyond—remained under Roman rule.
• By this time, the Roman Empire was stable, entering its period of “good emperors” (e.g., Hadrian, Antoninus Pius).
• Roman sources from this era (e.g., Suetonius, Plutarch, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger) provide substantial documentation, though primarily from a non-Christian perspective.

Quote:

“From a point of view of Roman imperial history ... it’s one of the best times probably in the Roman Empire."
—Bart Ehrman [04:40]

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2. Christian Sources After the New Testament

[06:18]

• The New Testament writings wrapped up just before or around 120 CE.
• New Christian writings now included letters, treatises, apocalypses, non-canonical gospels, and works attributed (falsely) to apostles—key among these:
  • Apostolic Fathers (e.g., Letter of Barnabas, Didache)
  • Non-canonical texts: Gospel of Peter, Apocalypse of Peter
  • These provide insight into a rapidly diversifying Christianity.

Quote:

“You take a book like, say, the Gospel of Peter ... they help us understand what Christianity is doing at this period.”
—Bart Ehrman [08:10]

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3. Diversity and Theological Disagreements

[12:06], [14:10]

• Christianity was far from unified; early diversity exploded by 130 CE.
• Groups ranged from Jewish Christians insisting on Torah observance to radical innovators like Marcion, who rejected the Jewish God entirely.
• Gnostics introduced further theological variance.
• Even among "Proto-Orthodox" Christians, there were disputes about doctrines like the millennium (literal vs. metaphorical).

Quote:

“By the year 130, you start finding these Christian groups that believe things ... that today most Christians would say, well, that just ain’t Christian.”
—Bart Ehrman [13:23]

Quote:

“This is, I think, when the diversity really starts to explode within Christianity. That doesn’t get tamed until later.”
—Bart Ehrman [13:55]

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4. Numbers and Geography: How Big Was Christianity?

[16:29], [18:15]

• Estimated 20,000–30,000 Christians out of 60 million in the Roman Empire.
• Christian communities scattered around the eastern Mediterranean—Judea, Syria, Asia Minor (Turkey), Greece, Rome, North Africa, Egypt.
• Predominantly urban; rural populations remained largely untouched.

Quote:

“Most people in the Roman Empire have never even heard of Christianity at this time, let alone rejected it.”
—Bart Ehrman [17:33]

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5. Apocalyptic Expectations: Fading But Present

[20:01]

• Apocalypticism (the belief in the imminent end of the world) persisted but was fading.
• Some branches continued to expect a literal millennium; others reinterpreted these predictions.
• Proto-Orthodox Christians debated whether end-time prophecies should be taken literally or metaphorically.

Quote:

“This apocalyptic view ... has never died out.”
—Bart Ehrman [20:16]

Quote:

“Within that [Proto-Orthodox] group ... there are Christians who are still saying there's going to be a literal millennium ... and others who say ... you're completely misunderstanding it.”
—Bart Ehrman [21:20]

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6. Persecution: Myth and Reality

[22:25]

• No widespread, empire-wide persecution at this time.
• Early persecutions were local and sporadic (e.g., Nero in Rome post-fire of 64 CE; Pliny in Bithynia around 112 CE with Trajan’s approval).
• The myth of constant dire persecution emerges more in later Christian retellings and in apocalyptic literature like Revelation.

Quote:

“The major persecutions against Christians were actually later phenomena ... Christianity wasn't a big enough deal for much of anybody to worry about.”
—Bart Ehrman [22:38]

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7. Shared Practices and Surprises: What Was 'Christian'

[25:03]

• Proto-Orthodox groups recognizable: one God, Jesus as Son of God, death and resurrection, baptism, Eucharist, worship gatherings with leaders.
• Key difference: No church buildings; worship in homes, sometimes outdoor spaces like cemeteries.
• Other religious groups didn’t usually have weekly worship spaces; Jewish synagogues were more of a model than pagan temples.

Quote:

“These basic kind of rubrics are there in most of the communities ... so they'd be recognizable to that extent. ... There weren't church buildings yet.”
—Bart Ehrman [25:34]

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8. Would Jesus Have Recognized His Movement?

[29:00]

• Ehrman speculates Jesus would be shocked, perhaps repulsed, by the changes: being worshipped as divine, Eucharistic rituals, Gentile dominance, and reinterpretations of Jewish scripture.
• The only group he might recognize: Jewish Christians who kept the Law and saw him as Messiah, but even they had views (e.g., of his divinity) Jesus likely never endorsed.

Quote:

"I think Jesus himself would have been repulsed by that idea. He didn't understand himself to be a divine being ... I think Jesus would have been completely astounded at what had happened 100 years later."
—Bart Ehrman [29:54]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you took a time machine ... to the year 130 ... you'd be pretty amazed at how different places are.”
  —Bart Ehrman [13:38]

• “Christianity is not making big inroads into the rural areas ... 80 to 90% of the empire was rural.”
  —Bart Ehrman [19:02]

• “It wasn't weird for the Christians not to have [buildings] ... What was more weird in the pagan view was that these people would get together every week.”
  —Bart Ehrman [28:25]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:29–03:42 – Introduction, Bart’s background in the period, and sources for Roman history
• 06:18–08:34 – Christian writings after the New Testament
• 12:06–16:19 – Early Christian diversity and particular groups
• 16:29–20:01 – Christian population and geographical distribution
• 20:01–22:25 – Fading but persistent apocalyptic beliefs
• 22:25–24:47 – Persecution, myth vs. reality
• 25:03–27:05 – How ancient Christianity would look (and not look) familiar to modern Christians
• 29:00–30:20 – Would Jesus recognize or approve of this 130 CE Christianity?
• 33:48–43:34 – Listener questions: NT truth, Jesus’ marital status, "we" passages in Acts, persecution under Nero, Gospel of Thomas vs Q

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Listener Questions: Highlights and Responses

• Is asking if the New Testament 'is true' like asking if the US Constitution is true?
  — “Genre matters a lot, and truth is not an easy thing ... depends on what you mean.” [34:24]

• Was Jesus married?
  — No evidence he was; no rule he needed to be. Cites historical and social reasoning. [36:25]

• Are 'we' passages in Acts eyewitness testimony?
  — Possibly a literary device to claim authority; not actual diary entries. [38:32]

• Nero and persecution in Revelation:
  — Revelation exaggerates; no mass martyrdom in Nero’s time. [41:09]

• Is Q the same as the Gospel of Thomas?
  — No; different content, dates, theological perspective. [42:34]

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Closing Summary

[43:38]

• Christianity 100 years after Jesus was surprisingly diverse, urban, and small in numbers.
• Doctrines and practices were in flux; differing branches held beliefs that would later be deemed heretical.
• The foundation for what became orthodox Christianity was only beginning to emerge from this milieu of competing ideas.
• Jesus himself would likely have been bewildered by much that passed for Christianity in 130 CE.

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Next Episode Preview

Bart and Megan will discuss “Reincarnation—Is it possible to be a Christian and believe in reincarnation? Is there such a thing as Christian views of reincarnation?”

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End of Summary

Transcript

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[Megan Lewis]

Welcome everyone to a very special episode of misquoting Jesus. Our 100th episode in keeping with our centesimal celebration. Yes, I absolutely had to look that word up. We're going to be exploring the world of Christianity 100 years after Jesus death. Was Christianity still a small persecuted offshoot of apocalyptic Judaism or had it spread far and wide? Was it still an apocalyptic religion at all? The and what theological disagreements had occurred in this time frame? I have the questions and Bart, as always, has the ANSWERS.

[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. Let's begin.

[Megan Lewis]

Today we're taking a look at the state of Christianity 100 years after the death of Jesus and asking the key questions for any historical discussion. What do we know and how do we know it? We're going to get into how Christianity looked 100 years after Jesus death, especially when compared to the small grouping of apocalyptic radicals that he had led before we get into all of that. Bart, how are you doing today?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I'm doing well, thanks. Just got back from a cruise with a group of people who are interested in the kinds of things we do on the podcast and on my blog and cruise to Western Europe. Man, was that good. Yeah. So I really like these kinds of cruises because you spend, you know, I spend 10 days with these people, you know, 20, 25 people and we just talk and I give lectures and we have common cause and we see amazing things. How was your time on Skye?

[Megan Lewis]

It was lovely. It was really lovely. It was traditional Scottish weather, so some brilliant sunshine and, and a lot of rain. But that actually suits me quite well. I miss, this is very odd. I miss cold rainy days. We don't get a lot of them here in Maryland, so that was food for the soul, really. And I got to see my parents and all of my siblings and all of my nephews and nieces who are numerous and small and hilarious. So yes, it was a lovely time we all had lots of fun.

[Bart Ehrman]

Fantastic.

[Megan Lewis]

So I wanted to ask, before we start the more academic portion of our interview today, is, is Christianity 100 years after Jesus death something that you've dealt with before? Is it something that comes up a lot in lectures?

[Bart Ehrman]

Actually, the answer is yes. But if you had asked me that 40 years ago, the answer would be no. When I got into this business, I was really interested in the New Testament. Basically, I was interested in the first century of Christianity, and I knew very little about other things. I knew about what happens during the New Testament period, and then I knew something about the Council of Nicaea. I knew a little bit about the Middle Ages, a little bit about the Reformation. But the period right after the New Testament was not really a long suit for me. I started getting interested in graduate school, maybe doing my PhD, and then I became really interested. And now, in many ways, I mean, my PhD courses tend to be more on the second and third Christian centuries than on the New Testament. It's an area of ongoing, very serious research interest of mine for. Well, I guess for 40 years now. 30 or 40 years, yeah.

[Megan Lewis]

So kind of in that vein, what was the eastern Mediterranean like 100 years after Jesus death? What was the political situation? What was going on?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, so Jesus dies in Israel, which is obviously to the east of the Mediterranean Sea. And they're a whole. This is all part of the Roman Empire at the time. 100 years later, it's still part of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire itself has developed in many ways, but the basic structure is very much like it was in the days of Jesus. It's still a big empire ruled by an emperor. Jesus was born during the first emperor. Caesar Augustus was the emperor, and he was crucified under the rule of the second emperor, Tiberius. When you get to a hundred years later, we're up to Emperor number 14. Now, some of them have been good emperors in terms of, from a Roman perspective, a Roman Empire perspective. And some of them have been quite awful from a widespread perspective at the time. I mean, starting with Caligula, including Nero, there have been some hard times in the empire. But by the time 100 years later, where you have a sequence of emperors who are coming in that are going to be good emperors. And so the second century, from a point of view of Roman imperial history, in terms of, like, how happy people are in the world, in the Roman world, it's one of the best times probably in the Roman Empire.

[Megan Lewis]

Now, obviously, we have a lot of sources for the Roman Empire in general. What kinds of Sources did we rely on for this time period in this particular geographical location?

[Bart Ehrman]

This whole period is pretty well documented from Roman sources. We have authors writing just before this time, you know, authors that people may have heard their names, like people like Suetonius, who is a biographer, Plutarch, also a biographer, Tacitus, who's a historian who write histories and biographies of important people almost up to this period. And we have personal letters from during later in this period. Pliny the Younger writes a bunch of letters to the Emperor Trajan. And later we start getting historians who are covering the second century. And so we have the rules of emperor emperors like, like Hadrian or Antoninus Pius and later Marcus really is later in the century. We have really good records for these things. And so, you know, we don't have nearly as much information as we'd like, but we have pretty good information. If you want to kind of go back to the ancient world, this is one of the better documented periods from the pagan Roman point of view.

[Megan Lewis]

How about then for Christianity in this time period? Had Christians started the kind of prolific writings that we see in later on? Or is it still kind of small and a bit sparse?

[Bart Ehrman]

This is actually the reason I first got interested in the topic, because I became interested in the writings after the New Testament. Today, probably most scholars think that the final books of the New Testament were written about the year 120 or so. Usually second Peter is dated to the year 120 or so right around there. Probably not written, but not written by Peter, who had been dead for decades by this time. But and now for the last 30 years, there's been this kind of movement to date the Book of acts to around 120. I'm not sure I agree with that one, but it's a view widely held. So now we're Talking about like 10 years after all the books of the New Testament were basically finished. And we do have writers who are producing writings at this time. My first interest in this was because of a group of writers called the Apostolic Fathers who range in date from probably around the year 100 and all the way through the second century. They're called the Apostolic Fathers not because they were apostles of Jesus, but because in legend and tradition, these were authors who were said to have known the apostles. And so they're the first Church Fathers, and so they call them the Apostolic Fathers. And there are people like Ignatius of Antioch, for example, who's writing about 20 years before this period. But then you have a Letter of Barnabas probably written around the year 135 or so. And so we have a number of writings from Christians from this period that are sort of non fiction writings, you know, writings to churches and writings of treatises and so letters and treatises and apocalypses appear in this period that we have. So a number of non canonical books, including Gospels and apocalypses and epistles, many of which claim to be written by apostles, by Peter and Paul or whoever, but absolutely were not. So if we can date these books, so you take a book like say the Gospel of Peter, or you take a book like the Apocalypse of Peter, they're written right around this time. They're very helpful not to know what Peter himself would have said decades earlier, but they help us understand what Christianity is doing at this period. And you get to see a lot about different developments within Christianity. Part of the real interest of this is that the way Christianity is developing is very different from what people think of as Christianity today and in many ways different from what's going on in the New Testament period.

[Megan Lewis]

And we'll get into all of that very shortly. We'll be right back.

[Bart Ehrman]

I'm Bart Ehrman and I'd like to announce a new conference this coming September. A conference to promote biblical knowledge among those who are not scholars. We did a conference last year called New Insights into the New Testament, a biblical conference for non scholars, and our topic was the Gospels. This conference was a huge success and so we've made it an annual event. But this year we've added some exciting new features besides the talks and the Q&As. As I'll be explaining in a minute, our theme this year is Paul and his Letters. The conference will involve 10 scholars, each of whom will be giving a lecture with Q and A to follow and much more. To find out more about the conference, you can go to www.barturman.com. i want to say I couldn't be more excited about this particular conference. Next to Jesus, Paul is the most important figure in the history of Christianity, but he's widely misunderstood by the general public, but also among many scholars, many of us. These lectures will not be at a technical, scholarly level, but they will be addressing key issues in the understanding of Paul. And many of them will be presenting views that even scholarship could learn from. We have a fantastic lineup of internationally known scholars. All of them are superb presenters to non scholarly audiences. Some of these talks will be presenting alternative understandings to Paul that is alternative to what most of us have long thought and even taught. Well, as you can see, this is it's Quite a lineup with very interesting topics and superb scholars and good speakers. There are other features and benefits besides each lecture with Q and A that

will go over the course of two days. Days.

Everybody who signs up will have access to a pre event attendee mixer. Everyone will have immediate access to the Historical Paul course which will act as a kind of a prequel to the event. This is a course that I myself did. I did a 50 minute lecture with Q A. Everybody will get that automatically even before

the conference for free.

Everybody will get lifetime access to all

of the event recordings.

So when you you come to the conference, you'll get the entire conference as a recording for life. The event passes to join the conference will be only $99 for all of this. And there are other additional options that you can, you can get. We're going to have some scholars meet in a VIP mixer with those who want to come. We're going to have an exciting roundtable discussion among the panelists. After the conference we're going to have a hot topic discussion between two of them. They're going to be dealing with a particularly hot topic not dealt with in the conference itself. After the event you'll get more details about all this and the entire conference if you go to the conference page. I realized last year when we did this thing that there's nothing like this conference available. There are Bible conferences and Bible studies available for denominational groups and people of various Christian theological persuasion. There is nothing out there that is done by scholars for non scholars explaining scholarly views in understandable terms in a setting where you can watch from the comfort of your own home without any travel expenses and have lifetime access to the recordings. There's nothing like it. If you can't attend, by the way, you can still register for this and get the full lifetime access to the recordings. Well, it's a lot and I hope that you can come and join us because I think this is going to be extremely good. Again, if you want to learn more, if you want to sign up, Simply go to bart erman.com Nint N I N T I hope to see you there.

[Megan Lewis]

So you say that Christianity in this period would be very different to what we might expect. Could you talk a little about really what it looked like when I went

[Bart Ehrman]

all the way through college and then even my early years of kind of doing a master's degree, I had this kind of idea. You had early Christianity, the first century were basically, you know, there was a Christianity then. And then like everything that important mattered stopped. And it's not till the Reformation, that it kicked in again, you know, and so very Protestant point of view. Obviously, that's what I was raised in, so it was not entirely my fault, but that was my view as a graduate student. I came to realize, you know, even in the New Testament period, Christianity is hugely diverse. Just in the New Testament itself, there's all sorts of evidence for followers calling themselves followers of Jesus who believe things that are completely at odds with one another. I mean, when you read just Paul's letters, our earliest writings, Paul seems to have more enemies than friends among the Christians who think completely different things. And so that got me interested in diversity issues. When you get to the early second century. So around the year 130, you start finding these Christian groups that believe things and practice things that today most Christians would say, well, that just ain't Christian. It can be pretty wild stuff. And so this is, I think, when the diversity really starts to explode within Christianity. That doesn't get tamed until later. Later Christians ended up trying to unify themselves and trying to establish what's the right belief and what are the right practices and what are the right ethical principles. And they ended up succeeding in that to a great extent and making Christianity what we know of today, so much so that we don't think that anything else could have existed. That was different, man, if you just laugh. If you took a time machine, you landed in the year 130, and you started checking out Christian churches around the world, you'd be pretty amazed at how different places are.

[Megan Lewis]

Can you give us some examples of some of the different groups and their beliefs that we would have seen?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, by the year 130, you have a number of groups with just. Almost just radically different views. I mean, for example, you know, Jesus started out, Jesus and his followers were Jewish, and they maintained their Jewish practices and beliefs, and they. They were Jews. Even after Jesus death, his immediate followers, the disciples, were still Jews. They didn't give up on their Judaism. And by the year 130, there are groups of Christians, followers of Jesus, who continue to insist that if you're a follower of Jesus, then you have to follow the Jewish law. And it means if you're male, you have to have circumcision. If you're not, if you're born pagan, you got to get circumcised and you have to keep kosher and you have to follow the festivals and you have to keep the Sabbath and you have to be Jewish, you keep the Hebrew Bible, and that's it. And the. Some of these groups thought that the apostle Paul was the enemy of the faith because he taught that a person is made right with God apart from the law. And they thought that was just dead wrong. And they had different gospels from the ones that are in the New Testament. These were Jews who understood that Jesus was Messiah. On the other extreme, you have people who are already saying that in fact, Christianity is a completely different religion from Judaism. So much so that the Christian God is not the Jewish God and that the Hebrew Bible is not Christian scripture. So it wasn't long, much after the year 130that were this, this fellow Marcion came along and argued that in fact there are two, literally two gods. And the God of Jesus came to save people from the God of the Jews. They also have authoritative books for them. Paul's the hero instead of the enemy. And these gospels that the Jewish Christians have are the ones that are heretical gospels and these gospels are anti Jewish gospel. And so. And then you have other groups of Gnostics coming along at this time which are believing different things from both of these groups. The reality is there are so many different groups even know how to categorize the period. Because even though we have great documentation, relatively great documentation for the Roman Empire as a political and social and cultural phenomenon, we don't have great documentation for these Christian groups. We get some things, and when you read these some things, you think, wow, these are different from each other.

[Megan Lewis]

Can we estimate, regardless of which particular group they belonged to, how many people would have called themselves Christian? Or do we just not have the data for it?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, we don't have hard data, but we do have some ways of coming up with rough calculations. I got really interested in this. I wrote a book published a few years ago called the Triumph of Christianity. And I got really interested in the question that I had never thought about calculating before. Like how many Christians were there in the days of Paul? You know, when Paul's writing his letters, say around the year 60, 55 or 60, actually, how many Christians in the world were there when you reach the year 100, how many Christians are there? When you get to Constantine constantly, how many Christians are? And I got interested in this and there were. And I found that there were people who had made estimates. And my book of Triumph of Christianity, I went really deep into it to try and figure it out. And so I won't go into all that here, but I will say that around this time around the year 130, it looks like there are probably maybe something like 20 to 30,000 Christians in the world. And they're all in the Roman Empire, virtually all in the Roman empire. So 20 to 30,000 Christians in an empire of 60 million. And so we're not talking about a huge threat to the Roman existence at this point. It's not like the Roman emperors are kind of quaking in their boots about these Christians. They're like, you know, 30,000 of them. Most people in the Roman Empire have never even heard of Christianity at this time, let alone rejected it. But these 30,000 are growing, and they're growing at a rate that in another 200 years they're going to be a major part of the empire. And in 300 years, they're going to be the dominant religion of the empire. And so it's on its way. But at this point, it's still a relatively small group.

[Megan Lewis]

Now, were these 30,000 mostly concentrated in the same area, or do we have kind of pockets throughout the empire?

[Bart Ehrman]

We have pockets that we know about and other pockets that we suspect. You know, Christianity started out in Judea, in Jerusalem. Jerusalem. And it spread up into north of that, into Samaria and up into Galilee. We know of Christians up in Antioch, in Syria. And so it kind of spreads north and then it tends to go west from there. And so it spreads into what is now Turkey, which was then Asia Minor. That's where Paul did a lot of his missionary work. It spread over to Macedonia and Achaia, which are modern Greece. Again, Paul worked there. Paul's mission was to go to Spain in the late 50s. We don't know if he ever made it or not. Probably not, but we don't know for sure. But we have good evidence that there were by the year 130, that there are absolutely there are Christians throughout these regions that I've mentioned. So what's now you think of as Israel and Palestinian territories and up into Syria and into Turkey and into Greece and into Rome. There are definitely Christians in Italy, a large church in Rome, but also in other places throughout Italy, possibly as far as Spain, down into North Africa, and certainly in Alexandria, Egypt. And so if you kind of go around the Mediterranean, the regions that are fairly closely attached to Mediterranean, so southern Europe, heading east, and northern Africa, you've got Christian communities. And these communities tend to be urban still at this point. In other words, Christianity is not making big inroads into the rural areas. And that's important to notice for the reason that at this time, 80 to 90% of the empire was rural. So the vast majority of people lived in rural areas and the vast majority of Them had never been touched by Christianity. So this is an urban phenomenon still at this point, by and large.

[Megan Lewis]

Now, were any of these communities or different religious groups still taking the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus literally? Or had everyone kind of moved away from that as the end of the world had not actually happened as predicted?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, it's a very interesting transitional period in some ways. I would say that actually this apocalyptic view that Jesus propounded and that his disciples held, that Paul held in some ways has never died out. I mean, certainly hasn't died out. Today people think, man, the world's coming to an end and every time there's a war or a recession or an epidemic, no, this is the sign of the end. And it's just pure apocalyptic thinking. And so that's always been on the margins. And it was on the margins back then as well. And throughout history it can be shown to have been there, but it was fading out, but it wasn't gone yet. There were still groups of many groups of Christians who continued to think that the end was coming soon. And we know of these, we have writings by some of them. It became a big bone of contention within Christianity. So even, you know, apart from those Jewish Christians I've mentioned and the followers of Marcion I mentioned and the various Gnostic groups that I mentioned, you have this group of Christians that today are commonly called Proto Orthodox Christians. They're called Proto Orthodox because these are Christians and Christian churches and Christian leaders that are holding to the views that eventually came to wipe out the others. They didn't completely get rid of the Gnostics or completely get rid of the Marcionites and things. But by the end of the third century pretty much those were really on the margins. And these are people who held these views that became Orthodox, say at the Council of Nicaea. And within that group there are lots of disputes where they admit that they're, you know, they basically have everything, right. But there are Christians who are still saying that there's going to be a literal millennium and that Jesus is coming back and there's going to be a thousand year reign of Christ on earth, literally. And there are other people who are saying, no, that's supposed to be taken metaphorically. And if you take it literally, you're completely misunderstanding it. So you're having disputes about that. And we have writings by people who take the sides, you know, including I mentioned this book that is called the Letter of Barnabas and Apostolic Fathers. And there's another one called the Didache that was around, floating around at this time, which clearly seemed to presuppose there is going to be a literal millennium on earth.

[Megan Lewis]

Now, Christianity was obviously not the main religion of the empire yet and wouldn't be for a couple of hundred years. Were Christians being persecuted or were they generally being left to their own devices?

[Bart Ehrman]

So the major persecutions against Christians were actually later phenomena, later than this, in part because Christianity wasn't a big enough deal for much of anybody to worry about. But persecution started early on within the Christian movement. I mean, Jesus himself was martyred and some of his followers were martyred. And you have clear evidence of persecution in the New Testament in the book of Acts, but also in books like two Peter and one Peter and other places in these cases in the New Testament period. The vast majority of the persecutions are local and sporadic. There's no organized persecution against Christians in the first century. The first time an emperor gets involved with persecution is the Emperor Nero, whom I mentioned earlier, who was not out to persecute Christians per se, but needed a scapegoat to put the blame on for the fire that happened in Rome in the year 64. There was this big fire, burned down a huge portion of the city and many inhabitants who'd been burned out of house and home thought that Nero had ordered the fire so that he could implement some of his own architectural designs for the city. They blamed him. So he had to find somebody and he knew everybody hated these Christians and the Christians were known to hate everybody else. And so he's rounded them up in Rome. But so this is a local persecution within Rome, but it's the first time that an emperor got involved. Outside of that, you don't have much imperial involvement. But in the early second century, starting well, actually around the year 112, you have another case where a Roman official, this time in what's now northwest Turkey, in the regions of Pontus and Bithynia, where Pliny the Younger persecuted Christians with the authorization of the Emperor Trajan. And so around 130, what we're dealing with is a case where in some places Christians are seen as troublemakers. They're recognized as not worshiping the Roman gods and that's seen as a social and political threat. And so in some times and places they're being persecuted, but there's no empire wide persecution yet and won't be for another, for over 100 more years.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Now, we've talked already about how this early Christianity was different or unrecognizable to what we may expect. Were there ways in which it was similar? Is There anything there that we might recognize if we got in a time machine as being Christian?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, more so in some groups than others. I think today most Christians who would take the time machine back into some kind of a Gnostic group would have trouble getting their minds around it. Or into a Marcionite group that didn't even accept the Old Testament at all, or thought that there were literally two gods, but there would be same things in common with them as well, with the Proto Orthodox. I don't know that the majority of Christians were Proto Orthodox at the time. That's the usual narrative among scholars, but it's somewhat debated. The reason it's debated is because our sources of information almost exclusively come from the winning group. Because the winners not only write the history, they copy the books. And so if you got a book written by somebody on the other side, you just don't bother to copy it. And so it disappears. So we don't have it anymore. So God knows what we don't have anymore. But the side that we know most about, the proto Orthodox side, you know, they believe that there's only one God, he's the creator of the world, that Jesus is his Son, who died for the sins of the world, who was crucified by Pontius Pilate, was raised from the dead, ascended to heaven, who sent the Spirit, and in fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible. And you kind of go down the line, these basic doctrines are there. They practice baptism, they have the Eucharist meal, and they've got a hierarchy at this time. They've got church leaders. And so churches are gathered together with somebody who's leading the worship and the worship service. They pray and they read scripture, and they discuss scripture and they discuss their beliefs, and they encourage each other in their practices, and they pray for each other. So these basic kind of rubrics are there in most of the communities, probably, and so they'd be recognizable to that extent. Among the huge differences that people may not expect. There weren't church buildings yet. Worship was happening in homes. We don't have any evidence of an actual building used for Christian purposes for another 120 years or so, 130 years. There are things similar and things different.

[Megan Lewis]

Was the lack of a church building unusual in the ancient world? I know that household religion was definitely a thing for most pagan cultures. And obviously Jewish people had temples. Were there other religions that hadn't yet formed, like communal worship spaces?

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, I'd say most religions didn't have anything like we would think of as buildings to meet in regularly for Fellowship. And it's because in the pagan religions, they weren't scheduled for weekly meetings to get together and pray together and have community together. The worship really involved having sacrifices and having cultic feast festivities at certain points in time. And they were not communal efforts in the sense that we think of as, like, people sharing their views and having common cause. And it's really people coming together for a sacrifice or for a festival. And so there were temples. There were temples everywhere. But the temples were not gathering places for people on a. Except to gather to observe a sacrifice. And they'd have dining rooms where you could have eat in there. But they weren't places of worship the way the Jewish synagogues were. The synagogues were actually places of worship that are more like the forerunners of Christian churches, where there were actual buildings that were designed for worship, where people would meet every week in order to go through a kind of set liturgy. It'd be the synagogues that are really more the forerunners. Most pagans just didn't have something like that. And so it wasn't weird for the Christians not to have something like that. What was more weird in the pagan view was that these people would get together every week and they'd be in a home or in outdoor spaces, often in cemeteries, because they were big, nice places and they would worship together. That was an oddity.

[Megan Lewis]

Now, my final question for this week. If you had to guess, obviously we don't know, how do you think Jesus would have felt about what his movement had become 100 years after his death?

[Bart Ehrman]

Wow. Yeah. That's a good question. Well, I don't think he would have much recognized it. He would have recognized these groups of Jewish Christians who continued to keep the Torah and understood that he was the Messiah. There would be parts of their worship he would not understand. He would not understand that even these groups believed that he'd become a divine being. I think that would have just absolutely stunned him. And what's going on in most of the Christian world at this time is the large majority of people at this point have converted to Christianity from paganism. They're originally Gentiles. They don't keep the law. They not sure what to make of the Hebrew Bible, most of them, except that it predicts Jesus. And I don't think Jesus thought the Hebrew Bible predicted Jesus. That would have been strange to him. But just about everything the religion would have been strange from considering him to be a divine being who was to be worshiped. I think Jesus himself would have been repulsed by that idea. He didn't understand himself to be a divine being. He was preaching God and he thought the kingdom of God was coming. He didn't think the world would be around for another hundred years. The world that he knew, let alone the people, would be worshiping him and having this Eucharist service where they talk about eating his body and drinking his blood. I think that would have been completely I think Jesus would have been completely astounded at what had happened 100 years later.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much. We are going to go on a brief break, then we'll be back with some updates and also some listeners questions.

[Bart Ehrman (Weekly Update Host)]

This is Barth'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.

[Megan Lewis]

So this week, for those of you who have not yet signed up, is your last chance to sign up and attend the New Insights in the New Testament Conference. This is entirely online. It's very exciting. We did it last year as well. This year we're focusing on the life and letters of of Paul. And I know Paul always gets a big response when we do podcast episodes about him. So I'm pretty sure this one's going to be absolutely amazing. But it is, as I said, a live event on the 21st and 22nd of September. Now, similar virtual conferences will go for 150 to $200 minimum for tickets. We've unfortunately ended the early bird sales. But you can just buy a standard ticket for a whole $99. And if you want to use the MJ podcast code, that will give you a and you can sign [e-mail] Nint and I'm going to hand over to Bart to talk a little bit about this because it sounds amazing. He's excited, I'm excited. Everyone's excited.

[Bart Ehrman]

We're very excited. You're right. When we do podcasts on Paul or when I write blog posts on Paul, Paul has extraordinary high, a lot of extraordinary interest in what Paul had to say and do. And these are in addition to me, there are nine speakers who are are some of the top Pauline scholars in the world who are each taking topics. So we're not going to be covering like everything, but every topic is really interesting. We vetted these to make sure, yeah, this is something people want to hear. And some of it is I'm going to learn from some of this because there are some topics here that are really interesting. I haven't thought that much about myself and others I've thought a lot about that. I just know are great and these presenters are great. So like anyone with an interest in New Testament early Christianity, you know, even apart from Paul himself, this is really going to be a good one. I hope people can come. You're really going to get a lot for it too because we're doing a lot more additional things where you're going to have chances to meet with the scholars outside of they're giving their talks and we're going to have a roundtable discussions among the scholars and there's going to be a couple almost point counterpoint things between a couple of scholars. It's going to be a major event and so I hope you people can sign up.

[Megan Lewis]

And for people who can't attend on the 21st and 22nd, you do get lifetime access to all of the recordings. They're nicely edited so you won't have to sit through any like fumbling or ums and ahs. So you, if you can't attend, this is still I think worth doing because you, you get the recordings to really watch whenever you want and honestly as many times as you want. Because if you're like me, you need to watch something or listen to something a good two or three times minimum before it starts to penetrate the inner layer of my brain. So I really value that ability to go back and rewatch things. We are going to switch over now to some listeners questions.

[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 visit barterman.com askbart

[Megan Lewis]

okay, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 fantastic listeners questions. If I can count, I may have miscounted. I think there are five of them. First up, do you agree that asking if the New Testament is true is a bit like asking if the US Constitution is true? It's not really if you're looking for statements of fact, but maybe if you're asking if it accurately represents what what the thinking of the Congress at the time that it was written. In the same way, the New Testament is a fair representation of what orthodox Christian bishops believed when these documents were canonized as scripture, but might not be actual historical fact.

[Bart Ehrman]

Yeah, it's an interesting analogy. I had never quite thought about it that way before. I think the issue with the New Testament has to do with the genres that are represented in it. A constitution is a kind of writing that is prescriptive for how a country is to be organized and run. And the New Testament isn't like that. The New Testament begins with four narratives and, you know, stories about a historical figure. Just the genre is different, and so readers have different expectations of that genre. And the writer who's producing the writing expects the readers to have different expectations, and he or she writes in accordance with those expectations. Then you get another historical account in the Book of Acts. Then you get letters. I mean, personal letters or letters being written into churches. Then you have an apocalypse. Since the genres are so different, I'm not sure that you can say it's just like the Constitution. I would say that, you know, asking if it's true, if the New Testament is true is a very tricky, tricky question, because it depends on what you mean by true. Many people think all that means is historically accurate. And that's both too much for what it could mean and too little for what it could mean. Because historical accuracy isn't just, you know, there are lots of things that are true that aren't historically accurate in the sense mathematical equations aren't historically accurate. They're mathematically accurate. And poems are beautiful not because of historical accuracy, because they're good poems. And so the genre matters a lot. And truth is not an easy thing, whether you can say, like, there's one thing, one way that something is true. And so when people say the New Testament is true, they might mean a variety of things by it. And you have to look at each way they mean it and to evaluate whether in fact it's correct or not.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Now, forgetting Dan Brown, what is the historical evidence that Jesus was never married? Joseph fulfilled the first two injunctions of a Jesus, a Jewish father, to circumcise your son and to teach him a trade. So why wouldn't he have done the third, which was to get Jesus a wife?

[Bart Ehrman]

Well, I'm not sure that those are Jewish injunctions. I'm not sure what. What the questioner has in mind in terms of. I think he's. He's absolutely right. We should forget Dan Brown. He or she who asked the question may know. I wrote a book actually called Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinc Code, which is entirely. I was one of the 689 people to write books about the Da Vinci Code, but mine was somewhat different because mine was actually dealing with historical accuracy issues. And I just went through this whole thing and just showed, oh, my God. Whatever you think of the novel, whether you loved it or not, there's so many historical mistakes in it. So one of the things I deal with in my book Is this question of was Jesus married or not? And it's not that there were Jewish rules that men had to be married, married, or let, alone laws that they had to be married. And if you just think about it in a sociological perspective, how could every Jewish man be married? If you just think in terms of demographics, whenever there's a population group that is not involved in a war, there will always be more men than women because the men are not dying in war and women are dying in childbirth, especially in the ancient world. So more women die than men. So if you have more men than women, how can every man be married? See, it doesn't. Just on a pure sociological point of view, it doesn't make sense. Plus, we know of numerous Jews from this period, Jewish men who were not married. And interestingly, the ones we know about were apocalypticists who thought that the end of the age was coming soon. The people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, there were sects of Essenes that were completely. Who were celibate. The Apostle Paul was single and celibate. What's the evidence that Jesus wasn't? Well, it would take a long time to give it, but there's really pretty good evidence that I cite in my book that Jesus probably was not married. And there was no expectation. I can say this for sure. There's no expectation that he had to be married.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you very much. Acts 16:10 to 17 suddenly start saying, we did this and we did that. When? Before and after. It's in the third person. Does that mean that the writer of Acts was with Paul on his tr.

[Bart Ehrman]

True. So this is the first passage in Acts out of four in Acts where the author begins to speak in the first person plural. Scholars have called these passages the we passages in Acts because the author now saying, we did this, we did that, instead of Paul did this and his companions did that. It's we all of a sudden. And the questioner's right, it shows up abruptly and it ends abruptly. There's nothing like, then I joined them and we did this, you know, and then I decided to leave. But they did that. It's nothing like that. It's just all of a sudden it's we. Historically, traditionally, these passages have been taken to mean what the questioner has asked, that the author, at these points in the narrative, has joined Paul and his group and participated with them. In my book Forged, I try to argue why that's wrong, try to show why that's probably wrong, that there are very good reasons for thinking this author was not personally associated with Pa Paul in his ministry when I was in graduate school. The more common explanation is that the author had access to an itinerary that had been kept by one of Paul's companions, a fragmentary travelogue of sorts. And when he could, he inserted the travelogue. And I found that persuasive for a long time. But when I looked deeply into it, I started realizing the problems that it too had. My view of this is, is that this authority author is using a device that is common in the ancient world to try to show that you are an eyewitness to an event by simply injecting passages where you speak in the first person. And then people just naturally assume, well, at this point, this author was with them. And that would make the author of Acts an eyewitness to some of Paul's ministry. Many people object to that view by saying, well, if he wanted to claim he's an eyewitness, he would have done a lot more than that. I mean, if you want to be successful at doing this, you know, you'd really kind of go all out to make a claim for yourself. My response is he'd be more successful if he did it that way. How much more successful could he have been for the last 2000 years? Everybody thinks that he's an eyewitness who went along with Paul. There's no way he could be more effective. And so it was more clever, maybe, but it wouldn't be more effective. So, anyway, yes, it's an important question, and I deal with it in my book Forged.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Now, we talked a little bit about this during the episode today. When we're talking about the persecutions of Christians under Nero, you depict it on a small scale, limited to the city of Rome. How do you square this with the depiction of Nero and the Roman Empire within the Book of Revelation?

[Bart Ehrman]

That's a very good question. Nero is an enemy of the Christians in the Book of Revelation. Not only there, but especially in the Book of Revelation, he is guilty of sacrificing, killing Christians, martyring Christians. The author of Revelation seems to think that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of these in the days of Nero. There were not thousands and thousands of Christians in Rome or actually in the world, as we were saying earlier. There weren't that many. And so Revelation is exaggerating the extent of the violence. This is very common within Christianity to exaggerate the numbers, just as it's common today for politicians to exaggerate their crowd size, for example. And in the ancient world, you had no way of checking. Right. You didn't have photographs to see if they're telling the truth or not. And so the Christian writer tertullian, writing about 100 years after revelation, claims that there are more Christians in the world than pagans. That was. Oh, my God, he's not nowhere close on that one. But it's just, you know, so you claim a lot. And if you claim a lot, how awful your enemy is, you say, well, you know, he persecuted, he martyred millions of us. Well, no, Nero did martyr Christians. And this was remembered and it was exaggerated in the book of Revelation.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Our last question for the day, the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings of Jesus. So in my understanding, is the source Q. Is there any chance that they are one and the same?

[Bart Ehrman]

You know, I get asked this question a lot because it kind of makes sense. You know, you got this, got Thomas 114 sayings and nothing but sayings. And Q seems to be almost entirely sayings, nothing but sayings. I mean, there are a few narratives probably in Q. The reality is that Q cannot be Thomas and Thomas cannot be Q. The reason for knowing that is that there are lots of sayings in Q that are not in Thomas and lots of sayings in Thomas that are not in Q. There is overlap where sayings found in Matthew and Luke are found in Thomas, but it doesn't look like it's because it is the source for Matthew and Luke. And another reason for thinking that is that Thomas has numerous sayings that are very, very difficult, difficult to place back into the first century. Q must have been written by the year 60, at least, I would think. And some of the sayings of Thomas presuppose an understanding of the world that'd be more like Gnostic understandings around the year 120 or so. It really can't be this earlier source. Q.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you. Before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about today?

[Bart Ehrman]

Right. So this week we're celebrating the hundredth episode of the podcast. You and I have done this a hundred times, Megan, and so well done us. And we thought one way to do that would be to talk about what was happening 100 years after Jesus death. And so around the year 130, what was Christianity like? Christianity had developed a great deal by this time and had grown even more diverse than one could imagine. So we talked about the realities of Christianity at the Hundred year mark.

[Megan Lewis]

Thank you, Bart. Audience, thank you 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 mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. that includes the new insights in the New Testament Conference, which is coming up this weekend. You can use the code. It's bartllman.com 9th misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?

[Bart Ehrman]

Next week? We're talking about a topic that continues to be hot in many circles, including some Christian circles, reincarnation. Is it possible to be a Christian believe in reincarnation? Is there such a thing as Christian views of reincarnation? We're going to see. There's actually a very interesting history of that. And so yeah, next week, reincarnation.

[Megan Lewis]

It's going to be fun. Please join us then. Thank you all and good morning. Bye.

[Podcast Announcer]

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.