Why Did Paul Hate Jesus and His Followers?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Why Did Paul Hate Jesus and His Followers?"

Podcast: Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Host: Bart Ehrman (with Megan Lewis)
Date: February 6, 2024

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Episode Theme

This episode delves into the roots and reasons behind Paul’s vehement rejection and persecution of early Christians prior to his famous conversion. Bart Ehrman and Megan Lewis explore New Testament sources, particularly Paul’s own letters and the Book of Acts, to reconstruct Paul's motives, actions, and the historical context surrounding his opposition to Jesus and his followers. The discussion highlights how Paul’s fervor reflects the deep disconnect between early Christian claims about a crucified Messiah and predominant Jewish expectations about the Messiah. The hosts emphasize the diversity within Second Temple Judaism and how Paul’s specific worldview shaped his reaction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Paul as a Persecutor: Our Sources

• Primary Evidence: Paul's own letters (especially Galatians and Philippians) provide direct but limited comments on his pre-Christian life ([05:12], [07:12]).
• Acts of the Apostles: Details Paul’s persecution in greater, sometimes unreliable, detail; often disagrees with Paul’s own account ([05:12], [08:19]).
• Assessment of Evidence: Paul's accounts are more reliable, though sparse; Acts was written decades later and contains contradictions ([05:12], [08:19]).

2. Nature and Extent of Paul’s Persecution

• Paul explicitly identifies as a zealous Jew and Pharisee, deeply committed to the law ([07:12]).
• Sought to “destroy” the early Christian movement through violent opposition ([07:12], [08:19]).
• The specifics—whether systematic or personal acts of violence—are unknown; may have involved informal assaults or urging synagogue punishments ([11:10]).
• Quote:
  “He tried to destroy [the church]. He said it's not clear what he means. … It doesn't sound like it was systematic. It sounded like something he was just doing himself.” —Bart Ehrman ([08:19])

3. What Did "Persecution" Mean?

• Paul later endured synagogue punishments (“forty lashes minus one”), possibly reflecting the type of treatment he once instigated against Christians ([11:10]).
• Could have been informal violence, like beating someone up for claiming Jesus was Messiah ([11:10]).
• Quote:
  “Paul hears somebody saying that Jesus is the Messiah and he's ticked off because he thinks it's crazy, and he takes the guy out and beats him up.” —Bart Ehrman ([11:10])

4. Why Was Paul So Hostile?

• Common theory (which Ehrman rejects): Paul was offended by early Christian disregard for Jewish law, especially circumcision and outreach to Gentiles ([12:59]).
  • Ehrman asserts that Paul's innovation concerning Gentiles came after his conversion, not before ([12:59]).
• Paul was appalled at the Christian claim that Jesus—crucified by Roman authorities—was the Messiah, an idea utterly at odds with Jewish messianic expectations ([14:46], [28:26]).
• Quote:
  “You mean the guy who got crucified? … This isn't just like, not like the Messiah. This is the opposite of the Messiah.” —Bart Ehrman ([14:46])

5. Messianic Expectations in Second Temple Judaism

• Messiah (“Mashiach”) means “anointed one”—originally a future king from David’s line, a political/military leader ([24:19]).
• Alternative concepts: an angelic judge (inspired by Daniel 7), or a priestly Messiah (as in the Dead Sea Scrolls), but all agree the figure is powerful and victorious ([26:39]).
• Notably: No expectation that Messiah would be divine or suffer for sins ([22:11]).
• Isaiah 53, often cited by Christians, was not about the Messiah within its original Jewish context ([22:11]).
• Quote:
  “The Messiah was going to be a powerful figure sent by God to destroy the enemy and in some sense rule the people of God. … Christians came along and they said, Jesus is the Messiah. And someone like Paul says, you mean the guy who got crucified?” —Bart Ehrman ([14:46])

6. Crucifixion as a Curse

• Jewish law (Deuteronomy): “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.”
  • For Paul, before his conversion, this meant Jesus was cursed by God, an absolute disqualification for messiahship ([28:26]).
• Quote:
  “How can the one who's cursed by God be the Christ of God? … It makes no sense. And so this is almost certainly, I think, the reason that he persecuted the Christians.” —Bart Ehrman ([28:26])

7. Jewish and Roman Attitudes

• Most Jews had not heard of Jesus; those who had likely considered him just another failed apocalyptic prophet ([16:09]).
• Jewish reactions to early Christianity ranged from indifference to strong opposition; Paul was an outlier in his zeal ([18:13]).
• Romans only intervened in religious disputes when they caused civic disturbance ([19:43]).

8. Paul’s Zeal—Personal Background

• Only scant details about Paul’s background; he was educated, Greek-speaking, possibly from Tarsus ([32:08]).
• His intense zeal likely stems from Pharisaic commitment, but specifics are unknown ([32:08]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On why Paul found the claim of a crucified Messiah so offensive:
  “Calling Jesus the Messiah was just nonsense and probably blasphemous.” —Bart Ehrman ([31:07])

• On traditional Christian misunderstandings of Jewish messianic expectation:
  “There is no expectation that the future Messiah will be God come to earth.” —Bart Ehrman ([22:11])

• On the supposed motivation for persecution:
  “I've never really been convinced by that. For one thing, I don't think before Paul that followers of Jesus were saying, you don't have to be circumcised. I think that that is actually Paul's innovation.” —Bart Ehrman ([12:59])

• On why sources like Acts can’t always be trusted:
  “The problem with Acts is that there are places where it looks like it's not reliable.… Sometimes contradictory.” —Bart Ehrman ([05:12])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [05:12] – Sources for Paul’s pre-Christian behavior
• [07:12] – Nature of Paul's persecution; basic agreement between Acts and Paul’s letters
• [08:19] – Reliability problems with Acts’ account; discussion of “authorization” to persecute
• [11:10] – What persecution may have looked like; “forty lashes minus one”; possible informal violence
• [12:59] – Scholarly theories on Paul’s motivations; Gentile inclusion and Jewish law
• [14:46] – Jewish messianic expectations vs. Christian claims about Jesus
• [18:13] – Variety of Jewish views and degrees of opposition to early Christians
• [19:43] – Roman response to intra-Jewish conflicts
• [22:11] – What Jews actually expected of the Messiah & Christian reinterpretations of scripture
• [28:26] – Crucifixion as a curse according to Deuteronomy; why this was especially offensive to Paul
• [32:08] – Paul’s personal background and the mystery of his zeal

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Closing Summary

• Paul’s intense opposition to the early Christians resulted primarily from early Christian claims that a crucified—and therefore, by Jewish law, “cursed”—man was the Messiah.
• This claim ran counter to every prevailing Jewish expectation of a messiah as a triumphant, powerful leader or judge, not a humiliated, executed criminal.
• Paul’s violence and zeal were outgrowths of his devout Pharisaic commitments and his perception of blasphemy in Christian claims about Jesus.
• The specifics of Paul's persecution are unclear, with sources brief and sometimes unreliable, but the overall motivation is rooted in theology, not simple social or ethnic conflict.

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Next Week Preview:
The series continues with an episode on Paul's conversion—How did the man who so fervently opposed Christians become the movement’s chief apostle?

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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. Hello everybody and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. Today we are revisiting Paul, who is one of the most well known people in Christian history. His writings are a fundamental part of the canonical New Testament and have been used to shape Christian thought, theology and religious practice for years. However, the first few years of Christianity he was actively opposed to this upstart Jewish sect, going so far as to persecute Christians and describing himself as being zealous in this persecution. Before we get to Paul and his persecution though, we are going to have a quick chat. But I never ask this and I really should, how is Sarah? What is she up to currently?

[C]

Well, for those, those who don't know, my wife Sarah is also an academic. She's a Shakespeare scholar. So in my household we have the Bible and Shakespeare pretty well covered. She's been working for a long time on her fourth book, which is on Shakespearean tragedy. It's a very, very complicated book. She and I are both scholars, but we're very different kinds of scholars, which is good because otherwise we'd probably be at each other's throats. But we're just completely different. I'm more of the kind of hard academic, learning the languages kind of scholar and kind of plowing along and she's like this. She's more like a European intellectual type of scholar who reads everything and knows philosophy and literary theory and is just walking bibliography. And her books are very different from mine because her books are very, very sophisticated. Theoretically. She's not as much a historian as she is a literary critic. And her stuff on Shakespeare is just really quite remarkable. So it's her fourth book and Tragedy, the late tragedies of Shakespeare are really complicated and so she's dealing with all those. I mean, it's things like Macbeth and Hama, but also like Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. So it's in Timon. It's some that people don't very well. And she has amazing readings of these things. And so that's. She's trying to finish it this semester, just like I'm trying to do my book this semester.

[B]

How does the household work when you're both in the throes of research? Do you see each other or do you just kind of retreat to your separate corners and come out for meal times?

[C]

Well, that's kind of. But we, we have this kind of. This pact with. That we spend an hour doing our time together every day. So at least an hour of doing things. And so yesterday we worked out together for about an hour and today we're going to. We have move night tonight. So I cook hamburgers and french fries, homemade french fries and hamburgers. We watch a movie.

[B]

Sounds wonderful.

[C]

Yeah, it's great. Great. You also have an academic partner and

[B]

I do, and we both have the same original focus. We're both Assyriologists, but similarly to, I think you and Sarah, I came at it from a much broader educational background. So I did a lot of classics, a lot of Egyptology in my undergraduate degree, a lot of archaeology, and then kind of slid into assyriology. And Josh came at it from Hebr Bible background and he specialized in Sumerian and I specialized in. In Acadian. So we have very similar interests, but in slightly different spheres and slightly different historical periods. Yeah, we. We do very well. We have some very interesting conversations, especially with and around the Hebrew Bible because we have very different religious upbringings. So I have a lot of why on earth does American evangelicalism believe X? And he's like, well, this is why. This is the history. This is how people think. And this is. It's. It's. Yeah, it's fun and interesting, but he's working at the moment on researching for his. The third and final atheist handbook to the Old Testament, which he enjoys very much.

[C]

Kind of interesting that in the households. The Bible. In both years of my household, the Bible scholars are atheists and the, the, you know, the ancient areas or the Shakespeare person is the Christian. So go figure.

[B]

We have fun and I imagine you guys do as well. But we should move on to Paul. So when we're talking about Paul and his behavior prior to his conversion, and we'll get into conversion and all that exciting stuff next week, what are our sources for his behavior and for what he did towards Christians before he becomes this apostle?

[C]

Yeah, well, you know, in some ways, Paul is probably our best documented early figure in Christianity. You could argue he's better documented than Jesus because we don't have any writings from Jesus, but we do have writings from Paul. There are 13 books in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul. And scholars doubt, as we've said before, whether Paul actually wrote six of those. But there are seven that most everyone agrees Paul actually wrote. So we have things from his own hand. And in two of those books, in Galatians and Philippians, he does say something about his previous life before he was a follower of Jesus. And so that's our most valuable information. In addition, we have the Book of Acts in the New Testament, the fifth book, which, broadly speaking, details the spread of Christianity after the death and resurrection of Jesus for the next 30 years and how Christianity spread throughout the Roman world at the time. And the main figure in Acts for the second two thirds of the Book of Acts is the Apostle Paul. So it's kind of like a biography of Paul right before and then after his conversion and during his missionary work. The problem with Acts is that there are places where it looks like it's not reliable. One reason for knowing that is that often Acts will talk about the same thing. Paul himself talks about some incident in his life or something that he taught, and it'll say something quite different and sometimes contradictory. And so it looks like Acts, which was written several decades later, didn't have reliable information everywhere. The problem with Paul's writings is that he's writing to people who know him well because he converted them. So he doesn't say a lot about his past, probably on the assumption they already know that he's writing to do with issues that they're addressing. And so he doesn't say a lot. It's just a couple of short passages in these two books. But it's enough to give us a really good idea of what was going on, I think.

[B]

So what do these sources tell us about his behavior and what he was doing?

[C]

Well, this is a point on which they agree. In rough outline, they agree that Paul started out as a highly religious Jew. Paul himself says that he was particularly zealous for the Jewish law. He was born Jewish. He was raised Jewish, he says, to Jewish parents. And he became quite committed to his understanding of the Jewish faith. And he was a zealous Pharisee. And he almost certainly didn't live in Israel because his native language is Greek, which puts him in the Diaspora outside of Israel someplace, but probably in an urban setting because he has a high education, urban setting outside of Israel, but he follows the rules of the Pharisees, which had somehow reached wherever he was. So he's very zealous Jewish person who apparently he heard about the followers of Jesus, claiming that he was the Messiah. He engaged in what he calls a violent persecution of them.

[B]

Do we know how far this violent persecution of Christians went? Is it like a personal thing? He's not going to say hello to one if he passes them on the street? Or does it seem to have been more of a systematic campaign?

[C]

Yeah, it depends whether you look at the Book of Acts or whether you read what Paul has to say. The Book of Acts gives the story that most people are familiar with, which is that Paul engaged in persecution. He was present at the first public execution of a Christian, the stoning of Stephen. In Acts chapter 7 and 8. Paul's involved with that in some level. Then he himself engages in a persecution according to the Book of Acts, where he is commissioned or at least authorized by the chief priest, the high priest in Jerusalem, to go abroad and persecute Christians up in Damascus, up north in Syria, and that is on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians that he converted. There are reasons for thinking that's probably not right. One kind of major thing is the high priest in Jerusalem had no authority over synagogues anywhere else. The high priest had authority over the Temple in Jerusalem, but Judaism wasn't like a worldwide religion that had a denominational center, a place that was the authority. And the high priest wasn't like a pope or something who had authority over Jews throughout the world. He just was in charge of what was going on in Jerusalem, in the temple. And so the idea that Paul was authorized, given written authority to persecute Christians in Damascus almost certainly can't be right. Paul himself doesn't say anything about being authorized. He just says that he violently opposed the church. He tried to destroy it. He said it's not clear what he means. I guess we need to have a timeline here. If Jesus died around the year 30, say, some say 29, some say 33, but sometime around the year 30, based on all sorts of considerations, including chronological references in Paul's own letters, it's pretty clear that Paul would have converted to be a follower of Jesus three or maybe four years after Jesus death. So there's a three year period before Paul converts, and it's during that period that he was persecuting Christians. So say between the years 30 and 33. But we don't know if it was for most of that time or just for a month of that time. We don't know how long it was. The point is that Christianity could not have spread very far in those three years because the apostles would have been staying in Jerusalem, basically. And so word apparently got to wherever Paul was at the time, whether it was in Damascus or in the city he grew up in, maybe Tarsus or wherever, that some Jews were saying that Jesus was the Messiah and he engaged in a persecution of them. But he doesn't tell us what it entailed. It doesn't sound like it was systematic. It sounded like something he was just doing himself.

[B]

Do we have a sense for what this persecution would have looked like?

[C]

No, not really. Paul later in his letters, years years later, as a Christian, as a person who's been an apostle for decades, he talks in the book of Second Corinthians in chapter 11, about the persecutions he himself experienced. And he says that on several occasions he suffered the 40 lashes minus one. That's a puzzling phrase. And it's usually interpreted to mean that he was opposed by Jewish authorities in the synagogue. 40 lashes minus one. The logic of that is usually said that, you know, it was thought that 40 lashes is too severe a punishment. So if you want the extreme punishment, you do 40 minus one without violating what's too extreme. You see what I mean? And so Paul says that happened to him on several occasions. It was a synagogue punishment. So that means that when he had been in a synagogue as a missionary later in his life, Jewish authorities were offended and they had him punished by being flogged. So is it possible that Paul was doing that before he himself was a follower of Jesus? Was he putting this kind of punishment, convincing synagogue leaders to punish followers of Jesus that way? That's one possibility. At the other end of the spectrum, the one that I incline to a little bit more these days, is that Paul hears somebody saying that Jesus is the Messiah and he's ticked off because he thinks it's crazy, and he takes the guy out and beats him up. And so, you know, it might have been something completely informal like that. We he doesn't say.

[B]

Do scholars have different ideas about why Paul would have been quite so angry with followers of Jesus? Like, why? What would inspire him to go and physically assault someone because they said they were a follower of Jesus?

[C]

Yeah, you know, scholars debate a lot why Jews, period, would have persecuted the followers of Jesus early on. There's one theory about that that I've never really been very attracted to. It's that Jews were offended when followers of Jesus were saying that Gentiles could also be among the people of God without converting to Judaism. And so men didn't have to get circumcised, for example. And that, that that was offensive that you could say that somebody could join the people of God without being circumcised. And some people have said, well, maybe that's why Paul's doing this is because these Christians are preaching to non Jews. And, you know, that's just not acceptable. I've never really been convinced by that. For one thing, I don't think before Paul that followers of Jesus were saying, you don't have to be circumcised. I think that that is actually Paul's innovation. Paul's innovation was not that the death and resurrection can bring salvation as opposed to the Jewish law. The followers of Jesus were saying that before Paul. I think that his innovation was saying that this applies to Gentiles as well as to Jews. And so we'll talk more about that probably in the next episode. I think the reason Paul persecuted the Christians was the main reason most Jews did, which is that there was this expectation of what a Jewish Messiah would be. There were different expectations, different Jews had different expectations about what the future Messiah would be. But in all of these expectations, it was thought that the Messiah was going to be a powerful figure sent by God to destroy the enemy and in some sense rule the people of God. The Christians came along and they said, Jesus is the Messiah. And someone like Paul says, you mean the guy who got crucified?

[B]

You're joking, right?

[C]

This isn't just like, not like the Messiah. This is the opposite of the Messiah. The Messiah is supposed to overthrow the enemy. Jesus was. He was arrested by the authorities and publicly tortured to death. That's the Messiah. You are nuts. I think he thought that this was just so horrendous and awful and terrible and so opposed to anything God would have done or said that he was really ticked off about it and he went after these people.

[B]

Would blasphemous be too strong a word for what Paul felt he was reacting to?

[C]

Yeah, it's a little bit hard to define what, you know, technically in the technical sense, what blasphemy means in that context within Judaism, if it means saying something that is really horrible about God. Some people say that, you know, blasphemy means like saying the, like cursing God or saying the name of God or something that had something technical like that. But it could just mean, like, you know, you're Saying something that is really demeaning to God, that's a blasphemy, then certainly this would be constituted a blasphemy in that sense and would deserve a serious punishment.

[B]

Do we know what Jews at the time thought of Jesus? Obviously, most did not think he was the Messiah. But would he have been considered a prophet or just this crazy guy who got executed? Like, what kind of reputation do we think he would have had?

[C]

Well, for the most part, Jesus didn't have any reputation during those early years because nobody knew who he was. You know, in the Gospels, you get this idea that Jesus is going around and getting, you know, hundreds of people following him, thousands of people following him when he feeds the multitudes. Mark indicates there are 5,000 men, not counting the women and children. So 13,000 people listening to him up in Galilee. And so you have this idea of these crowds. You know, he comes to Jerusalem and the entire city turns out to welcome him. And that almost certainly is hugely, hugely exaggerated. Galilee didn't have that many people, especially in the rural areas, to be following Jesus. And it appears that he was unknown when he came to Jerusalem. The authorities probably had never heard of him before. He was an itinerant preacher who came to Jerusalem to celebrate a Passover feast. And so the first time people, most Jews hear about him is when some of his followers say that he's been raised from the dead and is the Messiah. And prior to that, most people hadn't heard of him. Those who had heard of him would have probably thought. Thought that he was an itinerant preacher who thought that the end of time was coming. We have records of people like that at the time in the writings of Josephus, the Jewish historian. Josephus, who describes events of the first century and mentions a number of prophetic figures. People understood themselves to be prophets, declaring that God was soon going to come into history and destroy the powers of evil and set up a good kingdom. And Jesus appears to be one of them. Josephus himself doesn't say much about Jesus, just a couple of brief comments, but probably somebody who'd heard of Jesus would think of that. He's a Galilean preacher who got in trouble with the law and like a lot of these other prophets, ended up being punished for it.

[B]

Among the maybe few people, few Jewish people who were aware of Jesus and aware of what Christians were saying about him, does it seem as though they all would have had this very extreme response that Paul seems to have had, or do we think there was more nuance and variation?

[C]

Yeah, no, that's a good question. I mean, I'd say it's hard to say because we don't have good evidence either way. I mean, the Book of Acts indicates that Jews did persecute Christians in Jerusalem, that they thought that the followers of Jesus were troublemakers. They arrested the apostles sometimes, and they put them in jail sometimes. And King Herod executes James, the disciple of Jesus, and then the Jewish leaders. Leaders and the Jewish mob stoned Stephen to death. And so it looks like, according to the Book of Acts, there's widespread Jewish opposition. We don't know if that's actually true. Paul doesn't actually give us much information about that. My hunch is that there weren't a lot of Christians at the time, but those who were around. Judaism was very diverse at the time. You had Jews who had a wide range of views. The Pharisees were very different from the Sadducees, who were very different from the Essenes. And most Jews didn't belong to any of those groups. You know, so there are different kinds of Judaism. And most probably thought, well, this is an unusual sect. They're saying this. They've got this guy who's crucified, they're saying is the Messiah. Wow. Okay. And probably they're just. Either they're not scratching their heads or just say, oh, my God, you got to be kidding me. But it may be. May well be that there were others like Paul, who said, yeah, look, this is not. We've got to take care of this. The problem is we don't know.

[B]

Do we know or have a sense for how the Roman authorities may have responded to the. This violence, infighting among. Among Jewish acts?

[C]

Well, we have a number of records of Romans interfering in local disputes, not just with Judaism, but with other kinds of groups throughout the empire, sometimes religious groups, sometimes the Romans intervene when there are problems that are social problems caused by a religious group or another, or a social group or a political group or another. We have a record later in the reign of Claudius, some decades after Paul's persecution, that Claudius expelled Jews from the city of Rome because they were having disputes about something. The disputes were, in this case, instigated by somebody who is named Chrestus. And some people think that's a misspelling of the word Christ Christos, which would mean that Jewish followers of Jesus and Jews were not followers of Jesus, were at each other's throats and were causing minor riots. And Claudius just said, well, forget this and just cast them all out. That's a possible reading of that passage From Suetonius, a 2nd century biographer of Claudius. But it's also possible that what's going on actually is that there's some guy named Chrestus who's causing problems among Jews. And so authorities do intervene when religious practices or religious beliefs or other things cause social problems. They don't normally intervene for purely religious reasons. Roman authorities would not have cared if there's some group of Jews saying, oh yeah, our Messiah has come, they'd say, okay, whatever. But if it had political implications, as it could in the case of saying that Jesus is king, since the Romans are the rulers, you can't really have another king. You could have an intervention on those grounds or because it's causing disturbances between Jewish groups. What we do have is later evidence that eventually Roman authorities did start intervening because Christians were understood to be troublemakers, not so much for their belief that Jesus was God or anything, but just because they were, they were seen as troublemakers. And it's possible that that was happening early on as well as a little bit later.

[B]

I wanted, before we finish, to just go back to Paul specifically. You mentioned this a little earlier, but I just, just want to reiterate the point. As a devout Jew, what would Paul's expectations of a Messiah have been?

[C]

Ah, right. Turns out to be kind of a long and complicated topic because we know from Jewish sources at the time that there were various expectations of exactly what the Messiah would be. I'm going to need to give a little background to this because it's a topic that most people don't understand very fully. I know my students, most of my students who've been raised in conservative Christian households think they have two thoughts. One is that in Jewish expectation, the Messiah was going to be God come to earth. That's one expectation and it's completely wrong. There is no expectation that the future Messiah will be God come to earth. My students think that because Jesus is God, Jesus is the Messiah, so God had to come to earth, okay? And so. But nobody thought that. The other idea that my students and most Christians have is that the Messiah was somebody who was to be sent from God to die for the sins of the world and be raised from the dead. That that was the expectation. And they quote passages of the Hebrew Bible to support that view. Especially most familiar to people today would be Isaiah, chapter 53, where you have a description of a person who suffers for the sake of others. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon him. And by his wounds we were healed. And so it's somebody who's been horribly mangled for the sake of others. Christians have long said that's the Messiah. But the problem is that Isaiah 53 isn't talking about the Messiah. Anyone can see just by reading Isaiah 53. All you have to do is read the passage. Nobody reads it. Read the passage and look for the word Messiah and try and figure out who in fact is this person, who is he talking about? So we're not going to get it deeply into that. I'm just saying that the common expectations of what the Messiah would be would not have been the view of Jews at the time, and certainly not the views of Paul.

[B]

So if that's not what the Jews were expecting, what. What were people anticipating for a Messiah to be?

[C]

Well, the first thing to say is that the term Messiah itself matters. It's our English word. Messiah comes from the Hebrew term Mashiach, which means anointed one. And so this is a figure called the anointed one. What's that mean? Well, the origin of the term Messiah goes back to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In ancient Israel, when a person was made king, there was a kind of a coronation ceremony where the person would have oil poured on his head early on by a prophet to show that God had specially favored this person as perfumed oil and was considered to be a real luxury item. And so the person who has this ceremony of oil poured on his head is the anointed of God. The Mashiach God in the Old Testament promises the greatest king of Israel, King David, that he, David, will always have a son sitting on the throne in Jerusalem. This is in the book of Second Samuel. In Second Samuel, God says, you'll always have a son seated on the throne. He'll be my son, I'll be his father, and you will have an eternal reign. So that's a promise that there will always be an anointed one on the throne. And that promise lasted for about 400 years because there was a Davidic descendant on the throne of Israel. There was a Davidic line ruling Judah for all those years. But then the Babylonians wiped out Judah in 586 BCE and there's no longer a Judean king. But some Jewish thinkers after a while realized, well, you know, God said there's always going to be a son of David on the throne, and there's not now. So he's going to in the future, he's going to put a son of David back on the throne. And so There'll be a future Mashiach, a future Messiah. And that began the expectation that God would send another figure like David, a son of David, who would, like David, destroy the enemy and set up a sovereign state in Israel and would rule Israel. And so that was the original expectation of a messiah. As a great political figure. He's not God. He's not somebody who dies for the sins.

[B]

He's a future king, which is obviously not what happened. Were there any other expectations about what a messiah might be?

[C]

Yeah. So over time, what happens is people develop alternative views that we know about. For example, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were some people who thought that the Messiah would not be a human person like David, a descendant of David directly, but would be a kind of divine figure, a cosmic judge of the earth who would come from heaven and destroy the kingdoms that are here now, and set up God's kingdom on earth that was based ultimately on what is now Daniel, chapter seven, where there's a figure called one, like a son of man, who is this cosmic judge who overthrows the kingdoms of earth and sets up a good kingdom. And by the time of Jesus, there were Jewish groups saying that that son of man figure is the Messiah. He's not just a human king. He's like this divine angel who comes and destroys all the kingdoms. There are other Jewish groups, including in the Qumran community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, that thought that the future ruler of the people of God would be a messiah who was a priest. So not a king and not a future cosmic judge, but a priest, a powerful priest who would interpret the law of God and would rule the people of God. So there are various expectations, but the thing that all of these expectations have in common is that this is going to be a future figure who is powerful and who wipes out the enemy in some way and rules the people of God, probably in Jerusalem. And so this is a future hope for the people of God that somebody will emerge or something will emerge to restore them to their sovereign state.

[B]

So Jesus, quite obviously, is not a king or a judge or a priest. Yet those who follow him are still proclaiming him to be this messiah that the Jewish people have been waiting for. Is this, then, the roots of Paul's vehement dislike of Christians?

[C]

I think it is. I think it's pretty clearly the problem for Paul is that he thinks that this is. It's a crazy idea. Even after he became a follower of Jesus himself and was writing his letters, he comes out and says it. He says, this is Ridiculous. And that's why it's true. Because the foolishness of God is stronger than the wisdom of humans, and Christ is the foolishness of God. This is in 1 Corinthians 1. And so who would think that God would save the world by a crucified man? And who would think that a Messiah would be crucified? This is nuts. Then Paul says, yeah, it's nuts, and it's true. That's what happened. And so what seems to be weakness is in fact power. And what seems to be foolishness is in fact wisdom. So before Paul came to that view, he agreed with everyone else. It really is foolishness. It is crazy. And it was crazy for Paul for another, somewhat more specific reason that he hints at in the book of Galatians. In Galatians, Paul points out that when Christ was crucified, he took the curse upon himself. The curse upon. Of God upon himself. And Paul has scriptural authority for this. He quotes the book of Deuteronomy that says in one place that cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree. So in Deuteronomy, this is saying, you know, if somebody is, like, executed and then, you know, nailed up to a tree to humiliate the person after his death, that obviously that person has been cursed by God. But Paul is thinking that Jesus was nailed to a cross which is made out of wood, which is a tree. And so he's saying that Christ bore the curse because he was nailed to the tree. So that's what Paul's saying afterwards, after he becomes a Christian, but before he's become a Christian. I think this was part of the problem. Paul knew that not just that Jesus got executed. It wasn't just that the Messiah had been stoned to death or strangled or something. He'd been crucified. He'd been nailed to a cross. And the Bible itself says that a person nailed to the cross is cursed by God. How can the one who's cursed by God be the Christ of God? It doesn't make any. It makes no sense. And so this is almost certainly, I think, the reason that he persecuted the Christians.

[B]

Thank you. It's not only that he didn't fulfill the expectations of what a Messiah would be, it's that he, according to Jewish scripture, was actually also just cursed by God. And you just can't have a Messiah who's cursed.

[C]

Yeah. Christians today and historically have overlooked this problem by saying. And they've said it's because. Oh, yeah, no, the Messiah was supposed to be born in Bethlehem. He's supposed to be born of a virgin and he's supposed to be able to heal and he's supposed to be crucified for the sins of others. He's supposed to be raised from the dead. And they point to biblical passages to support these views. But none of these biblical passages uses the term Messiah where it's talking about a Messiah. If you read them in their context, Jews at the time were thinking about prod expectations of what the Messiah was that had been around for centuries. And they all agreed the Messiah is going to be a great and powerful figure who destroys the enemy. And so calling Jesus the Messiah was just nonsense and probably blasphemous.

[B]

So, final question. Paul describes himself as being zealous in his treatment of Christians. This, to me at least seems like pretty strong language. Is there anything in Paul's upbringing or life experience that might account for that strength of feeling?

[C]

We wish we knew more about Paul's upbringing. All we have are these few statements in Philippians and Galatians which don't help us very much. I mean, there are so many things we wish we knew about Paul. He's highly educated. Where did he get educated? He's a Greek speaking person. Where did he come from? The Book of Acts says he came from Tarsus, maybe major city. But there are reasons for doubting that. What was his education like? Why is he a manual laborer if he's so well educated? I mean, there are all these kinds of issues. And what is it about his past that would make him particularly incensed about this? It may simply be that he's a zealous Jew who supports the views of the Pharisees, that the idea of a Messiah who is a crucified man is just completely repulsive to him. We'd also like to know what his physical condition was. Was he capable of taking people out, beating them up? And what is his social position? Was he capable of convincing synagogue leaders of doing X, Y and Z? We just, it's a blank slate. We just don't. We don't have the information, unfortunately.

[B]

Well, thank you very much. We're going to take a quick ad break and then we will be back.

[D]

Jesus and Paul are the two most important figures in the history of Christianity. But did they even agree with one another? Join acclaimed scholar Bart Ehrman in his online course Paul and the Great Divide, where you'll dive deep into the complex relationship between Paul and Jesus, explore their differing views on crucial issues, and uncover the profound impact of their teachings on the early Christian faith. In this eight lesson course, you'll gain valuable insights into the historical context of Jesus and Paul's beliefs, their views on salvation, and their understanding of the Jewish law. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to enrich your understanding of these influential figures. Visit Bart ehrman.com Paul to learn more or sign up today. And remember to use discount code code MJ podcast for a special offer. Once again, that's bart erman.com forward/paul with a discount code MJ podcast.

[A]

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

[C]

for future segments, Please visit bart erman.comart Ask Bars

[B]

okay, an easy one to start with, Bart, what languages do you know?

[C]

English one I know well. So to do a PhD in New Testament, everybody has to learn Greek. Most people have to learn Hebrew. I took Greek in college and it's my primary research language now. Greek. First semester started Hebrew in my master's program. So I did Greek and Hebrew. I taught myself Latin four times in fact, because I kept forgetting it. I taught myself Coptic, which I don't read much anymore at all. Some years ago I taught myself Syriac, which is related to Aramaic, the language of Jesus. I also don't deal with that at all anymore. So I had those ancient languages, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Coptic and Syriac modern languages. Everybody basically who does a PhD in New Testament has to learn German and French. And I also some years ago taught myself Italian. The problem with knowing this many languages is that if you don't use them constantly, you just can't keep them in your head. And some years ago I just finally decided, look, I'm just going to concentrate on the ones I really, really need to know. So basically for my research, it's mainly Greek, German and French. I do Latin when I need to and Italian when I need to, but basically not a lot.

[B]

Thank you. Why is there no mention of Scripture and neither the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed? Did the Church not take the holy books seriously?

[C]

Two very good questions. The answer. The second is the people devising these creeds took Scripture extremely seriously. The creeds are devised based on their interpretations of Scripture, and so they took the Scripture seriously and they by and large agreed on which books were authoritative. There were some differences early on in the 4th century when these creeds were being developed. There's some disagreements about which books on the margins would be in, but there's pretty good agreement about most of the central books, and people agreed that these were Scripture, but the Church fathers who devised the creeds did not think that Christianity was about believing the Bible. Christianity was about believing the doctrines of the faith. And these creeds are putting out the doctrines that people need to believe in order to be true Christians. And so they have to believe there's one God, that he's the Creator, that Christ is his son, that Christ became a human, but that Christ is also divine, and that Christ died for the sins of the world and that he was raised from the dead. These are the things you have to believe you don't have. Belief in the Bible was never a doctrine that was taught until many, many centuries later. Today it's what people say in my part of the world. Don't believe in the B Bible. You can't be a Christian. And you know that's not true. And so, yeah, so they, they absolutely thought Scripture was important, but they didn't think belief in Scripture was one of the articles of faith.

[B]

Thank you. And we have a couple of questions related to today's topic. How was Jesus viewed by the Jewish leaders of the day? Was he considered to be heretical?

[C]

The Jewish leaders of the day kind of depends what you mean by that. If you mean people who were outspoken proponents of one form of Judaism or another, for example, leading Pharisees or leading Essenes or people who were widely known or who thought of themselves as prominent teachers with those kinds of people, Jesus just got into arguments because the way Judaism worked at the time and still works pretty much today is that it's not that they're definitive, like everybody agrees on this. It's that there are all these different views. And you argue the views. Right. Rabbi so and so says this, but. Rabbi so and so says that, but this third Rab Rabbi come. It actually tries to recognize. And so, you know, it's like that. And Jesus was in that mix. When it came to Pharisees, for example, they had disagreements and they argued their disagreements. We don't see the arguments because we only get Jesus side in the New Testament. But more likely the Pharisees had comebacks and then he had a comeback and they kind of did that. If you're talking about Jewish leaders in the sense of who is running the show in Israel at the time, that would have been the leaders in the Temple in Jerusalem. And they didn't have any opinion about Jesus until he showed up for a Passover feast because they almost certainly never heard of him. But when he showed up, their view of him was. Appears to have been that he was a potential troublemaker because he was declaring that the institutions of Judaism were going to be destroyed soon when God intervened in history, that God was going to destroy the temple and God was opposed to them. The Jewish leaders, they're not the people representing God, they're the ones opposed by God, and God's going to destroy them. And Jesus apparently was getting some attraction to his teachings, and so they arranged to have him executed. At least they had him arranged to be arrested. And so they didn't like him. They probably didn't know him. I mean, probably the first time any of them had a conversation with him is after he got arrested. Presumably they talked to him then. But. So I don't think that he was well known enough to have a widespread reputation among leaders generally.

[B]

And finally, what is, or do we even have the historical evidence of Paul's encounters with the Roman imperial cult leaders in Asia Minor or Greece?

[C]

We don't have records of Paul's involvement with cult leaders for listeners. When we're talking about cults here, we're not talking about kind of in the modern popular definition where people think of a cult as kind of a group of crazy people led by an even crazier people person who makes them drink the Kool Aid. Okay, so it's not that the word cult in historical context is a shorthand term for cultus deorum, which means the care of the gods. The word cult shows up in English in agriculture, which is the care of the fields. Right. Cultus de horum is the care of the gods. It means the worship practices, and usually worship practices of polytheists, of pagans. You know, there are pagan priests and pagan leaders throughout various parts. Everywhere, really, that there was religion which was everywhere. And the questioner is asking, well, like, if Paul's in a city and there's like a temple of Zeus there, and there's a, you know, a priest in the temple of Zeus, how's that going for Paul in relationship to the priest of Zeus? And we don't have any record of that in Paul's own writings. We have a couple of things in the Book of Acts where the leader of the local cult becomes convinced that Paul's right. But I doubt if that happened very much. What we do have accounts of are Paul's confrontations with Roman authorities, who are not cultic leaders, but civic authorities. And in those cases, Paul indicates that in fact he suffered corporal punishment at the hands of Romans on a number of occasions. And again, it would not be because his religious beliefs per se, It'd be because he was a social problem. He was a troublemaker, you know, causing disturbance of some kind for some reason. And so they punished him to get him to stop. And it never worked. And eventually, of course, according to the tradition, he ends up being martyred.

[B]

Thank you so much. Bart, before we finish for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about?

[C]

Yeah, we're talking about why Paul persecuted Christians before he himself became one. What was it that offended him? Him? And we looked at our sources, which are a couple. Paul's letters say something about it. In the Book of Acts says something about it. It looks like the main reason Paul was really aggravated at Christians was because they were saying that a crucified man is the Messiah, which is just the opposite of what Jews thought a messiah would be. And Paul thought this was nonsense and crazy and probably blasphemous. And so he tried to shut them up. We don't know how he did it. He says he tried to destroy the church, and he did so with violence. And so it's probably because precisely because of their claims that Jesus is the Messiah.

[B]

Audience, thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Barth's courses over at www.bartehrman.com, which includes the upcoming Genius of Matthew course. You can access that [e-mail]. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?

[C]

Yeah, we're continuing this conversation because if Paul was so ticked off at Christians for believing Jesus as the Messiah, why did he become a Christian? What convinced him? And so we're going to be talking about the conversion of Paul to become a follower of Jesus.

[B]

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 Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.