← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
Megan Lewis
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Bart Ehrman
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Megan Lewis
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Bart Ehrman
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Megan Lewis
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 today on Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. I'm going to be talking to Barth about exactly how the New Testament got the form we see it in today, what's called the canon, who decided it, when was it set and what exactly was left out during the conversation? I suspect we'll also touch on the non canonical Christian writings. We won't dwell on them this week, but I promise there will be episodes devoted to them in the future. So do not worry about that. We'll get back to it. But before we start, Bart, how are you doing? How's your week going?
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Bart Ehrman
My week's going great. We have a mountain house in the western part of North Carolina. It is cold and sunny and brilliant and right now it's just me and my dog and so we're having a great old time.
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Megan Lewis
That sounds delightful.
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Bart Ehrman
It's lovely. Yeah, yeah. I did want to ask you something. Not about your personal life just now per se, but you said you do this as serology stuff and could you just say like Assyria, give me some help here. Yeah, yeah.
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Megan Lewis
So it's like the, the cultures and language of ancient Mesopotamia, which is Iraq and modern Syria. What was like Babylonia, if you're familiar with the Old Testament, the Neo Assyrians are involved in the whole Mesopotamian culture spectrum.
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Bart Ehrman
Okay. So Assyria is kind of a broad term for anything having to do including Babylon.
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Megan Lewis
And Yeah, yeah, it's exactly how the field got. His name is a little bit convoluted. But when the languages in one cuneiform, which is the writing system, it's these little tiny wedges. When that was first kind of rediscovered by Western scholarship, the language was thought to be Assyrian and there is a dialect called Assyrian, but the languages are Akkadian and Sumerian, so that's where the Assyrian connection comes from. It confuses people because you say Assyria and they think maybe you're mispronouncing Syrian.
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Bart Ehrman
Yes.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah. Like, no, we're kind of. But, no, not really.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Right, right, right. Okay. No, I didn't know that about the whole. Okay, great. Glad you're hosting this, because I'm learning things already.
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Megan Lewis
Well, I'm always happy to help. Okay, so we should talk before we get into the weeds. Really? Why Testament canon an important topic of conversation?
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Bart Ehrman
You know, it's really interesting to me, just as somebody who's been in this field for a long time, I guess I've been studying the Bible for seriously for about 50 years now. And it's really interesting to me that just over the last 20 years or so, 25 years, this has become a topic of general conversation among people. When I started out teaching in the mid-80s, nobody, like Lay folk, had no questions about the canon or. Or, like, how we got it or anything. And these days, it's like the one thing people want to ask me about and think it's because, starting with Elaine Pagels, who's a professor at Princeton University, she wrote a book called the Gnostic Gospels back in the late 1970s. And people started realizing there are other books out there that were written by Christians. We got these other Gospels, and then they realized, whoa, we've got Acts, we've got letters, we've got Apocalypses. And people started realizing you got this other stuff out there. And then the natural question was, well, why do we have these 27? Then why not? Why don't we have the Gospel of Peter? You know, we've got a Gospel of James. Why isn't that in there? You know, we've got letters by Paul that are in it. Who decided that? And. And, you know, how do we know they're right? So nowadays, that is really, really is one of the most common questions that I get. It's always been interested with me. I was interested in this 50 years ago, but then all of a sudden, like, you know, hey, the world's caught up with me.
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Megan Lewis
You're on the edge of a cutting trend.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, people usually don't say that about me.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, it's not really the thing you associate with academia in general, is it?
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Bart Ehrman
No.
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Megan Lewis
So at the very, very basic level, then, when we talk about a canon, what exactly are we talking about?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, the word canon itself, it's a Greek word, canon, and it means a straight edge A straight edge can be used to. If you're into construction, you need to cut your board straight. And so the canon is what gives you the straight line for things, but it also can be used as a ruler, so it can give you how long it needs to be. And so a canon, when applies to a group of books, is the limit for the books. And so it's the circumscribed extent of the books that are in that collection. When it gets used in religious context, it also means these are the books that toe the right line. So the canon of the New Testament are the books that the church fathers decided were the authoritative scriptures, the ones that were inspired by God. It's these books and no other. And so they follow the canon and the word gets applied broadly. Of course, you have a canon of the Old Testament and you've got a canon of Shakespeare, and you've got a canon of English literature. So it's a widely used word. It basically just means a collection, but it comes from this idea of there being a straight line.
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Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you. So who worked out what should be in the New Testament canon? That seems like a very important thing.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so that's a big. It's a very big question. My first PhD seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary was with my mentor, Bruce Metzger, who was an expert on the canon. And my first PhD seminar, we spent the semester just discussing this question. And he wrote the authoritative book on it. And so it's a. It's a big question, you know, how did it happen? Happen? So I'll give you the very short story because we'll talk about more of this throughout our discussion today. And, and I think we're probably going to have a lot of episodes dealing with various aspects of this, because there's a lot into it and a lot of stuff that's really interesting. But the basic idea is that the early Christians started out with a canon of Scripture because Jesus was a Jew, his followers were Jews, and they already had their Bible. Now, the Hebrew Bible that Christians would call the Old Testament was not set in stone yet, but just about every Jew throughout the world at the time believed that the first five books of what we call the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, those five books were called the Torah, the Law. And everybody agreed those were inspired by God and were authoritative. Most Jews agreed also that there were lots of other books that were authority. Many of the prophets, for example, that you get in the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Psalms, for example, and so they had a group of books that they thought were authoritative. What ends up happening is that after Jesus death, his followers, of course, have modified their beliefs. They were Jews, and they continued to be Jews, but now they believed in the Jewish Messiah. But there were different people who were Jesus followers who had different views of his significance and the significance of his death and how one attained salvation. And how do you relate to the Jewish law now? And how do you behave as believers of Jesus as opposed to other people? And so people had different opinions, and people were writing things, and people started writing accounts of Jesus life that differ from each other. And people started writing letters explaining how you ought to behave and what you ought to believe. And sometimes they were different from each other. And it got to a point where church leaders had to say, well, which ones of these are we going to accept? Which are authoritative? And so the way it comes about is church leaders had to make decisions, and there were long debates about it that lasted for a very long time because different leaders had different opinions, because different leaders had different theologies and different beliefs and different practices and different rituals. But eventually, over a course of centuries, as it turns out, these decisions were made. It's about three or four hundred years before pretty much everybody's on the same page.
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Megan Lewis
Wow, that is a long and involved process. Then it wasn't like everyone just had a meeting one Friday afternoon and decided, so we like these ones, and we don't really like these ones, so these are the 27 we're going to keep.
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Bart Ehrman
And yeah, no, that's the surprising thing for my students here at Chapel Hill is, you know, most of them just kind of think, I think, like most people do, that the Bible descended From heaven, these 27 books descended from heaven a few weeks after Jesus died. No, no, it didn't work like that. There were long, protracted debates. And the other thing that we'll. We might be getting into more, but if not now, later is there never was a church council that decided this. There never was an official vote until way, way later. Most people today, at least in our generation, and get a lot of their understanding of Christian history from that inimitable authority, Dan Brown, in his book the Da Vinci Code.
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Megan Lewis
You mean that's not factual?
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Bart Ehrman
I tell my students, look, if you want to know about the history of the Middle Ages, don't do it by watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Do watch the movie, but that's not where you want to get your history. And if you want to get your history of early Christianity, don't read the Da Vinci. I mean, read the Da Vinci Code, but don't do it. History in the Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown says what now seems like everybody thinks that at the Council of Nicaea they decided which books would be in the New Testament. And the Council of Nicaea was in the year 325. And that's absolutely false. That's not true. We know what happened in the Council of Nicaea. We have records from what happened in the Council of Nicaea. They didn't even talk about which book should be in the news. It wasn't an issue. This is not the issue at the Council of Nicaea. And so that's completely wrong. There were later councils that stated their opinions about it, but they were never like worldwide ecumenical big councils that were the official word until the 16th century. The council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century is the first big council that actually made a decision. By then, of course, it was a done deal for the New Testament.
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Megan Lewis
What was left out then and what happens to the text that were left out?
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Bart Ehrman
Right. So that's the interesting thing. And because throughout history scholars have known that there were other books available, but for the most part we didn't have the books. We had some of them. We have a gospel, for example, that claims to be written by Jesus brother James. It's mainly about the life of Jesus mother Mary, in order to explain why she was chosen to be the one who would bear the son of God. And James Jesus brother writes this account of Mary's birth and her upbringing and her life and then the birth of Jesus. It was a popular gospel throughout the Middle Ages. It was very, very popular. In some ways it was more popular than the New Testament gospels. We know that because the artwork, if you look at medieval artwork, scenes from this proto Gospel of James, as it's called, are everywhere in medieval art. So we knew of sun books, but most of the books we know about now that we actually have have been fairly recent discoveries, including for example, a Gospel of Peter that was discovered in the 1880s, which is an amazing account of Jesus trial, death and resurrection. Because in this account there's actually a narrative of Jesus coming out of the tomb, which you don't get in the New Testament. Very, very interesting. And we have a gospel allegedly by Thomas, who was thought to be Jesus twin brother, not just a brother, but his twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas is his name. And it's a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, half of which we don't have in The New Testament. The other half are kind of like the New. And so we have these books right now and we have letters allegedly written by Paul. In the New Testament we have 1st and 2nd Corinthians. Outside the New Testament we have 3rd Corinthians. And in one part of the church it's still accepted as part of the canon. Not in Protestantism or Catholicism we have an Apocalypse of Peter and we have an Apocalypse of Paul. So yeah, there are lots of other books out there. These are called the Christian Apocrypha and they are very, very interesting in their own right. But they're interesting historically in part because some of them almost made it in.
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Megan Lewis
That is interesting. You kind of briefly touched on this. Do different denominations have different canons then?
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Bart Ehrman
When it comes to the New Testament, the major denominations have the same New Testament. The Catholic Church, all the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Protestant Churches have the same canon. The Ethiopic Church traditionally has had a different canon, for example, the Armenian Church. And so the smaller denominations within Christendom have some additional books that we don't, which replicates what was happening in early Christianity up through the 4th century. We have 4th century Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. A couple of our very best manuscripts of the New Testament include other books. For example, a very famous codex called Bible manuscript. In some ways the most important one we have is called Codex Sinaiticus. It's called that because it was found on Mount Sinai at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai. And it's a very old 4th century manuscript. And included in its collection New Testament is the Letter of Barnabas and the shepherd of Hermas, which, you know, nobody but scholar scholars know about it. Most people don't know. But it, it almost made it in the New Testament. The shepherd of Hermis. It's an apocalypse.
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Megan Lewis
Why were things left out then? For theological reasons, people didn't think they were reliable.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, so there were debates up and down the line that started, they started in the second century. We have records of debates. Is this book inspired scripture or not? Is this one in, is this one out? So you start getting these in the second century. They become more pronounced in the third century and then really become more heated in the fourth century. When you read these discussions, discussions by say people like late 2nd century church father Irenaeus, or the 3rd century Origen, or the 4th century father of church history as he's called Eusebius, he wrote a 10 volume history of the Church that we still have that traced the history of Christianity from the days of Jesus up to his own time. They discuss which books ought to be in, and they never say, okay, these are our criteria, and then lay out there. And they don't do it like that. But when they discuss the books, it's pretty clear what their criteria are. The only books they're going to allow in the New Testament are books written by an apostle or somebody who's a close companion of the. Of an apostle. And so Peter and Paul are in. But if somebody else writes a really good book, like Justin Martyr, Roman in the middle of the second century, he writes a really good book. Yeah, well, it's not going to be in there because it's not written by an apostle. So it's got to be written by an apostle. It also has to be widely used in the church. They get very concerned that we're not going to pick a local favorite here. If it's not widely used, if it's not widely disseminated, that probably shows that God didn't want it for the general church. And so it's got to be widely disseminated. It's got to be apostolic. It's widely disseminated. The term for that usually is Catholic. That doesn't mean, like Roman Catholic. The word catholic means universal. And so it means it's being used universally throughout the church. So it's got to be apostolic, it's got to be catholic, and it has to be orthodox. The word orthodoxy is a word we'll be using a lot in this podcast. It comes from two Greek words which mean correct doctrine or right opinion, or correct doctrine or true teaching, something like that. If a book taught things that were deemed heretical, deemed false teachings, they weren't letting that one in. There's no way that one was inspired by God. And so it ends up being kind of a circular process in one way. It's circular is because the way they decided if a book was apostolic was if it was orthodox. The way they decided it was orthodox was that if it agreed with the dominant theological view, in other words, their point of view. So if a book subscribed to a theology that was contrary to the point of the theological perspective that the Church Fathers had, then it could not have been written by an apostle. And so you see, it's kind of a circular reasoning. It's not that it's written by apostle, therefore this theology is correct. It's this theology is incorrect, therefore could not have been written by an apostle. And so that's why books like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas and these other books, a Lot of these other books got excluded for that reason.
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Megan Lewis
That's interesting. Thank you. So you've explained that the formation of the canon took a while because people were kind of discussing what should and shouldn't be in. Has it then, since it was formed, has it changed over time at all?
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Bart Ehrman
So these debates went on, as I said, starting the second century. By the end of the second century, most of the people who were in what I call the Proto Orthodox tradition, I guess I better explain that term. So the Orthodox tradition is that people have the right opinion and the right belief. The problem is everybody thinks that they are Orthodox. Everybody thinks they got the right opinion. If you don't believe me, ask my neighbor. He thinks he's got the right opinion. And so everybody, by definition, thinks they're Orthodox. But the term Orthodox comes to be used for the. The group that supported the point of view that became dominant within Christianity. And so, for example, as found in the Nicene Creed of the 4th century, these are people who agree with these basic assertions of the Christian faith, opposed to the heretics, who think something else. This position did not become the dominant position within Christianity until about late third or early fourth century. And so that's when we can start saying that this is the view that's orthodox. It's the view that most people in the tradition agree with, even though a lot of people who disagree. So when I call up somebody proto Orthodox, I mean somebody who holds these views before it becomes the dominant position, okay, so by the end of the second century, Proto Orthodox Christians pretty much agreed on the four gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There was some disagreement about other books, which letters of Paul, including whether Paul should be in at all, which letters of Peter, which letters of John, etc. Etc. The first time anyone came up with our 27 books, you know, the first time anybody said, okay, these are the 27, was a bishop, a very powerful bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, very influential, named Athanasius. Alexandria was a large church. It was an influential church, and Athanasius was its bishop. And every year he'd send out a letter to the various churches in his jurisdiction, not just within Alexandria, but throughout Egypt. This was a letter of advice, and it was telling them all sorts of advice. He did. It's an annual letter. In his 39th letter, the 39th Festal letter, it's called, which was written in the year 367. So 367 CE, he listed what he said. These are the scriptures. These are the ones you can read in church, and they are our 27 books. Two things about that. One is that's 300 years after these books started being written. And so there were debates until then. But the second thing is that didn't end the debate. There continued to be debates on into the 4th, 5th centuries. To some extent. What ended up happening is, as I said, there was never a vote, but basically because there was kind of an informal agreement and because scribes who were copying books only copied the ones that everybody pretty much agreed on. It wasn't ever set in stone, but it basically was. And after that it really didn't change throughout the Middle Ages, like within the Catholic Church or within the Orthodox Church, there were never proposals for other books. And there are not serious proposals today. Even though you get, sometimes you get scholars who wish that this book or that book was in. Yeah, it ain't going to happen. And so it's been pretty well set in stone even though there was never a vote.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. Could you maybe give us an example of one of the debates that people went through during the formation of the canon?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, one of my favorite non canonical gospels is the Gospel of Peter. This was discovered in the 1880s in Egypt. And it was discovered in a small collection of books that was in a tomb. Some French archaeologists were digging up to a cemetery, an ancient cemetery in a place called Akmim, Egypt. And they uncovered, they found this book, a 66 page book. And it had three main writings in it, says it's ontology, including a section of what we've come to call the Gospel of Peter. It's an interesting book for lots of reasons. One is that it actually claims to be written by Peter. And the reason that's interesting is because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do not claim to be written by people named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This book actually claims to be written by Peter. So whoever's writing it saying I'm Peter. Yeah, you're not. It was written later. But one of the reasons is very interesting is I said that it has an account of Jesus coming out of his tomb. And it's a very interesting account because when he comes out of his tomb, they've posted a guard at his tomb. The Romans have to make sure that nobody will steal the body. And two divine beings, angelic beings, descent, the guard is watching and these two divine beings descend from heaven. And they're seeing this happen. The stone starts rolling away from the tube and they're just frozen in terror that what is this? And then two angelic beings go into the tomb and as they're looking, three people come out of the tomb. Two of them are as tall as a mountain, and the third one that they're supporting between them is taller than a mountain. And then behind them walks out the cross. The voice comes from heaven and says, have you preached to those who are asleep? In other words, has the gospel message been taken to the realm of the dead? And the cross replies, yes. Whoa, that would be great to have in the New Testament. And you think, well, that couldn't be in because it's too crazy, right? No, actually, the reason it didn't get in isn't because it was thought to be too crazy, because, you know, there are weird things that happen in the New Testament too. They just don't seem crazy because, you know, you're used to reading them. The reason it didn't get in is because there was an early church father who read this who actually approved of it, a Proto Orthodox church father named Serapion. He told his churches that it's okay to use this around the year 200. But then somebody told him, someone else who had actually read it said, you know, it has a heretical view of Jesus. This gospel actually has been used by people who claim that Jesus was so divine that he wasn't really a human being. And so it's got a false teaching about Christ. And so then he read and said, oh. He said, well, most of it's fine. He said, but there are a couple of additions here that seem a little like it could be heretical. And that may have been one of the additions. He saw that we don't have the whole thing now. We only have this little fragment. So that was a debate over Christology, a debate over whether Christ was fully human or not. And it was deemed that this gospel could be used by people who said, he's not fully human. And so they said, it can't be written by Peter then. And if it can't be written by Peter, it's because it can't be. It doesn't belong.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah, interesting. Thank you. When we look at the trajectory of Christianity as a religion, do you think that the creation of a canon, a specific canon, rather than keeping the more like the myriad of Christian texts available, had an impact on how the religion developed?
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Bart Ehrman
Yes, I do. I think it made a huge impact for two reasons. One thing is they decide what to include. And deciding what to include has serious ramifications. For example, if you have only one gospel instead of four, then you get one perspective on Jesus. And most people who read the gospels carefully, if you Read Matthew carefully and then read John carefully, you realize they're telling very different stories and they've got very different perspective and they're emphasizing very different things. And so you could pick one of those as the authoritative account. There were people who thought that's what you should do, but by including four, you get four different perspectives. And these four different perspectives, it makes it a more interesting phenomenon, because then they're all authoritative, they're all true, and yet they're different. And so how do you deal with that? And the way you deal with it is you read them against one another so that the rough edges of each one is taken off so that you've got to reconcile them if they're all authoritative. If Mark, for example, has a very strong emphasis on Jesus being very, very human, but he never has Jesus calling himself God. And if you've got the Gospel of John where Jesus goes around calling himself a divine being who's equal with God and on the same level of God, but in places he doesn't look very human. I mean, so you got both of those things together. Well, how do you deal with that? Well, you deal with it by smashing them together. So you get both that he's fully human, like in Mark, and he's fully divine, like in John. And so then when you read Mark, you read Mark in light of John. And so people today who don't pay close attention to it when they read Mark, they just simply assume that Mark's Jesus is just like John's Jesus. And so it has a huge effect because it means that you're taking different points of view and figuring out how they can all be the same. And so when today, this is the common way of reading the Bible, and it has been for centuries, which is that you assume, look, it's one book, right? It's between two covers. And so since it's between two covers, it's all the same book. I mean, when you read a book, you know, if you read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, you don't assume that chapter one is written by a different guy from chapter two and might say something the opposite. But when you take a collection of writings by different authors, written at different times, with different perspectives, different theologies, different, and you put them in one volume, they might be different from each other, but you don't notice it because you just assume it's all one book. So one thing it does is it flattens out the differences. And in a way, it kind of enriches the theology because it allows you to have Numerous theological views that are all right at the same time. But the other thing it does by having a canon is it excludes other views. It excludes a lot of views. You don't have books in there written by people who hate Paul. For example, there were Christians who hate Paul, and we have writings by people who hated Paul. We have writings claiming to be by Peter that say that Paul is the greatest enemy of the Church, allegedly by Peter. Well, that's not going to get in there. But the letters by Peter that do affirm Paul, such as first and Second Peter, those do get in. And so you're excluding some things. And by including lots of things, you're kind of enriching the theology and making all these books read against each other.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. Do we have evidence that the Church Fathers, while all of the books in the New Testament are taken as authoritative, do we have evidence that early Christians or the Church Fathers viewed one or more books as maybe more authoritative than others?
- [27:14]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, absolutely. We absolutely do. And it's clear in a lot of different ways. One way is to see which ones they quote the most. It's interesting that among the Gospels, Mark is quoted by far the least of all the Gospels. And there might be various reasons for that, but the main reason is probably that the vast majority of Mark is replicated in both Matthew and Luke. Matthew has over 90% of Mark, some of it word for word, the same. And it's a lot longer. It includes a lot more of Jesus teachings like the Sermon on the Mount. And so I think a lot of people thought, well, I've got Matthew. Why do I bother quoting Mark? So there's that. So it's not necessarily as more authoritative, but is more widely read. There are some books that made it into the New Testament that were not seen as authoritative at all by many, many people. A book like Second Peter, for example, There were lots of debates about whether 2 Peter should be included in the New Testament by Church fathers into the 4th century. There was a very famous teacher in Alexandria, Egypt, at the time of Athanasius, named Didymus. He was blind from being young, so people call him Didymus the Blind. I've had a personal affection for Didymus the Blind for a long time because I wrote my dissertation on him. But Didymus outright said that Second Peter was a forgery. He says it's forged, it does not belong in the New Testament. And so it was not quoted as an authoritative text for a long time until it finally got in. And that's true of a Lot of. A lot of the shorter books, like second and third John and James and Jude. Revelation was really tricky. A lot of people didn't like revelation until the 4th century. People were saying, yeah, no, this is not part of Scripture, but there are other books that were. And Paul becomes a very important figure, and Matthew and John become the most important gospels.
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Megan Lewis
We'll have episodes in the future for those listening specifically on the individual gospels and their differences and what they're trying to espouse. Why, if Mark is replicated almost in its entirety in Matthew, why was Mark included then in the canon?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's a good question. And it's. It's one that's not easy to answer, as it turns out, you know, because we don't have any information on it other than it was always accepted. And I think it's always accepted because it was our first gospel. Mark was written before Matthew and Luke, and all three were written before John. Mark was used as a source for Matthew and Luke, which means Mark was in wide circulation. Matthew and Luke, they didn't know each other personally. They lived in different cities. They both had Mark, which shows that just 10 years later, it's widely circulated. So it's one of these books that just gets read a lot because it's in wide circulation, much more widely in the first century than either Matthew or Luke, because he was around for 10 or 15 years longer. And so it was just kind of always there. And there was nothing wrong with it. I mean, you know, Matthew and Luke replicate most of it. There were some things that people had problems with Mark, including the fact. I'm sure we'll get into some episodes at the end of Mark. Jesus gets raised from the dead, but nobody sees him. He doesn't show up to anybody. And in fact, the disciples never hear that and never learn that he got raised from the dead in Mark. Whoa. So there were problems with it, but still they thought it was, you know, a reliable gospel for as much as it gave, and so they included it.
- [30:28]
Megan Lewis
Interesting. And that raises one more question for me before we draw the discussion to a close. Were the church fathers and the people putting these 27 books together? Were they aware of the relative historicity of each of the texts? Did that have an impact on what was included?
- [30:45]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, this is a great question and an unusually interesting one. I think we ourselves, you know, in modern times think a lot about what historically happened, and the disciplines of history developed after the Enlightenment. But there were historians, of course, in the ancient world, but they didn't have our abilities to decide what actually happened because they just didn't have, they didn't have libraries for the most part. Most people, they didn't have, they certainly didn't have data retrieval systems and things that we have. But people in the ancient world were concerned about what happened when you have a historical text. Most people were. They didn't have the tools that we have to make those decisions though. The church fathers were concerned to have gospels that recounted what Jesus really said and did. And they were also concerned that the book of Acts, which is not about the life of Jesus, but is about the life of the early church, accurately recorded what actually did happen. And so they didn't approach it the way modern historians do. And so their conclusions were often different, but this was something that they were concerned about. But the way they decided this thing when it came to things like the historical Jesus and what happened in the life of the apostles after Jesus, the way they decided this was less by rigorous historical examination of the sources, the way we would do it today, and more again by this thing about whether these views were widely accepted and were orthodox. And so you have gospels, for example, of Jesus as a five year old boy who makes mud sparrows on a Sabbath and gets in trouble for it because he's breaking the sabbath by making things. And the way he solves the problem when he gets upbraided by his father for breaking the sabbath is he speaks to the sparrows and tells them to come alive. They come to life and they fly off chirping. So like, whoa, that's a good one. I think a lot of people look at that and said, yeah, that's a great story, but I don't think that happened. And so, you know, probably stuff like that. They were concerned to that extent. They did want things that were historical, but they didn't have the modern historical methodologies or abilities to make the kinds of distinctions that we make today.
- [32:57]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you. That's an excellent place to end today's discussion. We're going to take a brief break, but we will be right back with Bart's weekly update.
- [33:08]
Bart Ehrman
If you're enjoying the Misquoting Jesus podcast, you'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out@Barterman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you interested in learning about important academic topics but don't want to go back to school? You need to check out Wondrium, the service that streams university level courses taught by top scholars who are also also skilled communicators. I've done nine courses for them and can tell you for high level adult learning, there's really no other game in town. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supported Our show. This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online course launches.
- [34:45]
Megan Lewis
So Bart, what news do you have for us this week?
- [34:48]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, I'm not sure I've got any news because I lead the academic life. I've got to say that the thing I've really think about that I've been enjoying about being an academic. I'm on sabbatical this semester and most people think, oh great, you know, you get six months off. Yeah. What are you doing? Going to the beach? Yeah, I ain't going to the beach. But what I am doing is I'm expanding the kinds of things that I can do academically because I have more time. My next book is going to deal with ancient Christian ethics. I'm sure we'll talk about this to some length, but I've been reading Greek and Roman ethics, especially ethics in the 1st and 2nd centuries by Greek and Roman authors. I'm a big F man of a an author named Epictetus. He was a slave who became a Stoic philosopher and his writings are fantastic. And so I've been having the greatest time getting up in the morning and reading Epictetus. And so but it's really, it's the kind of thing people ought to read this. I mean when, when I tell people like you really need appetite, they say I come up. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, really. And they do. They say, wow, that's pretty good. Yeah, it is good. It's very challenging. I'll talk about Epictetus sometime in the future. I'll be the podcast.
- [35:57]
Megan Lewis
That sounds wonderful. We'll have to do an episode just on ethics generally and how Christian ethics relate to.
- [36:03]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I'm writing a book on this is what my next book is going to be on is how how Christian ethics. In some ways it's just like everybody else's ethics, but in other ways they really change things and it's important to see how that happened.
- [36:14]
Megan Lewis
Well, wonderful. Thank you for giving us a little teaser of what's to come.
- [36:22]
Bart Ehrman
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
- [36:39]
Megan Lewis
okay, so we have a couple of questions from our listeners based on dealing with the canon. So it seems like much of the Christian apocrypha. So those are the books that did not make it into the canon were written after the canonical Gospels and epistles. I could see Christians using this observation to argue that the correct books became orthodoxy. Are there non canonical books that were written before canonical? And to what extent do canonical books truly present the proto orthodox viewpoint?
- [37:08]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, it's a great question. As I said, we have all these gospels and other books. What I would say is that the four gospels we have are the earliest ones that survive. There certainly were other gospels written before all of these that we don't have anymore that if they are discovered would be apocryphal gospels. One reason we know that there were earlier gospels is because the author of Luke begins his gospel by saying that he had many predecessors who wrote accounts of Jesus words and deeds. And so there were gospels floating around that Luke had access to, including for example, a gospel that scholars have called Q, which was a source for Matthew and Luke. And so there are certainly books floating around. We also have some books that survive were probably written before our books of our existing New Testament. It's usually thought that Second Peter was the last New Testament book written, written probably around the year 120 or so. There are scholars now who think maybe the Book of Acts was written that late as well. I'm not quite sure if I agree with that, but two Peter's usually date around 120. We have a number of Christian books that were written before that, some of which people thought belonged in the canon. A book called First Clement, that is a letter written by the Church of Rome to the church in Corinth was written in the 90s. The Gospel of Thomas may have been written before Second Peter. The Gospel Peter possibly was written before Second Peter. And so there are these other books. So these aren't necessarily all the earliest books. The Didache is another book is written before much of the New Testament. So it's not that these are the oldest. Being the oldest does not make them the most historically accurate. The way to think about this is if somebody today writes an account of Thomas Jefferson that improves on a biography of Thomas Jefferson written in 1920. You wouldn't say that the 1921 is more reliable because it was in 1920. It's earlier, but you have to check to see if it's reliable. And that's true with the New Testament books as well.
- [39:13]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Would you say then that the canonical New Testament books accurately represent the proto Orthodox viewpoint?
- [39:20]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's a tricky question because proto orthodoxy usually is defined by theological views that are supported in the New Testament. But the thing is, the New Testament also was used by groups that were not proto Orthodox. And so various groups that later came to be called heretics were very fond of many of the books of the New Testament and claimed that these New Testament books taught their views. I'm sure on the podcast we'll talk on a number of occasions about the Gnostics. And many Gnostic groups love the Gospel of John, for example, Gnostic groups love Paul, or they loved various heretical groups. Groups that came to be seen as heretical also use these books. So I would not say that these New Testament books are, strictly speaking proto Orthodox. They were used by the Proto Orthodox and they were Proto Orthodox are comfortable with them, but so are other groups.
- [40:12]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. And our second question, why did Martin Luther exclude the apocrypha from the Protestant canon?
- [40:19]
Bart Ehrman
That's a good question. The apocrypha that is relevant for this is not the New Testament apocrypha, the Christian apocrypha, but what's called the Old Testament apocrypha. And even that term is a little bit complicated. The Old Testament apocrypha are, roughly speaking, a group of books, number them 12 or 15, depending on how you're counting, that are found in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, but are not part of the Hebrew Bible. Most Jews in the ancient world were not reading their Bible in Hebrew because most Jews didn't live in Israel, they lived somewhere else. And if you're living in France and you're a Jew, you're not reading the Hebrew, you know, or in Asia Minor, in Rome or whatever. And so Jews throughout the world were reading Greek. And the Greek translation of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible included these 12 or 15 additional books, and they were not accepted by Jews worldwide as authoritative. They were not included in the Hebrew Bible, but they were accepted by Christian groups because the earliest Christians also used the Greek Bible and these were parts of the Greek Bible. And so they were widely used and were seen as having some kind of authoritative status throughout the history of Roman Catholicism. When Martin Luther began the Reformation in the early 16th century, he decided the Hebrew Bible alone would be. Those would be the books, the book in the Hebrew Bible. It's not clear what his actual motivation is, but it is commonly noted some of these books in the deuterocanonical or apocryphal can be used to support certain Roman Catholic doctrines that Martin Luther opposed, including the doctrine of purgatory. Purgatory is a Roman Catholic doctrine. Martin Luther and the Protestants rejected purgatory and it could be seen as being taught in some of these books. Books. And so it may be, may have been for theological reasons or it may have been for historical reasons that he thought the Hebrew Bible books were or could be both.
- [42:15]
Megan Lewis
I see. Thank you. Fascinating as always. Thank you to everyone who sent in your questions. If you have questions that you would like to ask Barthes in upcoming episodes, please submit them at www.barturman.com askbah. Bart, before we end for the week, would you mind just summarising what we've talked about today?
- [42:34]
Bart Ehrman
I would say this is one of the most interesting topics and important topics for people who are not scholars, because they wonder, why do we have our New Testament? Why these 27 books? And the things to remember are that these 27 books did not start out as the Bible. When Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, he didn't think, well, this will be part of the Bible. They were writing books for their reasons. And over time, Christians wanted to have books that were authoritative to guide their Christian beliefs, in addition to their Hebrew, the Christian Old Testament, which they already had. And they had to decide which books book were authoritative. And so they debated this because there were different books with different points of view, just as there were different groups that had different canons of scripture. Eventually, as proto Orthodoxy became Orthodoxy and became the dominant view of Christianity, Orthodox people agreed on the war Gospels, the letters of Paul, etc. And this became the canon. It was never officially decided at a church council, never decided by a vote. It simply became an informal agreement that just about everybody subscribed to. And it's the canon then, that's coming down to us today.
- [43:38]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. Thank you. That was, as always, very, very interesting. Thank you audience for joining us. I hope you learned something new. I know I did. I always do. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. And if you want to learn even more about the New Testament and early Christianity, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back next Week Bart, what is our next discussion topic?
- [44:06]
Bart Ehrman
It's actually related to what we did this week. We were talking about the Apocrypha, and I mentioned a gospel allegedly written that somebody claimed to be Peter wrote, and other books have claimed to be about Peter. Next week we're going to talk about that phenomenon. You might call it pseudepigrapha, which is the fancy word for what we say today as forgery. If somebody claims to be a person, they're not, and they write and they want to convince people they are that person. How often does that happen in early Christianity? Is it a common practice throughout the ancient world generally? Was it an approved practice? You know, was it acceptable, as people tend to think? And is it appropriate to call it forgery, or is that a loaded term? So those are the kinds of things we'll talk about next time.
- [44:48]
Megan Lewis
Wonderful. Thank you, Bart. Thank you everyone else, 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.