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- [00:01]
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Megan Lewis
The first gospel recording, Jesus Life wasn't written until several decades after his death. Dr. Bart Ehrman is here to tell us why it took so long for pen to be put to paper and how this impacts the use of the Gospels as historical documents. 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.
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Chris Huntley
Have you ever wondered how Jesus message of repentance and preparing for the Kingdom of God somehow turned into the Christian message of we must believe in Jesus for eternal life? It's Chris Huntley and I'm on the Bart Ehrman team. And that's the question that Bart's going to be answering in his upcoming talk for for the new insights into the New Testament conference titled A Core Teaching of Jesus and why His Followers Abandoned It. That's just one of the 13 fascinating talks that we have on the historical Jesus coming up this September 26th through the 28th. Besides the talks, we've also got additional events like attendee mixers, roundtable panels and the chance to meet the scholars. If you're a Misquoting Jesus fan and you want to support the show, joining us at NIT would be a fantastic way to do that. We're offering two specials in August. One of them is early Bird pricing throughout the month and the second is we're giving away a NINT Journal to anyone who signs up at the elite level. So if you want to learn more or register for the event, head over to barturman.com nint and grab your seat before those deals are gone. And as always, use the code mjpodcast for an additional discount. Thank you so much and I hope to see you there.
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Megan Lewis
Welcome back to Misquoting Jesus, where today we are talking about why it took quite so long for someone to write the Gospels. We've also got a Listeners Questions bonus segment, so be sure to stick around for that. Before all of that. Bart, are you ready for the most important question of the entire interview.
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Bart Ehrman
I'm desperately waiting for it.
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Megan Lewis
Have you ever been fired from a job?
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Bart Ehrman
Ah, yeah. Good. Okay. Yeah, right. No, no, that's a good question. So, uh, you know, when I was in, I think when I was in graduate school, I made a list of all the jobs I had done up to that point and I think there were 38 of them. Like jobs that I got paid for, different kind because like I did all sorts of things, but I think I was only fired from the first one. And so the deal was my mom ran, was administrator for the Kansas, Kansas University Student Union, which was a big six story building that had lots of meeting rooms and things and restaurants and things. And when I, when I was 12, I wanted a job because like I've, like I've all. I always liked working, I liked making money. So. And I started this job, a dollar an hour washing dishes in the, one of the cafeteria and the student union and. 12 years old. And I got fired after about a month because the state health department people came in and realized they had a 12 year old working here. They said, man, you can't have a 12 work a year. I said, oh my God. So they, they fired me. So it was an inauspicious beginning to a career. But.
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Megan Lewis
So yes, you have been fired, but you were 12 at the time and you were only fired because you weren't legally allowed to be employed.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the only reason. No, like I, I, yeah, no, you know, I always had the mentality that if I, if I was going to do a job, I wanted to, to do a good job. And so I, I've done a lot of jobs and I just, I just, I always found it. Jobs can obviously be hugely boring. And so the key is to figure out something that's interesting about it. And so, yeah, so, yeah, that's, I think that's the only one. Have you been fired?
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Megan Lewis
Not that I can remember. I was. The closest I think I can come is I did work as a camp counselor in a summer camp in upstate New York for two summers. And the second summer I worked there, I was not asked to return again for the following summer, which was not the same as being fired, but was kind of like a less than subtle. You didn't do a great job this summer. And to be fair, I didn't, I was not, not well enough equipped to be dealing with large amounts of small children.
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Bart Ehrman
Yes, yes, yes.
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Megan Lewis
Yeah. And my, there was a whole, there was stuff going on, but no, that's, that's as close as I can come. I don't think I've actually been fired. Well, there is, of course, still time.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you won't be fired from your current job taking care of young children.
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Megan Lewis
This is true.
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Bart Ehrman
This is very permanently, I'm afraid, until. Well, until they're no longer young children.
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Megan Lewis
All right, important stuff over with. Let's get on to the, the educational side of things. When you were a Christian, did the dates of the Gospels composition give you cause for concern?
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Bart Ehrman
No, not at all. For a couple reasons. One was I, I thought they were written probably within about 20 years of Jesus death. And I thought that they had been written by eyewitnesses. And so Matthew was Jesus disciple. Matthew the tax collector. John was the beloved disciple. John of 70. Luke was not one of the disciples, but he was, he was a companion of PA who had good information from knowing the apostles. And Mark was the companion of Peter. And so these are eyewitness accounts or at least, you know, relating what eyewitnesses had seen. And so I, the dates didn't bother me at all.
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Megan Lewis
So when do scholars think that the Gospels were written?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, the critical scholars who are not like conservative evangelical fundamentalists or conservative, you know, Catholics or Jesus, like, you know, scholars of various kinds have pretty well agreed on the dates, as it turns out. I mean, pretty much everybody who would teach like in universities and things would say that Mark is probably the first Gospel written around the year 70. Luke and John, I mean, Luke and Matthew are later. Matthew maybe a little bit earlier, but sometime in the 80s, 80 to 85. John, the last gospel, 90 to 95. Those dates aren't, aren't really particularly controversial, although they're, they're always, of course you're going to have scholars come along, say, no, no, that's not right, or they'll redate things or do. But basically that's pretty much the consensus and I think there are good grounds for it.
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Megan Lewis
So when scholars are trying to ascertain the date of an historical document, what kinds of evidence are they looking at?
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Bart Ehrman
Right. So, you know, it's, it's part in part tricky because these Gospels are anonymous. And so if you, if, if you actually have a book written by somebody, you know, when he was born and died, then you got a pretty good idea. But, you know, these are anonymous books. And so there are lots of anonymous books from the ancient world. And sometimes books, something will be discovered. You know, you don't even know what it is. And it's like it doesn't have a name attached to it. So how do you date it? How do you decide? And what you do is you, you, you begin by trying to figure out if there's a time after which it had to be written and a time before which it had to be written. And so just start with the before, which, in other words, like, how do you know it was written before the year 150, you know, for example? Well, how do you know? Well, several things. For one thing, it had to be written before any of the surviving manuscripts were produced. Okay. So there's. That you can date manuscripts in various ways. And so that helps with something like the Gospels. What you do is you try to find evidence of somebody literally quoting them and telling you they're. They're quoting them. And so somebody who says, says, oh, yeah, this was in a gospel, you know, or this, and it. And quote it. And with the New Testament gospels, Justin Martyr, in the year around the year 150, definitely quotes the gospels. And he doesn't call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but he, he calls them the memoirs of the apostles. And he's quoting our gospels. It's pretty, it's pretty clear. And he's around 150. So they had to be written before 150. Okay, so then you try to see, okay, if it's before 150, how, how far back could it go? So as I said, Mark is usually thought to be the earliest because it looks like Matthew and Luke both used Mark, so it had to be before them. And the question with thinking of something earlier is does it refer to any events or quote, any writings that you can date? And in the case of Mark, it is widely believed that Mark knew about the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in the year 70. But there are reasons for thinking that is written close to that event. And so it had to be, basically, if that's right, then it had to be sometime between the year 70 and the year 150. You could, if you, if you're dubious about that, you could say at least it had to be written between the time of Jesus death and 150. So between 30 and 150. But it looks like it's between 7, 70, 150. And then you start, then you start looking for other things. There are further hints, you know, know, did it influence something else without a direct quotation, did it, you know, and so scholars dig around like that, but they narrow it and narrow it and narrow it. And so usually it ends up being that most scholars think these gospels were produced between 70 and 100 of the common era.
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Megan Lewis
What is it about the Gospel of John that makes scholars, or that prompts scholars to place it at the kind of the latter end of that particular scale?
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Bart Ehrman
The John's a particularly interesting instance. We have a, you know, we have a manuscript of John that some scholars date to the first part of the second century. It's called p.52. And there are disputes about this, but most scholars have traditionally dated it, say between the year 125 or the year 140. And so that would, if you have that manuscript, it's just, it's a tiny little thing. It's in Manchester University, it's in John Ryland's library in Manchester University. And it's, it's this size of a credit card. But they can date it. And so if that's right, okay, so it has to be before that. And so you go like that. But why do they date it as the last Gospel? Interestingly, John has virtually always been considered the last gospel, going back to as early as people talked about there being gospels. Clement of Alexandria, for example, around the year 200, is quite definite that John wrote his last. And so he was always known to have been last. I think the reason in antiquity is comparable to the reason people have today, which is that the theological views of this book are very different from Matthew, Mark and Luke and appear to be more theologically advanced from Matthew, Mark and Luke. And some scholars today think that it was influenced by Matthew, Mark and Luke. I'm not confident about that, but some scholars think that, and if it was, then it's produced after them. But the, the very rich theology that you find in John is so much more like you start getting in the second century than you get in, like, you know, the early part of the, in the middle of this first century. And so that's why they tend to think it has a later theology and therefore it's probably a later book.
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Megan Lewis
So we've discussed kind of roughly the, the dates of compositions for the Gospels. Are these the earliest written accounts we have of Jesus life?
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Bart Ehrman
They're the earliest ones we have there. I, I would not be surprised if there were earlier accounts in circulation. One big question is if, if Mark was first writing around the year 70, did he have written sources? When I was in graduate school in the 70s, the, the, the standard line was that Mark had a written passion narrative and that he used a, an account, a written account of Jesus death and resurrection. I don't, I don't find that convincing. I'm not sure I ever found it convincing, but that was the view. If he did have written sources, then there were earlier written sources. Luke begins his Gospel by saying that many others have tried to write an account of the things Jesus said and did, and now he's going to write an accurate account if he's right, well, we know that we're pretty sure he used the Gospel of Mark, but Mark is not many. And so if there were many before Luke, then theoretically they could have been earlier. And so we just don't know. Luke did appear to use this source that scholars have called Q. Matthew and Luke seems to have used this account, which was a list of Jesus sayings, basically. And if that's true, Q may have been earlier than Mark. But these are the four. These four are the earliest ones that we have now.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. We are going to take a brief break and when we get back, we're going to be looking at how stories of Jesus were transmitted in the earliest days of Christianity.
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Podcast Announcer
Welcome to our upcoming Highlights and Events segment where we catch up on Barth's courses, community updates and all the latest news from the Biblical Studies Academy and beyond.
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Megan Lewis
So our announcement for today is just a last chance warning for early bird pricing of the Hebrew Bible. Exploring the Literature of Ancient Israel with Joel Baden. Early bird pricing expires on August 23rd, so you don't have a whole lot of time to go and register. There is being, there is being, there's 25% being taken off the price, so absolutely go and take advantage of that if you are interested. The class starts live on September 2nd. You will be able to watch all of the replays if you can't attend the actual Zoom classes. And you can sign up at bart ehrman.com forward/the Hebrew Bible and you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount. Another reminder, anyone who signs up for this course in August will be also given the bonus the Rise and Fall of Ancient of Israel, also by Dr. Baden. So fantastic offer, 25% off plus a bonus course if you sign up in August. I don't know why you haven't done it, frankly. Go and go and do it right now. But any thoughts to add on that?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I haven't done it but you know, I get them for free because you know, I run this business. But this is, I said, I said last on last week's podcast, this one is going to be really important because I mean the Hebrew Bible, it's much larger than the New Testament. There are lots of complications and it is so interesting. I always Used to love teaching Hebrew Bible when I, when I would do that. But, you know, it was my secondary field of expertise in graduate school. Joel Baden is like, you know, he's one of the leading guys in the, in the world. And so I think it is definitely something people want to take.
- [16:09]
Megan Lewis
It'll be good. So go, go. Well, after you finish the episode, then go and sign up. We'll have another reminder at the. Welcome back. Before the break, we were talking about the most likely dates for the four canonical gospels. Now I'm going to ask Bart, what do we know about how stories of Jesus were transmitted in the very earliest days of Christianity? Was there like a newsletter going around? How did that happen?
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Bart Ehrman
No, that's a really good question because I think most people haven't thought about it because people just assume these are eyewitness accounts. They don't claim to be. They don't claim to be written. They're not written in the first person. They never mention. They not only never mention their names, they never say I or we in these accounts. And so there are very good reasons for thinking they were not written by eyewitnesses. I'm not sure if we've done an episode. I've done a course on the authorship of the Gospels that people can see why people don't think they're written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But if that's the case, you're dealing with authors who are writing in very fluent Greek. So they probably were not from Israel. They're writing 40, 50, 60 years later. We don't know if they had written sources at their disposal. They may have had. Where are they getting their stories from? So I've actually devoted a book to a book to this question. It's the, it's the best book I ever wrote that nobody's ready, as opposed to the worst book I've ever wrote that nobody's read. So it's called Jesus before the Gospels.
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Megan Lewis
I've read that.
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Bart Ehrman
Oh, you're the one. I knew somebody bought it.
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Megan Lewis
Something new to do? Honestly, no.
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Bart Ehrman
I got $2 of royalties. You must be the one. Thank you.
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Megan Lewis
It was me. You're welcome.
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Bart Ehrman
So the. So what I deal with in the book is how stories are circulating in early Christianity so that the Gospel writers inherited stories that they had heard. And basically the answer is they're passing along through the oral tradition most people did not read in the ancient world. And so if you want to communicate a story about somebody, you tell them a story and then they tell somebody else's story. The story and then that person tells somebody else the story and it goes on like that. And Christians had to be telling stories about Jesus for decades before the Gospels were written. The reason I say they had to have is because we know as a fact that Christian churches were being established around the Mediterranean in major urban areas. And most of the people converting had been pagans. They weren't Jewish. And Christians somehow are convincing these pagans who worship the Roman gods, the Greek gods, who worship various gods. They're convincing them to give up their own gods that their families have worshiped forever, and to worship the God of Jesus and to believe that Jesus is the way of salvation. Well, nobody's going to start believing in Jesus if they never heard of Jesus even though they heard the name. It's not. I'm not going to give up everything to worship somebody I don't know anything about. And so people had to be telling stories in order to convert people. And so stories are in circulation and they're going around. I mean, they're in, you know, they're in Jerusalem and they're in Antioch and they're in Ephesus and they're in Rome and they're like, they're in all these places, people telling these stories. And so the big issue I deal with in my book is how reliable is oral tradition and how reliable is memory? When you hear somebody tells you a story, how well do you remember it and how well do you repeat it? And then the next person, how well do they do it? And it's very interesting topic. I loved writing this book. It's one of my favorite books to write because it got me into understand. Studying psychological understandings of memory, how psychologists understand how memory works and how sociologists deal with social memories and how. How anthropologists deal with oral traditions by studying oral cultures. And the, the results of all of these studies are not what people are taught. They're not what, not what I was told when I was in college or graduate school of this stuff.
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Megan Lewis
My, my high school psychology way back in the mists of time tells me that actually things like oral accounts and memory are not super reliable in terms of accuracy.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, they're not. People always say, well, back then they had better memories because since they didn't write, they had to memorize everything. And. Yeah, no, that's wrong. I mean, it sounds right.
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Megan Lewis
Is that wishful thinking?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's wishful thinking because we actually know, we can test it. It, we have tested it with both, you know, you can test, you can actually do some kind of test on the world stuff, on ancient stuff, but certainly in modern cultures, when people in modern cultures who are in oral, oral cultures, which still exist in some parts of the world, these things have been studied rigorously since the early 20th century. When you go to oral cultures and somebody says that I'm telling the story, that's the same as I told it 10 years ago, or this is the same story I heard from so and so. Well, anthropologists started like recording the stories word for word and then comparing when somebody said it was the same and here not the same. It's like sometimes they're like, you know, 90% different, but in their minds it was the same because it was the same gist, the same kind of the same basic story. The idea that something has to be word for word the same to be the same is, is something that came about with broad spread with, with broad literacy. Only in literate cultures do people think it has to be word for word the same. So when we say something's the same, it's not what people mean in oral traditions. And these stories about Jesus were being passed around in oral traditions.
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Megan Lewis
I want to just revisit something. You said previously that there was an idea that the, the Gospels were eyewitness accounts. Do we know where and when this idea started?
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Bart Ehrman
That they're eyewitnesses? Yeah, it goes way back into, in Christianity when the first person, the first author. Author that we have who talks about the authors of the Gospels is Irenaeus, who is a church father who's writing around the year 180 or 185. And he indicates that Matthew was the tax collector, John was the beloved disciple, Mark and Luke, you know, companions of Peter and Paul. Before that. I mentioned that we have Justin Martyr who quotes the Gospels without naming them, but he does call them the memoirs of the apostles. And so by the middle of the second century at least, these books are being touted as eyewitness reports.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. That was just random curiosity going on. Now if the Gospels weren't written until 40 plus years after Jesus death, we do know that there were other literate Christians kind of wandering around the Mediterranean. The apostle Paul kind of springs very prominently to mind. Do we know of any other people who were writing about or for Christians prior to the gospels that we have?
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Bart Ehrman
The only Christian writings that we have that, that definitely predate the Gospels are the writings of Paul. We have, you know, in the New Testament, 13 books claim to be written by Paul. Scholars have long doubted six of those. And so scholars talk about the Seven undisputed Pauline letters. Those were written before the Gospels. Some of the other books of the New Testament may have been, but in most cases it's really pretty unlikely. So the only writings we have are the writings of Paul. But Paul himself refers to other writings that he produced that, that we don't have anymore. And he mentions people writing to him. Church is writing to him. We don't have those anymore. There are definitely people writing at the time. And by, you know, by the time of when John, if John is written around the year 100, there, there are reasons for thinking that they're pro. There's something like 7 to 10,000 Christians in the world. And so there's definitely were people who could write. But being able to write me does not necessarily mean being able to compose a paragraph. In other words, being able to write in the ancient world might just mean signing your name. But to be able to write a paragraph takes a lot of education. And to be able to write a book in the ancient world, that was really quite rare. So I don't think that there might have been a lot of literate Christians who could maybe read things, but there would have been very few who could actually compose narratives.
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Megan Lewis
So do scholars have any ideas or thoughts about why it took so long for this kind of extended narrative to be written about Jesus life?
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Bart Ehrman
Right. Well, you know, maybe, maybe there were writings earlier. We don't know several things to say about it. One is that Jesus was from Galilee and was, was executed in Judea. The people he knew spoke Aramaic. He spoke Aramaic, his disciples spoke Aramaic. We don't have any evidence of older Aramaic accounts being written. We do have evidence of Aramaic sayings being circulated. Some of the sayings of Jesus sometimes sayings are quoted in Aramaic, you know, in the Gospel of Mark, for example. And other sayings of Jesus make better sense if you translate them back into Aramaic. So there certainly were things being circulated orally, but no evidence of Aramaic books. So these are Greek authors writing later. And they wouldn't have been writing, you know, a lot earlier because most Christians in the early, you know, decade or so would have been from, probably from around Israel or from Judea. So. So right. So why not earlier? Two things, I think. One is most of the early Christians could not write, as I indicated, literacy was very, very low in, in Israel at the time. Lower than throughout most of the rest of the world, as it turns out. So the earliest Christians just couldn't write. And so there's very few people could. But by Paul's day, of course, People are writing. So why didn't anybody put it down? Well, Paul might be a clue to that. Paul thought that Jesus was coming back right away. He thought that. He really believed that, that, you know, when Jesus returns, there'll be a day of judgment and most people will be destroyed, but his followers will be saved. And Paul's one of the ones who will be alive at the time. He says this in 1st Corinthians 15 and 1st Thessalonians 4. Well, if the, if the end is coming right away, why would you be writing a gospel? And what would be the point? For posterity? There isn't going to be a posterity. And so I think those are two of the factors.
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Megan Lewis
Could you elaborate a little bit on the literacy aspect of this question?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah. Well, I think some people would be surprised that I said that literacy rates and in Israel, in Galilee and Judea were quite low because people tend to think that Jewish boys all learned how to read. I got a. An extended letter just this week from somebody trying to explain to me that this person had talked with somebody, had a graduate degree in Jewish studies, and the person who explained him that Jewish boys all had to be able to read. This was part of the rules. And they're getting that from later rabbinic writings, from the, basically from the Talmud and from things centuries after the New Testament period. We have, there are studies of literacy in the ancient world that show that probably at the best of times, 10 to 15% of the population could read and possibly write a little bit. But there's a full study of literacy in basically, it's called literacy, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. That's why it's called Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine by Katherine Hetzer, who looks at every piece of evidence, and she concludes that at that, probably in this time in the days of Jesus, maybe 3 or 4% of the population could read or write. And so, you know, you're not talking about very many people, and those, again, who could write are certainly not going to be able to compose. And so it's just we're so used to, you know, most people we know being able to read that we just assume it was like that, but it wasn't.
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Megan Lewis
It definitely feels very ubiquitous now. If you hear of someone who cannot read in modern Western culture, you're like, that's a little odd.
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Bart Ehrman
It's only with the development of the. It's only with the industrial revolution that it happened because governments especially started realizing that an educated populace would help the economy.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you. Now, final question for our interview today. How does the relatively late dating of the Gospels impact their reliability as an historical source? Is it the case where we can get like the broad sweeps of Jesus life and, and what happened, or are there specific historical events that we can actually pinpoint?
- [29:31]
Bart Ehrman
Well, again, this is going to be a topic of this, the conference we're doing in September, new insights into the New Testament where people are these scholars, these, you know, 13 scholars are all presenting papers about what in their judgment you can say and not say. And so it is an, it is a, it is an exercise. But the dates of the, the dates of the Gospels are a real problem. You know, it's not as bad as the Hebrew Bible. I mean, when Joel Baden's doing this, this thing on the, and people will find out when they do the chorus with Joel Baden. You know, if you've got, if you've got stories about Abraham, you know, when were they written, 800 years later, if, if he was a human being, it's like, you know, it's like, it's really bad there. But, and in most of ancient world, but now we're talking about 40 or 50 or 60 years. So it's, it's a problem, but it's not an insurmountable problem. The big problem isn't so much the, the late date. It is per se. It is possible for somebody today to write an accurate account of Thomas Jefferson, so. Well, yeah, but he's hundreds of years. Yeah, yeah, but we've got the sources. The problem isn't so much the date. The problem is that there weren't, there weren't the sources. There were oral traditions and the oral traditions had been circulating for 40, 50, 60 years. And you know what happen traditions when that happens. And so that's why it ends up being complicated. But as I've indicated before, scholars do have ways of dealing with these kinds of problems in ways that are pretty convincing even to those of us who tend to be skeptical about history. There's some pretty convincing ways of going about establishing what in these Gospels probably is historical to the satisfaction of most of most scholars.
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Megan Lewis
Thank you very much, Bart. We are going to head over to the bonus segment for this week, which is listeners questions.
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Podcast Announcer
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/bars foreign.
- [31:40]
Megan Lewis
We have some fantastic listeners questions this week as always, but you know, they're always fantastic. First up is about visions in the new Testament, the listener says, I'm curious about visions in the New Testament, especially those of Paul seeing Jesus in general. Were visions intended to be taken literally or like apocalypses? Were they a kind of genre writing? Given that Paul didn't know Jesus and seems to rely heavily on visions of him to press his points, did contemporaries not call him on this?
- [32:11]
Bart Ehrman
No, I don't think so. I think that visions were meant to be understood as literal events that truly happened and that we talk about, when we talk about visions, we often mean hallucinations and. But there, you know, they're. A psychologist would call that a non veridical vision. And so a non veridical vision is one where you, you see something that actually isn't objectively really there. But people in the ancient world didn't make that differentiation as clearly. And when they, when they saw something, they assumed it was there, just as people do today. I mean, when people have visions of their grandmother in their bedroom three weeks after she's been at her funeral, you know, they almost always believe she was there. And that's true in the ancient world too. So I, Paul actually believed he saw Jesus, I think, and it may have been a vision. He doesn't call it a vision per se, but he thinks he saw Jesus. He thinks Jesus appeared to him. It may have been, you know, if you don't believe that he did, it might have been a hallucination, it might have been mistaken identity. It could be, you know, who knows what, it could be something. But I think something did happen. He meant that he really did see it and people took him literally.
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Megan Lewis
Was Polycarp a follower of John the Apostle?
- [33:32]
Bart Ehrman
Right. Depends who you ask. Polycarp is one of our best documented figures from the early second century, from the first half of the second century. He was the bishop of a church in Smyrna, which is in, in western Asia Minor, so Western what's now Turkey. He was a prominent bishop. We have a letter by him that he wrote that actually may be a compilation of a couple of letters. We have a letter written to him by another bishop named Ignatius, and we have a, an account of his martyrdom. And so he's pretty relatively well documented for a Christian from the period. One later church, Father Irenaeus, whom I mentioned earlier in the podcast, writing around 180 to 185, claimed that he knew Polycarp and that Polycarp had spent time with the Apostle John. And so that's the claim. I don't know. I doubt it actually. I mean, irony says it, but I don't think so. There are lots of interesting points about it. One is that Polycarp in his letter quotes a lot of books from the New Testament, including Matthew, Mark, Luke quotes, you know, Paul, he quotes a number of books. He doesn't quote the Gospel of John weirdly, you know, if he's a companion, I don't know. So. So anyway, there are things. There are issues about it. But I. I think this kind of lineage question that happens in early Christianity, so and so knew so and so and so often I think that that ends up being problematic historically.
- [35:10]
Megan Lewis
What do you think about the thesis that the historical Jesus was a vegetarian or pescatarian and that his outrage at the templ. At the mass slaughter of animals.
- [35:21]
Bart Ehrman
It's not what he says when he. When he does the cleansing of the temple. He. He never opposes eating meat in any of his sayings. He tells his disciples to prepare the Passover for him in the Gospels and that entailed eating a lamb. And so I. There were some vegetarians in the ancient world. There were some Jews who were vegetarians. The Jews who were vegetarians tended to be Jews living out in the Diaspora in. In Greek and Roman culture places because to get meat in those places meant eating sacrificial meat sacrificed to pagan gods. And so some Jews abstain from that and so practice vegetarianism. But it wasn't very common and we don't really hear a lot about vegetarianism in. In Israel.
- [36:13]
Megan Lewis
In Jesus day, in the story of Jesus birth, the angel that appears to Joseph quotes the prophecy that says they shall name him Emmanuel. Joseph follows the angel's instructions by marrying Mary, but names the child Jesus. I've always wondered what this means. Am I crazy or does the prophecy not fit?
- [36:32]
Bart Ehrman
The prophecy that Matthew quotes does not say his name is Emmanuel or will be Immanuel. It says his name will be called Immanuel. When Jesus main name actually means something like Yahweh saves. And Christians understood that Jesus was God's presence among them. And so saying that he. That he. His name Jesus will be called Immanuel means that Jesus will be understood to be the one who's God with us. There are other passages in the New Testament where it says that somebody's name will be called so and so and so. It's just a. It's just. It's just a typical way of referring to a metaphor, metaphorical meaning of the name.
- [37:22]
Megan Lewis
Final question for today. In Galatians 1, Paul says that he went to Jerusalem and met Peter and James. If as seems likely, Paul didn't speak Aramaic and Peter and James didn't speak Greek. How did they communicate with each other?
- [37:38]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, good question. Normally, what happened in the ancient world is what happens today is you have a translator. So there were people, especially if they're in Jerusalem. Jerusalem. Unlike where Peter and James and Jesus grew up, Jerusalem was a cultured urban place where educated people spoke not only Aramaic, but Greek. And so it wouldn't have been too difficult to find one of the, one of the local Christians there to be able to translate. So I, I assume that they, I assume that they had a translator.
- [38:13]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much and audience, thank you all for your questions, but before we winish. Before we winish. Winish is not a word. Before.
- [38:21]
Bart Ehrman
We will never winish.
- [38:24]
Megan Lewis
Nope, never. Before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about?
- [38:30]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're talking about the interesting phenomenon that the gospels that we have of Jesus, our earliest accounts of his life, were written 40, 50, 60 years later. And the question we're dealing with is why? Why weren't they written earlier? Why don't you have accounts of Jesus from earlier times? And we've, we're trying to explain that and to show what kind of problems it causes for historians. It doesn't, doesn't mean that Jesus is made up or anything. It just means that for various reasons, we just don't have earlier written accounts.
- [38:58]
Megan Lewis
Audience, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, sadly, without Bart. I will be joined by Dr. Joel Baden instead. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.