← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
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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.
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B
Let's begin. Hello and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus. The identification of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet is probably a familiar one to many people listening, but it's not one that's commonly made in modern churches. So today we're going to talk about this movement away from apocalypticism when it started, how visible it is in Christianity's early record. And my final question to Barth, just a sneak preview for everyone listening is going to be if apocalyptic preachers, modern doomsday preachers are actually closer to Jesus own original message and the Christianity that we are more familiar with today. But before we get into that, Bart, how are you doing this week?
- [01:33]
D
Yeah, I'm doing well. We're in the middle of the semester, papers are coming in and there's a big deal on college campuses now about chatbots because when Chatbot GPT came out, everybody got really nervous about it. And turns out they're justified in being nervous about it because students, they use it. Some do. And so we were trying to devise ways to defeat it so that students actually come up with their own ideas. I had this kind of funny thing that happened a few weeks ago. I was doing a webinar with a group of people and a person wanted to say what the topic would be, wanted to do a topic on whether in the ancient world there were any people who pretended to be the apostles for one reason or another. So apostolic impostors. And I had never thought of that, you know, and I thought, wow, really? Huh. That's interesting. So I thought about it and I, you know, worked and I gave this webinar where I talked about it like, no, it doesn't seem likely And I explained why and stuff. And so at the end of it, I asked the guy, I said, so why? Where did you come up with this idea? Like, have you read that someplace? Like, has somebody said that before? He said, no, I hadn't read it someplace, but I just wondered about. But see, I did type it into Chatbot GPT. And he read the answer to me, which was, there are some New Testament scholars who have maintained that there were apostolic imposters. The major person to argue this is Bart Ehrman in his book, Listen to how I'd argue this in some book. I'd never even thought of it before. So the Chatbot thing is, you know, like, if you actually know the stuff really well, you can still detect this stuff. I mean, it's going to get better. I know, but at this point, I tell my students, look, I'm going to know. Let me teach that right now. I'm going to know if you're using this stuff.
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B
Was it a book you'd actually written that was being referenced, or was it.
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D
It's one of my books on forgery.
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B
Okay.
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D
And so, you know, it kind of makes sense. You know, you have people who claim to be apostles when they're writing, but that's not an imposter in the sense that we were talking about, where somebody actually, like, physically claims to be. I thought that was pretty good. How are you doing? Any imposters for Megan Lewis lately?
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B
No imposters, thankfully. Or at least if there are, I haven't come across them. And I don't think I'm influential enough for people to want to impersonate me anyway. Unless they would like to also come to my house and help me organize my garage. That would be fantastic. If there are any Megan Lewis imposters out there, that's. That's what you need to be doing.
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D
I've heard you're revolutionizing the optician world.
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B
I'm trying. I'm trying.
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D
Oh, you're doing well, too.
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B
Thank you. I enjoy them. They make me happy. Okay, we should get into apocalypticism or de apocalypticism.
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D
I tell my students that if they want to pass the class, they need to be able to say de apocalyptization.
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B
De apocalypticization. I don't think I would have passed, but it's been, I think, probably about five minutes since we talked about apocalypticism on the podcast, so it's been far too long. We need to absolutely get back to it, and most of our audience is going to be very familiar with what it is. But could you take, like, Maybe two minutes for those who are new to the show and explain what apocalypticism is.
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D
Yeah, so apocalypticism, luckily is not an ancient world word. It's one that scholars invented to describe a phenomenon, especially in ancient Judaism, the word apocalyptic itself, which is one that we use, or apocalypse. The word apocalypse comes from a Greek word that means a revealing or an unveiling or a disclosure. And it's a revealing of in the Jewish circles that this emerged in this view, merged in it's revealing of the secrets of the world that can make sense of it. And in Jewish apocalyptic thought, which started about 200 years before Jesus and is a view that Jesus himself held and John the Baptist held and his earliest followers held, the view is that this world, the reason there's so many awful things happening in this world, why there's so much pain and suffering, is because the powers who control this world right now are forces of evil that are opposed to God and opposed to his people, and in fact opposed to most everybody. And they're making life miserable. And God has allowed this to happen for some unknown reason. But the powers of evil are on the ascendancy and things are getting worse and worse, and it's going to continue that way until God finally, at his predetermined moment, intervenes to destroy everything that's evil and bring in a good world, a utopian world, a kingdom of God. And that these apocalypticists in the days of Jesus and before and after thought that their world was just about as horrible as it could get and that the end was coming soon. So the idea is that people who are faithful to God are going to be rewarded when this happens, and those opposed to God will be punished. And so you need to be on God's side and you don't want to put it off because it could happen any day now. This has long been argued to be one of the principal views of Jesus himself and of his followers, in line with John the Baptist and people producing the Dead Sea Scrolls and lots of other Jews at the time.
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B
So this is not something that modern churches really, well, many modern churches at least, really talk about. I sat through many sermons, but none of them have really talked about the imminent end of the world and about this being Jesus message. So there has clearly been a shift away from apocalypticism at some point in early Christian history. How soon after Jesus death do we start to see this movement away from his more overt apocalyptic teachings?
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D
Yeah, it doesn't take too long. And you're right, I mean, eventually the apocalypticism, it never disappears the idea that the world's coming to an end soon doesn't disappear. And in this book I wrote called Armageddon, I show how this view maintained itself kind of on the margins until the end of the 19th century, when, once again, it became big. And so the churches that, you know, you've been associated with, or churches that I was long associated with, didn't have this message, you know, that the end is going to come next Thursday kind of thing. But there are some obvious there a lot still do, as we're going to talk about later. So our first Christian author was the apostle Paul, and he wrote a number of letters that we have in the New Testament, and the ones that look like they're the earliest ones that he wrote, books like First Thessalonians and first Corinthians are books where he emphasizes it could happen anytime now. You need to be ready for it. You need to be alert because the end's coming and you don't want to be caught out, you want to be ready for it. So be on your guard. And so in the very earliest writings, we have that. But as time goes on, it starts shifting away from that a little bit.
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B
Do we see a shift in Paul's own writings away from apocalypticism? And is this also reflected in the canonical Gospels?
- [08:26]
D
Yeah. So it's an interesting question because in later letters of Paul, he doesn't seem to be as convinced it's going to happen right away. When he writes 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians, he indicates that he's going to be alive when Jesus comes back and to bring the end of the world. He talked about those who are dead in Christ will come to meet Jesus when he returns, and then we who are alive will also go and meet him. He says in 1 Thessalonians, he seemed to think he's going to be alive at the time. But in later letters like in Philippians and second Corinthians, he seems to think that he's going to die before it happens. He talked about maybe dying first. And so it looks like he's thinking maybe there'll be a bit of a delay here. And then when you get into letters that Paul did not write, but that are written by people claiming to be Paul, the Deutero Pauline letters, as scholars call them, the later letters, this apocalyptic message pretty much dissipates in a serious way where it's not that the end is coming soon, there's going to be some time now. And there are later books of the New Testament that are quite explicit about it. The book of Second Peter, for example, is written to explain why it hasn't happened yet. And this is where Peter, the author of this book, who claims to be Peter, says that God delayed it so that more people will have time to repent. And you shouldn't say that God's gone back on, you know, his promise that it's going to happen soon. And this is where Second Peter says, because with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. And so what he means is, you know, if it's coming soon, that's by, you know, by God's calendar. It doesn't necessarily be by our calendar. People quote me that verse sometimes to say, you know, why it's taken so long. And I say, yeah, no days of thousand years. Thousand years is a day. So if you tell me that, you know, Jesus is coming back in three days, we can start looking for him in about 23, 23. In 300 years or 3,000 years. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. About 5,000. Yeah.
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B
So do you see in the canonical gospels that try and preserve Jesus actual teachings? Do you see, like, a shading of the apocalyptic message or people changing what is being said to try and make it more in line with this less imminent idea of the end of the world?
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D
Yeah, this is one of the really intriguing aspects of the Gospels of the New Testament. We've said on earlier podcasts that our three earliest gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that they are. They're called the Synoptic Gospels because they're so much alike. You can put them in parallel columns and kind of read them next to each other, but they have changes between them. And also, these gospels had earlier sources of material. And so scholars talk, for example, about the Q source, which was a source of Jesus sayings that was available to Matthew and Luke but marked out sight. So you've got Mark, who's probably our first gospel, and you have this Q thing that you can reconstruct from Matthew and Luke. Matthew has some of his own materials that were before him that he incorporates into his book, and Luke has some of his own materials he incorporates in his book. And so you call those M, Matthew's materials, and L, Luke's materials. Okay, so I'm saying all that to say that the earliest sources of our. Of the Synoptic gospels, our earliest gospels, Mark, Q, M and L, all of them are filled with apocalyptic predictions of Jesus, where Jesus is saying, be ready, going to come soon. The Son of Man is soon. To arrive. You know he's going to come in judgment. You know, you have these sayings about this happening. And as time goes on, that apocalyptic message starts getting muted until by the final gospel, the Gospel of John, it virtually disappeared. John doesn't have this message and he's our last gospel. Jesus preaches about completely other things in the Gospel of John. It doesn't talk about the coming kingdom of God and how you need to repent in preparation because it's almost here, not in John at all. And it starts disappearing already in Luke, our second to last gospel. And so what happens is the gospels start getting less and less apocalyptic. So they de apocalypticize over time. They're getting rid of the apocalyptic message.
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B
In the later non canonical gospels, do we again see that same shift away from the apocalyptic message?
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D
Yeah, it even continues more. And so the way it works, if you map it out carefully in Matthew and Mark, you have this apocalyptic message of Jesus. In Luke, Jesus starts modifying it and so that he's not talking so much about the be ready because the kingdom is coming soon. It's more that the kingdom of God is here among us. In my ministry in Jesus ministry, people start seeing the kingdom of God. In Luke, it's still coming, but it's not as pressing of an issue in John, as I said, it's virtually gone. Jesus doesn't talk like that. When you get to the Gospel of Thomas, which is probably 30 years or so after John, it's usually dated around the year 120 or so. It's debated, but around the year 120, so it's later still, nearly 100 years after Jesus had been saying the end was coming soon. In this gospel, Jesus preaches against an apocalyptic message. Jesus says, look, don't wait for the kingdom of God. It's not coming. People aren't going to say, look, there it is, or here it is. The kingdom of God is spread out on the earth and most people don't see it. And so the kingdom of God is not this thing that's going to happen in the future where evil is destroyed. It's somehow present on the earth now, either like inside believers or among believers or something like that.
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B
Do you see when you're looking at the texts that shift away from apocalypticism, are they all shifting toward the same kind of idea or different teachings? Or does what they talk about instead vet vary from text to text?
- [14:20]
D
It varies from text to text and throughout history and down till today, you have different explanations for why it didn't happen. And of course a Lot of Christians today would say, well, Jesus didn't predict it was going to happen. And so, you know, why should it happen? But it looks pretty clearly like earliest Gospel sources. He did predict it. And then as time goes on, people have to come up with explanations. And you find different explanations both within the New Testament and then increasingly later. So, for example, the thing in Second Peter is that God's delayed it, you know, so that people have a chance to repent. More commonly, people started saying that the kingdom of God is not. It's not some kind of utopian actual place here on earth. The kingdom of God is God ruling as king, and he rules as king in our lives. We have the kingdom of God within us. For example, by the time you get to about the, the end of the fourth century, the early of the fifth century, you start having people come up with an actual kind of conception of it, especially St. Augustine, who says that in fact the kingdom of God that was predicted is the Church. Jesus wasn't predicting some kind of, you know, wild, spectacular cosmic event where the earth would be destroyed or anything like that. He's talking about the Church was going to come. And so the kingdom of God is the Christian church on the planet. And that became the dominant view since Augustine, who's the great theologian of early Christianity, pushed for it very strenuously in his book the City of God. That became more or less the standard view among Christians down to the 19th century, that the kingdom of God is actually the Church.
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B
So you said that apocalypticism never fully goes away. Do we see in early Christian heretical groups people that stick with apocalypticism after the proto orthodox tradition has moved away from it?
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D
Yeah, it's interesting because you get various groups that take various stands on it. There are all sorts of groups that are anti apocalyptic. You know, the Gnostics, for example, tended to be anti apocalyptic. We'll talk about Gnosticism more. We've done some already. It's a topic that continually comes up. But there were groups, including proto orthodox groups, that continue to think that when Jesus said it's coming soon, he meant it, but he meant it for our day. There was a group, for example, that was called the Montanists. They're at the end of the second century, they're following a guy whose name just happens to be Montanus. And so they call them, they're called Montanists. And Montanus was a kind of a prophet. And he had two women who were his colleagues who were also prophets. They were saying that the kingdom of God is soon to come and it's going to arrive here at this village. They had this specificity about it coming soon. And there were people who it was a large movement and people had a kind of expectation, eschatological, apocalyptic expectation that it's coming soon based on these prophecies. And one of the interesting things is that this movement in part may have been responsible for, for Christians deciding which books would be in the New Testament, weirdly. And the logic of it is, we'll get to it some other episodes, but the logic of it is that proto orthodox Christians wanted to insist you could not have new revelations from God to change the plan. And so the plan is in the writings. And so this is when they start thinking serious about which writings are there. Because we need ancient apostles. Because if you're saying that you can prophesy something, anybody can prophesy anything and say God told them so. So we need some written authorities here. And so that's part of the reason for the canon.
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B
And we've mentioned this before, one of our earlier podcast episodes was on modern end of world prophecies. Are these doomsday writers and preachers, do you think, more closely mimicking Jesus own ministry than mainstream churches who may stick more with emphasizing the care of your fellow human aspect of Christianity?
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D
Yeah, boy, that's a tough question. It's a really good one because one's always hesitant to say, yeah, the fundamentalists are the ones who are getting it right. I mean, really, in some senses, though, there's a big movement among fundamentalists of various stripes to insist that the end is coming soon. This insistence has been around, as I think we probably said earlier, since the 1890s. The people who hold this view assume that it's always been around, but it hasn't been. It's a new formulation and it is going back, you know, taking the teachings of Jesus literally in a sense. I say in a sense because Jesus appears to have thought that this was going to happen in his own generation. And they're saying it's going to happen in our own generation. And so it sounds like that's the same thing, but it's only the same thing in a sense because Jesus didn't mean 2000 years later. So they're not taking Jesus literally, they're transplanting him into their context. But in terms of their expectation that it's coming soon, the answer is absolutely, that is what Jesus himself appears to have been saying, but in so many other ways, the way Jesus phrased it and what Jesus thought about it is so radically different. From what the fundamentalists today say, I mean, just kind of as one obvious example in the modern world, fundamentalists are very interested in major social and political issues, including, you know, everything from, you know, second Amendment rights to issues that contain involving abortion and, you know, and prayer in school and whatever. Pick your topics, that is what you hear frequently. And they base these largely on this kind of passion and expectation that the end is coming soon and would need to shape up. And Jesus didn't take those kind of social and political stance at all. These were not the things he was interested in. So the very tenor of his ministry was hugely different. But this insistence that the end's coming soon, yeah, that's, that's what he said too.
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B
And in some, some modern settings, you see kind of attempts to bring about the end of the world through one's own actions. Is that a more modern reaction to Jesus preaching or is this something that you also see in early Christianity as well?
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D
Yeah. Now this is an especially intriguing question because when I talked about Jewish apocalypticism, I gave a very broad sketch of it. And even if you write a book on it, it's going to be, you're not going to be covering everything. But one of the important aspects of early Jewish apocalypticism is that different Jews had different expectations about how this was going to. And there were some Jews who thought that this would be an intervention of God. And it's got nothing to do with what we do. You know, we're not going to bring in this kingdom. God's going to do it because these powers of evil are far more powerful than us. And like, we're helpless against them. But God, God can overthrow them. That was the view of Jesus. That's the view Jesus supports. He was not in support of violent opposition against the powers that be in order to initiate the kingdom. But there were plenty of other Jews who did think that. And that may have been driving a lot of what later came to be known as the zealots among the Jews. And it's the view that was held by at least some of the Essenes who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's an entire scroll devoted to, it's called the War Scroll. It's about how the children of light are going to actually do battle with the forces of darkness. And It'll be a 40 year war that they win. And so there's been this tension within apocalyptic thinking from the very beginning about whether humans can initiate or inaugurate the kingdom, or whether it's completely up to God to do it. And so the, the apocalyptic groups today, the fundamentalist groups, some of them, some of them just think, you know, we just have to sit back and let God do it, and it's all in God's hands. Groups like that are also groups that notoriously are opposed to, to any legislation involving the climate, climate change, or they're either completely uninterested in issues about climate change or climate control because, you know, God's not going to let us blow ourselves off the planet. He's going to take care of it, you know, pretty soon, so why bother? But there are other groups of conservative Christians who want to kind of urge it along. And a large part of that is what led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The establishment of the State of Israel was promoted strenuously by conservative evangelical Christians in Britain and in America. And even today there's big movements among some fundamentalist groups for Israel, for example, to take over the Temple Mount. Again, the logic being that the Temple Mount that now is not under Israeli control, it's where the Dome of the Rock is in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock is built over where the Jerusalem Temple was. And according to the book of Second Thessalonians, when the Antichrist appears on Earth, he's going to go into the Temple to declare himself God. Well, for that to happen, there has to be a temple. And so there are fundamentalist groups that not only are pushing for Israel to take over the Temple Mount and want them to take over the Temple Mount, but are also collecting the materials, have collected the materials to build the temple. And this is so that it can happen. We've got to do this so it can happen. And so that's really kind of pushing the matter and saying it's not going to be just God, you know, we've got to do this.
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B
So you mentioned a little earlier that de apocalypticization was kind of necessary to deal with the fact that the world didn't end when it was supposed to end. Jesus didn't come back within Paul's own lifetime. So that kind of answers the question of why the shift away. My question is why do you think this modern shift back towards apocalypse racism has happened?
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D
Yeah, that ends up being a kind of a question about Western culture in many ways and, and how Western culture has moved for a variety of reasons. The. I've mentioned several times that this, this view started coming to prominence in the 1890s. It first appeared in the 1830s, started to appear like where people started talking about in the 1830s in England with the beginning of this Group called the Plymouth Brethren. So at this time in the 19th century, many Christians were being confronted with the realities of modernity, realizing that's a big world out there and there are a lot of people who don't believe like we do. Not just kind of the pagan guy I got living next door, but like people off in other countries. And people became aware, more and more aware of other cultures on a wide scale. And also sciences were on the rise and science was coming up with dangerous views like the earth was not 6,000 years old and we were not created as a human species, just, you know, from dirt, but that in fact we descended from lower forms of primate that descended from so and so. And you go back and it turns out the world is. Earth is very old and we are evolved and these things contradict the Bible. And so some biblical theologians, again in England and in Britain and in the US fought against that. And that's as a kind of a counter move is when they developed the idea of the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible is inerrant in everything it says. Once you say that you have the teachings of Jesus that says the end is coming soon. So if it's inerrant, then the end is coming soon. And so these people simultaneously became completely anti scientific and became believers in the imminent end of the world. So they became apocalypticists.
- [26:05]
B
And that movement happened a long time ago, I mean, still in, in the modern era, but it wasn't two years ago. Why is it, do you think, that apocalypticism in this sense has continued to be a viable theological ideal for so many Christians? If in early Christianity the lack of an end of the world caused a shift away, why has a similar lack in modernity not caused a similar shift away?
- [26:31]
D
Yeah, well, of course it has for a lot of people. You know, people who are raised in fundamentalist circles often, you know, kind of see the light, realize, yeah, no, it's not going to be like that. I had a informal office hour yesterday with a few of my students, and one of them started talking about how her mother was really freaked out by this movie in the 1970s called Thief in the Night. And anybody who's an evangelical in my generation knows the Thief in the Night. Every one of us saw it 20 times and how the hell scared out of us. I mean, it's like, oh my God, the rapture is going to happen and we're not ready, you know, and so it's about the rapture coming. But, you know, almost every, all of my friends who are evangelicals had that view and they don't have it anymore because they've seen the light. And so a lot of people see the light, but a lot of people also become convinced that the end is coming soon. And I think it is a completely a matter of the realities of modernity again. In my book Armageddon, I sketch this and I try to explain how it happened. There was apocalyptic thinking that happened very seriously in fundamentalist churches through the 20s and 30s. But it really hit big time starting in 1945. Once atomic bombs were dropped, people realized we really might be blowing ourselves off the planet. And so nuclear exchange became a major reason for fundamentalists to think that the end was coming soon. Because it was clear during the Cold War it could happen any day now and they should feel that threat now. But most people aren't as worried about that as we were when I was a kid. For example, it's climate change. We really are going to destroy the planet. And people look at weather changes and things and they think, well, okay, it's a sign of the end. And so at every generation, you have authors who write books showing indisputably that the prophecies now are being fulfilled to this thing or that thing or the other thing. You can say two things about these authors, by the way. There have been lots of them since. Some of these people who were preaching this when I was a fundamentalist in the 1970s are still alive and still preaching it today. And the two things you can say about every one of these authors is that, number one, they've all been proved to be indisputably wrong. Some of them actually pick dates. That's a mistake. But you know, back in the 70s when they said, well, I'm not gonna pick a date, but it's gonna be very, very soon, you know, well, it hasn't happened. So they're all wrong. And the other thing is they've all made a lot of money, which is kind of ironic for somebody who thinks the world's gonna end, that they're beefing up their bank account.
- [28:57]
B
Well, I think we are going to stop there and take a brief break. Thank you very much, Bart. And after the break, we will be back with some news from Bart's World. And then some listeners questions.
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C
Have you ever wondered where the New Testament Gospels really came from? Were the books actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? As everyone seems to say, the answers
- [29:19]
B
to these questions may surprise you.
- [29:21]
C
In fact, what you discover may challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels. If you're ready to learn the historical truth. Then you won't Want to Ms. Bart Ehrman's free webinar did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? In this 50 minute talk with Q and A, you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the Gospel's authorship, such why did early Christians say the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? If they're anonymous, what's the best evidence that the Gospels were written by the apostles? Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books? And last, if the apostles did not write the Gospels, who did? And where did they get their information? Don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels. Sign up now for free lifetime access to Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john? @barterman.com Authors thank you.
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E
This is bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Oh Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, ehrmanblog.org happenings, and online course launches.
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B
Bart, what's going on with you this week?
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D
A few weeks ago we did this, I guess a couple weeks ago we did this Bible conference for the BART of Professional Services thing. This is called the New Insights in the New Testament. And we did this conference live and people can still buy it and stuff online. But now I'm moving on to the next thing for this, which is going to be a course I'm going to be doing in, I guess in about a month. Yeah, a month. It'll be on November 11th, and it's going to be on this topic that you and I have talked about and that I've published a book on. My book was called Misquoting Jesus, and it's about how scribes changed their manuscripts of the New Testament. And I've never given a extended course on this. Well, except I used to teach a PhD seminar on it all the time or attend an entire semester reading Greek manuscripts and stuff like that. Great. So we're not going to do that. In my course. I will not be requiring Greek. But we're calling the course the Corruption of Scripture and it will be dealing with how and why scribes who are copying their texts change them. And I'll be bringing up stuff that I've never talked about before. You know, there's so much in this kind of topic I'll be dealing with things that have been near and dear to me since I was in college. These are issues I've been really interested in since I was in college. Continue to be and there's a lot to be said about it. And so there'll be a lot of stuff in there that I think will be interesting to people who want to know, do we have the original Bible or not?
- [32:12]
B
That sounds fantastic and nice and detailed. I like courses that have a lot you can sink your teeth into. Just a quick reminder for people who are going to be joining us for our anniversary special, which is the next episode of this podcast. October 17th we will be doing a live recording or a live stream on YouTube at 8pm Eastern standard. It will be published as a podcast the week after. For those who don't watch on YouTube, this is primarily going to be a question and answer session and is your opportunity to ask questions your questions of BART Live. So we're asking you to please submit your questions by today. Today is the last day you can submit questions. There's a form on the website that's bart erman.com Ask Bart. And if you leave your email address in the form, then we will get back to you and let you know if your question has been selected and give you instructions for joining the stream on the 17th. So that I think is going to be an awful lot of fun. If you have a question, please get it in before the end of today. Otherwise we will not be able to read it. We're going to do some questions from listeners speaking of audience Q and A.
- [33:19]
E
Now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquotingjesus fans. If you'd like to submit a question for future segments, please visit barterman.com askbart
- [33:37]
B
okay, we have some good questions this week. First up, was Jesus a vegetarian? He eats fish in some resurrection narratives. But some people see these stories as later additions to the Gospels.
- [33:50]
D
I don't think those stories are later additions to the Gospels. They're probably later stories. In other words, I think the Gospels had those stories originally when the Gospels were written. But they're stories that I don't think they're historical stories. So was Jesus a vegetarian? That's kind of hard to answer because we don't really know. The likelihood is, yeah, it's unlikely there were vegetarians in the ancient world. Sometimes the Pythagorean philosophers and their followers were vegetarians because they believed in reincarnation and they thought some of us get reincarnated as animals. So you don't want to eat, you know, a piece of sirloin because it might be your great, great grandfather, you know, so you don't want to eat animals. But Jews by and were not. Some Jews later became vegetarians because they were living in gentile areas and they didn't want to eat meat because it may have been meat offered to a pagan God as a sacrifice and they didn't want anything to do with that. But Jews annually, for example, celebrated the Passover meal, which involved eating a lamb. And I have no doubts that Jesus would have participated in that if there was a place where he could have a lamb. They probably did up at Nazareth, I don't know. So I don't think. No, I don't think Jesus was a vegetarian.
- [35:07]
B
Next question. I read a book recently that claimed Jesus taught reincarnation. And the book claimed that this teaching survived in the Bible in the story of Jesus calling John the Baptist Elijah. The book also cited the belief in our incarnation of many of Jesus followers, including Clement of Alexandria and various Christian Gnostics. Do you think this is Jesus teaching on the afterlife? And if not, then what were Jesus views on the afterlife?
- [35:34]
D
Yeah, well, I wrote a book about this, so I have a book called Heaven and Hell that addresses all of these questions directly. I do not think Jesus himself believed in reincarnation. Jesus believed that an afterlife for individuals would come at the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. And it's not that you get reincarnated as someone else. There were people who did hold to a view of reincarnation in Jesus day, but it was not a common Christian view. It did become a marginal Christian view later on in Christianity as Christianity spread a bit by the early third century, we know of some who believed in reincarnation. But no, it was not ever a major doctrine. And I think it certainly was not the doctrine of Jesus.
- [36:22]
B
Thank you. Next one. Since we only know about Jesus up until the age of 12 or 13, apparently Matthew or Luke mention him. What do you think he was doing in the gap of time in the Gospels from then until he was 33? Some people have suggested he traveled east and studied Hinduism and Buddhism, but that seems unlikely. I know this is complete speculation. I'm just curious about your thoughts.
- [36:46]
D
Well, it's not complete speculation because we know about when and where he lived and what people were doing when and where he lived. So the natural assumption is that he was doing what people did when and where he lived. You know, we know some things about what the Galilee was like in the twenties of the common era and before and the early part of the first century. So Jesus was apparently raised in the little hamlet of Nazareth, very small place, a few Hundred people probably lived there. For everybody there, it would have been a hand to mouth existence. People would have had farm plots to raise food on and there were probably some kind of barter system set up and people would do various things on top of farming. Jesus father apparently was somebody who would fix the local, you know, the gates and make the yolks and kind of big style woodwork stuff. And so if that's what he did, Jesus probably learned how to do that. So people didn't travel much, you know, it would be very rare probably for many from now from Nazareth even, even to go to Jerusalem. And so the best guess is that Jesus just grew up as a, as a lower, lower class peasant in Nazareth. Somehow he acquired knowledge, I think of the, the Torah, of the scriptures. And it may be that there was a local rabbi there or there was not a synagogue building there, but archaeologists have determined, but you know, they got together probably for a Sabbath service and maybe had scriptures for them to read. So I'm afraid it's rather unexciting and it's not really as thrilling as, you know, Jesus went off to India and studied with the Brahmins. Those ideas, by the way, about Jesus going off and traveling and all that, you can find them in gospel accounts. These are gospel accounts that were forged in the 19th century and have been proved to be forged. But I have a chapter on them in my book Forged. I have a chapter on these 19th century where people get this idea, oh, maybe he went to Egypt and learned magic, you know, or maybe when he studied with the Brahmins. And there's like nothing, nothing, nothing to suggest anything like that at all. Let me just say further after that though, when I talk to my students about this, I say, you know, you wonder if Jesus is the son of God who could do miracles. Was he on the Nazareth Nazareth baseball team? You know, and so if he played shortstop, did he ever make an error? Was he batting a thousand percent, you know, how did that work? So there are by the way, infancy gospels that do talk about Jesus as a, as a young boy.
- [39:15]
B
Thank you. And our final question, in what way were the Gospel writers influenced by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70?
- [39:23]
D
Yeah, it's a big interest for scholars and has long been an interest to scholars. The reason it's an interest especially is because with the destruction of the temple in the year 70, Judaism has to change in order to survive. Judaism cannot be a religion focused on worship in the temple as instructed in the Torah, the law of Moses. It cannot be a religion focused on sacrifices of animals because there are no more sacrifices of animals. And this begins a tremendous shift in Judaism, the Jewish religion worldwide that has come down to us today. So that every form of Judaism we have today descends from this post 70 experience of the destruction of the temple. And the followers of Jesus, the first ones were Jews. And all the Christians are accepting the Hebrew Bible and believe in the God of Israel and think that most Christians by the year 70 who are not Jews think, well, most Jews have rejected. And so how does that affect the Gospel stories? And we don't know for certain. Obviously we don't know all the ways that affected them. One thing is the Gospels do appear to presuppose and expect the destruction of the temple. The first gospel is written right around the time, just after the time the temple was destroyed. That's Mark. The others are written later. They show that they know that the temple's been destroyed. And various people have different interpretations of this. One is that the Gospel writers are trying to show that Jesus now is the new way, that the temple's been destroyed. And so Jesus is the way to God. And that may be why, for example, when Jesus dies, the curtain in the temple is ripped in half so that you don't need the temple to have access to God. Jesus provides you with access to God. And so this may have been part of the business of Christians understanding that they have superseded Jews as the people of God. That has rather drastic implications about Jewish Christian relations, but also about Christian self identity as the new Jews, you know, the new chosen people, which not everybody had, but some did because of that.
- [41:33]
B
Thank you very much, Bart. We're going to wrap up here, but before we finish for the week, would you mind summarizing what we talked about and let people know where they can find out more?
- [41:43]
D
Yeah. So we've been talking about how the Gospels of the New Testament and the rest of the New Testament and then later Christianity came to de apocalypticize Jesus. Jesus himself maintained that the world was near its end, the world that he knew the history as he knew it, and that it had grown in evil and wickedness so much that God was soon going to intervene in bringing in a good kingdom on earth and that it would happen within his own generation. That didn't happen. And so then Christians had to deal with it. Why would Jesus say it's going to happen soon if it didn't? Various ways of dealing that can be found within the New Testament and then certainly after it, where some Christian thinkers and authors say that Jesus didn't really mean literally it's going to end. He meant something, maybe metaphorical or he meant it, but God has now decided to wait a while so people can repent. Or maybe he meant the kingdom of God. It was going to be something not that was going to come in the future, but something that would be within us. So people had different expectations. But by and large, the tradition got de apocalypticized. There continued to be apocalyptic groups on the margins of Christianity throughout most of history. But then the apocalyptic movement roared back at the end of the 19th century and is still with us today in various forms of fundamentalist Christianity.
- [43:02]
B
Thank you. And which of your books should people read for more information on this?
- [43:06]
D
Probably the one where I deal with this the most is my book. It's called Armageddon. What the Bible really says about the end, where I talk about Jesus as an apocalypticist, but also talk about how people started shifting his message. And I talk about, you know, the book of Revelation and its view of apocalypticism and how, how that ends up being interpreted through the ages as people become less apocalyptic.
- [43:29]
B
Thank you so much, audience. Thank you 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, you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we doing next time?
- [43:49]
D
Next time we have a special edition. This will be our one year anniversary, so we're very happy about that. We love how this podcast has gone and it's been a lot of fun with Megan to do this.
- [44:02]
B
I'm having a great time.
- [44:03]
D
Good. I'm glad because I certainly am too. So we're gonna have a special edition. It's gonna be a live edition. It'll be 8 o' clock on October 17th and I'm going to be taking live questions. People will be submitting these questions but have to do it by the end of today, as Megan said earlier. But we're going to pick out questions and people will actually ask the questions themselves. And so I'll be interacting with those during our anniversary podcast.
- [44:26]
B
I hope we will see you all next week. Thank you everybody and goodbye.
- [44:34]
C
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.
- [44:50]
B
Thank you for joining us.