← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.
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The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and
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world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many
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fascinating little known facts about the New
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Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity.
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I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Hello everyone and welcome back to Ms. Quoting Jesus. Today we are talking about the Gospel of John which is typically attributed to the beloved disciple, John the son of Zebedee. Why was this particular John out of all of the johns in the Bible selected as the author? Was John, son of Zebedee, even the beloved disciple? And could someone else entirely have written the gospel? Before we get into that, we will have a quick chat. Bart, Happy New Year. How are you?
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D
Here we are, okay, New year, you know, new possibilities and hopefully a better reality for the world in general. I'm pumped because as I probably have said before, I'm on leave this semester, a sabbatical to give me some time to write the next book. The problem with this kind of situation, every colleague I have ever had has a situation. They have a leave for a semester or for a year to write a book and they think they've got so much time and so they start reading and they read this and they think, oh, that's interesting. And they kind of find this and by time, you know, a month left and then they realize, oh my God, I haven't started writing yet. I have a whole book freaking out. And so I'm pretty disciplined about these things and I, I don't know if I'll be able to get this thing written, but I'm, I'm sure going to try. You know, people wonder like, you mean you don't have to work for six months? What, what kind of job is this again? How do I get that? Yeah, it isn't like that. It's like it's still, oh my God, it's just so much work. But so happy New Year to you. How are things looking for you? Looking forward to good actually.
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C
Everyone is obviously still off school, so they are running around causing absolute chaos, having the time of their lives, generally enjoying the fact that they don't have to leave the house. So, yeah, they're having a great time and I'm enjoying having them all home. It's really, really enjoyable.
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D
You know, my sense is that, you know, when you have kids that are running around having the time of your life, it's not like not having kids with people around you running around. People don't have kids, are like, oh, my God, these people are a nuisance. But, I mean, when I had my kids, I thought, well, wow, that's great. They're having fun. Isn't that great? But not everybody's like that either.
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C
Yeah. And my sister and I, she has children similar ages to mine, have a sisterly saying, not actively screaming, which is. It can be absolutely chaotic. And we are fine as parents because no one is screaming in pain, terror, anger. As long as they're not actively screaming, everything is all right.
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D
Yeah, great. Yeah, no, it's good. It's good to have those kinds of bars. It's kind of a low bar, but.
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C
Okay. I was going to say it's a low bar, but it is there. We do have status.
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D
Okay, good. Yeah, great.
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C
Okay. We should get to John, though. And we have talked about the Gospel of John in past episodes, but for people who kind of missed out on that, could you tell us roughly when and if we know where the gospel was written?
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D
So it is almost always considered to be the last of our four gospels of the New Testament. This is not just a modern assessment based on scholarship. It was the assessment of early Christianity, too. In early Christianity, it was widely thought that Matthew, Mark, and Luke had been written and that the Gospel of John then was the last. They thought about that, I think, because even today, people realize that it's a different kind of gospel when people read it, they tend to think it has less to do with kind of the nuts and bolts of what Jesus was doing during his life. They used to call it a spiritual gospel in early Christianity. People today might call it a more theologically reflective gospel where there's more kind of theology going on and less kind of action. For that reason, I think, in early Christianity, I think that's one of the reasons they thought that it was probably the last. But today it still generally seemed to be the last of our gospels. But it is often dated sometime to the 90s of the common era. So usually 90 to 95. That's a generally accepted view. There will be exceptions, of course, among some scholars, it's important to realize what that means. If Jesus died around the year 30 and this thing is written in the 90s, then it's, you know, it's 60 or 65 years probably after the events that it's attempting to narrate as to where it was written. It's really kind of anybody's guess. Scholars often do guess. And one of the kind of amusing things I think is how some scholars guess and are so sure about their guess. But I'm telling you it's guesswork because it's written in Greek. It's usually thought that it was written outside of Israel. The person is a Greek speaker who's writing it. But their guess is one of the traditional sites is Ephesus. Many listeners may have visited Ephesus where you can actually see the tomb of John the son of Zebedee and another John. Two Johns were famous in early Christianity. So Ephesus is an old guess. But the reality is there's nothing about the book itself that suggests Ephesus as opposed to some other place where there were Christians in the Greek speaking Roman Empire.
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C
Thank you. Now, the Gospel, like the others, doesn't actually name its authority. So which John is being attributed with its authorship and when did this attribution first come about?
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D
This is a very important question because, you know, people just call it John and the author doesn't call himself John. That's the first thing. There's nothing in this Gospel that would make you think John as opposed to, you know, someone else. One of the ironies is that we do have a book in the New Testament that claims to be written by somebody named John, but we don't call that book John. That's the book of Revelation. We take another book that doesn't claim to be written by John. We call that one John. So that's how it goes. The attribution. When people call it John or attribute it to John, they do mean a specific John. They almost always today mean John the son of Zebedee, who was one of Jesus, 12 disciples in the Gospels, at least in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and was one of the close three, one of the inner circle of three disciples in Matthew, Mark and Luke. So Jesus has 12 disciples, men disciples. And there's an inner circle of Peter, James and John. James and John are the sons of a man named Zebedee, who was a fisherman in Galilee. And they too started out as fishermen. And the idea then is that that's the author of this book. One of the ironies is that John the son of Zebedee is never mentioned in the Gospel of John. That's interesting, but it's just fact.
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C
So how does John son of Zebedee relate to this person called the beloved disciple?
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D
This is a very tricky business because it has to do with this figure, this unnamed figure called the beloved disciple or the disciple whom Jesus loved. And it has to do with the authorship of the gospel and with lots of other things. There's this figure in the fourth Gospel that does not appear in the other gospels. So Matthew, Mark and Luke don't have this figure, and the figure is never named. This figure is a man who is closely related in some way. Not in terms of family, but he's closely related to Jesus. He's in a close relationship with Jesus. He is called the disciple whom Jesus loved. He starts showing up in the second half of the gospel and becomes an important figure. He's the one at the Last Supper who is leaning on Jesus breast and asks Jesus about who's going to betray him. He's the one at the foot of the cross when Jesus dies along with Jesus mother, the one to whom Jesus on the cross gives his mother as a child, says, behold your son, and says to the disciple, behold your mother. And so this is an important figure in the Gospel of John, but he's never named. And so there are a lot of debates among people today about who this person is. And some traditionally, he's been identified as John, the son of Zebedee.
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C
What would the other options be for who this beloved disciple could be if not John son of Zebedee?
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D
Well, there are a few things you can say from the text of John. Pretty clearly he's one of the close disciples, and he's at the Last Supper. And so he appears that he's one of the 12. He can't be Peter because the beloved disciple is in several episodes with Peter, for example, they're the two who run to the tomb when they discover it's empty. And there's kind of a foot race and it's between these two. And so it can't be Peter, and so it's some other close disciple. But the thing is that since this person isn't named for a long time people have wondered what are the possibilities? And many people think that it's another one of the disciples. And the idea that it's John can make sense because in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it's Peter, James and John who are closest to Jesus. It can't be Peter, for reasons I've said. It can't be James, because the beloved disciples we're going to see in a second was thought to have written this book, and it couldn't have been written by James because James was the first martyr in Christianity. He was in the New Testament. So he wasn't alive by the time the Gospels were being written. And so that leaves John. And so some people say, well, so it must be John, the son of Zebedee. And that's the standard view. But people have pointed to other things. Some people have said it's Mary Magdalene because, you know, people think of her as the closest disciple, even though she's not in the Gospel, she's not particularly close. But other people have said it's Lazarus in the Gospel of John, because in the Gospel of John, Jesus is said to have loved Lazarus, so he's the beloved disciple. And so there are all sorts of possibilities. One possibility that's a very strong possibility among many scholars is that it's not meant to be an actual person in Jesus life, but it's a kind of symbolic literary figure that instead of naming somebody, it's meant to be kind of an ideal disciple rather than a particular disciple that we know about. Otherwise, there are a range of possibilities.
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C
So why then was it decided that John son of Zebedee, was the author of the Gospel of John?
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D
The four gospels, as you said earlier, were originally anonymous. So whoever wrote these books didn't put their names on them. That seems weird to people today because you open up the Gospel of Matthew and it says Gospel according to Matthew. But, you know, if you would think people would think about that for a second, if somebody wrote a gospel they wouldn't like, suppose I were to write a gospel, which I won't, but suppose I do, I wouldn't call it the Gospel according to Barth. And in their manuscripts, it actually doesn't say the Gospel according to. In our manuscripts, when it has the names of these authors on it, it's just according to. And so Matthew's Gospel is just the title in our manuscript is According to Matthew or According to Mark according to John. And so that's somebody else telling you who wrote the book so that you can identify which is which. And so the question is, when did people start identifying the authors of these books? Well, it had to be before any of our surviving manuscripts. And we don't have any reference to John writing this book. For if it's written in the. In the 90s, we don't have any reference for nearly a century, 90 years. By the end of the second century, around, maybe around the year 85 or so, we have a church father named Irenaeus who identifies John as the author, as does a fragment. That's a. The first list of books that we have that author thought was part of the. Was the New Testament. The first list of book is called the Muratorian Canon. But the Muratorian canon identifies John. And so by the end of the second century it's being called John. Before that, it doesn't have a name associated with it.
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C
I have to say, before we go any further, I think a lot of people would absolutely read the Gospel according to Barth. So I wouldn't rule that out entirely. I would be very happy to read that particular book.
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D
Well, okay. I will say that this last semester I taught a course on the Jesus in scholarship and film and my students for their final writing assignments assignment all had to write a gospel. And they were fictional accounts and you know, but they were great. Yeah, really great. So. Yeah, but I'm not likely to do it.
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C
Well, what do we know about John, son of Zebedee, historically?
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D
Yeah, well what we know historically is one of the things that calls into question whether he could have written this book. Our only information about him comes from the gospels of the New Testament and from later legends. And so within the Gospels he shows up in Matthew, Mark and Luke. As I pointed out, he does not show up in John. And in our early accounts he's a fisherman. He and his brother James are sons of Zebedee and they fish for a living. They fish on the Sea of Galilee. And so that helps us because they appear to be from, you know, around that area in the Galilee area. That area where they're from fishing on Sea of Galilee, that's a rural area. There aren't big cities there. They're not connected with any big cities. Connected with Capernaum, smaller place, places around there. They did not have lots of like big buildings or what we would think of as kind of culture centers. There weren't schools in these places. There weren't public buildings in many of these rural places. People did not have educations in these places. And people who are fishermen were living a hand to mouth existence. Most people like that were put to work as soon as they were of age to be able to be of any help in a boat. So they didn't go to school. You know, they work for a living. And so by the gospel time, John is an adult. He and his brother are still helping his father. His father's still alive, so he'd be probably a young adult at this point. They're portrayed in Mark as mending their nets, which you know, shows they're just kind of doing manual labor. The reason that matters is because the historical Johnson of Zebedee, who was, I think he probably certainly was a historical figure, would not be educated, would not know how to read or write. That would not make him unusual. It would make him typical of that entire area. The best estimates say that at this time in rural Galilee, something like less than 5% of people could read and fewer people could write. He would have spoken Aramaic, probably would not have learned Greek because he wouldn't have gone to school and he wouldn't have lived anywhere where Greek was being spoken speaking Aramaic. And so he probably was illiterate. And I'll point out that this isn't just kind of a scholarly guess. In the New Testament, in Acts, chapter 4, verse 13, Peter and John are said to be illiterate. They're called agromatoid. They don't know their letters. And that's almost certainly true for people who were fishermen up in Galilee.
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C
So if John son of Zebedee was illiterate and therefore couldn't have written the Gospel himself, is it possible that maybe he dictated an account to a secretary or something similar?
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D
Some people have suggested that, and it's certainly worth considering. There are several factors that would have to feed into the consideration. One is the Gospel is written in Greek. John would not have known Greek, let alone literary Greek. Even if you can't write it out yourself, if you're dictating, you're still dictating a literary work using literary constructions, you know, things like full sentences that have subjects and verbs that agree with each other. And the difficulty is that the Gospel of John was not originally written in Aramaic. There's not a lot of dispute about this among linguists who are experts in both ancient Greek and ancient Aramaic. This was an original Greek composition, and it's a very high level Greek composition. This book could not have been written by somebody kind of an average person who graduates from university today, which would be somebody who's had 12 years of preparatory work and then four years of college. Somebody at that level could not have written this book. And we're talking about somebody who had no education, who probably could not sign his name. And so he would not have been able to write it. He would not have been able to dictate it as it's come to us. Could he have given like a scribe, like, could he have like told stories to some Greek speaking scribe who wrote it all down and then composed it into something? Yeah, I suppose that would be theoretically possible. The problem is we don't know of a single instance of that kind of thing ever happening in the ancient world period, where a book was written by somebody like speaking one language, telling somebody a bunch of stories to somebody else, then who takes the stories, translates them into the other languages, and then makes a literary composition out of it. We don't have any example of that. So it's possible, but, you know, doesn't seem very likely.
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C
If it's highly unlikely that John son of Zebedee did write the Gospel of John, are there segments or sections within the gospel itself that give any alternative clues as to its authorship?
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D
Well, this is where the disciple whom Jesus loved comes in. Because there are two passages that many people, including many scholars, including friends of mine, who continue to be my friends, even though they have this view, who think that these passages show that the author of this book is trying to claim himself to be the disciple whom Jesus loved. And so the thinking behind this is that these passages give hints that the author is claiming to be the beloved disciple. And then by process of elimination, since it can't be Peter and it's one of the close disciples, it must be John. So this is somebody who's actually claiming to be John the son of Zebedee. I was convinced of that view when I was an evangelical Christian who simply believed that John the son of Zebedee wrote it. But there are a lot of scholars who aren't, you know, evangelical Christians who still still think this. And I just think that it's. I don't see how it works. I just don't.
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B
Could you tell us a bit about
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the passages that are used to argue for this case?
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D
So, look, they're both really interesting passages. And the first one is a passage unique to the Gospel of John. In the other gospels, you know, Jesus obviously gets crucified and he. And he dies on the cross. John has this very interesting thing that happens right after Jesus dies. They want to make sure that he's dead. And so a soldier comes up and he takes like a spear and sticks it into Jesus side to make sure he's dead. And out of his side there pours out blood and water. What? Blood and water. And the author appears to think that people are going to have trouble believing me on this. And so this is John 19:34, 35. And people can look it up themselves. John 19:34, 35. It says that one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. Okay. He who saw it has borne witness his testimony is true. And he knows that he tells the truth that you may also believe. Now, the person at the foot of the cross is the beloved disciple, is the he. The he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. And so this author is saying that that disciple has told the truth and that you can believe it because he said it. And so people often will say, see, the beloved disciple is claiming to write the book. When somebody tells you that, you think, yeah, boy, it sure does. Yeah, until you look at what it says, it doesn't say that at all. The author does not say, I saw this happen. The author is talking about somebody and he says, this person told us he's born witness and he knows that he's telling the truth so that you can believe. I mean, that's like my, you know, it's like my talking about, like, suppose I'm talking about a, like a politician. Okay, that, that. And I've heard something about this politician. And so my favorite politician now is a guy named Jeff Jackson. He's running for attorney general. He's of my state. And he's, he's like, he's in Congress right now. And so he's my favorite because he was my son's best friend in high school. Okay, suppose I'm telling somebody that, you know, Jeff, he's kind of in the news last day. So folks, I know Jeff, Jackson's best friend said this. And he heard Jackson say that he knows that he's telling the truth. If I say that, that doesn't mean it's me, right? It means I know the person who said it. And so I just don't see it in this verse, unless somebody wants to think already, like going into this thinks, oh, it's got to be the beloved disciple. There'd be no reason you would think that because he's talked about in the third person.
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C
What's the other passage that's used for this argument?
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D
The other one gets used even more and boy, I really don't understand this one because just look at the grammar. Okay? So I mean, you know, apologies to my friends who are, you know, who know, you know, just about everything about the Gospel of John. But I, I'm sorry, I just don't see it. This comes at the end of chapter 21 and at the end of chapter 21, which is usually thought by scholars to be an add on to the original Gospel of John. I would say the general view of John among critical scholars is that originally it probably ended at the end of chapter 20, but then after Jesus, resurrection, appearances, and it Kind of ends. And the author says, you know, there are many. Jesus did a bunch of other things, but these are written so that you might believe. And it kind of looks like it ends there. And then there's another chapter with more resurrection appearances that looks like an add on for a variety of reasons. But at the end of that one, it's trying to explain about the beloved disciple who's had an appearance of Jesus at the resurrection. And the author then says, chapter 21, verse 24. This is the disciple that is bearing witness to these things and who has written these things. And we know that his testimony is true. Okay, well, that's it then. He's bearing witness. He's the one writing this, right? Yeah. No, the disciple is the one who's testifying to the things he said. And we know that his testimony is true. I mean, if I say, look, John Smith is saying these things and we know that he's right. If I say that I'm not claiming to be John Smith, I'm claiming John Smith is not me. And so the fact that it goes from the third person to the first person is a clear indication to me least, I mean, I think the most sensible readers, it's got to mean he's not talking about himself. I think what happened is people grow up thinking, well, it's, you know, God, it's written by the John, the beloved disciple. And then they look at these verses and it kind of seems right, but just look at them closely. Clear to me. It doesn't. It's not saying that. My view is that the beloved disciple, whoever. Whoever the beloved disciple is, is in the book. The author is not claiming to be that person, in my view.
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C
I see. So if we don't have any explicit information about who the author is, and the passages that seem to maybe hint at a particular author don't really hint at that particular author. We're reading our own beliefs into the text. Is there anything, say, in the literary style that can be helpful in trying to answer the question of authorship?
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D
Yeah, it kind of goes back to what we were saying before, that it's written in a very good Greek style. Like there aren't grammatical mistakes and things. I mean, it's high quality Greek. It is not what you would call kind of highly literate Greek written by one of the great elite authors of the Roman world. This would not be considered like high level literacy. So this is not like, you know, James Joyce or something, but it's perfectly competent and it tells a really good story. And so this is Somebody who's highly trained in Greek composition. That tells us something, because there are only really two groups of people in the Roman world who would be highly trained in Greek composition. Somebody from a really wealthy elite background whose family could afford for them to get a high level education, which would take years and years. The reason it's a high level elite family is because those years and years have to be spent working if you're trying to support your family. And so this is somebody who's had the leisure to go to school for years and years. The other group would be slaves who are trained to be authors so that they can be scribes or they can be used to write things. But I'm not sure that most slaves who were trained to read and write were trained in composition. Some rare ones may have been, but usually it's just so they can copy things and, you know, do that kind of thing. So my guess is it's somebody who's in a Christian community somewhere outside of Israel. It does not look like he comes from Israel. His primary language is Greek, which put him outside of Israel. The reason I say that, by the way, is because some elite people in Israel at the time could speak Greek. But we don't have anybody in the first century of the common era, the first century when these Gospels were being written, we don't have anybody from Israel that we know about who was writing literary Greek. The closest thing is Josephus, the Jewish historian. And he admits he had to learn how to do it. And he was man, he was a really high elite within circles. And so this, it seems unlikely it's somebody from Israel. And so it's somebody living outside of Israel who's a Christian, who is highly trained. And we don't know where he was. We think he's living at the end of the first century. Other than that, you know, as much as we'd love to know more, our hands are tied by our lack of evidence.
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C
So someone outside of Israel most likely would not have been an eyewitness to the events they're describing. Do we have any ideas of what sources were being used to construct this narrative?
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D
There have been a lot of debates about that. The current debate represents a pendulum swing. What happens in a lot of scholarship, especially in the humanities, is that somebody will stake out a position and then 30 years later, somebody else will stake out the opposite position. Then 30 years later, somebody will stake out the original position with new evidence and stuff. And so when I was in graduate school, everybody thought John did not have the Synoptic Gospels. At his disposal, whoever the guy is, he didn't use the Synoptic Gospels. And now the pendulum has swung the other way. A lot of people are saying, oh, he used the Synoptic Gospels. If he did use the Synoptic Gospels, which I don't think. Personally, I don't think there's good evidence for it. But if he did, he didn't use them in the way that, say, Matthew used Mark, where he copied stories and then changed them and added things to them. This one is not like copying out stories from that. And so it's kind of guesswork, you know, does he have previous written materials available to him that tell a very different story from the one in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Is he basing it largely on oral traditions that he's heard? How creative is he himself in his composition? There's a lot to be said for him being fairly creative in his composition. One argument for that is that when you read the Gospel of John, you have different voices speaking at different points in the narrative. For example, John the Baptist will be saying something, okay? And then the narrator will say something about what John has just said. Then Jesus will say something. And the thing is that John the Baptist and the narrator and Jesus all sound exactly alike. Why are these three very different people from three different. Very different backgrounds and educational levels and. And everything else? Why do they sound just the same? Because you're not hearing three voices. You're hearing one voice, the voice of the author. So that's a piece of evidence that he's being fairly liberal with his use of sources, that he's changing them rather than just conserving them.
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C
I have one final question. In a previous podcast, you interviewed your colleague Hugo Mendez. He argues that the Gospel of John is actually a forgery. What are your thoughts on that argument?
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D
Yeah, well, this is a. Hugo is my closest friend who disagrees with me on these two verses. I didn't want to name names, but Hugo and I don't agree on this. And so I will say that Hugo's work on the Gospel of John and on first, second, and third John, the letters later in the New Testament, the work is spectacular, and it is drawing a lot of attention to itself. And Hugo has a really, really interesting theory. His view is that what's going on is that none of these is written by John, which I agree with. He thinks, though, that the Gospel of John is making a claim to have been written by one of Jesus apostles, because he agrees with me, it was not written by one of Jesus apostles. So that allows him to say so. It's somebody making a false claim. And that by his definition and by my definition, that would be a forgery. He thinks that when this author says something like the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, that the author is claiming to be an eyewitness to the life of Jesus. I think that's a plausible claim. That may be right. And if so, then I too, would consider it a forgery. I don't think that the author's claiming to be John, the beloved disciple. And Hugo. It was funny we did that. You know, we did that interview on the podcast, and after the interview, after we turned off the cameras, we went at it for an hour. It was great. It was so much fun. We may have actually kept the recording. We probably should. We probably should post this.
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C
Just the stuff people would want to see. Yes.
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D
So, yeah, probably is. So, you know, we just disagree. We disagree about those. Those two verses. I don't think that it's claiming to be by the Beloved Disciple and Hugo does. But Hugo's bigger theory is that whoever wrote First John is imitating John, wanting you to think he's that author, and whoever Second John wants you to think that he's the author of First John. There are all these different authors and he's got good evidence for it. I think it's really, really interesting. But we do disagree about the Beloved Disciple.
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C
Well, Bart, thank you so much. We're going to take a quick ad break, and then we'll be back with some more news from Bart.
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B
Most people know many of the stories of Genesis. The Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, the stories about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. But do you know what scholars say about those accounts? What archaeology, science and history can reveal about them, what their significance could be, even if they aren't literally true? Enter Bible scholar Bart Ehrman's captivating online course in the history, legend and myth in Genesis. In the in six enlightening lessons, you'll journey through questions. Did Genesis borrow its stories from other cultures? Are these accounts historical or legendary? And who were the real authors behind the Pentateuch? Whether you approach Genesis as a believer, a skeptic, or simply a seeker of knowledge, this course will challenge your understanding of these ancient narratives. It's a unique opportunity to navigate the complex of the Bible's most famous book. Don't miss out on this intellectual adventure. Visit barterman.com Genesis to learn more or sign up today. And be sure to use discount code mjpodcast for A special discount.
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E
This is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, UrbanBlog.org happenings and online course launches.
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C
Bart, so you are on your research leave. Sabbatical and you're working on a book. And I know we've spoken about the book before, but it's been a little while, so I wanted to ask you if you would tell us a bit about that project.
- [33:01]
D
Yeah, you know, it's really developed as I've worked on it. It's the first book for a popular audience I've written where my ideas have developed significantly over time as I've gotten deeper and deeper into the topic. What it's been all along is how the ethics of Jesus revolutionized the ethical world of the ancients, but actually have transformed the ethical conscience of the West. What we think is right and wrong, I'm going to be trying to demonstrate goes back to the teachings of Jesus and I'm toying with the title. I never get to use the titles I want. Actually, they have one or two times allowed me to use my titles and those have flopped. But this time I've got a title I really like. Yeah, not good. But I'm thinking right now calling this the Origins of Altruism.
- [33:50]
C
I like that.
- [33:51]
D
Yeah, I do too. So, of course evolutionary biology has shown that altruism is possible within the human race and that it could be genetically part of who we are. There are ways to explain that even with the survival of the fittest. What I'm going to be arguing is that the Western idea that we have now that we really ought to help people in need, that we don't know strangers, goes back to the teachings of Jesus. He got it from his Jewish tradition. But the Jewish tradition didn't take over the Western world. Jesus followers did. And I'm going to try and show how that worked, that the emphasis how you ought to live is not just to help your friends and your family and those that you are your same socioeconomic class which was the Greek and Roman definite view, but you need to help those who are desperately in need, who are hungry and homeless and who have no resources and are strangers to you. You should give massively of your resources to help them. How that affected everything in the Western conscience, ethical conscience, and still affect us today. Even people don't have anything to do with Jesus, but that it is also manifest in interesting ways, including. I'm going to be talking about how it came to be manifest in understandings of forgiveness when people do nasty things to you, how forgiveness became a topic of conversation, but also in all of this, it's how those ethics became part of the Christian tradition, but how the Christian tradition also radically changed Jesus ethics because they were too radical. And so nobody's really following what Jesus says, but the basic ideas are part of our conscience.
- [35:32]
C
That sounds absolutely fascinating. Do you know when it's going to be out?
- [35:35]
D
I don't know when it's going to
- [35:36]
C
be written at some point in the future. Megan, don't rush me.
- [35:41]
D
No, it's due. I'm going to try and write it this semester. If I don't, at least during the summer, it's due to the publisher in August. They always take a year to publish something. So probably like, you know, Christmas 2025. I don't know. It's going down there.
- [35:56]
C
We can push some Christmas lists for.
- [35:57]
D
Yeah, right, Chris. Right.
- [35:58]
C
Next year.
- [35:59]
D
Yeah, next year. Right.
- [36:00]
C
Well, thank you for sharing that with us. We are now going to go to our listeners questions.
- [36:08]
E
Now it's time for questions from listeners where BART answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit bart erman.com Ask Bart
- [36:26]
C
okay, we have, as always, some excellent questions from our listeners. First up, setting aside a possible lack of factual basis for the resurrection of Jesus, is it plausible that the authors who wrote about it believed that Jesus had a different body than the one that was badly damaged on the cross? Mary didn't recognize him in the garden, and he apparently walked through walls and moved without normal physical limitations. Colossians and Revelation say he was firstborn of the dead. But the Bible records other people who were supposedly raised from the dead also.
- [36:58]
D
Okay, yeah, I'll answer that last bit first. It is true there are other people raised from the dead in the Bible. I mentioned Lazarus earlier. And in the Old Testament, Elijah raises somebody from the dead and Elisha raises somebody from the dead. And so people get raised from the dead. Those people who get raised from the dead elsewhere die again. And so they are not the resurrection of the dead. The resurrection refers to a future event in Jewish thinking and then later Christian thinking where people will be brought back to life never to die again. And Jesus is the first of that sort. The question of whether some of the Gospel authors or others had a different view of Jesus body, my response is that I think in early Christianity there was a variety of views about what the resurrected body of Jesus was. There were some people whose writings, if they wrote anything, never made it into the New Testament. These are people who thought that Jesus was not bodily raised from the dead, but that he had some kind of spiritual resurrection, like his soul came back to life. We know about people like that because Paul attacks them in the book of First Corinthians, especially chapter 15. Many people today think, well, Paul thinks Jesus was spiritually raised from the dead. And yeah, that's kind of right, but it's not what they think it means. Paul thinks that Jesus body came out of the tomb, but it was transformed into an immortal body. It went in as just a physical body and it came out as a spiritual body, but it was a body. The body was transformed into something immortal that could not get sick or get hurt or die again. And Paul thought, that's what our resurrection will be like. There were other people who wanted to insist that the body came out of the grave was the same body, just exactly the same body. And you get that in the Gospels too, where in Luke, for example, and in John, you have Jesus saying things like, the disciples don't believe it's him. He says, well, give me something to eat. They give him some broiled fish and he eats it. So apparently Jesus has a digestive system still. I don't know, but he can eat things. And he tells Thomas, feel my hands and my feet. In other times, I still got the scars. And so some people wanted to emphasize the continuity with the body that was buried. Others wanted to say that he was transformed and that's why Mary doesn't recognize him. His body's been transformed, but it's still the tomb is empty. The point is, the tomb is empty. And then there are some people whose views were not included in the New Testament because they were declared heretical, who thought that Jesus body was not raised from the dead, but that his spirit was. And interestingly, a lot of Christians agree with that third heretical view, but it's not the view of the New Testament.
- [39:50]
C
Thank you. In Matthew 16, Jesus gives Peter keys to the kingdom of heaven. What are those keys? And did Jesus mean for Peter to carry on his work?
- [40:01]
D
That's a very. It's a fraught passage. It's a difficult passage. It's the one where Jesus names Peter as the rock and says, upon this rock, I'll build my church. And he seems to give him the power on earth to forgive sins, to allow people then to enter into heaven. This is part of the idea that the apostles carry on Jesus work, that the spirit of Jesus is still alive and among the Apostles so that they have the authority of Jesus himself. It's Jesus death and resurrection for Matthew that brings salvation. But the salvation is conveyed by his messengers, by his apostles. The term apostle means somebody who is sent. And the disciples, the 11 remaining disciples in Matthew are sent after Jesus death in order to proclaim the good news and to baptize people into the new faith. By doing this, they open up the possibility of heaven for them. Peter is the leader of the apostles for Matthew, and so Peter is the one then who has charge of this act of salvation, of opening up, giving people the keys to heaven.
- [41:17]
C
Thank you.
- [41:18]
B
How likely is it that Jesus would
- [41:20]
C
have been familiar with the concept of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53? And if he was aware of it, how likely do you find it that he would have self identified himself as the suffering servant in relation to his ministry?
- [41:33]
D
Yeah, great question. Jesus does quote parts of the Scripture, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah is one of the pat one of the books that he appears to know. He never quotes Isaiah 53 in any of our texts. He never quotes any of the suffering servant songs. Isaiah 53 is one of four passages in the second part of Isaiah where you have this figure called the suffering servant who is referenced in two of these four passages. The suffering servant is explicitly identified as the nation Israel. And that was the standard interpretation in the days of Jesus. We don't know of any Jews who interpreted the suffering servant as a future Messianic figure until after Jesus death. When Jesus died, his disciples were trying to understand how God would have his chosen one crucified. And they landed on passages like the suffering servant things, passages to say that Jesus in fact was the Messiah who had to suffer. And so I think it's absolutely a post Easter phenomenon of thinking of Isaiah 53 in relationship to Jesus. There's no evidence in the New Testament itself that he specifically was thinking of Isaiah 53. He does three times in Mark, three times in Luke, four times, etc. Throughout the Gospels he says that he has to suffer and die. But the question this person's asking is what did the historical Jesus say? And I don't think the historical Jesus was going around saying that he had to be crucified. I think he thought the kingdom of God was coming soon and that he would be made the king. When that didn't happen and he was crucified, then his disciples shifted from the kingdom is something that's coming with, you know, being given to Jesus to rule to. Jesus had to die and be raised from the dead. So I don't think Jesus used it to understand himself.
- [43:27]
C
Thank you very much. Final question. In the New Testament, both Jesus and Paul have interactions with or knowledge of demons. My layman studies lead me to think that the demons encountered by Jesus may have been the best available description for what we now call mental illness. But Paul says that idol worship is synonymous with demon worship, seemingly referencing Deuteronomy. When did the notion of demons enter Judaism? And how does the ancient notion of demons differ from pop culture and Hollywood?
- [43:57]
D
Right. We should do a whole episode on this. It's a big one. So short story is that the word demon comes from a Greek word, daimonion, which in Greek and Roman circles referred to a lower level divinity that was not necessarily evil. Could be evil. Could be good. People could have, like a guardian daimonion, like Socrates had a daimonion, which was like a guardian angel. But daimonia could also be wicked. When Judaism started developing an apocalyptic view, about 200 years before Jesus, Jews started thinking that there are forces of evil in the world that are making life miserable for people. And one of these forces they called demonic, they were demons. And so by the time of Paul and Jesus, there were many Jews who thought that demons existed. They're like henchmen for the devil. And so they did. They understood it that way. And that's how you explain why people are having such miserable times. If somebody has, for example, some kind of tendency to harm themselves, they must have a demon inside of them. Or if somebody has an epileptic fit, they must have a demon inside of them. Or somebody can't talk, they must have a demon inside of them. So you assign things to demons. And Jews started saying that idols were not really representing gods, they were representing demons because you're worshiping something evil. It started with apocalyptic Judaism, but demons were thought to be real spiritual beings, and they are the ones that caused harm. And so people today have to try and explain what these things really were. And it might. And this is one of the explanations, is that it. It's describing things that we can't understand just on the surface, physiologically.
- [45:40]
C
Thank you very much for that audience. Thank you all for submitting your questions. They're always really, really interesting to read, and I very much enjoy hearing Bart's answers to them also. Now, before we finish up for the week, Bart, would you mind summarizing what we talked about and maybe let people know where they can find out more?
- [45:55]
D
Yeah. So we talked about the authorship of the Gospel of John. Why is it attributed to John, the son of Zebedee? Could John the son of Zebedee actually have written it or not? And what's the relationship of John the son of Zebedee to a figure in the gospel called the disciple that Jesus loved? The answers that historical scholars have come up to those questions are quite different from what most people are raised on. But it's a standard view today that John the son of Zebedee did not write this gospel. It is debated whether John the 7th Zebedee is to be identified as a beloved disciple or whether it's someone else. My view is that John did not write this gospel and that whoever wrote it was writing somewhere else in Greek and was not an eyewitness to these things, but he was living decades later.
- [46:41]
C
Thank you very much, Bart Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show.
- [46:45]
B
If you did, please subscribe to the
- [46:47]
C
podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that 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?
- [47:02]
D
Well, conveniently or possibly by your design, it's closely related to the question you just asked me about demons. We're actually dealing with a very, very serious topic next week, which is dealing with the problem of evil and especially how does the New Testament explain that there's evil in a world that is created and run by God? If God is sovereign, why is there evil? And many people think they have the answer to that. Many people have simple answers. Some people have sophisticated answers. And we're going to talk about what the New Testament has to say about it. Place is not not what you would expect.
- [47:40]
C
Join us next week. Thank you all and goodbye.
- [47:46]
B
This has been an episode of Misquoting
- [47:48]
C
Jesus with Bart Erman. We'll be back with a new episode
- [47:51]
B
next Tuesday, so please be sure to
- [47:53]
C
subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on
- [47:57]
B
Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.