Conversations With History - Bart D. Ehrman

[Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Bart Ehrman who is the gray distinguished professor of theological studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill his new book is God's problem how the Bible fails to answer our most important question why we suffer he is on the Berkeley campus as the 2008 Forester lecturer Bart welcome to Berkeley no thanks for having me here yes where we born and raised Lawrence Kansas aha the Midwest yes and looking back how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world well it was a fairly conservative time in place so I was born in the mid 50's and Lawrence is a university town so I think it is a little more progressive than a lot of the rest of Kansas but but basically it was a pretty conservative conservative upbringing and what sort of conversations do you have around the dinner table politics or religion the Bible yes yes yes and so yeah my parents were quite interested in and all of the above aha and when did you come to the conclusion that you might be interested in religion I get I guess you became born-again as you described in your book in high school yeah I I had a religious upbringing we attended an Episcopal Church when I was a child and we were active in the church but then when I was in high school I started attending a Youth for Christ club which was in the high school and looking back it seems a little strange to me that I needed to be born again I'm not sure what I was being born from since I'd already was a religious Episcopalian but I think the idea was that I needed to have a personal relationship with God through Christ and so that's what happened then when I was maybe 16 years old and I became a very committed and a hard-hitting evangelical Christian and and I gather that you're you see the origins of your commitment to scholarship during the same period I believe you say you you became ill in high school and tell us what happened as a result well uh yeah I I wasn't a brilliant scholar in high school I was fine I did I did well but I actually between my junior and senior years in high school I was playing baseball actually and I got I got sick I got hepatitis and it kept me from playing baseball and it kept me homebound and I decided to start working on the debate topic for that that year I was on the debate team and I threw myself into it the way I thrown myself into athletics before this and after a while I was just completely absorbed by the idea of books and reading and knowledge and research and so I traced my my scholar my becoming a scholar to that that moment in my life when I really became intensely involved with with a high school debate topic mm-hmm and then where did you do your undergraduate work so then since I had had this born-again experience I thought that to be a really committed Christian I needed to have Christian training and so my options were to be on the debate team at Kansas University or to go off to a Christian school I decided that I really wanted to be committed and so I went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago which was a three year degree program where I studied Bible and theology graduated from there and then I went to Wheaton College in Illinois which is Billy Graham's alma mater to finish out my my degree mm-hmm and then from there was on to to graduate school at Princeton at the seminary or the theological studies program there yeah that's right so when I was at Wheaton I took as my foreign language Greek I wanted to do that because the Bible is written in Greek the New Testament is written in Greek and and to understand it fully of course you need you need to be able to read it in the original language and so I took Rican in at Wheaton and it turned out I was pretty good at it and I decided I wanted to do my graduate work on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and as it turns out the leading expert of that in America taught at Princeton Theological Seminary a man named Bruce Metzger and he was at the end of his career and I wanted to study with him and so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary and I the only degree option for me there was a divinity degree so I was actually trained to be to be a minister but I was really more interested in the academic side of things and continued on then and did a PhD there in in the Greek New Testament and along the route of your education religious studies did you have any met mentors other than Metzger that that really influenced you that it's kind of narrowed the focus of where you wanted to go in your research I had a number and of people my Greek teacher in college you a fellow named Terry Hawthorne was very influential on me and I had several other professors at at Princeton seminary most of them were New Testament scholars and they were of varying degrees of theological persuasion some of them were rather conservative as as bruce metzger was others were on the other side of the theological spectrum and so I think I was exposed to a wide range of things there that otherwise prior to that I hadn't been exposed to mm-hmm and after you getting your degree you were actually a minister in a to a congregation in in Princeton New Jersey that's right I was the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church for a year it was when I had actually started my teaching I graduated from Princeton seminary with my PhD and I started teaching at Rutgers University and while I was while I was doing my teaching I was also for one year the pastor of this Baptists American Baptist Church it wasn't a conservative Southern Baptist Church it was a fairly liberal by this time I had become fairly liberal in my views of things and so I pastored this church for a year yeah so help us understand what a an academic committed to theological studies or a scholar of the literature of the Bible what is it exactly that you do Yeah right good question so I think I think roughly speaking very roughly speaking there are two kinds of people who do the sorts of things I do there are some people who are theologically oriented who teach in divinities and seminaries who are in the business of training people to be ministers and so those are the kinds of professors that I studied with people training ministers but also within there there's another type of scholar who works outside of a divinity context and that's where I started working at Rutgers University which is the State University of New Jersey it's a secular University and after teaching there I've been teaching since 1988 at at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill these are these in this context religion professors are teaching about religion rather than trying to affirm religion or trying to convey religion they're they're they're teaching about religion the way political scientists teach about political science they're they're not necessarily committed to a particular point of view and they're not trying to espouse the particular point of view or trying to evangelize anybody they're simply teaching about a teaching about religion in my case teaching about ancient Christianity and the New Testament is part of of ancient Christianity mm-hmm so if students were interested in going this route what can you tell them about the skills that are required to do this work obviously languages yeah languages but the Religious Studies department at Chapel Hill or anywhere else where the Religious Studies departments are usually parts of the humanities and so the kinds of skills are the same skills that students would have if they were studying classics or philosophy or history or any of the actually any of the humanities or social sciences religion is understood as an important historical and cultural phenomenon and it needs to be studied as other historical and cultural phenomena are studied and so that involves looking at the literature's of religions looking at practices of religions looking at philosophical undergirding zuv religions and so forth during this time when I was teaching I had I mean the part we've left out so far is that I moved away from my conservative religious beliefs and I was teaching not at somebody who was who was intent on converting people to some kind of religion I was actually just a historian of ancient religion mm-hmm and and this is a point I wanted to go to next which is as one looks at your story is recounted as kind of a sidebar and in your book God's problem you're on two trajectories basically that is you very early you you become a person of faith drawing on your your youthful enthusiasm and Whitman and strong beliefs and on that trajectory and then another trajectory which you've just described as that of you know evidence historical analysis a search for truth in in the secular way of doing these things at the university and I get the sense that at a certain point these two trajectories weren't going on a parallel course that they crossed in one way and you chose the other talk a little about that well no that's exactly right I I think I got in interested in pursuing the study of religion when I was a born-again Christian and was interested in knowing more about this faith and that drove me into scholarship because I wanted to learn more and more but the more I pursued scholarship the more I saw the scholarship at many points was at odds with my religious convictions and so over time I had to deal with this on the personal level which is it's quite unlike most most academics my wife is an expert in medieval English drama and this does not cut up against her personal beliefs in any way and so it's not a personally it's it's how she's chosen to pursue her academic life but in my case my academic life was originally driven by personal religious convictions and then came to to to create tension with my personal religious convictions and and something had to give and gave her my convictions and I struck me as I was reading your book that there's an element of of courage involved in your the path that you took and by that I mean you you must have believed and you must have believed strongly and then these two worlds clashed in a way and at a certain point you have to confront yourself in the mirror and say well you know I have to wonder about this yes well it's it as it turns out it's very difficult emotionally to move away from from a perspective religious perspective religious worldview that you've you've held held deeply I I see this with my own students in Chapel Hill where my students many of them come from conservative Baptist backgrounds and they're very committed to the Bible and their beliefs and when we when I teach the New Testament from a historical perspective bracketing the question of belief and they learn historical information about the New Testament it actually confronts them with things that they are they're not comfortable with and it does create a good deal of emotional turmoil that is fairly unusual in the world of academics I think but but if one is going to be a serious academic one needs to of course engage in the study and and fall you know things fall out as they do in in looking at your work and and the the textual analysis you do in the course of this book and some of your other books which I looked at it's very clear that comparative historical studies are very important as you look at these texts and I want to talk a little about that because it seems to be very important so you so you're looking at a work that we know as the Bible or some piece of it and and and what what are the questions one has to ask about that work when you're when you're trying to understand its multiple meanings yeah the study of the Bible especially the New Testament which is what I'm particularly expert in is a complicated affair because a lot of people read the New Testament and a lot of people have minions about the New Testament but scholarship on the New Testament tends to be different from the popular reading of the New Testament in part because just for the reason that you mentioned that to understand the New Testament when one really has to situate it in its own historical context when people read the New Testament today mainly the people read it are believers who simply assume that this is speaking to them in some way but the historians want to know what these books are as first century documents these are written by Christians in the first century who were living in a particular time in particular place with a particular set of assumptions about the world of its particular set of assumptions about how religion works and one needs to understand these these writings within their own historical context and once one does that once one engages with these books from a his point of view of history they start looking very different from the way that they look to just simple believers who were reading the text were for personal reasons is there a moment early in in these these two phases of your life where you know a light bulb went off or was this this transition to to full-time scholar from part-time evangelical was this the culmination of of years or was it was there some moment that came and Here I am not as much interested we'll talk a minute about how you watch suffering and how that it was a keeper but but really I'm interested in the the contrast between these two worlds yeah well there there was a there were a number of aha moments for me when I realized that there there's a tension here and one of the early ones I mean it sounds a little bit silly now looking back on it but I had done a I'd done a term paper on a for class I was taking in seminary one takes courses on it on a book of the New Testament be the entire course and so I was taking a book on the exegesis or the interpretation of the Gospel of Mark and one of the problems with the Gospels that historians have long noted is that there are a number of discrepancies among them and contradictions and they have different perspectives and and how does one grapple with this and I was dealing I wrote a term paper on a specific passage in the Gospel of Mark this is a it's it's a tiny little detail but there's this passage in mark where Jesus disciples are accused by the Pharisees of eating grain on the Sabbath and Jesus tries to defend them by saying that that these Pharisees should remember what happened when King David went into the temple and ate the showbread which is only supposed to be eaten by the priests and they did this when Abiathar was the high priest and so Jesus backs them down with this reference to the Hebrew Bible the problem is that when you actually read the Hebrew Bible passage about this and in the book of Samuel it's not I'll be off are the high priest who is raining at the time it's it's his father ahem alack and so I wrote this 35 page paper trying to explain how it was that even though Mark said it was I'll be afar that was the high priest in fact what he meant was that it was a hem alack in other words I was trying to reconcile a contradiction and I spent 35 pages of detailed interpretation dealing with the Greek text and the Grammatik the grant grammatical problems of the Greek text in order to argue this point and at the end of this paper my professor who is a very pious Christian man simply wrote a comment where he said maybe Mark made a mistake I said and it just blew open the whole thing for me I realized I'd gone to all this effort to try and show that in fact there's not a contradiction here but it's just much simpler to say it's a mistake and once once that happened I started realizing that in fact there are a lot of mistakes in the Bible contradictions discrepancies different points of view different authors have different things that they have to say about fundamental issues about who Jesus is who God is what salvation is and so that the Bible is not a unified monolith in fact it's a book that has lots of different reference points of view represented in it and and this is an important point because the you're dealing with a problem of the human author I'm not talking about Jesus now but obviously you know the disciples who as you just said make mistakes but it's also the these these works come to us after translations and and and so on that that add another layer of mixed meanings yes absolutely the it's very my older view that the Bible is the inspired Word of God with no errors in it came under fire for for just this reason we don't have we don't have the originals of any of the copies of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible either what we have are copies that were made centuries later in most cases by scribes some of whom weren't very good and these copies that we have all have changes in them this is this is what my earlier book on misquoting Jesus was about is that we have thousands of copies and these thousands of copies have hundreds of thousands of differences in them and I got to a point where it no longer made sense for me to say that God had inspired the words of this text because we don't have the words of this text and so what would be the point of even saying God has inspired them we don't have them and so this was another another sort of moment for me when I realized that in fact this older belief of mine simply wasn't credible now an important theme in your book is your own experience in addressing the question of human suffering was also a catalyst for this transition to you know just being a scholar in essence but but at the same time you continue to be I guess a humanitarian or somebody focused on you know the problems of the world and finding your your commitment to to faith as not giving you the answers as you work through the text talk a little about that because you're really it's a very human sense of not just your suffering but but the problem of suffering which which leads to changes in your thinking that's right when I was pastoring this church in Jerzy was when I was moving away in many ways from my Christian faith and one of the things that happened in those years was that I was teaching Rutgers and was asked to teach a class at Rutgers called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions it was a class that was on the books and they needed somebody to teach you they asked me to teach it and I thought it'd be an interesting class to teach because I think a lot of the authors of the Bible are wrapped up with just this question why is there suffering and so I taught this class at Rutgers and it got me thinking deeply about the very problem of suffering and and why they're suffering and I realized in the course of teaching this class that the different biblical authors have different answers to why they're suffering that a lot of these answers are not answers people would have today and a lot of these answers are at odds with one another and this drove me deeper into trying to understand how we can explain this world that we live in with so much pain and misery in it if there is as the Bible says a good and all-powerful God who's in charge of it if if there is a God who's in control of this world why is there massive starvation why are there hurricanes why are there tsunamis why are there earthquakes why are there why are there genocides why is there a holocaust I mean all of these things became very pressing issues for me as I started thinking more and more about the world and and the relationship to some kind of true God ultimate God and and when you were a minister you you mentored and nurtured a Cambodian family and you talked about that in the book tell us a little about that because that was kind of a personal way that this hit you yeah the is actually right after I stopped being the pastor of this church in New Jersey I decided that I wanted to be involved in some some kind of social social work and I hooked up with the lutheran Social Services and they they had me tutor a family a Cambodian family in English as a second language and so every week I would go over to this family's apartment in in Trenton New Jersey the fellas name was Marseilles noon and his wife Sufi and we we would spend an hour to working on English and as I worked with them over the weeks and months it became clear they had gone through horrible suffering themselves they had been in Cambodia during the purge of the Khmer Rouge and had lived in pnom pen and had been driven out of the city with everyone else when they depopulated the cities in Cambodia and had been put on slave in slave labor camps and as I talked with them more I realized just the horrors they had gone through very much like the movie The Killing Fields and they had escaped finally they Marseille had tracked down his wife and children and they escaped under cover of night over the mountains - into Thailand and had been put into a refugee camp and then had been brought to the United States by the lutheran Social Services and and this you you were struggling with comprehending how they could have gone through this I guess these experiences I in Cambodia well there was horrible experiences and this is a case where a good deal of the suffering is simply caused by humans I mean mo Pot's regime was was awful and so on and of course our bombing of Cambodia had helped was one of the factors to help create that regime it's what it's what started the whole thing and and so there were there were a number of factors leading into it including American policy and Vietnam to begin with but but then the question was uh what I mean on a deeper level you can explain why on a political level this happens but on a deeper level as somebody who was still a person of faith I had to ask myself why does this why does this sort of thing happen and how does one explain this if if one believes that there's a God who answers prayer for example and what is the evidence of that exactly in Cambodia I'd say there's virtually no evidence of it and this is what began making me challenge my previous faith in a and a good and all-powerful God and and this becomes the goal of your book which which you conceived of 30 years or so back but but only now have written and so give us an understanding of how you set out with this problem in mind to to do the research that you do yeah so well I taught this class at Rutgers and I thought it was I thought it was an interesting topic about how different biblical authors deal with suffering you know the biggest problem I had at Rutgers actually was convincing my 19 and 20 year old New Jersey middle class white students that there was a problem there was suffering yeah and suffering the suffering existed then there was a problem of it and so this was during it was actually during one of the Ethiopian famines and I resorted to doing things like bringing in pictures from the newspaper of women starving to death with children on the breast starving to death and and pointing to these pictures and saying look this is a problem and so I think the students got the idea by the end of the semester but then when the term ended I thought I'd really like to write about this about how different biblical authors struggle with it but then I thought you know I'm only 30 years old I'm not really old enough to write about suffering I need to live a while longer and so a couple years ago after I'd written a bunch of other books on other topics I thought you know I'd like to go back to that that question of suffering and then I thought no you're too young to write the book but then I realized that when I'm 80 I'm going to say I'm too young to write the book and so I thought well I'll just I'll just go ahead and do it and so over these intervening years I've continued to think about it and to read about it and and so I decided to devote some serious research time into how the Bible authors deal with this problem and then and that's the my book as the result of that so so let's talk about this and let's take one answer of the Bible at a time and see what we can draw out of you about you're the way you study problems in addition to explicate the you know the bible has to say so the first item that goes back in the bible to the beginning of the the Bible the Old Testament what was the answer there what what what will we told in that work about why we suffer well one of the oldest answers that you get in the Bible and an answer that pervades much of the Hebrew Bible and and it's found in the New Testament as well is the answer that you find in the early Hebrew prophets and it doesn't really matter which prophet you read whether it's Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Hosea Joel Amos all of these prophets basically have the same view the question they're dealing with is why is it that Israel the people of God suffer and the solution in the prophets is that the reason the people of God suffer is because they have violated God's will they've broken the Torah the law and God is punishing them God is punishing them to get them to repent so they'll return to him and if they return to him then things will be fine in the suffering will abate and so you find there's a page after page after page of these prophets so that the basic answer they give is that suffering comes as a punishment for sin mm-hmm and is there one give us one story that is an example of this that that really makes the point which is repeated again and again well it starts off it's not just the prophets it's the entire historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible I mean the the Bible begins with Adam and Eve being told not to eat the fruit in the in the garden they eat the fruit and they're they're punished as a result they're kicked out of the garden Adam now has to work by the and get his bread by the sweat of his brow Eve now when she bears children will experience terrible pain this is all these are curses put on them by God because they disobeyed and as the narrative goes on this theme keeps getting repeated that the the entire world eventually all of the human race is wicked and so decides to punish them by sending a flood and so he kills everybody on earth except for Noah and his close family and and it goes from there you can read this narrative throughout the entire Hebrew Bible it's the the sequences that people sin it leads to punishment from God if it leads to repentance good enough if not then more punishment comes mm-hmm and and as we will move to the second solution in the Bible but the question arises as you move from solution to solution is it that the previous solution or the one that has dominated are the one that has come first has proven inadequate is is that what's going on here in your mind as a scholar that's part of it for some of some of the subsequent solutions come about precisely because the earlier solutions don't seem to work I mean there's the problem with saying that suffering comes as a penalty for sin is that you can't explain why the righteous suffer you would expect under the prophetic scenario that the people suffering all the time would be the wicked and the righteous would be prosperous but it obviously doesn't work that way and so other solutions have to be devised in order to to explain that there there are other solutions that are probably independent of one another there are a lot of smart people in ancient Israel and among early Christians and they had lots of different views and they weren't all just reacting to one another but this kind of progressive ideas certainly generated a number of the number of the solutions that you get in the Bible and and the second solution is is what well so well there's not it's it's not sequence one two three yeah right I'm good doing the sequence of your book okay yeah but but here it's we have to find another explanation and maybe it's it's it's what man does to man yeah well the prophets actually realized this that that not all suffering comes because of of God punishing people the reason God punishes people is because people are doing bad things to other people and so there's implicit in that of course the understanding that'll that a lot of evil happens simply because people people are wicked or they be behave in a wicked way this is the closest thing that you get in the Bible to what is now among Christians anyway the prominent explanation the prominent explanation among Christians is that the reason they're suffering in the world is because is because people have free will God has given people free will if he hadn't given them free will they would be programmed like robots simply to do what God had asked them to do but since they have free will they have the freedom not only to love God but also the hate they have the freedom not only to do good but also to do evil and so necessarily there is suffering in the world because because of the existence of free will and so the Bible doesn't quite go at it in those philosophical terms but it certainly understands that human beings can do nasty things to other human beings and that's that's one of the reasons there's so much suffering as you're looking at these answers and you pointed out that you know there were bright people in these religious communities who were thinking about these issues but but what other things should we look at you as a historian you know in in terms of their social milieu the historical forces at work one of the one of the things that comes up again and again is this was all happening in areas of the world that would be being conquered by one empire after another yeah well it's not not an accident that the biblical authors are so taken up with suffering I mean because of they're just precisely because of their historical situation Israel of course is located at a place that was a very desirable place for anybody wanting to have claimed to be a world empire so it's situated roughly I mean on the Fertile Crescent between Babylon and Assyria over to the east and Egypt to the to the southwest and anybody who wants to control that whole area has to control the the land that Israel claimed and so Israel continually on top of regular natural disasters that everybody in the ancient world had famine and drought and pestilence and so forth Israel had the problem of constantly being conquered by other countries and so in the eighth century BCE is conquered by the Assyrians in the 6th century by the Babylonians later by the Persians later by the Romans and the Greeks the Romans and so it goes and these prophets in fact were responding precisely to these situations and saying the reason Assyria has overthrown you is because you've sinned if you haven't sinned it wouldn't have happened but then then some people looked around and noticed that the righteous people in Israel suffered just as much from from the Assyrians as the wicked did and so they have to have some other explanation and and the third alternative here is suffering as Redemption which becomes very important in the New Testament it does and it's it becomes probably the key motif in the New Testaments understanding of suffering but it's found already in the Hebrew Bible as well the story of Joseph you've made the story of Joseph in the in the book of Genesis Joseph is sold as by his brothers as a slave and ends up in Egypt as a slave to a household and so he's and this is not a great life he's eventually thrown in prison for being falsely accused of rape and very bad things are happening to him but the way the story works is that God is working behind the scenes all along the way so that at the at the end Joseph is elevated to a position of power in the in the government of Egypt and he's able to bring salvation to his his family that starving to death back in Palestine and they they come to Egypt and he's able to provide them with what they need and so they are saved from a dire famine because of Joseph's suffering and directly and so so suffering can sometimes have a silver lining where sometimes suffering actually brings salvation of some sort that's the view that gets picked up of course in the New Testament where Jesus himself suffers for the sake of salvation and in so in that view salvation is the result of directly result of suffering mm-hmm and and then we move well not sequentially but but another alternative here is that God is all power and and and we have to accept that and you find this in job job is a very interesting book and of course you know any any book that talks about suffering in the Bible has to talk about joke what what people frequently don't understand about job I'd say most readers of job don't understand is that is what scholars have recognized for a very long time which is that job actually has two different authors with two different books that have been put together into one book and so the book people are familiar with is the beginning in the end of the story where you have job was a very righteous man and because he's so righteous he has thousands of cattle and thousands of sheep he has great families seven sons three daughters and and he's got a terrific life and the the Satan the sort of the devil's advocate up in heaven tells God that the only reason job is righteous is because he he's getting everything out of it and and God and Satan in effect have a bet that the Satan can get job to curse God and the Satan does is worse it doesn't happen job doesn't curse God he's a patient suffer even though everything is taken away from him as camels as sheep is his possessions his children are killed everything is taken away but he still doesn't curse God and so then God rewards him he rewards him by giving him back twice as much of everything he had before so you get twice my sheep camel servants he gets his tent gets ten children back and dies a happy old man so in this view of suffering and job suffering comes as a test of faith will you remain faithful even if things aren't good and if you do then you'll get rewarded that's a powerful story I find it offensive actually in part what I find especially offensive of this is this idea that job could be given back ten other children as if the murder of ten children you know that that can be made all right by the substitution of ten additional children I find that completely offensive but that's one of the views of job this narrative at the beginning of the end well what people don't realize is that the middle part of job is written by somebody else it's not written as a story it's written as a poem as a series of poems in which job and his three friends oh call Franz have dialogues about what about why job is suffering and the friends take the profits point of view the job is suffering because he's done things wicked and God's punishing him and Joanne says he's not wick wicked he's innocent he hasn't done anything wrong and after Chapter after Chapter of them going back and forth Jobe finally demands that God appeared to him so that he can state his case and show that he doesn't deserve this and God appears out of the whirlwind but instead of explaining job why he suffered you know Joe was actually a bet that I had with Satan or it was a no it was a test to see how you'd be strong but you've passed the test or instead of giving some explanation what God does is the overwhelms job with his power and he begins by saying where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth and he he starts in on joke telling him at that he's almighty and Jove as a mere peon and basically he squashes Jobe in the in the dust and Joe ends this poetry by saying I repent in dust and ashes wellyou've repents he didn't do anything wrong but since God is almighty and Jobe is a mere mortal he has no right to question the Almighty about why he's suffering so that's that's the answer the poetry it's interesting here because the because of the textual analysis you're doing in the work of your scholarship you you actually unravel layers of subtlety and complexity here which which is interesting I just comment yeah well I think I think to understand Jobe without that kind of unraveling of its different parts Joe doesn't make any sense but I think I think when you look at it in this way that you actually have two different authors whose books have been spliced together that and you realize that in fact the patient Jobe of the beginning and end isn't the impatient job of the poetry and that the view of suffering at the beginning and isn't the view of the middle of the book it actually then makes better sense now ecclesiastics and the vision there is is the one that you see most to relate to yeah I do I think the book of ecclesiastes is maybe under red it's a terrific little book it claims to be written by Solomon the wisest man ever to have lived but in fact it was written hundreds of years later scholars where linguistic experts in Hebrew can can date books by on the basis of the style of the writing it's pretty clear this is a later book somebody claiming to be Solomon who wasn't the point of the book can be found at the very beginning where the author says vanity of vanities all is vanity the word vanity is a Hebrew word Hevel which means it's something like the mist that's around for a little while and then burns off and it disappears so it means something that's transient temporary impermanent and that's what all of life is this world goes on and on and on nothing ever changes there's nothing new Under the Sun but we're here just for a little while and so what does one do with that well the book of Ecclesiastes looks around and sees there's no justice and he looks around and sees we're not here for long and his conclusion is we should eat and drink and enjoy our toil and enjoy our spouse he believes that you should grab the simple pleasures in life for as long as you can because this life is all you have there's no afterlife this isn't a dress rehearsal for something else it's not a dry run this is it and so you should enjoy life for all it's worth while you can one of the solutions that you discuss has appeared to have greater relevance in our time because of the way it is appears to have intruded on American politics and here we're talking about the apocalyptic vision to solve this problem to explain suffering by the notion of apocalypse and and and your analysis points to the way that this appears in initially I in the old test in the book of Daniel talked a little about that and then help us understand what the key components were to this this answer yeah this answer becomes prominent in in in early Judaism near the end of the the Hebrew Bible period in the Book of Daniel which is the last of the books of the Hebrew I would have been right here the hundred 150 160 BCE so but this view becomes dominant in the New Testament and becomes the explanatory position of the New Testament this is this view is called apocalyptic because it is based on the the Greek word apocalypsis which means a revealing or an unveiling the idea is that God has revealed the heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities and so God explains why why this world is in the state it's in the apocalyptic sister reacting against the prophetic point of view the prophets thought that God was punishing people that's why they were suffering but the apocalyptic sis realized that righteous people are the ones who are suffering and so God must not be punishing them so why are they suffering and the apocalyptic escaped up with the idea that there are forces opposed to God that are creating suffering in the world this is the period in which Jewish thinkers came to think that God has a personal enemy the devil and the devil has demons who work his his nefarious ways here on earth and there they're all these cosmic forces that are creating havoc here on earth but God is ultimately going to establish his sovereignty over the world by destroying these forces of evil and setting up a good Kingdom on earth and so the apocalyptic sister God would once again reassert himself and good would emerge triumphant and God's kingdom would come to replace these wicked earthly kingdoms on earth now it when you when you're discussing the prophet Daniel it becomes very interesting that this his prophecies and descriptions come at a time when the the Greek influence and the efforts by the Greek Empire at that time - Helen eyes and to stop the the the traditional Jewish rituals prayers ways of behaving that follow the dictates of God that that this is how we get the the Maccabee revolt the which is celebrated by Jews today as the holiday of Hanukkah but so so Daniel is a man of his time who's dealing with with real historical forces the the efforts to colonize this Jewish community in Judea so and his language becomes very very metaphorical basically yeah that's right so this was an awful time period for people living in Israel the the monarch of Syria who was trying to Helen eyes trying to make Israel Greek basically outlawed the possibility of following Torah so that to the extent that women who had their their baby boy circumsized the the children would be would be murdered and hanged around their mother's necks and we we learned about this in some of these books of first first and second Maccabees for example and Daniel is responding to this he sees this not just as human evil bad things that humans do he sees it in a bigger cosmic context that in fact there are forces that are bigger than us that are at work in this world that are creating this kind of havoc and since these are cosmic forces they need to be dealt with on the cosmic level God Himself is going to intervene and destroy these forces of evil and and get rid of the evil kingdoms to set up his good kingdom on earth now and you suggest that when you look at what they're writing they it's very on the one hand very descriptive it's like four chapters have been written and these are the chapters where we are and what has happened to us and so on and that what the OP apocalyptic s-- are giving the people of the time is the next chapter looking ahead to the future so in a way they're they're kind of futurologists yes absolutely in fact they use a very interesting ploy Daniel is as we said it was probably written maybe 150 160 BCE but but the author claims to be Daniel living 400 years earlier under the Babylonian captivity and so this author pretending to be Daniel four hundred years earlier predicts what's going to happen in the future but as these predicting was happening in the future the real author of course is recounting what's already happened in the past so that the reader reads this and thinks that this ancient person was correct about all of his predictions but the author then goes on to predict what's going to happen next and the reader doesn't realize that now he's changed gears and is talking about what's going to happen in the future the author thinks the whole thing and the reader thinks the whole thing has been a prediction but this then provides validation for his predictions of this good kingdom that's going to come you know in a matter of months and so it provides hope for readers that in fact this has all been foreseen it's all been according to plan it's all under God's sovereignty and if we hold on for a little while longer it'll be okay why do you think that this these kinds of visions have taken on a new influence a new power and not just today but but in recent years in our culture and had such a political impact well it's a very good question you know there there continued to be people today who think that some kind of apocalyptic scenario like this is going to be played out when I was in college in the 1970s the the best-selling book in the English language this isn't widely known the best-selling book in the English language apart from the Bible was a book called the late great planet Earth by Hal Lindsey which was an apocalyptic scenario about what was going to happen when when war broke out in the Middle East and and the Soviet Union was going to march in and there's going to be a Confederate of European nations that came in to oppose the Soviets and a nuclear holocaust was going to happen and this was told as a prediction of what really was going to take place based on prophecies of the Bible the book of Daniel the book of Revelation and so forth this was an extremely popular book millions and millions of copies of this thing we're read and believed and and in our day the Left Behind series many people watching the show may not know the Left Behind series but it was extremely popular it sold more copies than than The Da Vinci Code and people believe that there's going to be this apocalyptic and I think it's a very interesting question why it is especially in American Christianity that it's believed that that this apocalyptic moment is going to happen now that people are so dissatisfied with this world that they think that is controlled by Satan and his henchmen and that God's going to do something about it it's a very interesting question what what exactly the appeal is and is it that in some ways I want to be careful here that that the the elements of this makes sense at one level and that if people are people of faith who are looking for explanations of what's going on in the world and they're not sort of grounded in political analysis or economic analysis that that one can see them making that leap and and when you when you get a work that purports to put everything together yes then you've got an audience yeah absolutely the these apocalyptic scenarios is painted in the in the Bible the New Testament for example they speak about awful natural disasters there'll be earthquakes and there'll be hurricanes and they'll be and they lay out all these disaster there'll be wars and rumors of wars and of course every generation has had earthquakes and hurricanes and tsunamis and wars and rumors of wars and so people who read the Bible literally think oh this is talking about our day and so this this happens if you go into a conservative evangelical Christian bookstore today you'll find shelf after shelf of prophecies coming fulfilled you know this this was going to happen Israel and this has happened you know that there there were supposed to be disasters and look what happened we have tsunamis we have Katrina etc and so things are being fulfilled in our own day given your background as a person who who brings historical analysis to these texts you seem to be in a unique position to address a very important question namely how do how are people of faith drawn to the present situation in a more progressive way so that their faith leads them to be concerned about the environment so that their faith leads them to the humanitarian concerns that you know or theme throughout your book and I'm curious does does your perch your portfolio as somebody who starts as a person of faith moves away from that but continues to study you know these issues as they appeared back in time and contributes to the interpretation of text what is there an answer there that you can help us see a way toward yeah you know I think one of the most hopeful signs on the religious scene is that that a large number of people on the religious right have taken up important social issues the reason this is a hopeful sign is because the apocalyptic scenario that I just painted out has often led to social complacency if you know if the end is coming and God's going to make right all that's wrong and God is going to resolve all of our problems then there's no point in us really sort of doing much about it now because we can't do much about it but but Christians of the far right have started realizing that in fact if God is going to do this in the future we ought to be doing something about it now and so you find people who are typically conservative Christians who would who are now is supporting things like like environmental issues global warming and concern for world poverty and and and issues like that which have traditionally been more liberal issues but they're being taken up by these conservative Christians because they realize that their theology in fact virtually requires them to be concerned about these things and so I see that actually as one of the more hopeful signs on the on the political scene right now in terms of in terms of what's going on with religious religious right how do you advise students to prepare for the future because presumably it's not just students who want to become ministers who are in your classes at the University of North Carolina but but also people of faith who want to deal you know with the problems of the world is there some advice that you would give them in terms of their studies in preparing to address those problems yeah you know the the the strange situation that one is in teaching religion in a secular institution is that you're teaching a subject about which you you I mean you you can't promote a particular aspect of your subject because of the separation of church and state so so I do get students who were planning on going on to ministry but by far the my students are simply people taking a class because they're interested in taking a class in the New Testament you know along with their classes in philosophy and history and classics or whatever but what I try to do in my classes is actually fairly basic I do try to get students to understand that you have these different perspectives in the Bible whether you're a person of faith or not the Bible contains a lot of different answers to a lot of different issues so that I'm trying to get them to see that you can't simply you know rest on the Bible the way that many of my students in North Carolina they think they can do but basically what I'm trying to do is to do what I think every University professor needs to which is to get students to think more and teaching Bible in the South is a perfect way to get this to happen because students come in with a vested commitment and interest in the subject matter unlike almost any other subject they're taking and if you disabuse them of many of their perspectives and their assumptions it forces them to think so that they have to come up with solutions themselves for things that otherwise they thought were going to be handed to them on a silver platter this makes them I think not only more more interesting and more able to deal with religious diversity but also with political diversity for example instead of simply accepting what their parents told them about about the political situation they're forced to think about it and so that's really kind of my strategy I think is to is to get students to reflect on big issues and to realize that there are multiple representatives to take whether religiously politically economically or anything else well on that note Bart I want to thank you very much for being here let me show our audience your book again which is actually been on the bestseller list God's problem and I want to thank you again okay well thank you and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history hahahaha Oh

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, berkeley, cal, history, religion, humanities, yt:quality=high

Id: Trt1ZWR5PqQ

Length: 57min 55sec (3475 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2008