← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Have Christians always believed the Bible contains no errors or mistakes? Or did this understanding develop over time? Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me today to talk about the Christian view of Biblical inerrancy. Welcome to Misquoting 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. Hey friends, I have a quick reminder for you. Our biggest event of the year. New insights into the New Testament is coming up at the end of this month from September 26th to to 28th where our theme is going to be the Historical Jesus. We'll be hearing the latest insights from 13 Jesus scholars including Elaine Pagels, Mark Goodacre, Paula Friedrichsen and of course Bart Ehrman. And for all of September we've got something special just for Misquoting Jesus listeners. When you grab an elite pass to NINT through the link bart erman.com forward/mj conference you'll get our very first merch ever created for the show. A custom Misquoting Jesus coffee mug. Now you can't buy this mug on our Etsy store or anywhere else. It's just exclusively available through this promotion. It is our gift to you for joining us at this incredible three day event with the top scholars in the field. All you have to do is sign up for an elite NINT pass in September and it is only available when you register through bart erman.com mjconference. Thanks and I hope to see you there. Welcome back everyone to Misquoting Jesus where today we are talking about whether Christians have always viewed the Bible as inerrant We've also got listeners questions coming up at the end, so make sure you stick around for those. But before we get into things, I have a question for you. What is a mistake you made early in your career that you now laugh about?
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C
Huh? That's a good question. So I would say I'm not the thing I laugh. One thing I laugh about sometimes is not actually a mistake, but it's a very bad misjudgment. I don't know how bad it was. It's just kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. So I was right, I was writing my dissertation, right? And my dissertation is on this very technical thing about a church father did him as the blind and how he quoted the gospels and how you could extract his quotations in Greek and compare them with Greek and Latin manuscripts in order to determine what the manuscripts looked like that were in his time and place in 4th century Alexandria, Egypt. This is like really niche. It's like so niche within like New Testament studies. I was, I was not willing to tell people what I was writing on because I was afraid somebody would scoop me.
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B
Which to the non academic person sounds like a bit of a weird thing, but it does happen. And then when someone publishes the topic of your dissertation, you have to start all over again.
- [04:17]
C
Yeah, no, I had a student that, that happened to. He was, he was partway through the dissertation and somebody published a book on it and he had to start over. But I mean, you know, the gospel quotations is did as the blind in comparison to Greek and Latin manuscript. There, there are a lot of. Aren't a lot of people lining up for that one?
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B
Well, no, because they didn't know you were doing it if they knew you were doing it.
- [04:37]
C
Well, I know. Yeah, that's right. They probably would come out of the woodwork. Yeah, good question.
- [04:43]
B
What did you, did you have like a second topic that you were telling people you were writing on if they asked?
- [04:49]
C
No, I told people. It's just like when I was at a professional, when I was at professional meetings there were other scholars who kind of were working the general field and, and I thought, you know, I'm not going to tell them what I'm doing because I think, you know, I think they would try to do it too. And so. Yeah, so. So you know, my friends and stuff, all new, they all thought I was crazy because I was supposed to be doing a PhD in New Testament and man, that ain New Testament. You're like, you know, New Testament is studying like the, the Christology of the Gospel of John or trying to understand the book of Galatians. What are you doing? I guess. Oh, no, man. I want to be really trained in something really technical so that I can be expert in this thing and then broaden out from there. And it really worked for me, but they just thought I was nuts. I, you know, I thought you were supposed to be a New Testament guy. What is this?
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B
It's related to the New Testament. I think it's, I think it's absolutely.
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C
It didn't help, it didn't help me trying to find a job, I'll tell you that. Applying to university teaching. What do you do? I work on the gospel text of dynamics, the blind. Oh, my God.
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B
Fantastic. You're the man we want teaching our undergraduates.
- [05:54]
C
Yes, we've been looking for that.
- [05:56]
B
Oh, dear. All right. Well, we are here today to talk about inerrancy and biblical inerrancy specifically. So how have your views, views on biblical inerrancy changed over the years?
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C
Well, you know, I, I suppose when I was growing up, I, I, I didn't really question the Bible. I, I wasn't a Bible thumper or anything. I was Episcopalian. And it wasn't like the Bible wasn't the center of my faith. I just assumed the Bible was accurate and that what it said happened. And then when I became born again in my teenage years and I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college, Moody Bible Institute, I was convinced the Bible was inerrant in, in every way that, that it's not necessarily that God had dictated the words to the authors, but he made sure that they were accurate and down to, you know, there really wasn't Adam and Eve. The world really was created in six days. Women really should be submissive to their husbands. You know, just like Jesus really said everything that says that he said and did, like it was Jonah really existed. You know, like everything was literally accurate and. Yeah, well, that changed when I became a biblical scholar and started reading the New Testament in Greek and the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. And I started finding mistakes and changed, change my view. So I, Yeah, so that was, boy, that was a long time when I probably, when I was probably in seminary. So I first started changing from believing the Bible was inerrant.
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B
So you, you kind of answered this in your previous answer, but just to make it clear for everyone listening, when we talk about inerrancy in the context of the Bible, what exactly do we mean?
- [07:35]
C
Well, the term itself is fairly modern, and I think people today, some people are using it differently from the way it's been traditionally used when I was, when I was a conservative evangelical, our understanding means that it has no errors of any kind. And we didn't mean just like in its theological teaching or its religious views, but any statements it has that involve, involves geology or biography or any of the other sciences or history or, you know, that everything it says happened really did happen. And so there really was a flood that covered the earth and there, you know, and so, you know, you pick anything in the Bible and it really did happen.
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B
Are there different degrees of inerrancy?
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C
There appear to be because today people have different views. When I was, when I was in those circles, we differentiated and especially as I started to move out of them, we differentiated between inerrancy and infallibility. When we made that differentiation, what we meant was that when the Bible is trying, trying to affirm something strongly, it makes it's. There are no mistakes like when it, when it says Jesus did this or when it expresses this doctrine, it is infallible. But there could be, you know, there could be slip ups, you know, or there could be, there certainly could be scribal mistakes. We, when I did believe in inerrancy, we thought that we, what we said was that applies only to the autographs by which we meant that when, when Matthew wrote his account, whatever he actually wrote on the papyrus was right, but scribes might have changed it later, so we might have some mistakes because of later scribal changes, but the autographs were without error. And yeah, so there are, there are. Degr agrees because some people would say no, the King, some people today, the King James Bible is inerrant. And so, you know, that's, so that's, that's quite different from what we thought, which was that the original Greek Hebrew was without error.
- [09:46]
B
Do we have any kind of evidence about whether early Christians felt this way about the texts that they were producing or that were being circulated in their communities?
- [09:57]
C
Yeah, that's. So that's a very long story and we'll, we probably want to spend a little bit of time on it because it's, it's quite clear that this modern view that there could be no mistakes in anything that's written was not shared by most of the earliest Christians, including the ones who are writing our texts. I mean, last, last week we talked about the synoptic problem where Matthew, just take Matthew. Matthew copied many of Mark's stories and he changed them. You know, there's no doubt that he changed them. He added words, he took away words, he Actually radically changed some things. He made some of the stories mean something different from what Mark meant. Luke, our Gospel of Luke, begins in the first four verses of Luke. Luke says that there were many people who had written an account of the things Jesus said and did. But he's done a lot of research and he's going to write an accurate account. But you know, we know that one of his sources was Mark and he changes Mark all over this, all over the place. And so clearly he didn't think that Mark was an inerrant revelation from God. So all the way back, you know, from the, as early as we have, even in the New Testament writings themselves, they did not consider the books they were writing to be scripture. They, they were just writing books. I mean, of course Matthew thought that what he's saying about Jesus was true, but he didn't think he was writing the Bible. He's writing, you know, an account of Jesus life so people could read it and understand it.
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B
Does this change when we look at non canonical texts produced by different sects of early Christians? Do Marcionites view their particular texts as inerrants as opposed to what the Gnostics were passing around?
- [11:44]
C
So what, what happens over time is that, you know, these people write these texts, they read stories of Jesus or Paul writes his letters. You know, when Paul's WR to the Corinthians, he's just writing a letter to them to deal with their problems. But he thinks that he's authoritative, he's telling them what to do and he believes that God, he's getting this idea from God, right? He doesn't think that, he's just making this stuff up. And so the writers do think that they have some kind of authority. What happens over time is that as, you know, as years and decades go by, people start thinking these really are authoritative texts and so they start ascribing them to divine causality that God inspired these authors. We have these non canonical texts and it looks like their authors thought pretty much like the New Testament authors thought that they're just writing down accounts that they think are true. And because they're true, they're authorized in the sense that they're representing the truth from God. If they did think that, then they, you know, so whoever wrote, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, or whoever wrote the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Philip, they certainly thought that what they said was true. That's what Matthew thought about his writing. So, so the ascription of authority by others does not depend directly on what the author thought. About what he was doing. Because later authors started saying that, yeah, Matthew's absolutely right and the Gospel Peter is absolutely wrong. They started, they started saying that, but the writers themselves appear not to have had that view. So. Oh, it's only over time that people started thinking these books that are now in the New Testament as being special and being authorized by God and being inspired. But they did not tend to use the word inerrant and they did not. And in early Christianity, there were different views about the literal meaning of these texts, whether they had mistakes or not.
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B
Is this ascription of authority based on divine guidance or authorship something that we see in the Greco Roman world or in Jewish writings? Or is this something that is solely occurring in Christian circles?
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C
Christians pick it up from understanding the Jewish scriptures. The Jewish scriptures were understood to be given by God, by many Jews. The law of Moses was directly dictated to Moses by God and it had to be followed to the T by many religious Jews. And the prophets were speaking the word of God. And so they didn't use the term inerrancy for their texts. They didn't have big debates about whether there were any errors or not. Most religious Jews at the time just assumed that these are accurate texts, the events they described are accurate events. They didn't have these categories of errant and inerrant, which really come to us more from the Enlightenment, you know, Starting in the 18th century, more than anything from the ancient world. And many Jews had no problem understanding that there are contradictions between their texts, just as there are early Christians we'll talk about in a minute. They also had ideas of contradictions between the texts where they can't be literally, literally true. And so in Greek and Roman circles, it was very rare to have texts that were seen to have been given by God. But there were some. There was a group of writings that were called the Sibylline oracles. And a Sybil was a kind of like a prophetess who would go into a trance and would, would, would say something inspired by the God. And these were understood to have value as explaining weird things that were happening in the world. And so the sibling oracles were kept in, in Rome in the Temple of Jupiter. And they were, they were consulted whenever anything weird happened to see what the Sybil had said about it, what could be interpreted that way. Sometimes he had books that were inspired by a God, but it's very, very rare. Wasn't, wasn't normally a part of Roman or Greek religion.
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B
Thank you very much. We are going to take a very Brief break and I'm going to tell you how you can get your hands on this spectacular mug. Look, it's me and Bart.
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C
So it is.
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B
It's so good. And we'll be right back for our interview. Now you may have heard the ad at the outset of this episode for the new Insights in the New Testament Conference. As a reminder, if you sign for the elite level this month will be sending you this delightful misquoting Jesus mug with me and B on complete with our glasses. Who doesn't love. That's fantastic. I love it.
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C
I want one of those. I don't think I've got that.
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B
I, I, I just. It actually arrived in the mail today. I, Chris is the person you need to be. Or Joyce maybe.
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C
Or maybe I have to join Nint. I need to go to ninth.
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B
That's true. You put probably a member already. Given that you're co hosting, they should have sent you a mug really. But for the announcement side of things, it's a little, little urgency in that. This Saturday, that's 9, 13 is your last chance to sign up for the NINT early bird rates. You can save as much as 20% by signing up by Saturday. So if you haven't got your pass yet, what are you waiting for? This is definitely the time to do it. You can visit bart erman.com forward/mj conference. You'll get our very first merch ever created for the show.
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C
And I'm telling you this conference is going to be good. If you all haven't heard about this conference, I'm telling you, if you're interested in historical Jesus, this is, this is for you.
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B
Yep. So everyone pause the episode right now. We'll wait. Go register before you forget and before the prices go up. Welcome back to our interview. We are talking about a biblical inerrancy and before the break I was asking whether the idea of divinely inspired texts being authoritative or somehow inerrant was something that we saw in the Greco Roman world or in Jewish scripture. And I wanted to continue that line of questioning by asking if there were other ancient views on errors within divine texts.
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C
Well, you know, within Christianity there were, there were lots of ways of trying to understand these, these written texts that, that over time are being considered to be authoritative. And so this is actually my next book project is, is how we got our 27 books of the 20s of the new Testament. You know, how we got this canon. And so I'm, I'm starting to dig into the now I've been interested in this for Many, many, many years. But, you know, there were, there were a range of views about things. And it's certainly, you know, the idea that they are inerrant was not something that people would express like that. So like, I mean, for example, in the, in the second century, there was a, a church father named Tatian who had the four gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And but he, he wanted to make like a combined gospel. And so he took the four and he combined their accounts. So like, he take the stories in all four, and when they had the same story, he would like integrate verse here, verse there and verse there so that there weren't any more any like, contradictions between them. And so you'd have the complete account. And so this is called the Diatessaron. Diatessaron means through the four. And it shows that he did not think that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were inviolable, but he did think that they were telling the truth. But the truth only got there once you combined them. And so you have that kind of thing. But soon after that, you start getting some theologians who just admit, yeah, there are contradictions here and we have to do something about it.
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B
When do we see the early church fathers starting to treat these Christian writings, what we have as the New Testament, as inerrant?
- [19:55]
C
Well, the church fathers don't use that term inerrant. They normally do assume that what's described to them really happened. And when you start getting the 4th and 5th century, they start digging into the text, kind of like the modern scholars who were paying very careful attention to the literal words. But, you know, I. By when you get to the third century, like the beginning of the third century, around the year 200 or so, you get people like Origen. Origen was the most significant theologian of Christianity before the Council of Nicaea, first 300 years, Origen was the brightest, most prolific, most ingenious theologian, most influential theologian. And he had a particular view of Scripture that modern inerrantists would not like at all. Because he, Origen thought, he thought several things that people wouldn't like today, but they became orthodoxy in his day. One thing was that he thought that the literal interpretation of the Bible was not the best interpretation. He thought the Bible certainly had to be interpreted literally. But he knew that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John contradict each other in places. His explanation of that was very interesting. He thought the Holy Spirit had inspired everything that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote. And in places he inspired contradictions. Why would the Spirit inspire contradictions? Because Origen thought that the deeper meaning of the text is more important than the surface meaning. The surface meaning would just be what it says literally. But the deeper meaning would be a figurative meaning, a spiritual meaning that was. That was more philosophically complex. And there are places where the Holy Spirit would put a contradiction between, say, Matthew and John, where, because this contradicts itself, it can't be literally true, which means you have to look at the figurative meaning. And so that's against inerrancy, because it is. It is a matter of error, but it's a divinely sanctioned error. And so. So he dealt with it, but he recognized the errors, and he loved finding errors in Scripture. He loved finding contradictions. And so. So, you know, the idea that modern, modern folk have, like conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists, that there's no mistakes, that was not the dominant view throughout the earliest centuries of Christianity.
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B
When do we see this view kind of starting to emerge within Christian history?
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C
Well, through the. Through the ages, you know, after Origin and on through Augustine and then through the Middle Ages. Figurative interpretations of Scripture were very popular. And so they would accept things literally but also figuratively. That. That really became contested, especially at the. At the Protestant Reformation. So when Martin Luther more or less started the. The Reformation, one of his very strict ideas was that the tradition of the Christian Church, that the. That you get out of the Vatican, that you get out of the Pope, you get out of the hierarchy, that tradition is not authoritative. The only thing authoritative is the Bible. And so it's sola scriptura. It's only Scripture. And you can't use figurative modes of interpretation. You've got to figure it out literally, because God literally gave this text, and you've got to understand it literally. Otherwise you're just putting your imagination into it, and your imagination is not inspired. And so Luther assisted on literal interpretation, but once you start doing just a literal interpretation, you have this problem of contradictions and things. And so that's when. That's when people started recognizing that if Protestants, especially if you have this kind of literal interpretation, we've got problems on our hands. And so there started being disputes among, especially among Protestants, but also Catholics, about whether there could actually be bona fide mistakes or not. And the two sides ended up splitting.
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B
What are some of the ways that these early Protestants dealt with these kinds of mistakes and contradictions? Was it just blind refusal? No, they're just. You're misreading. They're not there. Or were there creative workarounds coming out?
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C
I'd say they're both. I mean, there Some people, like Martin Luther really, you know, he would just say, look, this, these two don't agree. And so that's why he put the book of James in the appendix of his German translation. Luther's German translation of, of the Bible was as significant in German culture as the King James was in, in English culture. But he put four books of the New Testament in appendix in an appendix because he thought the book of James just disagrees with Paul. And he says, Paul believes that you're made you justified by God by faith alone, without works. And James says you're justified by works. And Martin Luther said, you know, if you, you reconcile those two, I'll eat my hat. You can't make. And so he recognized. So there are people like that. Most often, though, people try to figure out ways to make them both true. Like you got something that looks like a contradiction and you say, well, either it's because of scribal error or it only looks like a contradiction. Actually, both things are true at the same time. And so they, they started out with that and that, that, that, that worked pretty well for a long time, but then eventually that started to fall apart too.
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B
What happened when it fell apart?
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C
Well, I'll tell you the reason. The main reason it fell apart wasn't so much just that there are contradictions between the accounts. Although that was a major thing. People realized that when you read the creation in Genesis 1 and then you read the creation of Genesis 2 and you actually compare them. Like what happened at what stage? The first this, then this and this and this and this, or first this is. They're at odds with each other. Ah, so that, so that, that created some disturbance. But then science came along. And so it's really with the Enlightenment starting at, you know, starting at the end of the 18th century, but really getting into gear in the 19th century, certain sciences in particular, particularly geology and biology. And so geologists started realizing the world was not created in 4000 BC. It was not. It is man. It is really old. And biologists started understanding with Darwin especially, but he didn't start at human evolution. And if you have human evolution, there's no Adam and Eve. You know, if you think there is an Adam and Eve, you got to come up with some other explanation from the one in the Bible. And so in the late 19th century, second half of the 19th century, scientists were on the rise and intelligent, educated people started doubting the Bible because of that. Because it's not just that Genesis 1 and 2 don't go together. Neither one of them can be historically what actually happened. And so once that took place, then committed Bible reading scholars doubled down on scripture. And that's when you start getting inerrancy. You start getting it in the 19th century as an express doctrine, as one of the fundamentals of the faith. You have to believe the Bible is accurate about everything, including, you know, seven day creation or six day creation, Adam and Eve, a flood that covered the entire world. And people are saying, yeah, how does that work exactly? That you can have water covering all the mountains of the earth. Earth. Like there's not enough water for that to happen. No, no, it happened, you know, or Joshua makes the sun stand still because he's winning a battle. And, and he makes the sun stand so they can slaughter the rest of the end. How's the, how's the sun stop, you know, how does the earth stop revolving? Exactly. Rotating without, you know, destroying human. Oh, no, it was a miracle. And so you, you double down on it and you come up with the idea that it is completely inerrant in every detail.
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B
What knock on effect does this emphasis on inerrancy have on biblical studies in an academic, historical sense?
- [28:15]
C
Well, people who subscribe to inerrancy, they can be scholars of some areas of biblical studies. I have, I have friends who believe in inerrancy basically or fully, who are able to study Greek manuscripts, for example, and classify Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and try to figure out what the original wording was. If you believe in inerrancy, though, it's very hard to do most areas of critical scholarship on the New Testament and of the Old Testament, you can't, you know, it's very, it's very hard to say that Matthew changed Mark, to say the opposite of what Mark says, and then to say that, that it's inerrant. I will say so back when I was back in my day as a conservative evangelical, we would, you know, we'd say, look, it can't have a contradiction because if it has a contradiction, that's an error. I will say that some modern apologies, evangelical apologists are now admitting that there are contradictions and there are things that it says happened that did not happen. And they'll, they'll continue to say it's inerrant. Yeah, I know. You look puzzled, Megan.
- [29:32]
B
So I, I am a little bit.
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C
So I was in this debate. I was in this debate before, right before COVID there was an apologetics conference that they invite. Somebody invited me to in Chicago. It was great. I had great fun. They had three. They had Four speakers. Three of them were committed evangelicals who believe the Gospels, don't have any mistakes, don't have any errors in them. They're inerrant. And me in order. And they genuinely wanted to hear the other side. And I had a great time. People were so polite and friendly and sense of humor, and it was all, it was all good. And one of the people on the other side was my friend Mike Lacona. And the, the, the moderator of this thing said, okay, look, in the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus sends out his disciples, he tells them, don't, don't. Don't take a backpack with you. Don't take extra sandals. Don't take any, any money, but do take a staff, you know, to help you walk. A staff to walk with. And the moderator says, okay, that's Mark's version says. Matthew's version says, sends the boss out, says, don't, don't take, don't take a backpack. You know, don't take a pack, don't take your sandals, don't take any money, and don't take a staff. So he says, okay, he asked the four of us, we're on stage, that's first. Is that, Is that an error? And if so, who, who made the mistake? And, and the other two tried to say, oh, no, it's not, it's not a contradiction. One says one, the other says the opposite. No, that's not a contradiction. But Mike says, Mike Lakota says, well, Matthew changed it. And so that, in other words, Matthew, Matthew says, don't take a staff, even though Mark says, do take a staff. And so then the next question was, well, is it inerrant? And Mike said, yes, they're both inerrant. I said, mike, you just said that they say the opposite. But his logic was Matthew knew what he was doing, he wanted to change it, and so he changed it intentionally. Since he did it intentionally, he was trying to teach something by that. So it's not an error because he knew what he was doing. Oh, my God. Yeah. For me, that doesn't work. That's like saying if somebody asks me directions to how to get to Walmart and I send them intentionally, send them the wrong way, that I, that my, my directions are not. That my directions are inerrant, even though they lead in the wrong way, I think that's an error, man. They're not going to end up at Walmart. And so, yeah, so. But it's interesting to me because I think a lot of, A lot of evangelicals are saying, look, you know, this is Our inspired text, this is the word of God. But there got to be mistakes in here. There are.
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B
Do you think that letting go of the idea of inerrancy would be too much of a fundamental shift for a lot of fundamental Christians? So trying to say, oh, well, it's inerrant. It's just each individual text is inerrant in its own little bubble. Is a safer way to examine it?
- [32:48]
C
Yeah, I think so. The term fundamentalist, when I was a fundamentalist, we actually were rather proud of the term. It wasn't a term of derogation because we, we said, look, there are certain fundamentals to the Christian faith, faith. And we subscribe to the fundamentals. Jesus really was born of a virgin. He was physically raised from the dead. The Bible has no mistakes in it. You know, there was a list of things that we had, you know, the Trinity, you know, we had a list of things that are the fundamentals. And you might have differences between yourselves on other things, but these fundamentals are, They've got to be in place. And I think. And fundamentalism, starting at the end of the 20th century, the 19th century, it actually, you could actually trace the beginnings of fundamentalism somewhat earlier into the 19th century. There are a lot of good books written on the origins of fundamentalism by a person named Sandin, for example, or George Marsden. They have these books on the history of fundamentalism. But you can, you can show where it comes from, because it's not an ancient view. But it became so central to the idea that Christianity has to be true that when you double down on the Bible and you say it's got to be inerrant, it's very hard to give that up. Because if you give that up, what else do you give up? And so even if you're staring at a contradiction in the face, you just say, well, it can't be. It can't be an error. So when I, when I was in those circles, that was what we taught. If you give up inerrancy, it'll be a domino effect and that one thing after the other will start falling. And before you know, you're going to be an atheist. And so out of fear of deconverting, people would. They'd say, no, it's got to be completely accurate. And today there are many fundamentalists still like that. And people who wouldn't even call themselves fundamentalists without knowing they are fundamentalists because they subscribe to this. And the reason they subscribe to it is because fundamentalists have won this battle across Christianity and across the world, which is that if the Bible has a mistake, then Christianity cannot be true. That. So that's their line. They believe that and they teach. And so that even non Christians think that. Every week I have non Christians tell me, how can somebody possibly be a Christian? The Bible's contradictions. And it's just like repeatedly I have to keep saying, look, Christianity is not built on the inerrancy of the Bible. It's not biblianity, it's Christianity. It's faith in Christ. It's not faith in the Bible. No creed has a statement about the Bible. There are statements about God and Christ and the Spirit salvation. You can believe all those things without an inerrant Bible. But people just don't believe me whether they're Christian or non Christian, even though historically that's always how it was until the 19th century.
- [35:47]
B
Those are all the questions that I had for you. Bart, do you have anything that you want to add before we move on?
- [35:52]
C
Well, just that I know a lot of conservative Christians get upset with the kinds of things I write and talk about. And largely it is centered on the idea that the Bible is a very human book. But part of the point of this whole discussion about fundamentalism is that if you don't see the Bible as a human book, if you see it as having no mistakes of any kind whatsoever in it, you're imposing something on the Bible that isn't true. And you're imposing something in the Bible that is not part of the historical Christian faith. People, of course, can be Christian without believing that the Bible is inerrant, believing in contradictions. The Bible is just looking at the facts. And if you believe in God, God's not opposed to the facts. And if it's true that there are errors, it's true. And God's not opposed to something that's true if you believe in God. So you know, so you know, look, I learned this stuff at a theological seminary, being trained to be a minister, and all of my minister friends who are trained, you know, winded ministry agreed with this. Of course it's not inerrant. So it's just, it's bogus to say that you're destroying the faith if you say that there are problems in the Bible, there are historical problems in the Bible, and it doesn't mean you have to leave the faith.
- [37:06]
B
Thank you very much. That is all for today's interview. We are going to take a brief break and then we will be back with this week's bonus segment. How well do we really know the Gospels that shaped Christianity. The New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the cornerstones of our understanding of Jesus. But how reliable are they as historical documents in the unknown Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Join Bible scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman as he takes you on an illuminating journey through these ancient texts. Across eight captivating lectures, you'll explore the origins, authorship, and historical accuracy of the Gospels in an online course. Are these accounts based on eyewitness testimony, or are they a mix of history, myth, and legend? What do historians see that most readers miss? This course is an opportunity to dive deep into the stories that have defined a faith, questioning their origins and understanding their impact. Ready to uncover the truth behind the Gospels? Visit barterman.com to learn more or sign up today. Use discount code MJ Podcast at checkout for a special offer. This week's bonus segment is the Listeners Question and Answer, where Bart answers your questions. If you do have a question for Bart, you can submit it via bart ehrman.com Ask Bart okay, we have a set of 1, 2, 3, 4 excellent questions from various listeners. First up is about the thief Barabbas. The questioner writes, the thief Barabbas is called Jesus Barabbas, Matthew 27:15 and is described as a man who had been put in prison for an insurrection that had taken place and for murder. That's from Luke 23:19. Unless I am greatly mistaken, Bar Abba means son of God. So we have one Jesus Bar Abba, son of God, put beside Jesus Barabbas, the insurrectionist, who one is crucified and one is released. This seems way too much of a coincidence. What is going on there, right?
- [39:20]
C
So the question is, right, in Matthew, he's called Jesus Barabbas, except and only in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John just call him Barabbas. There's a textual variant whether the word Jesus was there or not, whether a scribe added the word Jesus in order to make the the symbolism more striking, or whether some scribe took out the word Jesus because he thought it was offensive. So there's a textual variant there, but whether it's original or not, it certainly highlights the issue at stake. And I think this question has recognized it. This, this passage. There are very good reasons for thinking this, Pat. This did not happen. Okay? So I mean, Pilate was not releasing prisoners who were insurrectionists, who in one of the Gospels was said to have committed murder in the insurrection. In other words, he killed a Roman soldier. Pilate was not releasing people like that. He was crucifying them. And so I, I explained why in My book Jesus before the Gospels, I explained why this passage almost certainly could not be original. I could. It's an original passage, but it is not something that actually happened. The God, the gospel authors are though, trying to highlight this particular situation. We don't know if this figure Barabbas from any other source. The name does mean son of the Father. You know, Abba Father Bar means a son of in Aramaic. Son of the Father. And the issue is what kind of son of God do the Jews at the trial prefer? Do they want an insurrectionist or do they want somebody who's willing to die for their sins? No, thanks. We want the insurrectionist. Jews are rejecting the Son of God who's willing to give his life for them in order to, to support a violent overthrow of the Romans. And so this is anti Jewish polemic that's written into the account and it's done in a way so that, you know, you have to kind of think about and realize it, what's going on here. But when you add Jesus to it, it just makes it a little bit more obvious.
- [41:21]
B
Thank you very much. Next question. If the New Testament had not existed and we were faced with the books and manuscripts that we have today, would the New Testament be much different in both content and order of books?
- [41:35]
C
I don't know what that means.
- [41:37]
B
I think they're asking.
- [41:38]
C
The New Testament didn't exist if the,
- [41:40]
B
if it wasn't canonized. When it was canonized and we had everything, all the manuscripts we have today and we were putting together a New Testament. Oh, what would it look like?
- [41:49]
C
Would we have the same one? Well, it depends who's putting it together. I'd throw a few extra books in and take out a couple. And so it's a very interesting question. I mean, and it's rooted in this thing that I, I'm, I'm starting to work on now. My. A book, probably that's going to be on how we got the canon and why we got the canon and when we got it and who decided and on what grounds and those kinds of issues. So if we, if all we had were a bunch of early Christian books, my guess is that without a canon of scripture, Christianity would be far more diverse now than it is already. It's already hugely diverse. People who call themselves Christian are Greek Orthodox and Appalachian snake handlers and Southern Baptists and Roman Catholic and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. They all call themselves Christians. And so it's very diverse. If we didn't have a canon of scripture, one of the Reasons they got a canon of scripture was to provide some kind of, kind of centrality to the faith. And given the various groups of Christians in antiquity that we were far more diverse than what we have now, boy, it'd be, it'd be a mess today. So much so that I'm not sure that we'd have a thing called Christianity. We'd probably have a bunch of different religions.
- [43:06]
B
Thank you. Next question is about Christology and the questioner says it is my understanding that the Gospels hold increasingly higher Christology as they progress chronologically. Paul predates the Gospels, however, and has a high Christology. Would this suggest that Paul was the first to bring a high Christology to a wider audience in the early church and that its gradual adoption is reflected in the Gospels?
- [43:33]
C
Yeah, that's a, that's a very good question. This is the issue I deal with in my book, how Jesus became God. Because a high Christology is one that understands that Christ is a divine being who becomes human as opposed to other ways of understanding Jesus divinity, which is that Jesus was a human being who became divine. And so the idea he's a divine being becomes a human is a, a high Christology because it starts with him up in heaven. So I think a mistake that many people make is thinking that Christology developed the same way in every place at the same time. So that first everybody thought this, then they thought that, then they thought that, then they thought that. And so if you, if you line things up, you know, if you've got a high Christology necessarily it's late. And if you've got a low Christology necessarily, it's early. And it's tempting to think that way. A lot of scholars even think that way. But I don't think that's how it works. People today have very old fashioned ideas. Yeah, I know people who seem to me to be living in the 1890s. It doesn't mean they are living in the 1890s. They got old ideas is right. And so that's true with Christology. The interesting thing is that it is interesting, as this person points out, if you put Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in sequence, the Christology seems to get higher and higher until you get to John where you have a high Christology incarnation. So you can do it that way. But then the irony is what this person points out, that our first author Paul also has an incarnation Christology. And so the point of that is that Christology did not develop in a linear way in the same way, the same time. You know, everywhere at the Same place at the same pace. And so there were high Christologies early. There were low Christologies early. There are high Christologies late. There are low Christologies late. Paul actually has a combination of a high Christology and a low Christology. He does think that Jesus was a divine being who came down to heaven, but then when he got re exalted again, he got even higher, got not made equal with God according to Philippians 2. And so. So the strange thing is you have kind of a hybrid Christology before. We actually have a definite high Christology state in the Gospel of John, if that makes sense.
- [45:49]
B
Thank you. Final question for today. In your episode on altruism, you said agape is not found in Greek and Roman literature. Where then did Christians get the word or did they make it up?
- [46:02]
C
So there is a verb, the verbal form, agapao, to love, is found in Greek and Roman literature. It tends to mean something like to be fond of somebody. It doesn't necessarily mean some behaving altruistically toward them. So the verb exists. The noun first appears in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, agape. And there too, it doesn't necessarily mean altruistic action, but it's a. It's another Greek word used in the Septuagint for love. And the Christian authors of the New Testament use the Septuagint, so they're familiar with this term agape from there, and it becomes the common term in the New Testament. And for early Christians, agape comes to mean behaving in somebody else's best interest, that kind of love, as opposed to sexual love or as opposed to really liking somebody or something else. It's acting on somebody else's behalf. So the Christians got the word from the Septuagint, but it developed a different meaning. And even after Christianity started, it still very rarely appears in Greek outside the Christian circles, interestingly.
- [47:15]
B
Thank you very much, Bart. Now, before we wrap up, would you mind just summing up what we spoke about today?
- [47:21]
C
Yeah, we're talking about the idea of inerrancy, that the Bible has no errors of any kind in it. And I tried to show that this is something that is a modern phenomenon starting in, basically starting the 19th century. The early Christians did revere the writings of Scripture and did think that they were authoritative. But the modern idea that nothing could be wrong, period, of any kind whatsoever, is a modern idea developed by people who consider themselves fundamentalists and that we would consider to be fundamentalists. But it's never been the primary understanding of Christianity.
- [47:55]
B
Bart. Thank you very much, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the Code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will Be Back Next Week Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [48:17]
C
Ah, well, next next week we're talking about one of my favorite non canonical gospels called the Proto Gospel of James and it deals with like what was going on in Jesus life before he was alive on earth. In other words, what about Mary? Where'd she come from? And why was she this mother of God, the Son of God? It's like, wow. And so the Proto Gospel is about that very interesting book that was very influential throughout the Middle Ages. That'll that'll be next time.
- [48:44]
B
Join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehr. 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 Barterman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.