← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
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B
Have you ever read something in the New Testament, maybe the Book of Revelation, and wondered why on earth it's included in the Bible? Why were these specific books included and why are they considered inspired by God while the non canonical writings are just the work of humans? Today we're talking about the formation of the New Testament using listeners questions. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is Misquoting Barthes where I force Barthes to listen to someone completely misunderstanding his position. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus podcast with Bart Ehrman. Bart we're talking about the canon and we've got a wonderful selection of listeners questions to guide the discussion. So everyone, thank you for sending those in. Can you remember your earliest understanding of the formation of the Bible? Did you think it kind of just fell from the sky one book at a time? Or did you have an understanding of a council being convened and books being voted on or what? What was your understanding of what happened?
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C
Well, so you know, basically I had not a single thought about it until I took a course on it. And I when I was at, when I was at Moody Bible Institute, one of our early courses, like first semester maybe or first year anyway, is was had to be on issues connected with the, the textual, the manuscripts of the New Testament and the formation of the canon. And I don't think I'd given it any thought before, but this of course was from a very concern evangelical point of view about how God had guided the process and that it was kind of a done deal from the beginning, but it was a process that the Spirit had to work out over time. And that was the first, you know, I think. And so the view, once I started thinking about it, I guess my view is pretty much what a lot of Christians use are, is that it was, it took some time, but it was all under the under the direction of the Spirit.
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B
So our first question is asking about the destruction of the Second Temple. The questioner wants to know what impact that had on the Development of the New Testament's canon and early Christian theology.
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C
It's a good question and it's answered in different ways by different scholars. Some scholars think that the destruction of the temple in the year 70 by the Romans had a huge impact on early Christianity. It clearly had a huge impact on Judaism because the Jewish, Jewish religion had always been a religion of worship of God in the temple as based on the Torah. Now there's no temple, there are no priests, there's no sacrifices. And it completely altered how, how Judaism developed after that. But a lot of scholars have thought that Christianity too is hugely impacted. Many scholars think that the Gospels in part were written in order after the destruction of the Temple, in order to show that, that this was all kind of part of the divine plan and that the Gospel, that the Gospels are saying this, that the Gospels idea was that it was all part of God's plan, that the Jewish people had rejected their Messiah and so that they would now be, you know, since they rejected him, God then destroyed their temple and so now Christianity is replaced Judaism. So I don't know. I'm not, I'm not. I mean, I do think that the authors of the New Testament after Paul know about the destruction of the temple and they know about the fall of Jerusalem and I think it had some impact on them. But I'm not sure that it made the most enormous thing that a lot of other scholars think. And I think that it didn't have much impact with respect to things like which books would get into the New Testament. It may have affected some of the authors in some ways.
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B
The next questioner is asking about how the split of Judaism impacted the canon. And the question specifically is was there ever a movement to get rid of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament entirely? It seems there's so much writing and philosophy creeping in by the third century that Christianity's Jewish roots are all but done away with. And it seems odd to keep the Old Testament going forward.
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C
Well, this is closely related to the other one because Christians did begin to develop, not every Christian. So I need to be clear about this because my scholar friends will be really upset with me if I present like a one sided view on this thing. But it's not as if like there was Judaism, then Christianity rejected it and then there's Christianity. Judaism and Christianity were closely connected in many ways and in many places for a very long time. So it isn't that there's this kind of linear development that every Christian had the same view of Judaism. Every Christian left Judaism. It's nothing like that. But the big debate within Christianity developed as more Gentiles became followers of Jesus than Jews. And by the time you get into the second century, the majority of followers of Jesus are not Jewish and they don't keep the Jewish law. And many of them are not overly fond of Jews and say so. There's an anti Jewish literature that develops starting in the second century. And so all of that happens. But it's a very good question then why, if Christians are mainly Gentile and they're not keeping the Torah and they don't consider themselves Jewish, why do they keep the Jewish Bible as part of their Scripture? It's actually a very large question that would take a very long time to discuss. But the basic issue is that there were Christians in the second century who thought that the Hebrew Bible was not part of the Christian Scriptures. The leading proponent of this was a man named Marcion, about whom I imagine we'll be getting more questions if we have questions on the canon, because he's very important about the history of the canon. Marcion was a thinker, kind of a scholar in the middle of the second century who argued that Christianity was not related to Judaism and that Jesus was not the Jewish Messiah and that Jesus was a savior of people who would believe in him, who saved them from the wrath of the Jewish God. Marcion believed there were two gods and that the God of Jesus was not the God of the Old Testament. And so he basically, he got rid of the Old Testament and he came up with a set of scriptures which would be. It's one, one, one book, like our Gospel of Luke. And 10 of Paul's letters were his canonical scripture. He said we should get rid of Scripture, get rid of the Hebrew Bible. There are other people who said no, but the Hebrew Bible is part of our scripture. In fact, it's not even a Jewish book. It's a Christian book. And so you have people saying the Jews misunderstand it. And so it's really. It's not even a Jewish book at all. It's a Christian book. And so you have authors like the author of the Epistle Barnabas, who has that view. You have a variety of views. You have other Christians who say, no, this is the Bible. You have Jewish Christians who say, no, no, the Hebrews, that is the Bible, nothing else. And so you have, you know, these people rejected Paul, for example. They didn't think that Paul was right about his views. So you have a whole range of views. The view that ended up winning out was the view that The Hebrew Bible was, was inspired by God, was given by God, and that it set the stage for the Christian, for Christianity, and that it's a necessary, it's necessary to have the Hebrew Bible because without it, then we don't have any roots in history. And we're just, it's like, you know, we think that something just happened, you know, 100 years ago that, that, you know, had never happened before. This is, in fact, goes all the way back to creation, God's plan for us to exist. And so you've got to have the Old Testament.
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B
Was there ever a move to take out some of the books of the Old Testament?
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C
Yeah, well, okay, good question. So not really. I mean, the thing is, there wasn't an established Old Testament when Christianity started. So when Jesus, when Jesus and his disciples were doing their thing up in Galilee, different Jews around the world had different books. They considered Scripture. Everybody considered the Torah scripture, all the Jews did. And, and Jews by and large accepted the, the, what we call the prophets. But there are other writings that were kind of on the margins for a long time, you know, like the Book of Daniel or the Song of Songs or, you know, their book Ruth. There were these books that were kind of out on the periphery that there wasn't like a set canon yet. When Christians started out, they basically had the, the text of the Hebrew Bible. And most Christians weren't that concerned about getting rid of Hebrew Bible books because they were thinking that it was just preparatory anyway, you know, so they weren't as, as concerned, as concerned about that as they were about which book should be in the New Testament.
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B
So we are now going to start talking a bit about Marcion. This questioner says, I noticed the Marcian canon includes Pauline epistles, but skips the undisputedly forged pastoral ones. I've checked other known ancient sources and canons and it seems that no other was able to pick up on the forgery like this. Was the Marcian canon a more original version of the New Testament canon or was Marcian. Sorry, was Marcion an early 2nd century Bart Ehrman who was able to, to identify these epistles as forgeries?
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C
Yeah. No, so. Well, there's a lot to be said about that. That's a complicated question, as it turns out. So as I said, Marcion has a canon of some things, like our Luke and something like our 10, 10, 10 Pauline letters. Marcion thought that the creator God, the God who created this world, was not the God of Jesus and that the God of Jesus intervened to save people from the wrath of The Old Testament God, the Jewish go when Marcion, according to the church fathers who give us information about Marcion, we don't have Marcion's writings anymore. So all we have are church fathers who talk about him sometimes a great length. The Church Father Tertullian wrote a five volume work against Marcion and we still have it. And so you can, we can, it's a major source. But his, his opponents don't necessarily represent his views faithfully because they're attacking him and so they sometimes caricature it or get it wrong. We know that because different ones of his opponents say slightly different things in places. So when, according to the church fathers, when Marcion had took his cat, had these books, he removed from them passages that were contrary to his understanding that the God of Jesus was not the God of the Old Testament. And so passages that affirmed the Old Testament or that affirmed creation or that affirmed the Old Testament God Marcion thought had been changes of the text made by scribes who didn't understand the true Gospel. So he took those passages out. When it comes to the Pastoral epistles, we have Marcion, so far as we can tell, never mentions them. So he does not call them forgeries. He doesn't have them. And the question is why? Most scholars have two opinions about this. There are two main views of this. And the view that he knew they were forgeries is not one of the two. It's possible that that's what he thought, but if he did, we have no record of that. And if he did think that, Tertullian and the other church fathers surely would have mentioned it, that he was completely off the wall on that one. The two theories are that these three letters, the Pastoral epistles, first and second Timothy and Titus, did not line up with his perspectives well enough. And so he didn't think that they were actually written by Paul. The second view is that he simply had never heard of them, that he didn't know about these, these three books. When the questioner points out that they looked at a bunch of other canon lists, he's right. They, the Pastorals are normally included. Our earliest manuscript of Paul's letters, interestingly, does not have them from the second century. And so it may be that in fact they weren't widely known until the end of the second century and that may be why Marcion doesn't have them.
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B
So if we have Marcion writing his own canon, what other groups were putting together a canon of New Testament scripture that is different to the one that we know?
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C
Well, it's It's a huge, huge debate about all of these issues. So this is what my, this is what my next book was going to be. I think we maybe have talked about it, but I've changed. I'm going to write that book eventually about how we got the canon and when it happened and how it was decided and who decided and what kind of arguments they were having about these things. Marcion is actually the first one that we know about who actually took a collection and said, this is it. Before that. We certainly know Christians who are quoting the early Christian writings by Paul or the gospels or other writings, quoting them as scriptural authorities. And so they're seeing them as scripture. But we don't know of anyone that set a limit like that said, okay, it's these, these are the ones until after Marcion. And so some scholars think that Marcion motivated the movement toward establishing a canon. The canon doesn't get established for a long time after that. A couple hundred years later, we don't have anybody, any Christian of, of any sort who lists our 27 books and says these are the 27 books until the year 367. The, the church, Father Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list and it's our list as the first time we have a list that did not solve the problem. People still debated various books after that, but Athanasius list ended up becoming the list. Let me point out in regard to that, by the way, the Council of Nicaea did not talk about this issue. People who get their information about early Christianity from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code think that the Council of Nicaea decided this issue. They not did not decide this issue. They did not discuss this issue, contrary to popular belief.
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B
I'm going to ask you a follow up question to that after a moment, but we're going to take a brief break. We'll be right back. It's Christianity's most feared doctrine, but is it really taught in the Bible? On July 18, Bart is teaching a free live course about hell called what the hell Jesus Teachings of the Afterlife, where you'll learn where the doctrine of hell actually came from, what Jesus really taught about the afterlife, and how a doctrine that scares so many people made its way into Christianity in the first place. Whether you're a history buff or someone who has experienced real trauma around the subject of hell, this is a fantastic opportunity to unravel what you've probably falsely learned about hell in the Bible. It's two lectures, including Alive Q and A and the recordings are yours to keep. Sign up for free@bart ehrman.com forward slash. What the hell? So before the break, Bart, you said that the Council of Nicaea did not even discuss the issue of a canon. So when do we get some kind of meeting or official discussion about what the New Testament canon should be?
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C
The first meeting to decide what should be in the canon is the Council of Trent. In the 16th century, there were no church councils that debated this issue like ecumenical council. So there are seven ecumenical councils. In early Christianity, ecumenical means councils where bishops from around Christendom, from around the world come together to make decisions. The Council Nicaea in the year 325 was the first of those. And none of the seven is the canon. An issue that's decided and boom, that's it, the canon. It seems weird to people. You think there had to be a vote, right? There had to be a vote. No, there was no vote by, by a large council. There were, there were small synods that would say, well, these are the ones we think are the canon start, you know, and you get some of these synods in the 4th century after Nicaea, but you don't get, you don't get like a council wide decision ever. And the way, the way it got decided then was by kind of popular opinion and scribal practices. And so preachers preached from certain books and referred to certain books as scripture. Church leaders accepted certain books without there being like an official decision. Everybody kind of agreed and, and scribes had to decide which books to copy and they ended up copying the books that became the New Testament rather than other books.
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B
Before we get this kind of solidified, were different church groups using different books
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C
as scriptural before and after.
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B
Excellent.
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C
The Ethiopian church today has a larger canon of the New Testament. Throughout the Middle Ages, the letters of Paul included not only the 13 that people talk about today, but also the letter to the Laodiceans which is found in a large number of Latin Bibles. And it's not, it's not included as one of Pauline letters in the, in the, what we think of as the official canon. Different, different churches had other books. There were some churches that accepted Third Corinthians. We have first and Second Corinthians in the New Testament. Some accepted the Third Corinthians. So that, that's, that's, that's after, like after the 4th century that's going on all, you know, through the Middle Ages, before the fourth century, there were, there were large debates about which book should be in, which should not, shall not be in, and different communities of different views there, you know, there were communities that thought the gospel Peter should be in. There are communities that thought the apocalypse of Peter should be in. They thought the apocalypse of John should be out. They thought, you know, their, their second Peter should not be in. So there were debates. And so when I get around to writing this book on the canon, my focus is going to be on the debates because they're not focused on it. Because I think a lot of people, scholars don't even know what the debates were because it's kind of hard to find them. But, but that's, but. So yeah, there were def. There was not, there was not a set canon to begin with.
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B
A questioner or a listener has a kind of follow up question to this. Since when was the canon of the New Testament considered to be inspired by God? As I understand it, inspiration was not considered a prerequisite for a writing to make it a canon canonical.
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C
I don't know about that, about whether inspiration was a requirement. I think it was an assumption. I think, I think it was an assumption that if a book is included in the canon of scripture, it is inspired. But I don't think that the debates were about is this book inspired or not. The, the debate, the, the debates had to do with how do we get back to the testimony of Jesus disciples, his closest followers. The idea is that his followers wrote books and they were the ones who knew Jesus and Jesus was sent from God. And so if you have the right books, then you've got a direct line back to God, from God to Jesus to his apostles who wrote the books that we read. And so the big debates were over was this book written by an apostle or not? And it became a really important issue because there were lots of books floating around in the names of apostles that people were debating was this written by an apostle or not? Is the Gospel of Peter by Peter? Is the apocalypse of Peter by Peter? Is second Peter by Peter? And different people said yes and no. And there are arguments about that. Is the book of Revelation by John the son of Zebedee or by some other John? And what do you do about gospels? We have gospels allegedly written by Jesus follower Thomas and Barnabas and Philip. We have a Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas. We have all sorts of books, gospels that claim apostolic names, but we also have these four that don't have a name attached to them. And so what do we do about that? Well, you attach a name to them and you start calling them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And it's not an accident that you name them after two of Jesus own disciples and the close follower of Peter and the close follower of Paul. So now you've got two eyewitnesses and two and two connection to the two close, the two most important apostles. So yeah, so inspiration wasn't the category. They used to talk about these things. It was do these teachings go back to people who knew Jesus?
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B
Do we know when this idea that, okay, we have this canon, it therefore must have been inspired. When does this start to come into existence?
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C
Pretty early on. So even in the New Testament, there are a couple of indications of later writers considering earlier Christian writers to be scripture writings to be scripture. So the two indications are in First Timothy 5, 18, the author's claiming to be Paul. So this is one of the pastoral epistles. First Timothy claims to be written by Paul to his younger colleague Timothy. Scholars are reasonably unified in thinking this is not actually written by Paul. Something we can get into in some other episode. But, but whoever's writing this thing is probably writing it claiming to be Paul near the end of the first century. So maybe in the 90s or something like that. And at one point in chapter five, verse 18, he quotes scripture, he says, as the scripture says, you should not muzzle an ox that's treading. And a workman is worthy of his hire. Now he's talking about why you should pay preachers. And so you don't muzzle an ox that's treading because the ox is treading, has to eat some of the stuff that he's treading to be fed and have the energy to continue doing his treading. And you should pay your, and you should. A workman is worthy of his hire. So the, the thing about the ox is in the Torah, it's in the law of Moses. The thing about workers worthy of hire is a saying of Jesus not in the Hebrew Bible. And it's found in the book of Luke. And it's quoted as scripture. The scripture says, Whoa, okay. Second instance has to do with Paul. Second Peter, a book that is widely thought not to have been written by Peter for very good reasons, probably early second century, maybe say around there 120 or so at one point talks about people who have misused and twisted the teachings of Paul. This is second two Peter 3, 16 twisted the teach the writings of Paul as they have with the rest of the scriptures. Whoa, okay. This unknown author is seeming to think that Paul, Paul's writing their scripture. And so people start quoting these early Christian books as scriptural authorities, meaning that in some sense they're Inspired by God.
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B
So the next question is, is looking at whether the canon, excuse me, whether the canon might be further edited or adapted. Given developments in scholarship and understanding of the text, especially with things like the potentially forged Pauline epistles, do you think there's any possibility of this canon being further revised?
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C
So my first PhD seminar as a PhD student was with Bruce Metzger, my mentor on the canon of the New Testament. And he was, he was the world expert at the time. His book is still the one that is the most authoritative book on the formation of the canon. And as one of the questions Metzger would always ask is, is the canon open or closed? If it's an open canon, then you can add to it. If it's closed canon, you cannot. So which is it? That's a theological question again. And so it just kind of depends which theologian you ask. Most would say no, you can't go around adding books as a historical reality. I'll say on just my own view of this is that it is never going to change. There will never be something added to it. There will be never take something taken away from it. Even if you can show beyond reasonable doubt that second Peter was not written by Peter, it was written by somebody claiming to be Peter who was doing it to deceive his readers to think he was Peter. I think you can show that, but nobody, they're not going to take it out. So I think, I think the practical answer, apart from whatever your theological views about what should be the practical answer, is no, it's never going to change.
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B
I recently read Bart's book on the Book of Revelation and he raised the point that Martin Luther was skeptical of whether revelation should be considered canonical scripture. Quite famously he thought it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic. Yet most modern day Lutherans don't have these qualms with the book. Do you know why? And is there any movement to try and decanonize a book that feels so discordant with the rest of the New Testament? Kind of answered the second half of that already, but if you could tackle the first, that would be great.
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C
Yeah, no piggyback on that. Yeah, they're not going to get rid of it. If they were, that'd be one that a lot of people would get rid of. But they it'll never happen. Martin Luther was completely groundbreaking and in, in some ways on his theological views of the Bible and in some ways ways it really affected the development of historical scholarship. Without his knowing it, he actually included four books of the New Testament in his appendix. He Took them out of the New Testament, put them in an appendix. Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. And it's because he was not convinced that they were written by apostles and that they were delivering the gospel truth as presented by Paul and Jesus. And if they don't preach the gospel, they shouldn't be in the New Testament, but they are in the New Testament. So he included them, but included them as part of the appendix, including the book of Revelation. He had different things to say about revelation at different periods of his life. He pointed out that in his view is kind of misnamed because revelation means to reveal something. And he said so far as he can tell, he can't tell what it reveals. And so, and so, so he left it out. Why, why did all that change? Well, you know, the Luther, the Lutheran churches, along with all the Protestant churches developed over time and there aren't any Lutheran churches that actually follow the, the, the Lutheran understanding of things that Luther himself had. It's, you know, theology's developed over time and, and as part of the Christian community, they simply accept the whole thing. And I'll say, you know, the, you know, the, one of the fine, the finest commentary on revelation today is written by a Lutheran scholar. And, and so it's, it's accepted now as canon without any question. Just because the, you know, people see that Luther did that in his own context. But we're in a different context now.
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B
Are there any non canonical gospels or New Testament era biblical works for which we have better or older evidence than we do for the 27 books of the New Testament? If so, why were they not included within the canon?
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C
We certainly do. I mean, there's a book that a lot of people thought should be included in the New Testament that was included in some of the canon list called the shepherd of Hermas. It's now one of the books that's in the Apostolic Fathers. It's a kind of apocalypse. It's not at all like the book of Revelation, but it's a revelation that God has given to this person Hermas. And it was a very important book in early Christianity, considered scripture by many. It is much better attested in our ancient manuscripts than the Gospel of Mark is. And that happens sometimes. Some of our books like Second Peter, nobody appears to have even heard about Second Peter for the first 200 years. It's not, not even mentioned. And then all of a sudden it kind of shows up. And so there, there are books that are better attested, but the inclusion in the canon was not based on how many manuscripts were available. We, our, our supply of manuscripts is serendipitous. Some manuscript scripts get discovered and the vast majority of manuscripts do not get discovered. They either don't exist anymore or they're just not haven't shown up. So we don't. The only way we know which books were most popular, the only way we can guess which books were most popular is less by manuscripts and more by how often they get quoted and dealt with by church fathers who are writing. And so, so the number of manuscripts isn't what determines canonicity. It's really about whether these are ancient books, whether they're written by apostles, whether they conform to the correct theology or not. Those are the main criteria.
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B
We have one final question. We know that the Old Testament was written over a span of several centuries. However the canon of the New Testament was written in a much shorter period of time over what or two centuries. Why was the canon frozen so early and have there been any attempts to add later writings to it?
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C
Well it depends what you mean by early it in some ways these are two different animals. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Jews had the Hebrew Bible as their scripture and it was and by the time you get say to the year 100 of the Christian era, 150 of the Christian most user agreeing what that canon is. But that canon didn't function for Jews for the most part the way the, the sacred writings of the Christians function for the Christians. Jews rarely would use their Hebrew Bible to come up with like doctrines they have to believe or doctrines they shouldn't believe or you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like a guidebook like that. Christians were very intent on knowing the right things to believe and the right ways to practice their religion. The Torah gives you know, very clear indications about how to. Not very clear but it gives instructions because gives some detailed insert about how to perform sacrifices for example, or at least what the sacrifices are. And so the worship services in the temple are somewhat guided by Torah. But the New Testament there isn't really much about how to practice Christianity per se. There's a lot of ethics, there's a lot of doctrine and people wanted to know we are now Christians, what are we supposed to believe? How are we supposed to practice our religion? How are we supposed to have ethics? And you need authorities for that. You need authorities for that because there are all sorts of Christian leaders saying all sorts of different things. So you need somebody who knows what they're talking about. It has to be an apostle. So Christians had a pressure on themselves to develop which books are the authorities and which ones are not that Jews simply didn't have because nobody was, nobody was questioning the Torah, you know, and, and so books like Ruth or Song of Solomon weren't like, critical for people's lives or anything, but for the Christians, you got to have these books so you know how to live your life and what you how to believe. And so the process was speeded up for Christianity, but it wasn't quick. I mean, the first time, as I said, that anybody listed our books is the end of the 4th century. So Christians were going around without a New Testament from for 300 years. And so, and even after that, it wasn't finally decided in any like, by any vote or anything like that. So I would just say they're, they're just two, two different things.
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B
Thank you very much, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all for your fantastic questions. And I have to say, Bart, I really do hope you write that book one day because I would like to read it, please. Thank you.
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C
I'm desperate to do so. Thank you.
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B
Well, that is all for today's interview, so we are going to move to this week's next bonus segment, which is Misquoting Bart. I'm going to be playing Bart a clip of someone completely misunderstanding his own viewpoint and then he gets the joy of responding to it.
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C
So well, let me just say I don't know. I don't know if he misunderstands me or not, because I haven't heard this yet. If, if he does misunderstand or miss, maybe he understands misrepresent. We'll see. I'll let you know.
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D
Many of the professors at schools such as this will read Jesus interrupted or misquoting Jesus, or so on and so forth. And since they don't have the scholarly background in textual criticism, that's as far as they'll go. And so they're getting the popularized version rather than the more in depth stuff that he's done in some of these areas. Though, by the way, I will mention it's been at least 10 years now since Ehrman has said he's no longer involved in the textual critical area at all. He's writing on broad subjects of Christian history. But you'll see the two kinds of Bart Ehrman. And then if you just back up and you look at the topics that he's written on popularly, all of a sudden, it certainly strikes me very clearly he has for many, many years now been providing an apologetic for his apostasy.
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B
I'm not sure that's misrepresenting you so much as being absolutely rude. I'm not going to say anything because I'm unimpressed. I would like to hear your thoughts.
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C
He's right. I'm not, I don't. I'm not involved in doing any research in textual criticism now. I, I thought about spending my entire life doing it. I thought that the returns were not commensurate with the effort, is like incredible effort to work in that field. And the payoff was. Was important. But I kind of did what I wanted to do. I spent my first 20 years or so of academic work working on. So that. That's true. I haven't worked on it. I'll put this. This person is James White. He's an apologist. I had a debate with him, and he's never, he's never done any work in textual criticism. I mean, he's not a scholar in this field. So that doesn't, that doesn't matter for this or that. I'm just saying that. So he's gonna, he's gonna now argue. It sounds like he's gonna argue that. That in my popular books, I say one thing. My scholarly books, I say another thing. So I'm being a hypocrite, something like that, probably.
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B
I have to say, I just want to point out that it's not unusual for scholars to work in a specific subfield, feel that they have done all they wish to do, and then move on to something else. It seems portraying this as some kind of character flaw or dishonesty on your part, and that's very, very common. You get people kind of bouncing around to whatever they. They're currently interested in my set.
- [36:52]
C
My sense is that he's saying that to set up, that he's going to say that I. I don't know what's really happening in the field anymore, and that part's not true. I do know what's happening in the field. A lot of I don't like, but I don't write about it. And so there's also kind of a common assumption among, especially among these apologists that if you, if you don't write an academic book about something, you. You probably don't know anything about it. It's a boy. Is that not true? Serious, Serious scholars of Christianity that. I know some serious scholars of Christianity, they know tons of stuff, far more than many of the people who write books about it. I'm not including myself there. I'm just saying it's a. It's a flawed argument. Okay,
- [37:34]
B
well, that was actually the whole clip.
- [37:36]
C
Okay, well, it's too bad, because what he's going to end up saying, I am sure, is that that in my popular books, the reason I'm sure of this is because I've heard other apologists say this, and they feed off of each other, of course. And so what they say is that in my, my scholar in, in my popular books, I talk about all these textual changes in the New Testament and how significant they are, and that in my scholarly books, I don't talk like that at all. I, I admit that we know most of the New Testament and that. And that we're pretty sure about it all. And so they, and so they paraphrase those two, two views to say that I'm contradicting myself. That is a, that's a technique that Dan Wallace used in our debates. Dan's a friend of mine. James White is not a friend of mine. We have, he and I have debated as well on this issue, on text criticism. And Dan says, well, you say things completely different. And people write me and say, well, you know, you're just contradicting yourself. I'm not contradicting myself. That what happens is people can't read. You say something.
- [38:46]
D
And then.
- [38:47]
C
So in my, in my book Misquoting Jesus, where I say, one line I use that they get really ticked off of me about including James White, is that I say that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. And they find that very upsetting. That is the direct quote from my mentor, Bruce Metzger, that they adore. Metzger used to say that all the time. And so. But if I say it, like, all of a sudden, it's like some crazy idea I've got. But then what they, what they. Then they point out, well, yeah, you've got all these differences, but none of them matters. And what, what they don't notice is that when I say that every time I say I say it in my book, miss quoting, I say the more difference in manuscript than words. Then I go on to say in the next sentence, most of these differences are insignificant, immaterial, and don't matter for anything other than to show that scribes could spell no better than students can today. I say that. And they say, he doesn't point out that most of these changes don't matter for much how. You know, how many times I need to say it. So, yeah, that I'm sure I don't know this interview. I'm sure people listen to that. People will be telling me, yeah, that is what he goes on to say. I bet it's going to be that.
- [40:07]
B
Thank you for your forbearance. I appreciate hearing your thoughts on that particular clip. And that is all for today. But before we finish for the week, could you remind us what we spoke about?
- [40:18]
C
Yeah, well, we were talking about some of the really interesting questions about how we got the canon and why we got the books that we got. And we couldn't dive in very deeply, but we got some of the really important questions about when, why and how we got these books. And it's I think it's an ongoing question that most people have not really been given good enough information about. So it's good to have this kind of discussion, I think.
- [40:40]
B
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, you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [41:01]
C
Well, next week we're going to talk about claims that Christians traditionally make about the Bible or views that they typically have about the Bible that have been challenged by scholarship and shown probably not to be true.
- [41:12]
B
Join us then. It's going to be a good one. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for official 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.