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[Music] welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart ehrmann 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
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about the New Testament the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity I'm your host Megan Lewis let's begin hello everyone and welcome back to misquoting Jesus with Bart ehrmann today
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we're going to be talking about Jesus huge surprise given the name of the podcast was he a real person how do we even know the answer to that question and how far can historians trust the sources that they have to rely on when
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looking at this but before we get down to business but hello how are you yeah I'm doing I'm doing better now we um you know UNC uh with with covet they started instituting uh something they call
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Wellness days where the every every now and then in the semester like three times in the semester they'll have a day that they just blow off classes and so we had a wellness day yesterday and uh
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oh my God is that great so I teach I normally teach a couple classes on Thursdays and it was off and man it makes a big difference and for the students too they're just they're kind
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of burned out and uh it's um yeah so uh so yeah it's a nice thing so I'm I'm flying high today I feel like this point in the semester is always so hard because you're so
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close to the finish line and you've been going for so long but you still have to get that last bit done yeah I know I mean it's you know it just it's a weird it's a weird cycle teaching because it just isn't like a normal like most
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people's jobs it's not you know it's not a nine to five thing and it's not a you know it's just it's just it's a whole different sequence and to Outsiders it seems kind of cushy and I I get that but oh man it's it's not
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and uh so uh anyway yeah so uh yeah how are things on your end uh okay actually I've spent the last week in a bit of a panic because we are going I'm taking all the children home to see my family for the first time
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since the pandemic started which is very exciting but of course because we haven't been anywhere in several years I have not been keeping up to date with the status of our passports which means that everybody needs a new one and
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because I'm a British citizen I have to like FedEx my old passport back to the UK yes as part of the application process so that that was a little more stressful than I would have liked um but everything is is kind of in line
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for that and we should make it one time so how many of you load up on the plane um it's me and the five kids hope you got some coloring books and things yes well luckily our eldest is is
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going to be she's 16 at the end of this month so I I have it like a kind of surrogate adult to help at least keep everyone in one place which is always tricky when you've got four who can just
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wander off at the as a whim you know you could just Charter a plane because of me yeah yeah okay well good luck with that but that's gonna be great yeah thank you yes it will be wonderful but I definitely uh
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need some luck um we should we should get into talking about Jesus though and before we start I do want to have a quick caveat right at the beginning to say that we're not talking about
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mythicism which is the idea that Jesus is a mythical a mythical figure who was created without any historical relation to well historical fact um which is a big enough topic that it needs its whole own episode and I'm not
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even sure that my definition was accurate um today what we're focusing on is what sources we have for Jesus as an historical figure and whether we can trust them when we start reconstructing
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this piece of History so this is obviously a pretty big question but but why do you think it's worth discussing you know the um you're right we don't want to talk about methodists today except except to say
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that the re you know there are people who say that they didn't even exist and um that's what mythicism is you defined it correctly it's it's the idea that Jesus himself is a myth and that that's not an issue that's seriously debated
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among uh experts in the field but who are you know New Testament Scholars but um but they they are nonetheless very concerned about knowing what kind of evidence do we have for Jesus
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um not not just his existence that kind of you know because the evidence for what he said and did of course is evidence for his existence but uh the fact that we have sources that uh that are you know all the sources agree
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existed but still that doesn't help you much knowing who he was and what what did he teach and what did he do and and what happened to him and and so it's really important for people to understand what kind of sources of
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information we have have for all of that and that's that's a topic that Scholars have really wrestled with uh for a very long time so the scholarly consensus then is that
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yes Jesus was an historical figure um so when we're trying to determine whether a person actually existed and we have to rely on historical data but what data do we have from the ancient world concerning Jesus
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well we have a lot more than for you know 99.99 of the rest of the population because you know and the reality is that in the in the days of Jesus um you know there are probably about 60
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million people uh in the Roman Empire at the time and we have very very little information about many of them um I mean for most of them we have no information at all
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um in uh they're probably about four or five well it's kind of hard to say how many Jews that were in the Empire at the time but usually it's set around like five or seven percent so okay so three or three to five million Jews in the
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world at the time in Jesus day so Jesus would have been living in the first century of the Common Era um and so say the first 30 years and in those years we we know about you know outside of the Bible we have very little
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information about about any of them but in the case of Jesus um you know we have uh we have we have records we don't have contemporary records uh we don't have you know in
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other words people who knew Jesus at the time didn't leave us any writings about him but nonetheless we do have we do have uh sources of information far beyond what we do for most people
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how much of a problem is the fact that we don't have contemporary records for Jesus obviously we'd all prefer for there to be some kind of like census maybe that has his name and and place of birth and family ties and all that kind
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of thing but we don't is this a problem for ascertaining who he was and and indeed whether he actually existed it's not so much a problem for whether it existed because of you know things we
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will get into once we get around to talking about those those mythicists but because we have so many records from so many independent sources uh that um that
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is pretty clearly existed I mean and one of our sources is in the New Testament the Apostle Paul who actually knew Jesus brother I mean so you know if Jesus didn't exist
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you think his brother would know it but but uh so and Paul knows one Paul knows some of Jesus disciples and and he just mentioned some casually he's not mentioning them in order to prove there was a Jesus he's just you know he's
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mentioning him and so it's not an eyewitness Paul Paul didn't know Jesus during his lifetime but he knew people who did know Jesus and he he met with them he talked with them spent time with them and so that's you know so that's
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just one that's that's one thing but it's a very big problem that we don't have contemporary records if we want to know exactly what he said and did um our primary sources of information
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are the gospels of the New Testament Matthew Mark Luke and John these are written between 40 and 60 years after his death um and so uh they are um they pose they
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pose a lot of problems for for Scholars but one thing I want to emphasize at the outset is that there are a lot of people who say that we we simply can't trust them at all because you know they are by they're in the Bible and you got to go
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outside the Bible and for a historian that's just nonsense uh Matthew Mark and Luke did not know they're writing the Bible they weren't writing scripture they were writing accounts of Jesus that
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they had heard and read uh and um that had been in circulation for years that is both a plus and a minus the the plus is it means that there are all sorts of stories floating around about Jesus in all parts of lots of
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parts of the world just third by the time these guys are riding and so it shows that there are independent lines of transmission going out with these oral traditions and historians love to have independent lines of transmission
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of of of about somebody because of their independent lines they haven't been based on each other uh and so they're you know they you can that helps for knowing getting information and so
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um you can't just discount the gospels as historical sources because they're in the Bible you have to treat them as historical sources written by people who did not imagine that they were writing scripture they were just writing their
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accounts and so they're just as valuable as historical sources as any other historical source so when we're looking at the gospels then how far can we trust them as historical sources and there are
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contradictions and obviously very legendary mythical elements to them they think about the Miracles that get reported um Matthew and Luke give two conflicting reports of Jesus birth so how do we when
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we're faced with evidence like that how do we decide which is closest to historical fact what is um maybe legend that built up around Jesus after his death yeah since basically since the
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enlightenment Scholars have realized that the gospels are not uh objective biographical accounts of what Jesus really said and did uh for some of the reasons you're mentioning when you when you compare the
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gospels to each other there are discrepancies and contradictions a lot of them in Minor Details lots and lots and Minor Details that are just flat out contradictions and uh but in other places that are really fairly major
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major uh events about Jesus life that are reported quite differently in ways that cannot be reconciled if you look at them closely enough most people don't look at them closely of course they just kind of read them over quickly and say yeah
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that's saying basically the same thing and that that's fine but but when you actually look at the details they're quite different these books are written 34 well they're written 40 50 60 years later by people who did not know Jesus
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who did not live in Israel who didn't speak Jesus language Aramaic they were spoke there were Greek speakers and they're basing their accounts on uh oral Traditions stories about Jesus that have
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been circulation for many for many years and as you know stories get changed when they when they get told and retold and retold and retold so those are all the those are all the downsides of the
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gospels and your question is then well um what do you do about it I mean how do you how do you is there anything reliable there and how do you know and that that of that of course is the the big issue that Scholars have wrestled
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with for for many many years so one of the things that historians look for when they're trying to understand in historical event is multiple sources like you said independent streams of transmission you've said that we do have these
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independent streams for Jesus existence and I wanted to ask about the gospels specifically given that Matthew and Luke are written using the gospel of Mark as a base do we count them as three distinct
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sources or are they more properly considered as a single Witness that's a great question and um the answer is yes and yes so so the deal is is that um Matthew Mark and Luke are
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very similar to each other as you point out the scholars have long called them the synoptic gospels synoptic means to be able to see be seen together and because they tell many of the same
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stories Matthew Mark and Luke the stories are usually in the same sequence first this happened in this and this and this with there are lots of changes too but the the basic skeleton is very much similar and sometimes they tell them in
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the same words word for word the same uh you'll have a an account of Jesus doing something and you have a you have a sentence it's just the same sentence in all three of them now my students have trouble sometimes believing me when I
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tell them that if you have uh two sources that report something and they're word for word the same then somebody's copying somebody they they don't believe me about that and so I do this little exercise when
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I'm teaching this to my class I I I'm teaching a new testament class and I'm trying to explain why it is the synoptic gospels have these similarities and I say yeah somebody's got to be copying somebody they don't believe me so what I
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do is I come to class one day when we're going to talk about this and I come in and like I come a little bit late to make sure everybody's there and I I start fussing around in front of the class I take something out of my bag and then I turn off the lights and turn back
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on and mess around the computer then I put the books back in my bag I take out my coat and I put it back I like doing stuff and they look at me saying what what's going on and so after about three minutes of doing this I say okay I want
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you to take out a pen piece of paper and write down everything you've just seen me do um and uh so uh they they write out their descriptions okay like 300 people
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in this class 350 people in this class and I do this and then I say okay I want to take I want to take uh four volunteers here and I just randomly pick up four papers and I start reading them I said we're going to do a synoptic comparison we're going to see how many
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of these have the same sentence word for word and you all out there the other 350 of you um you see if you've got any of the sentences that's exactly like any of these and I go through and I do a comparison and they're all different
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like they might you know they'll often mention similar things about my taking some out of a bag or turning off the lights but they never ever have a sentence the same and uh and you know I've done this thing for over 30 years
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I've never ever had it where somebody gets it the same then so then when I finish I say okay now what would you say if I picked up two of these things and they had a whole paragraph that was a word for word the same and everybody said oh somebody cheated I said yeah
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yeah somebody had a copy house would you get it I mean if you got I said you know and you know if you get the same thing word for word how else could you explain it and some guy in the back road invariably raises his hand says it's a miracle
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[Laughter] it's a miracle actually it's not you know even if somebody's copying something it doesn't mean it's not America it could still be a miracle I'm not precluding a miracle there I'm just saying somebody copied
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somebody so with the synoptic gospels Matthew Mark and Luke you get that okay you get those similarities so isn't that just one source then doesn't that mean that if they're all copying the same thing they're all the same source and the answer is partly yes and partly no
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it's partly yes because Scholars since the 19th century have recognized that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources independently they had access to a copy of Mark and they built
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their gospels off of the accounts found in mark but they also have other material not found in mark and so that means they didn't get it from Mark if they didn't give remark then they got
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it from an independent source so some of the material in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark is word for word the same like you know the beatitude to the Lord's Prayer very similar in a word for word in places and so the thought
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the thinking is that they got it from another source either Lou copied Matthew or Matthew copied Luke or they got it from another source and they're good reasons for thinking that in fact they got it from another source that Scholars
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have called Q and so you have Mark and you have q and these are independent sources but the Matthews a lot of stories that are just found in Matthew and Luke has a lot of stories just found in Luke so they dig them from Mark and Q so they got them
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from other sources so these are all independent streams of tradition um Mark q and what they call m Matthews sources and L Luke's sources and then you get the Gospel of John which has a
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bunch of stories not found in any of them those are also independent sources and then then they're questioned about other gospels from outside the New Testament like the Gospel of Thomas or the gospel of Peter are they getting all their stuff from the New Testament gospels no there's a lot of stuff and
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they're not in the New Testament gospel so so you do get independent sources of information and what you look for in these independent sources of information is the same kind of information you're not looking for word for word agreements
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because that would show borrowing but if you've got suppose you've got sources a bunch of sources where Jesus talks about the kingdom of God by using a parable about seeds you get that a lot in different sources
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well that's that's independent attestation that Jesus probably talked about the coming kingdom of God by using Parables about seeds it's it's not certain you know it's not certain but it's it makes it more probable the more
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sort of independent sources you have that say something like that I see thank you very much um so you mentioned earlier that the gospels date to several decades after Jesus death
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they don't always agree with each other and as some cases are a little bit light on the details what can we say with any kind of certainty about the life of Jesus
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um and so this is this is where the rubber really meets the road because what what Scholars do is the people who are really serious Scholars on this uh of whom there are many many who have spent their entire lives just on this
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question um uh smart smart people who can not just read the Greek of the New Testament but they usually understand Aramaic and uh they know Hebrew for the Old Testament and they know scholarship in French and German and Italian and
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they're like they spend their lives studying all this stuff like this is what they study and um what Scholars do is they look at a range of uh they basically go line by line through all of
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our sources uh the gospels in the New Testament gospels outside the news Testament the things that Paul says the things that mentioned in other uh in other sources of various kinds and they
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evaluate every every possible datum and they they do this in order to try and establish both the basic Contours of Jesus life what he what he stood for what he represented what he basically
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preached but also down to the details did he say this did he say that do you do this thing did he do that thing and they they they they apply a number of criteria that are uh comparable to what
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historians do for every field I mean anybody who's studying Thomas Jefferson does the same thing or Julius Caesar or Charlemagne you you take the sources and you apply a critical criteria to them
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and so one of the criteria is the one that we mentioned just now the the independent attestation but another one that's important for understanding historical Jesus is when you realize that the the people telling stories
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about Jesus are telling these stories precisely because they're trying to Proclaim something important about him they tend to be Christians if they say something that is really the kind of
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thing they'd want to preach anyway uh you're not quite sure if that goes back to Jesus or not because it may be somebody made this up in order to develop his own views um but if you've got something that
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actually man nobody would make that up about Jesus because that that doesn't make him look good uh or that that introduces a real problem for early Christians Christians would not have wanted to invent that one if you have something like that then you
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think yeah well okay that one's probably that probably is historical then because nobody would have made it up and so you have these various kinds of criteria that you would use for any historical figure that you use for Jesus and when you do that then the you know the
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question is what can you say about him there there are some things that I would say you know 99 of everyone who studies this intently would would agree on I mean
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basically I mean Jesus was From Galilee he was of the northern part of what we think of as Israel um came from a place small town named Nazareth he was uh lower class he was a
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um um uh he became a teacher he left home to engage in an itinerant preaching Ministry he had people who followed him around um who uh who who
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thought that he was a very important teacher possibly a prophet possibly a messiah the last week of his life he went to Jerusalem to Proclaim his message and he uh got on the wrong side
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of the law and offended um apparently offended Jewish authorities there and was was turned over to Roman authorities who who considered him a
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troublemaker and uh had him crucified for claiming to be the future king of the Jews um that much that much almost everybody would say and there's a lot more things that other people more that people would say but
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that that basic structure that basic structure is one that almost everybody would agree on knowledge that we don't have contemporary references to Jesus so even if most people were illiterate which I
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think is a well-agreed fact if there was an itinerant preacher wandering around the Wilderness causing unrest Would we not expect the Roman authorities to write about him or is this our modern sensibilities of Jesus
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is this much of an important person there must he must have been this much of an important person in the ancient yeah I think that is a modern I think that is a modern sensibility uh because
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it just kind of makes common sense to us that if somebody is a important figure they'll make the newspapers and the newspapers will be around for centuries and so it all makes sense to us it didn't work that way in the
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ancient world um we don't have we don't have contemporary records about most anyone in the ancient world I mean you just think for example who would who would have been
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um the most important um Jewish figure from um from the time let's say from the first century the the most important Jewish figure for us for the first century for
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historians is is the Jewish author Josephus um Josephus is a was a historian who's very involved in the Jewish Uprising in 66 to 70 that ended up to the destruction of the temple he was a
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leader of Jewish troops there he um he ended up being captured by the Romans and eventually was made a court historian by the Roman the Roman Emperor Vespasian and he wrote a bunch of books that are our best sources of information
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about first century Judaism and for the history of Judaism in the period he was tremendous he was a high upper class Elite Aristocrat very involved very important uh in the history of Israel at the time who is our most important
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author he's never mentioned in contemporary sources um and so he's uh so or you think about um you think about Pontius Pilate so Pontius Pilate would have been the most
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powerful figure in um in Jesus day um he um in in Judea he was the governor for 10 years between 26 and 36 CE now we do have a couple of sources from his
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time but they're not written sources per se we have one inscription that was discovered that refers to Pontius Pilate uh and um that was discovered in the 1960s which is a stone slab in caesarea
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and so it does mention his name and says he was a prefect and we do have some coins but if you talk about like were other people writing about him there's no written record of him in the first century at all and he was the most
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important figure in Judea at the time so the idea that you don't have writings about Jesus should not be used as an argument about anything because about whom do we have written records in from Israel at the
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time uh no one basically so um that complicates matters but Scholars of course are full of cognizant of it and so what Scholars do is they take the records that we do have that come from later which are similar to the records
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we have of of other people I mean about Pontius Pilate um he finished his rule in 36 of the Common Era and um we have some references to him uh later by a Jew
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living in Alexandria Egypt Philo uh who's writing about the same time as Paul so probably about 20 years or so after pilate's Rule and then by by Josephus and so once again it's decades later
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about this most important person so we do we deal with uh understanding pilate the way we deal with understanding Jesus we look at our sources we consider their biases we see if they independently support one another and then we render a
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judgment about what what he probably said and did so far insofar as we can tell thank you very much I think that's a wonderful summary of how we use Ancient sources as best we can even though they might not be the sources that we would
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like if we could waver magic wand and just have whatever we needed well you know evangelicals get upset with me Evangelical Scholars get upset with me sometimes because they say look what would you want you know we've got these four gospels and we've got you know what
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do you want and I I tell them in all seriousness well what we want are about a dozen sources written you know while Jesus was alive or right afterwards that are independent of each other that basically agree about what he said about
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what he did well that's completely unreasonable like you asked me what I wanted you didn't ask me what I like what was possible you asked me for my wish list I mean it's hard for us today
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to establish what leading politicians actually said I mean are you watching MSNBC or Fox News I mean which you know and and these are contemporary sources the next day and it's very difficult
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sometimes I mean if you have a recording that hell oops not always those it turns out but but uh but you know and so if you're dealing with Antiquity there's a lot more uncertainty and most historians
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live with the uncertainty when it comes to uh you know when it comes to understanding Seneca for example or uh or even Nero but uh but they don't like the uncertain but but Christians don't
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like the uncertainty when it comes to Jesus but we're in the same boat only we're actually in a more difficult boat with Jesus there's a lot we can say there's absolutely a lot we can say much more than the broad outline I just gave
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you that with relative certainty and Scholars can be evaluate you what's more certain what's less certain but um that kind of uncertainty just comes with the territory when you're dealing with the ancient world
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but thank you so much for answering my questions we have some news I think we spoke about it a couple of weeks ago you have a new course um or webinar I can't remember which one
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and the live recording is April 15th can you tell us a bit about that uh right yeah April 15th uh so this uh this used to be uh sort of um D-Day tax
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day luckily it's on the weekend this time uh so uh but it's it's D-Day in another sense because it's it's talk we're the the courses the Le the lecture is going to be on the rapture
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the second coming of Jesus and so this is um The Rapture is this this idea that's been around an Evangelical Christian Circle since the 1830s not since Biblical times since the 1830s
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that Jesus is coming back to uh take take his followers out of the world before a seven year period of tribulation of horrible horrible suffering on Earth when the Antichrist arises and then all catastrophes break
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out the Jesus followers would be taken out of the world at the Rapture so they don't have to experience that and uh this is this has been um it's been around Evangelical circles since the 19th century but it really started
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taking off in the 1890s and today it's just common knowledge among Evangelical Christians that this is going to happen and a an amazing number of people in our world uh believe it's going to happen
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and that's going to happen soon uh and so my lecture is going to be about that about uh the the fear the fear among evangelicals since I was before I was in college but when I was in college the
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fear was you will be left behind you don't want to be left behind and so that's my that's the title of the lecture will you be left behind a history of the Rapture and so it's going to try to explain how the Bible you will
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not find the Rapture in the Bible even in the verses that everybody says refers to the Rapture I'm going to show the don't talk about a Rapture people didn't believe in a Rapture for the vast majority of the Christian church I'm going to explain where it came from and
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why it's not a Biblical concept and I have to say given the conversations you and I have had about uh Revelation I would not want to be left behind either if this was an actual thing that was going to happen
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um so the the webinar then is called will he be left behind a history of the Rapture uh you can sign up for the live recording which is happening on April 15th um and the cost of that is 14.95 even if
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you don't make it to the live recording you can still access the um the uploaded report recordings on Bart's website and you can learn more about that and sign up at www.barterman.com forward slash left
00:30:10
behind now we are going to have Bart's weekly update this is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr ehrman's book releases speaking
00:30:24
engagements hermanblog.org happenings and online course launches so but what do you have for us this week well you know I'm um since my my book on
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Armageddon came out uh you know a couple weeks ago and so I'm I'm still in the in the midst of doing uh doing a lot of podcast interviews and uh for this and I've had some I've had some some nice ones I did uh I did the Sam Harris
00:30:49
podcast and I did Fresh Air with Terry Gross uh which both of these are always great great fun because they're fantastic interviewers and now I still have a lot of those uh coming up and so just about every day I'm doing some kind
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of podcast or another and um it's uh it actually it's a great it's a great fun because you you get to talk about your book and uh and different people have different it's very interesting these different podcasts
00:31:14
because sometimes someone like Terry Gross will be all over it you know and she'll have she'll she'll she'll be right on target but but she's you know she's she's not a Christian obviously or a believer in this and other people are
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really great interviews are are Christians who are really into this you know and kind of know all about it and then sometimes you'll get really in interesting people who don't know anything about it and so they ask it's a different set of questions and so it's it's different every time and it's
00:31:40
really interesting and you never really quite know what to expect so yeah so uh yeah so I'm yeah I still have some of those things coming up and uh so that's all good that sounds like a lot of fun and also an awful lot of work
00:31:53
it's not much work because I don't have to prepare I wrote the book already well I'm glad that that you're enjoying it at least and we're going to go to uh questions from our listeners now
00:32:07
[Music] time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans if you'd like to submit a question for future segments
00:32:20
please visit barterman.com askbars thank you okay we have a nice selection of audience questions this week I'm just going to jump right in so we can get through as many as we can
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so question one suppose we only had the gospel of Mark as a narrative um a narrative first century gospel and Paul's references to having met Jesus brother were not preserved would historical Scholars be likely to
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conclude based on just Mark's gospel that Jesus is a mythical figure so he's a mythical figure probably not I mean I think if you have one lengthy biographical source for an
00:33:03
ancient person that is far better than we have for any other ancient person and there's nothing particularly that would that would um cause suspicion that the person's
00:33:16
been made up in in this one account you you would historians would think that you know these Miracles that are being narrated or the account of the Resurrection are probably not historical but they almost certainly would conclude
00:33:29
there really was this person and they would try to figure out what it was that's that's what we do with just about every other source I mean you know we have you know when you have an a single basically a single account of apollonius of Tiana
00:33:41
uh people don't think somebody just made him up they think that he existed and that you can say some things about him based on this one source and so no I don't think I don't think people would consider Jesus to be a myth if we had
00:33:53
only one source thank you what do you think about John P Mayer's hypothesis in a marginal Jew volume two that the deadline statements such as Mark 13 30 this generation shall not pass away
00:34:07
until these things take place do not stem from the historical Jesus but rather come from the early Christian Community um John Myers multi-volume work on the historical Jesus is a major major work
00:34:22
by a very serious caller uh he's he was a Roman Catholic priest he died recently but he's a very very fine historical scholar he and I disagree on a number of
00:34:35
things and I think it's I think that Jesus himself did predict that the uh the end was coming within his own generation this is it's not just in you
00:34:46
know Mark 13 30. it is the um it's the constant Motif you get in his preaching about the coming end and the thing that is striking is that um that we have evidence that a similar thing was
00:34:59
preached by other apocalyptic Jews in his day it was it was preached uh appears to have been preached by John the Baptist his predecessor it was certainly preached by the Apostle Paul who who came after him it's in the
00:35:14
synoptic gospels as I said it's a belief of the synoptic Cosmos it appears to be the belief of the earliest Christians and so it's attested in the kinds of circles he ran around in before his ministry and it's attested by his
00:35:26
followers after his ministry and his ministries what connects the two connects his predecessors with his followers and so it would be very strange if he didn't predict it himself because everybody else around him was
00:35:37
and that can be documented so I don't I think a lot of a lot of Christians simply don't want to say look Jesus could not have said that because you know it didn't happen but historians don't worry about that kind of thing about whether a prediction comes true
00:35:51
they want to know whether somebody predicted it or not excellent thank you next question did the historical Jesus have delusions of grandeur in thinking that he would be made King of the New Kingdom or does
00:36:03
this conviction somehow come from a place of compassion notwithstanding how difficult it is to discern historical figures motivations is it still possible that Jesus was a decent person in light of his inflated claims about himself
00:36:17
um I'm not sure how many inflated claims Jesus made about himself people do think in terms of the Gospel of John where Jesus you know says things like I am the father are one you know or before
00:36:30
Abraham was I am and he he makes very exalted claims about himself and John that he does not make in Matthew Mark and Luke in Matthew Mark and Luke um if you just take our earliest gospel
00:36:42
Mark Jesus doesn't say much at all about himself he said he does say that he's going to go to Jerusalem and be rejected by the scribes and elders and be crew and be executed and then raised from the dead but it's not clear that's what the
00:36:54
historical Jesus said in fact we should have an episode on this I don't think Jesus was predicting his death at all uh I don't think he anticipated dying but this is where the idea of grandeur comes
00:37:06
in because I do think that Jesus imagined that he was going to be the one who was appointed to be the ruler of the coming Kingdom he believed the kingdom was going to come within this generation that a Heavenly uh figure was going to
00:37:19
come and judgment again against the Earth and was going to re-establish Israel as a sovereign state and that Jesus would be made the king that's that's what Jesus meant I think when he
00:37:31
suggested or maybe even told his disciples that he he was the Messiah so is that a vision of grandeur I suppose it is but I don't think that we can use our psychological categories from today
00:37:42
to understand somebody two thousand years ago in a completely different historical context and ideological context Jesus was an apocalypticist like other apocalypticists who thought God was
00:37:56
going to intervene soon and destroy the powers of evil and that wasn't you know if you have people on the street corner today saying you know the end is near and you know that and predicting exactly what's going to happen you'd say yeah
00:38:09
okay that person's nuts but but you wouldn't say that about ancient apocalyptics thinkers and probably shouldn't say it about modern thinkers either they have they have their own ideologies um you know we all have ideologies that
00:38:21
are crazy in 200 years people are going to think that almost everything we think is crazy but it doesn't mean that we're crazy uh so I don't I don't you know I do think that Jesus had apocalyptic hopes and expectations I think they were
00:38:34
wrong I don't know whether they had visions of grandeur because there's no way for me whether you know like he was kind of a little bit extreme there's no way for me to do a psycho psychoanalytical analysis and I don't
00:38:46
think it's the most most helpful way to try and do history is to try and psychoanalyze somebody rather than try to understand what they mean in their own context thank you um are there any non-canonical gospels
00:38:59
claiming to be written by Jesus and if not why not um so a couple things about Jesus writing in the New Testament Jesus is only said to be able to read once in the
00:39:12
New Testament in Luke chapter four it's the only place Jesus reads and so the question is was illiterate Jesus doesn't isn't said to write anything uh in in the gospels except for that non-uh original story of Jesus and
00:39:26
the woman taking an adultery where he writes on the ground but that that was added by a scribe it wasn't originally in the gospel in the gospels um there is one place where Jesus writes in the New Testament it's in Revelation
00:39:38
chapters two and three where but he doesn't put pen to Papyrus he dictates letters to John of Patmos who writes them that was considered writing in the ancient world and so the question is are
00:39:50
there any non-canonical uh accounts of Jesus writing there's only there's only one but there is one that nobody knows about except for Scholars there's a there's a correspondence with a king of
00:40:03
Odessa named abgar uh this is an apocryphal account quoted in eusebius and um so uh eusebius is a church historian from the 4th century and he
00:40:16
reports that the king of Odessa apgar was very ill and uh during Jesus life and he wrote Jesus a letter saying you know I'm very ill I understand that you can heal people would you please come
00:40:28
and heal me and Jesus Christ Jesus writes him a letter back and says Ah sorry uh you know basically the basic Alliance sorry I've got other things in my hands I gotta go get crucified you know so he's he's got to go be executed
00:40:40
so he can't come sorry but after I die I'll send I'll send one of my followers and and then you have the account of of um of Thomas actually going to Odessa and healing the king and converting the
00:40:52
entire city so that's the only writing we have from Jesus hands why don't we have gospels written by Jesus um I think um the the gospels that we're in circulation were attributed to his
00:41:04
followers uh and it was just kind of thought that they're they're telling the accounts there's no reason to make up something about Jesus writing something it'd be interesting if we did find something like that but you know we
00:41:16
don't have it yet thank you and our last question for today would you consider the Book of Ezekiel an early example of an apocalypse or Dante alighieri's Divine Comedy a late Revival of the genre in other words do either or both
00:41:30
of these Works share a substantive continuity with the Book of Revelation um I'd say kind of um so um Ezekiel is not exactly an apocalyptic
00:41:42
text although you might consider it as a text that's that could be used by later apocalypticists this is gonna be I don't want to get too deeply into the weeds here um but apocalyptic text generally are
00:41:56
um are texts that are using high level uh symbolism in Visions uh in order to explain the realities of Earth that are that can't be explained otherwise by by
00:42:08
simple means Ezekiel is kind of like that you get these Visions uh in Ezekiel a very very bizarre visions that are of equal uh weirdness to what you get in Revelation and other places and the Book of Revelation of course used the author
00:42:21
of Revelation used Ezekiel but Ezekiel doesn't have the idea that apocalypses tend to have that you get these these powers of Good and Evil that are in combat with each other Ezekiel is still
00:42:33
very much in the Israelite addition that God is sovereign and his heart he's mysterious but he he doesn't have like a devil that he's fighting or powers of evil God is causing the punishment
00:42:45
against the Israelites and if Israelites will repent God will return return them to his favor um apocalyptic texts tend to emphasize not that God's punishing his people but the forces of evil are punishing his
00:42:58
people um the first place you get that in the Old Testament something like that apocalyptic view is in the Book of Daniel chapter 7 through 12 the last book of the of the Hebrew Bible to be
00:43:10
written Dante Dante in a sense um so the thing with Dante is that he just in terms of form Dante is describing a journey uh a journey a
00:43:22
guided tour of of uh The Inferno and of purgatory and the and the Blessed Realms um and so that idea of a journey uh to heaven and hell is found in early
00:43:36
Christian Traditions my recent book Journeys to heaven and hell is about this about the early Christian forerunners of Dante The Book of Revelation is kind of like that but not quite the the one that
00:43:49
starts really kicking in is The Apocalypse of Peter uh in the second century and then you get an apocalypse of Paul and you get you get various Journey narratives where somebody sees the Realms of the dead and describes
00:44:02
them as a motivation for how people ought to live now and so that's what my book is about and trying to situate those Journeys in Christianity in light of Greek Roman and uh Jewish similar
00:44:15
texts going back to Homer's Odyssey and and the needs Virgil zeneid and then going up into other Christian other texts so Dante's more in that line Scholars call those kinds of texts
00:44:29
catabesis texts catabesis means going down and so Odysseus goes down into Hades and it's you go into the end of the other world and Dante's more in that line than directly in the line of of
00:44:42
apocalypses thank you so much and before we finish for the week would you mind just summarizing what we talked about and where people could find more if they're interested in this topic so there are um
00:44:56
there are questions about how do we know what Jesus really said and did very deep and probing questions that Scholars have long asked uh historians who work on the historical Jesus almost almost never
00:45:07
ever say well there's no such man there was a man uh and and we have better sources for Jesus than for almost anybody in his day but they're still highly problematic they're difficult to
00:45:21
establish the details of Jesus life and so Scholars work on this by applying various criteria to our surviving sources to try and understand uh the life of Jesus and the basic Contours are
00:45:35
agreed on by most by most Scholars with lots and lots of differences once you get beyond the very broad scope but we can certainly say that Jesus existed and that he was a Jew From Galilee who was a preacher who had disciples and ended up
00:45:49
making a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover feast where he was arrested and crucified that much is is pretty certain uh the details though are where it gets murky and you've written a book or two about
00:46:01
this haven't you yeah so my First Book for a popular audience uh was about this uh Jesus the apocalyptic prophet of the New Millennium um another book that is um takes a what I thought was a really pretty
00:46:14
interesting approach was called Jesus before the gospels where I I studied memory what what do we know about memory how does memory work do people remember things do they misremember things do they come up with false memories and how that affects the oral Traditions about
00:46:27
Jesus did everybody remember things accurately in the ancient world because people couldn't write or or is that just a modern myth that oral cultures pass on their Traditions accurately and I apply
00:46:39
that to the traditions of of Jesus to figure out what we can say he really said and did given the problems of memory and oral traditions wonderful so there's some reading recommendations for those of you in the
00:46:51
audience who are interested in finding out more thank you all so much for listening I hope you enjoyed the show if you did please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes remember also that you can use
00:47:03
the quote MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.butterman.com misquoting Jesus will be back in the next week but what are we talking about next time
00:47:15
will we have an act a pretty interesting uh corollary to to today's talk um one of the big issues came up in the Q a was Jesus predicting that the end
00:47:26
was coming in his own day uh or in his own generation and if so was Jesus a false prophet uh the end didn't come did he predict it was going to come if he predicted it and it didn't come doesn't that make him a false prophet good
00:47:40
question that's what we're going to try and figure out next time controversial stuff right there thank you everyone and goodbye this has been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart um we'll be back with a
00:47:57
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 Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining
00:48:11
us
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