← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:01]
Megan Lewis
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Bart Ehrman
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Megan Lewis
Together, these tools help us spot wildfire risk, allowing us to make fast, data informed decisions to protect the people and communities that count on us.
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Bart Ehrman
Learn more@pacificpower.net wildfire.
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Megan Lewis
Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Today we're going to be asking the question why is the book of Revelation in the Bible? If you've read the Bible and been left with the distinct sense that one of these things is not like the other, then you're not alone. Martin Luther couldn't see the Holy Spirit in the book at all. And it does seem to be completely out of line with the rest of the New Testament and is quite often glossed over by a modern audience. So why is it there to begin with? We'll get to that in a moment though. First, let's check in with Barth. How are you this week?
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Bart Ehrman
I'm doing pretty well this week, I think. I probably told you I don't watch a lot of tv, like none. But I do watch sports. And so this is the time of year when someone like me starts thinking this is the best of times and worst of times. I really like college basketball for one thing. And you're heading into March Madness now. That's the highlight of the year. You know, I'm not much, I don't follow baseball as much as I used to anymore. So basically I've got to wait till August or so till football comes back. So it's going to be kind of a dry period. I do like tennis though. I watch a lot of tennis, so that'll help. For me, it's like the highlight in the low light, what I'm looking forward to here. How about you? You're probably not, you're probably not a basketball fan, are you?
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Megan Lewis
No, no, not really. It's not really a thing in the uk. So I mean, college sports in general just really aren't something that British audiences follow. So coming to the US and having college sports be this huge production was quite interesting. So, no, I'm not following the basketball. My mother is visiting from the uk, though, which is an absolute delight. It's wonderful to have her here.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, that's great. You should tell her to watch some of the March Madness.
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Megan Lewis
We'll sit down together and try and work out what on earth is going on.
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Bart Ehrman
You know, as you know, my wife Sarah is also from England. And the college sports thing. Oh, my God. Because she, you know, she went to Oxford and stuff, she's thinking, what in the world? All this money going to football. What is. So it's like. It's a different universe.
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Megan Lewis
I think the closest thing we have is the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race.
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Bart Ehrman
That's it.
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Megan Lewis
That's it. That's it.
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Bart Ehrman
I'm a student in my undergraduate class. As a matter of who's from China. She's visiting from China. It's been very interesting. So I asked her. We had a big game the other day. I said, so I said, you watch basketball? She said, yeah, it's not a big. What sports do you follow in China? And she says, ping pong. I said, yeah, I guess that's right. Ping pong is amazing. Table tennis in China. Wow. It's really exciting. But it's like. Yeah, it's not quite the same over here.
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Megan Lewis
So, having satisfied our personal indulgences.
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Bart Ehrman
Yes.
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Megan Lewis
What are your thoughts? Why are we going to be talking about why Revelation is in the New Testament?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, I mean, the main reason to talk about it is because a lot of people wonder about it. We've said before that the book of Revelation is probably the least read book of its size, at least in the New Testament, probably by a long margin, and by far the most misunderstood. Many people avoid it because they find it so bizarre and unlike anything they've ever come across. They can't understand it, so they don't bother with it. The people who do really relish it, most people who really relish it, I argue in my book on Armageddon that they misunderstand it. But because they don't take some of these issues that we've been talking about seriously, about the severe violence and the way it's portraying God, they don't really have a problem with it being in the Bible because it's the inspired word of God, they don't have a problem with that. But the people who do take it seriously as a book displaying God's wrath and violence and the vengeance of Jesus wonder, why did he get in and was it a problem? And most people have heard that it had problems getting in. They don't know why and they don't know how it finally made the cut. So that's why we want to talk about it.
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Megan Lewis
So I mentioned at the beginning, right in the very opening of the episode, that Martin Luther had difficulty understanding Revelation as part of the New Testament. And he certainly wasn't the first person to have that struggle. How was the book received among early Christians?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, Martin Luther's interesting because he, you know, he really was kind of did not like the way the author began the book where he said this blessed is the one who reads this book and the one who understands what's revealed within it. Because Martin Luther said, nobody knows what's revealed in it. Nobody can understand.
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Megan Lewis
No one understands it.
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Bart Ehrman
How can you be blessed? And so Martin Luther put it in the appendix of his translation of the New Testament. Martin Luther, for those who don't know, he did a German translation of the New Testament long before the King James Version was put into English and it had the status of the King James Bible in Germany. He relegated four of the books of the New Testament to an appendix after everything else, because he was not convinced that they really proclaimed the Gospel of Christ. So he put them. And Revelation is the one that's kind of most famous for that. Of course, he's writing in the 16th century, and the Book of Revelation by that time had been accepted as Scripture and was accept was seen as Scripture, even though it wasn't copied that much throughout the centuries. When we think of a Bible today, we think of a book. You know, it has, you know, you buy a hardcover book and it's got 20. You got 66 books, and it's one thing. But when scribes were copying books, they copied one at a time, and they copied some books and not others. Sometimes they would just copy, you know, the Gospel of John or something, but as time went on, they would copy maybe the four Gospels at once or the letters of Paul at once, and sometimes the book of Acts and Revelation at once. But Revelation got copied less than the other books of its size by a long margin because I guess people didn't appreciate it or didn't understand it or whatever. Yeah. So throughout history, it's. It's had this problem.
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Megan Lewis
If we look then at the earliest Christians and the church when it was in its infancy, maybe, how did people react to the book? Did they accept it as Scripture, or was it more in the Apocrypha camp?
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Bart Ehrman
It's a complicated question because different people had different views. We really wish we know how the earliest readers interpreted it. We know how later readers interpreted it. And as we'll be seeing later. They interpreted it in ways that solved a number of the problems that others had had. We don't have any record in the early decades, say of how it was, how it was being read. We don't have a kind of a commentary on the book by a Christian trying to explain it until near the end, well around the year 260, a couple hundred years after it was written and being circulated. We do know that there were disputes about it. As soon as we have authors providing us lists of books that they think are the Christian Scriptures, where they'll list the four Gospels and Acts and the letters of Paul, though, they'll list books. But there will be some books that are always on the margins. Most of these are the short books like second and third. John often are not mentioned. Second Peter often not mentioned. Jude not mentioned in some of these lists. The book of Revelation has a mixed reception on these lists. Some of the lists just leave it off up through the 4th century. It was being debated in the 4th century. We have some authors in the 4th century saying that it doesn't belong in the New Testament. We have other authors saying it is in the New Testament. We have lists that include the Apocalypse of John, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, along with the Apocalypse of Peter, which did not make it in. And there were some church leaders who thought the Apocalypse of Peter should be in, but the Apocalypse of John should not. There are others thought that they should both be excluded. And so there are all sorts of views. It had a difficult time, and I suppose it's fair to say it was the last book that finally everybody agreed on.
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Megan Lewis
So you said we don't have an early commentary on Revelation. Do we have any kind of discussion or really any record of what people thought about it?
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Bart Ehrman
One of the big debates was whether the book was written by an apostle or not. When Christian leaders were deciding which books are going to be our authoritative scriptures, they required that a book had a very close connection with an apostle. Either it was written by one of the disciples of Jesus or by one of the first generation apostles like Paul or somebody who is closely connected with them. And so, for example, in the Gospels, Matthew and Luke are both disciples, allegedly. And Mark is supposed to be the companion of Peter and Luke is supposed to be the companion of Paul. And so those get in. The question is the Book of Revelation. It claims to be written by somebody named John who is located on the island of Patmos off the west coast of Turkey. And so he's often called John of Patmos. There was a disciple, John the son of Zebedee. But John was a common name. And so was it written by John the son of Zebedee or not? Or was it written by some unknown John, who's not an apostle, or connected with an apostle, who was John of Patmos? And so there were debates about. This very interesting letter was written on this by a bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, named Dionysius in the third century. Dionysius was a bishop of this church. Alexandria was a big church, a very influential church in early Christendom. And it was an area where Alexandria was known as a kind of intellectual center of the world. I mean, Athens and Alexandria were kind of two of the big places. Athens, obviously, but Alexandria as well. And within Christianity, Alexandria produced a number of the really brilliant early Christian scholars. And so. And Dionysius was connected with some of them. And so he was an intellectual himself. And he wrote a letter that we still have that makes a very strong argument that whoever wrote the Book of Revelation was not the author of the Gospel of John. And by that time, everybody thought John the son of Zebedee had written the Gospel of John. That's an interesting idea, because the Gospel of John doesn't claim to be written by somebody named John. The Book of Revelation does claim to be written by somebody named John. But they thought John, the Gospel was written by Jesus, disciple. And so what Dionysius did is he engaged in a kind of philological analysis that's very similar to what people would do today. In other words, he looked at the language. He showed that whoever wrote the Book of Revelation was writing in a different kind of style from the writer of the Gospel of John. That the Gospel of John is written in a pretty elegant style by somebody who's really rhetorically good in many ways. And the Book of Revelation is terrible. It's not just that. It's a different style. The author can't write Greek very well, as I think we mentioned in an earlier episode. I mean, he makes grammatical mistakes, kind of an embarrassing number of just flat out grammatical mistakes right off the bat. And Dionysius points this out and makes several comments that scholars today would still agree with. All of these, all of These years later, 1900 years later, we still agree. Yeah, actually, you're right. That is not good Greek, and it is not the author of John. And so his argument was less with the theology of the book or the portrayal of God in the book than with the apostolic authorship. But there were other church leaders who really were quite disturbed by the contents of the book and talked about that a lot, too.
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Megan Lewis
This is a great lead in to my next question. We've talked together about the violence and the destruction in Revelation, and you mentioned in the last episode that actually what troubles the earliest Christians was not the violence, but the materialism displayed in Revelation. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
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Bart Ehrman
It's not something that would strike people today, but it really struck the early writers who didn't like Revelation. So in the book of Revelation, we're taught that when Jesus destroys the enemies of God at the battle of Armageddon, the beast of the sea rouses his armies and Christ comes down from heaven and wipes them out. Christ then begins to rule the earth for a thousand years. And this thousand years is widely misunderstood by people today. It's called the millennium. But millennium would be the Latin phrase for a thousand years. And Christ rules for a thousand years. The enemy is gone. Satan has been put into a bottomless pit for a thousand years. And Christ rules with the martyrs. He doesn't rule with everybody. It's only those who had been martyred for their faith who rule with Christ for that thousand years. After that thousand years, then the devil's let out of his prison for a while, and he causes problems for a while. Then Christ puts him down again permanently after this period, after the millennium, before the city of God descends from heaven. When the city of God descends, then everybody enters into it. This millennial kingdom was understood in early Christianity to be a kind of paradise, glorious place on earth. And of course, then it got even better and better because this 1500 cubicle mile wide earth cities descends, 1500 miles on each side going up, descends. And the saints live in there forever. So in early Christianity, there were people who took this literally. There was going to be a literal reign of Christ. And these people were sometimes called kilasts. Kilia is another word for a thousand, spelled C H I L I A S T killiast. And they were people who believed in a literal rule of Christ for a thousand years here on earth. A lot of church fathers were opposed to this image quite vigorously because in their view, this shows that there's going to be this glorious paradise kingdom on earth. It'll be all this feasting and banqueting and happiness, and it's all going to be rooted in this kind of great material situation for these martyrs. And the opponents of this were people who were leaning toward a more ascetic way of understanding Christianity, where this material world is not what matters. God transcends this material world. And so you're not supposed to be bound to it. You're not supposed to eat really good food or rich food. You're not supposed to drink a lot of good wine or good wine at all. Drink the bad stuff and you should punish your body so that your body doesn't want to stay here but will have an eternal life with God. And you have these Kilias talking about how you're just going to be feasting every night and like, you know, it's going to be a fantastic big meal every. It's going to be like that for a thousand years. And these people are taking this literally and it's not acceptable as scripture because the Bible can't teach that. That was one of the very big reasons why people rejected it.
- [15:47]
Megan Lewis
So it clearly wasn't a shoo in for canonization. You've got the issues with the materialism. You've got. We don't really think this was written by John the son of Zebedee. Which John was it written by? Was it the guy down the road who goes out on a Sunday and talks to me like, probably not the apostle. But even with these issues, quite substantial issues, I think it was still ultimately accepted as scripture. Do we know what it was about Revelation that led Christian leaders to overlook these challenges and choose to include it regardless?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, we have some idea. Yeah. The book, in the early two or three centuries, it fared better in the Western part of the Roman Empire than it did in the east, east and West Empire. There were lots of differences. And the differences in the Christian Church developed. The differences became quite extreme. Of course, later, when you have the Roman Catholic Church ends up representing the Western world, and the Greek Orthodox Church ends up many centuries later. But there was always kind of a split between the Latin world and the Greek world and the empire. The church leaders in the west tended to prefer it in the canon. And one reason might be because some of them knew that the enemy in the Book of Revelation was the city of Rome. And the city of Rome was starting to persecute Christians more rigorously at that point. And so the Western world may have preferred it for that reason. Eventually the question is, how did they get everybody on the same page to agree to the book? And a couple of things developed. One thing that developed is that the theological controversies that were raging in the 4th century had some effect on people's view of Revelation. The theological controversy don't seem to have anything to do with the Book of revelation in the 4th century. The big disputes among Christians, especially early in the century, were over the status of Christ as God. So this is the Arian controversy where you have this teacher again in Alexandria, Egypt. His name is Arius, who maintains that Christ is God. Christ is absolutely God, but he's not as powerful as God. God, and so he's the Son of God. And the Son is not as great as the Father, and the Father begets the Son, which means the Son comes from the Father. And so he is a divine being, but he was created at some time in eternity past, and he created the world and he came to die for the sins of the world. But he's subservient to the Father, who is superior to him by an infinite number of great pieces of greatness. And so he's like. So just as the Son is greater than the Spirit and the Spirit's greater than us. And so this was Arius's view, that Christ came into being at some point and was not equal with God at all, but he was still God. His main opponent was the. At that time, the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, a guy named Alexander, who said, no, Christ is equal with God. He's not the same as God. He's equal with God, but he's not identical with God. And so there are two of them, but they're equally God. And the Spirit also is in there. And so you end up with the doctrine of the Trinity, which says that. That the three are equal. It's not that one is greater than the other. They're all equally great. Okay, so there was this debate about this. And so the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 was called by the emperor Constantine to resolve this debate. Constantine didn't care one way or the other. He was a Christian at this time. He was a very committed Christian. He really did convert. He really was a committed Christian, but he didn't care about these kinds of like. Well, he considered this a trivial matter, like, what's the matter? He's God. Okay, what's it matter? And. But to these people that matter. So what's that got to do with Revelation? What it has to do with Revelation is that a couple times in the book, God calls himself the Alpha and the Omega. Alpha and Omega are the first and the last letter of the Greek Alphabet. I am the beginning and the end. So he is before all things. He's after all things. God is the whole thing encompassed in one. He is everything. But in the book of Revelation, Christ also says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And the natural conclusion is they're equal. And so Revelation could be used in order to show that Arius was wrong. And so it could be used in the Arian controversy. And it ended up then supporting the view that became theologically orthodox, that led to the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.
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Megan Lewis
That's fascinating. Were there any additional to that that made Revelation a necessity for canonization?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, I wouldn't say it was a necessity for canonization, but there were some things that happened that made it highly acceptable to people. The big problem, as I said before, were the Killiasts who said that, you know, the Revelation teaches a thousand year reign of Christ and that just can't be right. We've mentioned St. Augustine several times in the podcast before, including in relation to the Book of Revelation. His interpretation of Revelation got rid of the thousand year literal thousand year reign of Christ. Augustine argued, look, the Book of Revelation is filled with symbolism. No one can doubt that it is filled with symbolism. And the thousand years reign of Christ is symbolic. It's not a literal reign of Christ where people are going to be gorging themselves every night and drinking too much. It's not going to be like that in the thousand year reign of Christ. As I said earlier in this episode, the Antichrist figure, the beast, is destroyed at the battle of Armageddon. But Satan is put away for a thousand years. He has no effect on the saints on earth. He has no power over the saints who are ruling the earth. Augustine argued what this is is that Christ conquered the powers of evil when he was crucified. And we have entered into a millennium where Satan is bound. Satan is not around to do any harm to any of the saints. The saints have primacy over Satan. During this period between the time that Christ conquered the forces of evil and the time he comes back to bring his kingdom. And so the millennium is now. It's happening in the Church. The Church is the millennial kingdom. And so this was saying basically that Revelation is not predicting what's going to happen in the future. It's predicting what's going on now. This interpretation was the dominant interpretation for over a thousand years. St. Augustine's interpretation became the standard interpretation. It's only in relatively modern times. It's really since the 19th century. Well, it can go back to the 18th century of modern times when people started thinking again, it might be referring to what's going to happen soon in our future. The idea that it's predicting our future is a modern invention. Many centuries people thought that it was symbolic of what was already happening in the Church. And so the whole thing about, you know, the Rapture is coming, there'll be a seven year tribulation here on Earth, there'll be Judgment Day, that's going to come. And these are the signs, they're being fulfilled now in our future, showing it's going to happen. That's a completely modern thing. And so it isn't the way Revelation was interpreted, but it meant that once people thought, oh, well, actually, so the Kilias don't have a leg to stand on. Okay, then it's fine. And they said, okay, so John did write it. And so then, so it got in the Bible.
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Megan Lewis
Problem solved.
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Bart Ehrman
Problem solved.
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Megan Lewis
So you just said that Revelation is kind of enjoying something of a renaissance in recent times with the rise of prophecy writers and popular media like the Left behind books and movies. Has Revelation ever been this popular before? Or is this just like a peculiarity of modern periods?
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Bart Ehrman
There have been times when it was very popular in some circles. It's never had as widespread of popularity, I think, as it does now. But there have been times when people took it quite seriously. And there's a lot of really interesting books by this. There's a guy Cohn, who wrote this book, the Pursuit of the Millennium, that talks about how the Book of Revelation was interpreted through the Middle Ages in groups that admittedly would be considered fairly fringe in terms of the historical significance overall, but were very important for things that happened in some regions, especially in Europe. In medieval Europe, there were places where there were predictions that the kingdom of God is coming to our city, like the Descent of the New Jerusalem. It's going to be here in Munster, Germany, and there would be fervor that would be brought up that would lead almost always to horrible disasters. In my book on Apocalypse, I talk about how at different periods of time, the Book of Revelation became popular in some places, usually in places in Europe and where people plausibly interpreted the Book of Revelation to show that it was all going to happen soon. This was a big thing in the 13th century, for example, in parts of Europe where, where there is a monk, Joachim of Fiore, who was a biblical scholar and a really bright fellow mystic, who had interpreted Revelation against Augustine to refer to periods of Earth and that a period that was yet to come. And his followers determined the date of when that was going to be. And they, they worked it out that it was going to be in the year 1260, and they had a very specific date. And there are a lot of people who bought it. It became a big, big movement, just as in the 19th century, there were a group of Protestants in America, thousands and thousands and thousands who believed that it was going to happen in October of 1848 and in more modern times. The book. One of the things I talk about in my book is how an interpretation of Revelation is what drove the Branch Davidians, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians who were wiped out, their compound wiped out by the FBI. That whole tragedy at Waco was driven by an interpretation of Revelation. There are times and places where it's been really big. But I would say today, when you have some phenomenon like the Left behind series, which God knows how many millions of copies, and people just read it, like that's what's really going to happen. Well, that's what the Bible says, and it's because that's how they're reading Revelation. I don't think we've had that before.
- [26:06]
Megan Lewis
Thank you very much. And this is our final episode for now, at least on Revelation. Is there anything like a final word you have to say before we close out the miniseries and move on to other things?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, the reason I'll say why I wrote my book about it and which is the reason why I think it's so important, as you know, Megan, and many people do, I guess that I started out as a conservative evangelical Christian, and I really believed that the end of the world was going to happen by the 1980s, that Jesus was going to come back. And I believed Revelation taught that. That was how I originally interpreted Revelation, as a prediction of our future. And then as I sort of moved on in my studies, I started realizing that Revelation isn't like a literal description of what's going to happen. And I began to think of it as a book of hope for those who are suffering now. And I taught it this way. For most of my career, over 30 years, I taught it that Revelation is a book of hope for those who are suffering, that God is going to make right everything that's wrong and that good will prevail in the end. And I really, I believed that even when I wasn't a Christian. When I was a Christian, I believed it. I really believed it then. But I really believed that's what the book taught. Even, you know, until some years ago when I started thinking more about reading it some more, I realized actually it's not like that. This book is not. It's not a book of hope. Hope doesn't appear in this book. The word hope does not appear in this book. The love of God does not appear in this. But this is not this is God exercising his wrath against the planet because he's really angry. And what's happened here, you know, I get that. But I think it's really important to understand what the Bible says, whether you believe in the Bible or not. If you don't believe in the Bible, it's worthwhile to know what it says because it's the most important book in the history of our civilization. And if you're a believer, it's better to be informed about what you hold to be Scripture than to be uninformed. And so I have no qualms at all with people being, confessing their faith and being believing Christians and, and even revering the Bible. But I think that you should be informed about the Bible because the opposite of having an informed faith is having an ignorant faith. And who wants to be ignorant? Okay, I know a few people, but I think since this book is so unusual and since it's in the New Testament, really is worth knowing what it's about. And so I think that's why this kind of discussion is important.
- [28:23]
Megan Lewis
Well, thank you so much. We'll leave that there for today and take a brief break, after which we will be back with Bart's update. And then Bart is going to get on his soapbox and talk to us about important things.
- [28:37]
Bart Ehrman
If you're interested in the gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible, you should check out my online courses where I cover all all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them out@barterman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast. Are you a curious person with a passion for learning but don't want to go back to school? You need to take a look at at Wondrium, the streaming service that provides classes on just about everything of interest. The Crusades, neuroscience, Beethoven, photography, travel, and lots else, all presented by true experts in accessible terms. For a free trial, go to barturman.com wondrium if you decide to subscribe to Wondrium, this podcast will receive a review referral fee, but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supporting our show.
- [29:52]
Megan Lewis
Welcome back, everyone. And now we have Bart's Weekly Updates.
- [29:57]
Bart Ehrman
This is Bart's Weekly Update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings and online calls, course launches.
- [30:12]
Megan Lewis
Bart, what are we doing this week?
- [30:15]
Bart Ehrman
Well, so I. I actually have some time this week to work on my. On my next book. I've got a book contract with my publisher for a general book on how the ethics of Jesus transformed the world. And it's a book I never thought I would write. People are used to me writing things that are kind of critical about the New Testament and the Bible and Christianity. I don't. I don't. Look, I really. I don't feel crit about. I mean, I'm a historian. I do approach them historically. But I think there are ways in which the teachings of Jesus really changed how people understood they should behave. And it still affects us today. And this book, my book is going to be talking about how that happens. How Jesus teachings actually revolutionize people's understanding of ethics, morality, and how to behave and how to live. And so I'm actually, I'm a great bit of fun of it because I'm reading all of these ethical discourses from the Greek and Roman worlds. So Roman moral discourse from, you know, Plato and Aristotle on up through, you know, for the next six or seven hundred years, non Christian ethical, to compare it with other Christians. It's really interesting. We're gonna have to do some episodes on this one.
- [31:23]
Megan Lewis
I was gonna say we need to do some ethics episodes.
- [31:26]
Bart Ehrman
Ethics, yeah, yeah, we all need ethics. The world needs ethics. But anyway, so, yeah, so I'm excited because this week I have some time to do that.
- [31:32]
Megan Lewis
Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing. We are going to be right back with Bart and his Soapbox.
- [31:41]
Bart Ehrman
Take cover. Fundamentalist Christians and mythicists. It's time for Bart Gets on His Soapbox, the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most.
- [31:56]
Megan Lewis
Bart, it is time for you to get on your soapbox. What are you going to talk to us about?
- [32:02]
Bart Ehrman
Last month I did an online course for my barterman.com thing as this. I do these online courses. I did a course on the Gospel of Mark. I love the Gospel of Mark and I think it's the best gospel. I just think it's great because people don't. They don't realize just how sophisticated it is. But one of the things I had to deal with in this course was, you know, who wrote the Gospel of Mark? Who wrote it? And, you know, one thing that just really irritates me about scholars, one of the many things that irritates me about scholars is how scholars will pick and choose what evidence they want to appeal to in order to support what they already think instead of like having an even balanced understanding of, you know. Well, I need to decide this. Here's the evidence. Here's the evidence. I think I need to look at it and weigh it evenly. You know, you just pick whatever it is that supports your view, you know, and you don't even pay attention to the problems of the thing you just picked. And that just drives me nuts. And the case of this has to do with who wrote Mark. There's this church father. Well, I will, I'm sure we'll do an episode on Papias. Papias was an early 2nd century church father whose writings we don't have. And who was one of these people who wrote books and we don't have the books. So he wrote a five volume book called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Sounds like it was a commentary on the sayings of Jesus. Might have been, I don't know. People have different views about it. But we don't have the book. We have a few quotations here and there about it. And the one quotation that every New Testament scholar seems to know about is that Papias says that Mark was the secretary of Peter and he wrote down Peter's view for his gospel. So the gospel of Mark is Peter's view that has been mediated through Mark. And people quote that and they say, see, so by 120 everybody knew that.
- [33:42]
Megan Lewis
Problem solved.
- [33:43]
Bart Ehrman
Problem solved. And the thing that drives me nuts about this is that they take Papias at his word about that, which is okay. I mean, I think you have to look, Papias says that, so what do you do with it? How do you evaluate it? But one thing you do to evaluate it is to see what else Papias said and see if you agree that those things are factual historically. And if like everything he says, every other thing he says is wrong, then why would you think this one's right other than the fact it supports your point? And so, for example, he also says that Matthew wrote Matthew, and he says that Matthew wrote the logia, the sayings of Jesus, and he did it in the Hebrew tongue. Well, our gospel isn't the sayings of Jesus, it's a whole narrative and it wasn't written in Hebrew. And so the people don't think, well, so that's not. I don't think that's talking about Matthew. Does that sound like you like it? But then we have a couple of other quotations from Papias. I Translated them in my book, the Apostolic Fathers for the little classical library. So people can just read them. They're anywhere. Just look up Papias. At one point, Papius says, here, I've got to read you this, because it actually relates to the Book of Revelation. And it's. It's a saying about what's going to happen at the end of time, according to Jesus. Papias says that he talked to people who knew. People who knew the disciples who talked to Jesus. And Jesus once said, the days are coming when the vines will come forth, each with 10,000 boughs. And on a single bough, there will be 10,000 branches. These are grapevines. And each, indeed, a single branch will be 10,000 shoots. And on every shoot, there will be 10,000 clusters of grapes. And in every cluster, there'll be 10,000 grapes. And every grape, when pressed, will yield. Every grape, when pressed, will yield 25 measures of wine. And when any of the saints grabs hold of the cluster, another cluster will cry out, I'm better. Take me. Bless the Lord through me. So that's the millennial kingdom. So he was Achilleas, like, you know, the ones who interpreted Revelation. And Eusebius quotes this passage, the church historian Eusebius quotes this passage about how this millennium is going to happen with all of this luscious wine floating around. And Eusebius says that Papias was a man of very small intelligence.
- [36:01]
Megan Lewis
We can definitely trust his views on who wrote Mark.
- [36:04]
Bart Ehrman
Who wrote Mark. And he also has an account of the death of Judas where the problem with Judas is, after he betrayed Jesus, he didn't hang himself. He got so fat that his head was so big he couldn't go down an alleyway, and he was fatter than a big wagon, and he ended up blowing up. That's how he died. And so this is the person who, if he says, well, yeah, Mark wrote Mark. And so you pick that, right? You pick that one little thing that you like, and everything else you say, yeah, well, that's not right. So I'm not saying he's wrong about the Mark of Peter thing. I'm just saying, like, consider your source, will you? I just. I just don't like when scholars. I don't like when scholars, like, pick and choose without doing a full evaluation just so they can prove that they're right about something.
- [36:46]
Megan Lewis
I think I absolutely agree with you.
- [36:48]
Bart Ehrman
Sorry. So that was a soapbox, wasn't it?
- [36:50]
Megan Lewis
It was a perfect soapbox. A perfect soapbox. And starting with your conclusions, and then Finding the evidence that supports them is absolutely a personal issue of mine also, so.
- [37:00]
Bart Ehrman
Right. We see eye to eye once more.
- [37:01]
Megan Lewis
We do. We do. Perfect. We can continue this partnership.
- [37:04]
Bart Ehrman
Okay, good. Okay.
- [37:07]
Megan Lewis
So before we finish for the week and the Revelation miniseries we've been going through, would you mind summarizing what it was that we talked about today?
- [37:14]
Bart Ehrman
Well, one of the big issues that many people have with the book of Revelation is trying to figure out how it got into the New Testament. It's so different from the other books and seems to portray God and Jesus differently, and it's so bizarre and symbolic. And so we talked about the problems it had in the early church, as many church leaders knew that it really was not written by the Apostle John and other church. A lot of church leaders were upset about the kind of grotesque materialism that they saw was in the book, and so they didn't accept it as canonical. But later, especially in the end of the 4th and 5th centuries, it came to be seen as a book that was useful for theological purposes, for some of the theological controversies going on. And there evolved interpretations of it that seemed satisfactory to the church at large. And so finally, later in the 5th century or so, just about most people in the 5th century are most Christian, not quite everyone, but most Christians are now accepting it as canonical. So we, we find it as the final book of the New Testament today.
- [38:14]
Megan Lewis
Thank you so much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss any future episodes. Remember that you can use the code njpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com, including that course on Mark that he was just talking about that last month. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week, and I hope everyone can join us. So thank you, everybody, 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.