← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
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Megan Lewis
Longtime audience members of Misquoting Jesus will know that one of the first questions I often ask Barthes when we talk about an ancient text is when was it written? Knowing when something was written helps to better understand answers to other questions like why was it written? And how it relates to other texts from that time. Unfortunately, ancient authors rarely wrote the date at the top of the page when they started writing, which makes working out when something was written a bit of a challenging process. Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman is going to guide us through how biblical scholars tackle this challenging process and look at why it is that the Gospel of Mark is understood as the first Gospel. 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 everyone. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus. Today we're going to be discussing why the Gospel of Mark is understood by Biblical scholars to be the first Gospel. We also have listeners questions and we're going to be talking about the the social side of the Biblical Studies Academy. More on that later. Before that, but we want to talk about the blog that you run. We mention it periodically, but it's a new year. It's a great time to be really kind of reminding people that this exists. So what is the blog and why should people be interested?
- [02:09]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, you know, some people may not know it exists, which is why I thought might be a good idea to say something about it. Because if you, you know, if they're enjoying what you and I are doing, this is the kind of thing I do on my blog all the time. I started the blog over 13 years ago, almost 14 years ago. Now I post five times a week between 1200 and 1400 words on everything having to do with Jesus, the New Testament, the Old Testament, ancient Judaism, ancient Roman religion. I mean anything of relevance, early Christianity to the kinds of things we, we've been talking about. And I, I, I just want to mention this blog for a couple reasons. One is because people might be interested in, but also because it's a fundraising thing. It, people have to pay a small membership fee. And by small I mean it's like, you know, you, you can get it for like a dime a week kind of thing. It's like, it's like 24.95 for a year subscription or 34.95. They're different. There are different levels. You can get more benefit, more perks at different levels levels, but the money that comes in, I don't get a dime of it. It all goes to charity. Charity is dealing with hunger and homelessness. And for me it's not only a way of disseminating knowledge about New Testament and Early Christianity. It's also a, it's, it's also way, way to raise money. This last year we raised $575,000 and all of it went to dealing with issues, dealing with charities that you can find out what they are on on the blog itself. And so, so I write these posts and people can comment on them and I answer every question I get on my blog. I have done for 13 years. I mean thousands and thousands. And so, so if people are interested in that, you know, it's just, it's another way to get the kind of thing we're talking about here. But it's, and, and the, the don't, the, you know, the fee is completely tax deductible. And so it's just, it's another, people should know about. So it's just called the Bart Erman blog. And, and it said, you know, urban blog.org or something. I don't know what it is.
- [04:19]
Megan Lewis
The address I have is Bart ehrman.org
- [04:22]
Bart Ehrman
no, no, no, Ermine, no, that's the wrong one. Ernblog.org Eh, oh yeah, no, I have the wrong address.
- [04:29]
Megan Lewis
Yeah, I pulled it as we were talking and managed to get the wrong one, which was very intelligent. Could you talk just quickly about some of the, the perks people get? I know you do meetups and dinners occasionally.
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Bart Ehrman
Next week I'm going to be in Tampa and I told anybody in Tampa I want to have dinner, let's go do dinner. And so we'll have like, we'll have some people together and we'll just talk about stuff that people are interested in and we do for, at certain levels. I do for those who are at the gold Level, which is like 49 a year. I, I do a monthly Q A. People can hear people submit questions and I spend an hour answering them. I do webinars with. At certain levels where like once every three months, I'll do a dedicated webinar to blog members. And so it's a, it's a. There are, there are a lot of things connected with it and it's growing significantly. I, When I started it, I thought Maybe I'd make 20,000 a year for charity. And now it's like, you know, well over half a million. And so, so it's gonna, it's gonna go as long as I can peck away at the keyboard, I think. Oh, and people have access to all the archives. I mean, it's like millions of words in there. So. Yeah, on, on interesting topics.
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Megan Lewis
It really is a great resource for people who, who want to be able to just take half an hour in the morning and read something that is educational and interesting.
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Bart Ehrman
And you have a good number of
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Megan Lewis
guest posts as well.
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, no, we have guests, we have guest posts. I have people like other schol. And especially if they've written a book that I think is pretty interesting, I'll have them write some blog posts about it, you know, or about some interesting topic, controversial topic. They often, they don't agree with me, which makes it even better. So, so it's a real source of information about the New Testament and early Christianity and related fields.
- [06:19]
Megan Lewis
So if people are interested, it's ehrmanblog.org you can go take a look, explore. There are. You can read the first couple of paragraphs of each post so you can kind of get a feel for what it is. But then if you want to read full posts, you do have to join as a member.
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Bart Ehrman
We do do one free post a week. But you know, you're missing out on 4/5 of it if you don't join.
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Megan Lewis
Absolutely. And like you said, nearly 14 years worth of archives, which is truly not to be sniffed at.
- [06:50]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah.
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Megan Lewis
So we should talk about the Gospel of Mark and this thing you mentioned last week, which is Mark and Priority, which is not some kind of skin disease. When did you. Well, when did you start. When did you first start to think about the order in which the New Testament Gospels were written? When was that something that kind of occurred to you as a research subject?
- [07:14]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know, I suppose just as soon as I started studying the Bible. I think even at Moody Bible Institute, which is a very conservative evangelical, basically a fundamentalist school, we, we talked about Mark in relationship to Matthew and Luke and how Mark appears to have been used by Matthew and Luke, which make Mark makes Mark prior. And so I think probably my entire adult life, I've, I've not just known about this, but thought about it and done research on it.
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Megan Lewis
So why, why does this question of which came first really matter? What difference does it make if Mark or Luke or John were written first?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, when I, when I teach my students about this, they often wonder why am I, why am I bothering to learn all this? And, but then I do explain once I get through it, but it's, it's, it, it ends up mattering in part because if Mark was the first and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark, the interesting thing is they not only copy Mark word for word in places, but they also change it in a lot of places, sometimes in, in minor ways, sometimes in major ways. And it means that if, if you're reading Matthew in relationship to Mark, say, and you see how Matthew's changed his story, you can ask why did he change that story? What was wrong with the way Mark put it? Why did he, why did he add things? Why did he take away things? Or why did he alter the wording? You know, he must have thought he had a better approach to this, a better idea about it. And you, if you do that, then you can understand Matth. Because you can see what he, what his priorities were in changing stories. If you've got a whole bunch of, you know, if you got. Look at 30 stories like that from Matthew and you see the same kinds of changes, then it tells you something a lot about what Matthew's trying to do.
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Megan Lewis
So when we talk about the Gospel of Mark being the first written gospel, there are a couple of things that need to be considered. So the first for me would be the dating of the actual manuscripts of Mark that we have. So when any given manuscript was copied. And then the second kind of part of this question is the dating of the actual composition of the gospel. So when the author of Mark sat down and first put pen to parchment. If we are looking at dating an individual manuscript rather than the text as a whole, what techniques are used to determine when your manuscript was copied down?
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Bart Ehrman
So, you know, a lot of people think that this is the primary way of knowing, you know, when was a book written? Well, when is the manuscript survive? And, and the survival of the earliest manuscript is important, of course, because if you can show that a manuscript was written in the year 200, for example, I'll tell you how we decide that. But if you could do that, then obviously the book was composed before that. But the date of the manuscript does not tell you in itself the date of the, of the composition. We have a lot of manuscripts from about classical authors that come to us from the Middle Ages, you know, from a thousand years after Euripides wrote, you know, we might have a manuscript. It doesn't that, you know, it doesn't help you much for knowing when he wrote. You have to have other things. But, but the manuscript is kind of the first place to turn obviously, because it had to be the book was produced before our surviving manuscript. So how do you date manuscripts? There's a science of dating manuscripts. It's kind of an art and a science called paleography. This is not just for the New Testament, it's for any ancient work. The word paleography means ancient writing. It's what it really means is the analysis of the writing style, the handwriting. It's a handwriting analysis. So back before there was printing, in other words, for most of human history, when people would write things by hand in different periods of time, there are different ways of forming the letters. And so there, there are stylistic things just in the writing itself that can help, you know, about when it was written. And so what's, what paleographers do is they try to find manuscripts that actually do have dates on them, because some do. And when you look at how those have dates, you can line them up chronologically and you can see how handwriting developed over the time. Over time. You can do this with Greek, you can do this with Latin, you can somewhat do it with Coptic, but not as easily. And so, and so if you've got a handwriting a good paleographer can usually date it to within about 50 years of when it was written. You can't have an exact date based on a handwriting analysis. So the because, and it's because if a scribe is trained, they're trained as a young, young person when they're writing a manuscript. When they're 20 years old, it's going to look pretty much like they're writing a manuscript. If they're like end up being 70 years old, they're writing the way they've written their entire life. And so you can't tell was described working when he was 20 or when he was 70. So you've got about a 50 year gap. But with that paleographers come up with estimated dates for manuscripts.
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Megan Lewis
Is there any other way that you can kind of augment this paleography or paleographic information?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, you know What a lot of, what a lot of people just assume is that you, carbon 14 date the manuscript, and that absolutely is possible. It doesn't get used very often with biblical manuscripts, because decarbon 14 dated carbon 14 is because of the, you can tell, you know, what the half life of carbon 14 is. And so the, or any organic material has a certain amount of carbon 14 in it. And over time it gets less and less. If you know the half life, then you can figure out how much carbon 14 is left in this organic material. And you basically when the, when the thing had died. And so if you're on using papyrus manuscripts, papyrus is kind of like a reed that grows by the Nile mainly, and you kill it, you chop it down, and then you make, you make a writing substance out of it. You can tell when the papyrus was created, or if they're using parchment, animal skin, you can tell when the animal was killed. And so in order to do that, though, you have to take sections of it, little pieces of it, and the analysis destroys the pieces. And so with biblical manuscripts, people are a little bit reluctant to go around destroying pieces. They're small pieces, and you don't take any pieces that have, you know, ink on them. But, but even so, you don't want to. They tend not to do that. Carbon 14 dating also is problematic, though, because it's, it tells you when the manuscript, when the organic material was killed. It doesn't tell you when the writing happened on the page. And so that's, so that doesn't, that is. And it also has a time gap. You, There's a, like a window within which probably the thing was done. So usually they don't use that, although they have on occasion for things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and such, just
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Megan Lewis
the things like the chemical composition of the ink, does that play into it at all, or is that similar to carbon 14? It's a destructive process. So it's, it's less, less used.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, it is a destructive process because you've got to take the ink off the page in order to analyze it. And so it isn't done as often, but there are, there, there is a value to the ink. And in some ways the ink is more important than the, than the, than the substance on the paper, the papyrus or parchment on which it's written, because the ink tells you when the ink was made. And there, there are certain kind of basic things you can tell about ink because certain kinds of inks were used at different times. They made them out of different substances, and often they did Use carbon based substances for ink so they can carbon 14 if they get enough of it. It's hard to get enough ink to do a carbon 14 dating though.
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Megan Lewis
So if that's how we start to determine the dates that a manuscript was created or was, was used, how do scholars go about determining the date the text, the actual thing that was written on that manuscript was composed? What do people look at to try and date a text?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so that's a very, very different thing and unrelated in some ways. I said that the earliest manuscript has to be after the thing was composed. Our earliest manuscript of Mark is a fragmentary manuscript that has portions of half the chapters. And it was written around. It was. This manuscript was made around the year 200, plus or minus 25 years. So probably around 200. And so Mark had to be before that, but that's all it tells you. So how do you go about deciding when a text was written, whether it's Mark or, or whether it's a letter of Paul or whether it's a book allegedly by Plato or a book by Tertullian? How do you decide when it was written if you don't know the author? Well, that's a problem because most ancient authors you can have a pretty good idea of when they lived and when they died. And so if you know the author, that gives you some boundaries. But with Mark, it's an anonymous text. So with an anonymous text, you look for two major things to begin with. You look first to see if it mentions anything in the text that is something that can be dated historically. For example, if you have a modern text that mentions the attacks on 9, 11, then you know that it was written after 9, 11, 2001, because it makes a historical reference. If you read an ancient text that mentions the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, then it was written after the year 70. So you look at the, the time after which it had to be written, and then you look for the time before which it had to be written. And so, for example, in the case of Mark or any of the Gospels, you look to see if it's quoted by anybody, if there's anybody who seems to know the text, who can quote it. Because if somebody later is quoting it and you can date that person, then you know that is before then. And so in the case of Mark, it does look like Mark knows about the destruction of the temple in the year 70 and the destruction of Jerusalem, and it does. And Mark is quoted as a written text by Justin, Justin Martyr around the year 150. So just with those broad parameters, it must have been written between 70 and 150. Then the question is how do we narrow it down?
- [17:47]
Megan Lewis
We will get to the narrowing down in a moment because that is very interesting. We're going to take a very brief break. Audience, please stick with us.
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Megan Lewis
Okay, so before the break, you explain some of the process behind assigning a date to a manuscript with the text and then the date of composition for the text itself. Broadly speaking, when we've got that broad range of a composition date, how do people go about narrowing it down to try and get something more definitive?
- [19:37]
Bart Ehrman
Well, there are a couple things you do you look carefully at the text to see if it is presupposing something happening in its immediate moment. Sometimes you get that where it appears that there's something going on. I mean, for example, in the Book of Daniel, just to take an Old Testament example, the author of Daniel is almost certainly writing during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, who is a king of Syria, the king of Syria, who that the Book of Daniel is really opposing without naming. But there are good reasons he's worried about this king who's ruling Israel at the time, a king of Syria. So it'd be written during his time period and so they can date it to the 160s, for example. So you look for that kind of thing. There's nothing quite like that with Mark. Another thing you look for though is even if you don't have the text like quoted by Somebody else where you explicitly know it had to be before this are the reasons for thinking that it is. It's known to another text and that you can date for some reason or another. And so I mentioned already that it looks like almost certainly that Mark was used by Matthew and Luke. Why does that help you date Mark? Because Matthew and Luke appear to be known to church fathers in the early second century. And it may be. It looks like Matthew especially, and somewhat Luke probably is being quoted in a book called the Didache that we have reasons for dating around the year 100 or so. And if that's right. So, I mean, it might sound like a kind of a house of cards. You know, you're building on a lot of speculation, but if you just independently look, is the Didache quoting Matthew? It sure looks like it. And was Didache written around the year 100? It sure looks like for a number of different reasons then if that's true, true, then Mark was probably written between 70 and 100, because Matthew used Mark and Matthew was known by the year 100. And then you can kind of date it back a little bit because if Matthew knew it and Matthew was in circulation by the 1 year 100, and Matthew must been probably, you would think, probably written around 90 or so. So you kind of narrowing it down and so. And so Mark ends up, in the opinion of scholars, based on everything, to have been written close to the time of the Jewish war, so which ended in the year 70. Scholars usually dated around the year 70.
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Megan Lewis
So if we have a date for the book of Mark, how do we know that Matthew and Luke are using Mark and not the other way around? Because if we're trying to get to like, Mark is the first Gospel. We know it's the first gospel because it's used by Matthew and Luke. How do we know it's that way and not the other one?
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Bart Ehrman
Yeah, that's. That's a good question. And it is the, the question that scholars have long called the synoptic problem. So when somebody says the synoptic problem, they mean something very specific by that. It isn't the problem that, you know, Matthew, Mark and Luke aren't very historical in places. You know, it's not the problem that they're hard to understand. There's not a problem that we don't have early manuscripts. You know, there are lots of problems, but the synoptic problem is the problem of how to explain the relationship between these three gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke. We exclude John because it doesn't have the same kinds of features that lead to the problem. The pro. The synoptic problem is that Matthew, Mark and Luke tell many of the same stories, the exact same stories. They usually tell them in the same sequence. They often tell them in the same sequence. And in a lot of places they tell them word for word, the same. How do you explain that? And the solution that scholars have had since the 19th century, that my students at first have trouble believing when I tell them, is that somebody's copying somebody. That's because, I mean, you know, if Jesus. Suppose Jesus ministered for three years. We don't know how long he ministered. Mark's gospel takes about two hours to read out loud. So he's got two hours of material out of three years of material. Okay, so Matthew and Luke have all those stories. Why do they have the same stories If. If it's a. What. How did. Did they just happen to choose those same stories, like, out of the blue? It makes better sense that, that they're copying.
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Megan Lewis
Is that their evidence that it has to be copying?
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Bart Ehrman
Well, yeah. So, okay, so here's what I do with my undergraduates. Because when I tell them, look, they've got these similarities, the word for the same. They've got to be like, somebody's copying somebody. They. They're kind of rolling their eyes. No, it doesn't have to be that way. You know, they're story. So what I do, I do this exercise with my students at Chapel Hill. The day I'm going to talk about the synoptic problem. I come into class late so that everybody's there wondering why I'm late. And I come in and I take, you know, I take my bag off my shoulder, I put it on the table, I take out some books and I. I turn on my computer, and then I turn on the lights and I go over and I take. Put my books and put them back into the table, and I turn off the computer. Like, I start doing stuff, and some of it's kind of weird, right? Like, why is he doing that? And they're all looking at me wondering what the hell. What's going on here? And so I do that for like a couple minutes. And then I say, okay, I want everybody to take out a piece of paper and a pen, and I want you to write down everything you've seen me do since I walked into the classroom. And. And so they do. They all write it down and say, okay, now I want three volunteers. And so I take three papers at random and I say, we're going to do a synoptic comparison of these three. And so I'll read the first one and I'll say, so does anybody in the whole class. I've got like 300 students in this class. Do you have. Does anyone in this class have exactly one of these sentences? No. Anybody have, like, six words that are exactly like any of those six words in secret? No. So then I do the second, read the second one, and I compare the two, and there are no, there's never ever, like a sentence in common. Then the third. And so I do that, and then. Then I ask the class, okay, now what would you think if I picked up two of these and they had an exact paragraph that was word for word, the same? And they'll say, yeah, somebody was cheating. I said, yeah, they're cheating. Somebody copied someone else's. How else could it happen? You know? And someone in the back row will always cry out, it's a miracle. See? Okay, okay, it's a miracle. But. But if it's a miracle, then you have to, like. If it's divinely inspired, then you have to explain why there are differences. Because if it's divinely inspired. And so. So I think it almost certainly had to be copying. And so the entire issue is who copied whom.
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Megan Lewis
How do you start to get to that question? Is it looking at that kind of broader compositional date range that you were talking about? So you take each gospel and you say, okay, well, this was composed between this date and this date and ordering them that way, or are you looking at the relationship between each individual text?
- [26:42]
Bart Ehrman
It's almost completely looking at the relationship between the texts. And so scholars started working on this in a very serious way in the 19th century. And they came up with arguments that. That are compelling to just about everybody today. Not everybody. Some people do think that Matthew was the first and that Mark was a condensed version of it. That's a very, very small minority of people who think that. But it was the view throughout most of the history, back to Augustine. Augustine thought that Matthew wrote his gospel and Mark made a condensed version of it. But there are reasons for thinking that's. That's got to be wrong. And so I'll give you one of the arguments that has always struck me as one of the very best. And it's one of the very best because it's a little bit complicated. So. So. So. But the way it works is this. If you put Matthew, Mark, and Luke in columns next to each other and compare their wording to one another so that you've got a verse, you know, and Matthew has a verse, Mark has the verse, Luke has the verse. There are a number of ways that the verses can be found in that kind of arrangement. It could be that all three have exactly the same wording, word for word, the whole thing. It could be that all three have different wording. It's clearly the same verse, but like, there's slight differences in wording, but all three word it differently. Could have that. Sometimes you have Matthew and Mark with the same wording, but Luke has a different wording. And sometimes you have Mark and Luke with the same wording, but Matthew has a different wording. What you almost never get. You get it sometimes, but in tiny little. In little details usually, but almost. You very rarely get Matthew and Luke agreeing in the wording. In a story also found in Mark, where they agree, but Mark doesn't. Okay, so that's, that's the thing. And so you go through this kind of logical process of how that could be if somebody's copying somebody. How would you get that kind of arrangement? And when you think about it, it makes Mark the source. The reason it makes Mark the source is if Mark was the source. Matthew and Luke both copied this passage from Mark. Sometimes they kept the wording the same. That's when all three are the same. Sometimes Matthew change it and Luke change it. But they, they would have changed in different ways. And so that's why the three are different. Sometimes Matthew copied Mark and Luke changed it. That's why Matthew marker and Luke is different. Sometimes Luke copied Mark and Matthew changed it. That's why I get this three. Why don't you get it when the Matthew and Luke commonly like agree in the word because they didn't use each other. If, if Matthew had been the source, you wouldn't have that arrangement. You'd have Matthew and Mark agreeing and Matthew, Luke agreeing a lot. But you see, it's only if Mark is the source that you can get that kind of thing. So, all right, so that, like, that's, that's. So I mapped this out for my students. I put it all on the board. I put it on the overhead. And this is when they're saying, like, why does this matter? I say, hold on a sec. You'll find out why this. Because it really does matter. But, but for now, I just want you to see the argument. So that, that's one, that's one of the arguments.
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Megan Lewis
So what are some of the other arguments then? For Matthew? No, for Mark having come first.
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Bart Ehrman
Well, one thing is that Matthew and Luke both have a lot of stuff in their gospels that are not. Not in Mark. This is, this is what has led people, scholars in the 19th century to argue that there was another source that Matthew and Luke had that Mark did not. The source that scholars have called Q. There are some people, scholars today, disputing whether there was this other source, especially Mark Goodacre, who did this course on the Synoptic Gospels, who spent a lot of time arguing that Q did not exist. And I think he's wrong about that. So it doesn't matter about for our purposes here, but there are these, lots of these other mainly sayings like the Lord's Prayer found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. The Beatitudes found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. Mark. And so one issue is like, if, if Mark, like, knew that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer, wouldn't he want to include that part? You know, or like, so if Matthew were the source, why would Mark drop stuff like that? Or if Luke were the source, why would Mark drop that stuff? Another argument. So it seems unlikely, although that's not particularly probative, I think. But then, but then the other, another argument is that Mark sometimes will word something in a rather kind of confusing way, or like the writing isn't very good or, or, you know, he'll have this strange metaphor and, and it'll be changed in one or the other gospels or in both. Usually not changed the same way, but often changed. And so the, the argument is that, well, if Matthew has this really nice kind of wording and why would Mark bungle it up just for the sake of bungling it up? Whereas if it were bungled up in the first place, it makes sense that Matthew would want to correct it. See what I mean? So, so these are various things that add together to. So, you know, you. There are, there are lots of arguments. People have written whole books on this and some people just think, well, okay, that's great, I've got this solved. And so that's that. But actually, as I said, it ends up having some effect on other things.
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Megan Lewis
I'm going to ask about the effect it has on other things in a moment, but I wanted to ask. We've got a hypothetical Q source, obviously. Has anyone ever posited that Matthew, Mark and Luke was. Were all copying the main segments that we're talking about from a different source entirely? Mark wasn't first. There was something else that came before all of them?
- [32:23]
Bart Ehrman
Oh, absolutely. In the 19th century, even the 20th. Still today, there are people who come up with extremely convoluted explanations for how the to explain the synoptic problem, the problem specifically. So if you want kind of a definition of the problem, the problem is how do you explain both the similarities and the differences between Matthew, Mark and Luke in wording, how do you explain both the similarities and the differences? And people have come up with very complicated things. Some are simply that you've got this primary source and they're all kind of copying. Copying it. That's one explanation. But there are other explanations because it looks like for example that to many of us it looks like Luke didn't originally have his first two chapters, the birth narratives, which we could maybe we've talked about. I don't know if we have. We can eventually. And, and there are things that. So is it possible that Luke was out in various versions and that Mark had a certain version and so there's a proto Luke before our Luke and there's a proto Matthew before our Matthew. And so. So maybe use the proto proto gospels of these things. And maybe there were. And so some of these charts like you got like these 20 pre earlier sources that all come together and max up until you get these three synoptics. So most schol use the term is Occam's razor, which is where you try to eliminate things. You try to make the, the solution as simple as possible. And that means getting rid of as many hypothetical sources as you can. This is one of the arguments that people use against Q because Q is a hypothetical source. We don't have it. So the question is, do we need it to explain Matthew, Mark and Luke? My view is that yes, you do need it and for. Because if you don't have it, it creates more problems than it solves, in my opinion. But you don't want like a bunch of other things going on. And so proto sources and things are usually thought to be too complicated. And yeah, when you don't need them.
- [34:24]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. So if we've come to the, the conclusion that Mark was first and Matthew and Luke borrowed from Drew from Mark, what kinds of other things does this conclusion lead into? What does it impact?
- [34:38]
Bart Ehrman
So I suppose people realize this for a long time, but it became a big deal in the 1950s when scholars started realizing that if, if Luke had Mark's gospel and he copied Mark's Gospel, he changed it in a lot of places and sometimes significantly. So if Luke changed it, as I was saying before, you can, you can see how Luke changed it. And, and that will tell you something about Luke's major interests. And so that that method developed in the 1950s in a rigorous way, and it's called redaction criticism. Redaction criticism is understanding Matthew and Luke to be redactors, that is, editors. Today, when we think of a redacted text, it's usually some, like, testimony to Congress where things get blacked out. Just blacking out stuff where. And it is that. But redactor, the word redactor just means editor. And so you look to see how Luke has changed Mark, and it tells you what his interests are. And when you look closely, just sticking with Luke for a second, it's really quite striking. I'll tell you one way that it's striking is that Mark very strongly supports the idea that Jesus death was a death for the sake of others, that his death brought an atonement for sins. For example, in Mark's gospel, Jesus says. Jesus says about himself, the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. Luke took out that verse. Matthew has it. Luke took it out. When Jesus dies. When. When Jesus has his last supper in Mark, he says that this cup is the cup, the cup of the new covenant in my blood. So it's given for others. It's, you know, the cup, the bread, and the cup are given for the sake of others. In other. He's going to die for others. Luke doesn't have that. When Jesus dies in Mark's gospel, the curtain rips in half, right when he dies, showing that his death. Now the curtain in the temple which separates God from the people, in Mark's Gospel, that curtain rips in half the second Jesus dies, showing that now people have access to God. In Luke, the curtain rips, but rips before he dies. And so it means something else here. So, like, you go through this thing, it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's taken out the atonement everywhere. Why would he do that? Doesn't have a doctrine of atonement. He has a different view of the importance of Jesus death. That's rather significant. And so that's the kind of thing you do. You make these very detailed comparisons, most of which don't matter for a whole lot. Some matter pretty much, and some. Whoo, that's big.
- [37:31]
Megan Lewis
Before we wrap up, would you just give a couple of examples of things that Matthew changes from Mark's account and how that plays into Matthew's own message?
- [37:42]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, well, I'll give you. I'll give you one. It's kind of a minor one, but I think it's really kind of interesting one.
- [37:47]
Megan Lewis
1.
- [37:48]
Bart Ehrman
So there's this passage that I, I talk about a lot because I've been working on this, My. My book on charitable giving. But this passage that's in Mark, chapter 10, where this, this man comes up to Jesus and he says, good Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? And Jesus says, well, keep the commandments. And then he tells him to sell everything. And so. So that. And Matthew has the story, and it's pretty much the. Pretty much the same story, except at the very beginning. Oh. Oh, yeah. So. So when in Mark, when Jesus, when the guy says, good teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? Jesus first says, why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. So Matthew has the story, and it's part, lots of it is word for word the same, except that beginning in this, In Matthew's version, Jesus does. The man does not say, good Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? And Jesus say, you know, why do you call me good? Matthew has. Keeps the word good, but he says, teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? And so now the word good doesn't apply to Jesus, it applies to the deed. And Jesus replies, why do you ask me about the good? There's only one who's good. God. That's a weird reply in Matthew. Why would he say, why do you ask me about the good? Because God's the only one good. The fact that God's the only one good doesn't mean you can't call Jesus good. It doesn't make any sense. So anyway, why did he change it? Well, because if he says in Mark, when he says, good Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? And why do you call me good? Only God is good. Jesus is denying one of two things. He's either denying that he's God, why do you call me good? God's the only one good, you know, or he's denying being good. Why do you call me good? God's the only one who's good. So either way, it could be read problematically. Matthew just changes it to get rid of the problem. But he does it in a way that doesn't make sense then of the man's response and to Jesus replies, so it's a tiny thing, but it's the kind of thing that the redaction critics look for to see, you know, what is. What is happening here. So in my chapter, you know, I. I have this. I have this textbook. Hugo and I rewrote this, this textbook on The New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew chapter, the entire chapter. We, we set it up to show how Matthew has changed Mark and how that can explain it. So we do the whole thing for Matthew to explain Matthew just on the basis of redaction criticism and so you can get a lot out of it doing it that way.
- [40:23]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you very much. We are out of time for this segment for the week but we have some information coming up about the social side of the Biblical Studies Academy and then BART is going to answer some listeners questions.
- [40:38]
Bart Ehrman
Welcome to our upcoming highlights and event
- [40:41]
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- [40:43]
Bart Ehrman
courses, community updates and all the latest
- [40:46]
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- [40:54]
Megan Lewis
Now we've been talking quite a lot over the past couple of months about all the different courses that are included in the Biblical Studies Academy including Hugo Mendez course on the introduction to the New Testament. But I wanted today to talk about the social aspect of bsa. So but I wanted to ask you why this was something that you all wanted to foster when you set up bsa.
- [41:19]
Bart Ehrman
Well, you know the, I've got to say this is, you know, everybody who's on the BSA so far, they're saying such positive things about, they're so happy that we've done this thing and it is a good thing. It's part because you get all these courses. I mean that's good. But the thing, one of the things people really like is that many people who have joined the BSA are really, they're really interested in the Bible, you know and they're interested in like what scholars have to say about the Bible. They've got no one to talk to about this. Like a lot of people like you know they're, it may be that their, their partner isn't that interested or they don't have neighbors who are interested. I mean how many people, how many times you go to your next door neighbor to ask them a question about you know, the Gospel of Mark? Like never but you know like you're kind of interested and so like you want someplace where you could do this and the be. The Biblical Studies Academy is a place where people who are like minded can not just hear courses in isolation but they can talk to each other. And so we have all of these chat rooms where people, just people they're not chat room but they're like, you know, you know where you can have yeah a forum where you can talk about things and you. We have one just generally people kind of spout off about what they generally think about something. We have one for Bible nerds. People want to kind of dig a little deeper, which is fun to read even if you're not a Bible nerd. And you have. So we have these various things and people like, are people of faith who want to talk about like their, how this relates to their faith issues. And so you can go on to different ones of these. But we also have, we have things like lecture viewing things where like a lecture will be shown, everybody's watching it remotely, then you discuss it afterwards among each other. Or you have a book club. We have a book club. I think they're reading Paula Fredrickson's recent book and then they discuss it together. And so it's a community. It's a remote community, but it's a community and people are just absolutely thriving on it because it's a chance for them to talk with people with similar interests about these issues that they find really important.
- [43:12]
Megan Lewis
Absolutely. I think it's one of the wonderful things for me at least about doing this kind of virtual work, existing in a virtual space is that you can build these communities of people who, like you said, it's difficult. Like I can't just walk outside and find someone who's interested in assyriology. I mean I possibly could, but it might take a while. But online I can, like my people are here. We can, we can get together and we can talk and do kind these kinds of things. Yeah, I think it's a wonderful thing. So if you are again interested not only in the scholarly, academic side of things, but in like sharing your opinions and hearing other people's opinions. Because we don't like an echo chamber. The BSA is definitely a good place to go and if you want to try it For a free 14 day trial, you can go to Bart ehrman.com BSA now we have some listeners questions so everyone please do stay tuned for that.
- [44:13]
Bart Ehrman
Now it's time for questions from listeners
- [44:16]
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- [44:22]
Bart Ehrman
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- [44:32]
Megan Lewis
Okay, we have a selection of fantastic listeners questions. Are you ready?
- [44:38]
Bart Ehrman
Yep. As long as it's not stump Bart. I'm ready.
- [44:41]
Megan Lewis
It's not, it's not. These are ones that people hope you can in fact answer for good.
- [44:45]
Bart Ehrman
Okay. Right, Right.
- [44:47]
Megan Lewis
So first one is about Revelation and the questioner says if Revelation references the reign of Nero rather than a future end time figure, why do you think it is that the first early church, Father Irenaeus wrote that the number of the beast would help Christians recognize him when he did the big bad guy finally arrive on the scene? Had the original meaning of Revelation already been lost by then? Or do you think Irenaeus was essentially in denial because Christ's second coming hadn't manifested?
- [45:18]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah, so it's, it's always important to differentiate between what an author is communicating and how he's later read by somebody, because how somebody later reads him may provide hints for what the person meant when he wrote it, but may not. So Irenaeus is living, you know, 90 years later, and, and he's interpreting this text, which he considers to be an authoritative text. And Irenaeus was somebody who expected that the end was going to come, but he knew the end had not come, and he thought that the revelation was predicting the end. And so since he thought the revelation was predicting the end, he assumed it hadn't happened yet. So he was not. Irenaeus was. Is a very, very important author for us. He was not somebody who engaged in historical criticism the way we do today, where we try to situate the author in his own historical context. When you do that with Revelation, it's pretty. This author's 666 and the, the beast out of the sea and all that are clearly referring to Rome and to the Emperor Nero. I will say in addition to that, that around the time of irony is slightly later, about 20 years later, we have our first commentary on, on the book of Revelation by an author who absolutely does say that is about Nero. And so there were. There were different opinions in the early church, and we, we don't take opinions of later readers as evidence other than evidence for how it was being read at the time.
- [46:55]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Next question is about heaven. The question says, I have the impression that early Christianity did not believe in heaven as an immediate life after death in paradise next to God Jesus. However, in Luke 23, Jesus appears to tell a fellow crucifixion victim that he will be with him in heaven on that day. Which is it? That they did not believe in an immediate paradise for the dead, or they did.
- [47:23]
Bart Ehrman
So it's all a question of who the they are. Who's the they? And so I deal with this at some length in my book Heaven and Hell. The book is designed to show where these ideas came from, that when you die, your soul goes to be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell, that your body dies, your soul lives on. And I, I explain where that came from because it's not the teaching of Jesus and It's not in the Old Testament. You start, do start finding hints of it in the Gospel of Luke. And this is, this is one of the key passages. Jesus is on the cross and he says to the criminal next to him, truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise. Luke appears to be shifting toward this later view that there's a. There can be a separation of the soul and the body and the soul can live on after death because both Jesus and this man are going to be in paradise even though their bodies are going to be dead. And so I. Luke is a. It's often talked about as like the most gentile of the Gospels. I'm not sure how appropriate that is, but people talk about it that way. But it definitely is written by somebody who's not a Jew himself, who is raised in non Jewish circles, who has a very kind of a Greek way of looking at the world. And in the Greek way of understanding things, there's not going to be a future resurrection of the dead. There's going to be, you know, the separation of soul and body. And you start finding that already placed on Jesus lips here in this passage at the crucifixion in Luke. And by the way, that passage is important because it's not in Mark. This is like one of Luke's changes. And so you can see the redaction only that, that this is something that's important to Luke, that there's some sense that after death there's a paradise available.
- [49:13]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Our next question relates actually to what we've been talking about today. And the question says you've talked often about edits and additions, yet it seems without question that an original autograph existed. What are some methods used to determine an original autograph existed versus that a text is the result of a compilation made over time, something more like a living document that evolved, as with the Didache.
- [49:41]
Bart Ehrman
This is an extremely complicated question. I'd suggest we do an episode on it, but it's complicated. I'm not sure people. It's an issue I've struggled with for about 30 years because when I was a. When I was a graduate student and even before that, I guess more than 30 years, let's say like 45 years. Oh dear. The, the whole goal of studying manuscripts when I started out was to try and figure out what the original text was on the assumption the scribes changed the original text and it might be worthwhile knowing what the author wrote. And so that, so that idea that there was an original text has come into has been shown to be problematic in biblical studies in ways that I explain in some of my, in some of my writings. What does it even mean to say? The original text of Luke, for example, I earlier in this episode said that Luke may have been lacking its chapters one and two. Well, if you're studying the manuscripts and they all have chapters one and two, and you say this is the original reading, are you saying what if the original reading of Luke, he didn't have chapters one and two? Maybe the original reading of like a story. You mean an oral. Original story of an oral story, original text of a. What do you, what do you even mean by original text or. So there are lots of complications. Maybe we should talk about this actually as an episode, because there's a way to make it interesting. But, but so when I say original text, what I'm saying is that at some point somebody wrote down this book, basically, as we have it today. So Paul, Paul wrote the letter to First Corinthians. Somebody put pen to papyrus. He dictated it, but somebody wrote it. I'm interested in what did that person write? Somebody wrote the Gospel of Mark. Of course, it's based on earlier stories, based probably on things he'd read. But at some point, what we have is Mark, chapter one one through chapter 16. I would say 16, verse eight. Somebody wrote that at some point. And I'm interested in knowing what that was. There are. It's complicated, but that's what I mean by original text.
- [52:04]
Megan Lewis
Thank you. Our final question for today looks at or wants to know about possible changes to the New Testament. They say the New Testament has some passages that seem to support obedience to political authority, like Matthew 22:21 and Romans 13:1 3. Is this what Jesus and his early followers believed? Or were these passages put in later to make Christianity more acceptable to the Roman authorities?
- [52:30]
Bart Ehrman
Well, speaking of the original text, these passages are original to these, these documents. Those two passages in Matthew and Romans, also in First Peter, there's injunction to obey the authorities. So it stands at odds with other passages in the New Testament. In the Book of Acts, for example, the apostles tell the authorities, we're going to obey God rather than you or the book of Revelation, which is completely opposed to the Roman authorities. So there's a tension within early Christianity. But early on, I would say the followers of Jesus realized that if they're going to be persecuted, it should be for their faith in Jesus, not for breaking the law. Because if you're just a law breaker, then, you know, they have a. They have a reason to Persecute you don't give them a reason. And so I think that happened early on in Christianity. My view about Jesus is that Jesus was indifferent to political rule. He certainly thought you should obey God first. I think he really did say, render under Caesar the things that are Caesar and of the things to God, the things are God. He didn't care about paying taxes. The governor, the emperor wants tax. Give me your money. It's his image on it. Give it to him. But that's not what matters. What matters is your relationship to God. And so I think Jesus was more or less indifferent, but thought, well, yeah, of course you should. I mean, why not? I mean, why should Paul. Paul broke the law a bunch of times. We know that he was, he was underwent corporal punishment, very serious corporal punishment on several occasions for violating what the authority. Roman authorities and Jewish authorities. Authorities. So there were mixed views within Christianity, but there's nothing to suggest that these passages were added, you know, like a century later or something. There are abs. I think it's all virtually certain that they were original to the, to the, to the writings. And they show that there were a variety of views of the relationship of Christians to the empire.
- [54:34]
Megan Lewis
Excellent. Thank you so much, Bart. AUDIENCE thank you all for your questions. If you have a question you'd like to ask Bart, you can go to www.bartehrman.com Ask Bart and submit them there. Now, before we finish for the week, Bart, would you mind summarizing what we spoke about today?
- [54:52]
Bart Ehrman
Yeah. So in this, in this episode, we've been talking about whether Mark was the first Gospel. I think it was. Almost all scholars do think it was the first and that it was used by Matthew and Luke. And we've talked about why that matters. Is it just like a little historical curiosity or does it affect any way you interpret the New Testament? I tried to show it actually affects how we interpret the New Testament rather radically to establish Mark in priority that Mark was the first of the synoptics to be written.
- [55:21]
Megan Lewis
Bart, thank you as always for your time. Audience thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code mjpodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.combartehrman.com and misquoting. Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?
- [55:43]
Bart Ehrman
Well, we're going on to something really different. We're next week. We're talking about what do evangelicals mean and traditionally have meant by being born again? And I have a personal experience with this because I was born again when I was a teenager. And we're going to talk about that. But we're also going to talk about is there biblical basis for this, or is this, like, just something that, like, happened recently? People started talking about being born again. And so we'll we're going to talk about whether it's in the Bible or not.
- [56:13]
Megan Lewis
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 don't 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.