Did Constantine Really Convert?

[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 about the New Testament the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity I'm your host Megan Lewis let's begin the conversion of emperor Constantine to Christianity is often pointed to as a turning point in the history of the religion but would Christianity have continued on its upward trajectory without this conversion was Constantine's conversion one of genuine religious conviction or was it motivated by something else and has his conversion been co-opted and overemphasized by later Christian authors but before we get to all of that but welcome back it's been a while uh did you find the Holy Grail last week in Cornwall uh well I looked hard and we decided the the Holy Grail was probably in one of these pubs that we we our local pub and so we spent a lot of time that makes a lot of sense Cornish clubs are very old so Holy Grail definitely they're old and they they serve you know they actually don't you know serve the kind of substance that Jesus was drinking at the Last Supper but they they have comparable Beverages and so it sounds like a productive research trip if nothing else well yeah I've seen about how to write that one off but I haven't quite come up with this strategy yet how are you so you you were on the Isle of Skye which is one of the great places on the on the planet so how was it and my mother-in-law Austin my answer was cold and rainy which actually for me is a positive especially coming from Ireland in the middle of the summer because here it is hot and humid and you can't really go outside without being hit by this like wall of moisture in the air so it was really really lovely to be somewhere where you could go outside and enjoy yourself and not feel like you're about to die from heat exhaust yeah well you know a lot of Brits that I know don't really do well in the heat my my wife is English and uh when it hits about 77 she starts complaining about how blistering heart it is but yeah so we're yeah so I'm still in England now and it's it's cool it's like Sweater Weather it's in the morning it's unbelievable so it's really a bit I mean so much of the night though a nation and the world is just just swamped with this horrible heat and uh so yeah I'm not not in England right now and uh very rarely they had a heat wave I think you were there for it they had it about a week and a half before we arrived but we missed it but no well the problem in England of course is there's no air conditioning in most places and so even when it if it does get to Upper 70s it actually does get very unpleasant inside because it's you know there's no uh so uh yeah so that's right but I'm glad you enjoyed Sky because it's um I've only been there once for I don't know a week or 10 days or something it I thought it was absolutely amazing no it's it's beautiful and the last time I was there I was a teenager on a family vacation and I have distinct memories of being absolutely unbearable um I did not want to be there I was not shy about making my feelings known and I actually apologized to my mother this trip um I thought how awful I was and she said he yes I know I was it must have been bad if you remember being bad usually we block those things out okay I'd like to I'd like to imagine you in that mode uh Megan because I've never seen it and that was a lot of teenage angst going on I think oh anyway we should we should get to to Constantine and his conversion to Christianity so before we get officially to Constantine I wanted to try and give a little bit of background for people we've talked a little around this topic before but what was the position of Christianity prior to his conversion was it Outlaws people persecuted or was it just really unpopular yeah well so it's you know people have wrong ideas about many people do because they they get their ideas either from popular culture or from uh or Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code or from movies or whatever so um it's a complicated situation Christianity um when it started out you know the in the early first century uh it was not never declared illegal it wasn't an illegal religion there weren't uh it wasn't against the law to be a Christian there were persecutions that sprang up over the over the decades here and there kind of locally there wasn't an official persecution of Christians by Romans until the middle of the third century and so uh that that's when Christianity was growing sufficiently that there were widespread recognition of widespread problems uh that we can go into in probably other episodes but but um at the end of at the so in the middle of the third Century there was a person there was a kind of a persecution where an emperor passed a law making it so that everybody had to perform sacrifices to the Pagan the traditional gods and Christians wouldn't do that and sometimes they were persecuted and sometimes even executed for it the major persecution though didn't happen until uh Constantine's own day at the um the beginning of the fourth Century in the year 303 uh the emperor Diocletian who is a very very important and skilled Emperor uh engaged in a persecution of Christians there were four edicts that were passed in the year 303 and basically Christians were there their scriptures were to be confiscated Bishops were to be imprisoned um it became it became illegal to be a Christian it was enforced differently in different parts of the Empire it's very important to understand the Roman Empire was very very big and they went from Britain to Iraq basically and it went up into Europe went into North Africa and so it's a massive area and it was very difficult to administer and there weren't like you know uh police forces National police forces or anything and so what would happen is an emperor would pass up you know or the senator there'd be some kind of ruling and they would go out to the local Governors and they would enforce it differently and so different regions were enforced differently so it wasn't that Christians everywhere were being persecuted especially in the west they weren't so much but during this persecution that lasted for 10 years that's called the Great persecution from 303 to 313 during that is when uh Constantine uh do we know about Constantine's religion prior to that conversion um Constantine's uh father was a one of the rulers of the Empire constantius their debates about constantius's own religion the uh there are Church historians ancient Church historians who claim that he he actually was a Christian but that seems unlikely it appears that he was a heinotheist a henotheist is somebody who who worships just one God while acknowledging a bunch of others but one is the one that you worship and it appears that uh constantius was that he he worshiped a god called Saul and wickedness which means the unconquered son so he worshiped the son God Constantine would have been raised Pagan he was born in the northern Balkans and um he worshiped the local thracian gods and he worshiped the Army Gods as he went into the military and he worshiped to the Civic gods and so so he was he was a pagan who worshiped many gods up until the time that he uh converted if Constantine was a hanotheist um I think he became one I think that he uh he became one the other debate has to do with his mother uh um Helena who was later a Christian and some people have thought that she was a Christian first and that she was influential on Constantine but I don't think the evidence bears that out I think that she was also she converted after Constantine but I think there comes a point at which Constantine follows in his Father's Footsteps and becomes a heintheist and that leads eventually then to his uh do we know what kind of exposure Constantine would have had to Christianity through his life prior to his conversion is it something that would have been um relatively common were people maybe around him Christian was he just aware of it in terms of these persecutions do we know anything about that yeah yeah it's it's a really good and important question I I have a book that deals with all of this the uh you know the the spread of Christianity and how it's taking over the Empire and how how it affected the Emperors and how the persecutions worked and all that the book called the Triumph of Christianity and in it I I kind of speculate a little bit about this because we don't have firm evidence but um it's interesting that when we have stories about Constantine's conversion it appears that he uh in the we'll we'll be talking about the vision or the visions that he had but it appears that when he first had his Visions connected with Christ he didn't understand what they were or who Christ was and so he had to get some spiritual advisors to give him some tips about like who who is this and what's it all about he certainly knew what Christianity was he was he was in diocletian's court as a uh as a administrator in diocletian's court when the persecution started so in 303 um and so he certainly was familiar with kind of basics of Christianity but not apparently not very many of of the details um and so the reason he would be familiar is because by the time by the early 4th century christianities probably got two or three million uh people who who are Christians in the Empire so maybe five percent of the empire um and so it's and it's growing very rapidly at that point and it's and so people are are becoming increasingly aware of it whereas for most of Christian history up to that point it was really a very minor thing that most people didn't deal with or maybe hadn't even heard of but by the time I caught some people at least people knew that there was this phenomenon they had some basic information about it and constantly so as a member of diocletian's Court then under a member of the military would he have participated in the suppression of Christianity during the Great persecution um yeah it's a good question we don't know anything about his particular involvement at the time the way the Empire worked is important to understand for all of this because the um as I said the Empire is huge and for most of its history there had been one Emperor and it's kind of hard to rule an Empire that wide if you're just one person especially when you don't have mass communication it's not like you can call them you know call Spain on the phone you know or have a zoom meeting with a ruler of golf and French you basically you've got you know horses carrying Messengers back and forth and it's really hard to rule and if there's a breakaway you know if there's a civil war you may not even hear about it for a few weeks that kind of thing so what Diocletian had done is he divided he he divided power so that there are four Emperors um two who were very senior and two were Junior to them and they each were located in a different part of the Empire and so this is called the tetrarchy the rule of the four and um Constantine's uh father was one of the four uh in in this rule uh and when Constantine was a younger man and his father constantius was in the west and he appears not to have not have not to have pursued the persecution very much at all um but constancine wasn't with them at the time he was serving with galarius one of the major Emperors in the East and galarius was a fervent persecutor and so it's hard to know what involvement Constantine himself had in that our records really don't give us very good so the rule of the four was designed dietitian designed it to try and um remove this hierarchical hierarchical hereditary system of the son of an emperor taking over and becoming the new emperor obviously as Constantine's father was an emperor himself this didn't work terribly well could you talk a little bit about that yeah it get yeah I'm not going to go into the weeds because it is really weedy down there but the basic idea is the Diocletian divides this thing up so you've got two senior people one in the East and one in the west and two Junior people under them and the idea it was a novel idea that the emperor should be chosen on the basis of their qualifications since their Merit because until then what happened was an emperor die and his his closest male relative usually his son or sometimes some other relative who doesn't have a son took over whether whether the person had any qualifications or abilities or not and that's why the world inherited people like Caligula you know because he's like he's the next in line and he was an awful you know and and Nero and and so the um so that had gone on for 300 years and diclation finally said enough this isn't working and so he it was supposed to be by Merit and then when the senior people died or left left office or whatever the junior people would move up is the idea and then other people would be appointed on Merit to be the junior people but when constantius became the senior guy in the west and he died he chose he he appointed his son to be his successor wait a second that's how it's not supposed to work but after that all hell broke out in the Empire and the Civil War and and such and so that so uh so that was the deal it was supposed to be on Merit it wasn't on Merit in the tetrarchy ended up basically biting the dust about a year after it was first the policy had first been a valiant effort by Diocletian there um moving away for a moment from the political situation what would conversion have meant to someone who came from a pagan background foreign well this is a really interesting question because most most people don't realize that in the ancient world broadly there wasn't really such a thing as conversion religious conversion because uh virtually everybody in the Empire you know like 93 or 95 of the empire was following traditional religions and they didn't even think of themselves as like following traditional religions they were just doing what everybody did just like they you know they live in a town and they follow the rules in the town and they'd keep the culture and keep the customs and part of the Customs was worshiping the gods and so they didn't realize they had like a religion uh and so but they all worshiped many gods and the different gods were worshiped in different ways and there was no sense that if you worship one God you were obliged to worship some other God too or that you shouldn't worship one God or another that you worshiped many gods so if you decided to worship a new God you know like if you're if you're worshiping Zeus and you decide now you know oh man Apollo hello I hear he does great things I'm going to worship him too you know and oh Athena yeah she's good and so so you you know you just you add them on you don't choose one over the other with when Christians came along they said no there's one God and you need to worship him through Christ and if you don't you're going to roast in Hell forever and most babies are saying what you I mean they had known about Jews worshiping one God but Jews weren't insistent that anybody else worshiped their God and Jews most Jews didn't believe in Heaven and Hell or anything like that it's just you know you've got your Gods we have our God let us worship Our God Christians came along and said there is one God and if you don't worship him you're going to be punished forever and so it was exclusivistic it was the only religion that was exclusivistic which means it was the only religion that you had to convert to and when you converted to it you had to give up everything else and that was boy yeah so that that you didn't find that in the Pagan really into the mechanics of conversion and why people might have decided to do that in uh a future episode going back to Constantine he claims that his conversion was the result of religious Visions he experienced while he was marching his Empire as well marching his army to Rome as part of the political turmoil you mentioned uh previously what sources do we have for these visions and how many Visions did he have good question and we wish we knew people Scholars who spent their lives studying this particular thing you know they're Scholars we spend who are experts on on Constantine and there are many many books and many studies about the life of constant and because he's so important not just for Christianity but for the history of of the West um but we have three sources uh from his time that describe his uh conversion and interestingly the three are all people who knew Constantine and claimed to be reporting his views but the three uh the three have many things in common but they are also differences among the three so much so that it's hard to figure out how to reconcile them so I'll just I'll go through them all if you'd like I mean the the first one um doesn't describe him becoming a Christian but it does describe him becoming a henotheist and there's questions about whether that's his conversion or not when he he had a he had a military battle against one of the other Emperors in the year 310 and he's up in what's Now France but Gaul and after after his after he won this battle he went to a temple of Apollo who was thought to be the god of the sun and Apollo appeared to him in a vision in the vision um Apollo appeared to him and handed him several wreaths and these each was supposed to represent 30 years of life so Apollo is promising him an extended very long Lifetime and also he learns in this Vision that he is the embodiment of Apollo on Earth he's young he's handsome he brings health to people and so uh and so well that was good and at that point according to this this speech that was given uh in honor of the event uh by some unknown speaker at that point Apollo at that point Constantine then became a worshiper of just one God and later people said then well that's you know that's when he started worshiping worshiping the god of the Christians what's that to the ounce of his Visions then if we've got that one about Apollo I did the other two explicitly mention um Jesus and and the Christian God yeah and so the the the second one I'll talk about it was was uh by a Church Father um a Christian Church Father a bishop uh of caesarea who was named uh eusebius who's very famous I mean he's well known to people familiar with early Christianity because he wrote the first history of Christianity from the days of Jesus for the first 300 years it's just called the church history of eusebius it's a very important book but he also wrote a biography of Constantine he knew Constantine probably not well but he he was in his presence some and he knew knew him and he wrote a biography of him and in in that book well you eusebius says is that um Constantine was uh was on on his march to uh to take back Rome Rome had been taken over by a usurper named Max Sanchez who claimed to be an emperor and so this tetraki the the rule of four people had become a rule of five people because maxentius had taken over the Italian Peninsula and Rome and um and so the other four wanted to get him out of there and so Constantine was marching to do battle in order to take out mcsentious so that could they they take out the usurper and according to eusebius while he was on his March he started thinking about you know how he was going to win this battle a couple of the other Emperors had tried to uh take take Rome and had failed miserably uh and now it's his turn to try it and he's thinking he's trying to figure out you know what kind of power can I use in order to to win this and um he's thinking in religious terms he's thinking you know it's clear that armies aren't enough I need Divine help here and the other two who tried it they were you know they were regular polytheists so the polytheist option doesn't seem to be working I need a god with a lot of power and so he's thinking about this that you know he needs to choose a Divine being that will enable him to win this battle and then according to eusebius Constantine had his vision it wasn't just Constantine his entire Army had a vision on the March they saw they saw a vision of the Sun and above the sun was a um was a cross-like uh image and on the cross were two on the top of the Cross were two letters the Greek letters Kai and row Kai looks like an X and row looks like a capital P and the the p goes through the X and it just happens that those are the two first letters of the name Christos Christ Cairo and um above it was a sign that said buy this conquer so that's the vision and Constantine had no idea what in the world was that and nobody else and so he calls in his advisors and he talks to them and then right then before The Battle Before the battle actually happens he has a um he has a vision of Christ Christ comes to him and shows him the same thing and he says you know that you need to take this into battle and so he so he wakes up he gets his advisors he they explain to him who Christ is and he he starts reading the Bible a bit and he tries to figure out what this is all about he realizes that Christ is the power of God on Earth and that if he worships Christ he can he can win the battle and he has an image of this Vision that he had uh the the cross with the Cairo on the top uh made it's called the labarum and it was a you know it was like a a standard that he would take into battle and according to Constantine that's why he won the battle at Rome and uh in fact every time he went on war he took the labarum and he won every war and it was at that point according to eusebius that he decided that Christ was the one and who who wrote the third account then all right now this is where it gets more complicated because the third account wasn't written a few decades after the event the way you see visas was eusebius was written like 30 years later in um in this account this was written a few years later by somebody who really knew Constantine uh he was a Christian Theologian uh named lactance lactance was actually appointed by Constantine to be the personal tutor to Constantine's eldest son and so he was in Constantine's household and he's writing you know a few years after the event and so presumably I mean he would he'd be the one you would trust but his but his his version is different from the other two um the other two are different from each other obviously but in according to lactances what happened was on the night before the battle the very night before the battle uh Constantine had a dream and in the dream um he was told he was shown the image of the Cairo uh and he was told that to put it on the shields of his soldiers and they would win the battle and he did woke up instructed all the soldiers to have their Cairo put on their Shields and they went into battle and they won and then and Constantine realized that Christ was the power that he needed and then he converted to Christ so those are the three accounts they obviously have things in common and then there are things I think we have these differing accounts is it that Constantine's story changed through his life or is the story being altered to suit the aims of the writers yeah I wish we knew uh I mean okay the film The answer is I'm not sure I mean I have ideas about it so the the deal is is that the uh Scholars have studied this phenomenon of conversion uh especially in the modern period and one of the interesting things that they have found and documented absolutely shown to be true is that when somebody converts years later when they talk about their conversion the things that have happened in the meantime affect how they remember the conversion event and they you know the so like it changes in their own head and so um it's absolutely possible that happened with constant it appears to happen quite commonly um so uh so there's that um and so the it's also possible that each each of these authors is trying to um portray it in light of something that he thinks is important the the person the the guy who gave the speech this the speech praising somebody is called a panageric in 310 so two years before the event the guy who gave the panageric says nothing about Christ it's about Apollo and you know the sun god uh and so you know this panagerist was a was a pagan well maybe he didn't maybe he didn't want a mentor Christ or maybe the old Christ thing wasn't even involved at that point eusebius writing later clearly has an agenda uh he wants to emphasize he wants to emphasize that Constantine's father was also a Christian and he wants to emphasize the very Christian aspect of all of this and and lactances is also a Christian who wants to stress that Christ is the power that overcomes everything so he has his own thing but there so there are you have these differences the other the other option these are not mutually exclusive but the other thing that a lot of people focus on is you know it can you get back to some historical event given the three differences is there is there enough here to reconstruct something that probably actually did happen that you can explain how you get these three versions Act of Constantine's conversion on the trajectory of the growth of Christianity and do you think that had he not converted that upward growth would would have maintained and we'd still be in the same position we are today yeah so I should correct a couple of very common misconceptions about Constantine's conversion the one that is uh most widespread uh misbred conceptions that immediately after Constantine converted or soon or sometime during his Reign he he made Christianity the official religion of Rome uh that that Constantine's the one who declared Christianity the state religion and that's just that's false that's not true and we know that that's not true that's not even debated among historians he did not do that oh we know that uh another another thing that is more widely believed or not more widely believed but it's widely believed that I think is really not true I think it's not true is is that Constantine is the reason Christianity became so widespread in the Roman Empire that it's his conversion that made the difference in Christianity I understand why people say that the reason I understand why they say it is because I used to say it I said it for years and years that's what you know that's what we all heard and so that's what we all said and it's just not true um because and the reason it's not true it has to do with the what you were referring to which is how Christianity had been growing over the years and I'm not going to get into the data here but if you actually look at the growth of Christianity if you plot it out as you would pop out plot out something like population growth um it's it's a it the growth rate is going at such at such a such a rate that even though there are only two or three million um people who are probably Christian when he converted or maybe four or five million when he converted at that rate of growth that it had been going on for decades and centuries there Christianity's growth had to slow after CR after Constantine converted it had to be slow because if it didn't slow by the end of the fourth Century at the rate it was going without Constantine there would have been more Christians uh in the Empire than there were people in the world and so the rate of growth is because so it's an exponential curve is basically what you'll explain so so Constantine's conversion was hugely important but it's not the reason Christianity took over if he hadn't converted probably you know another Emperor would have after him maybe one of his sons was an emperor next and or one after that because Christianity was just taken over unless somebody stopped it which is what Diocletian tried to do so the the thing that makes the thing that mainly makes Constantine's conversion uh important and hugely significant is that he made Christianity a legal religion soon after his conversion so that he ended the persecution people could fearlessly uh accept Christianity so that you know so they didn't have to worry about it but also people who were in among the elite started to convert and that that helped things because the elite were the ones who were funding local religions the rich folk and now the emperor converted they have no quality without converting so they didn't all convert it once I mean even in for the next in decades at the end of the fourth Century still half the empire was was pagan um by the end of the fourth Century but it's going out and it's I was just wondering given the size of the Empire and the difficulties you mentioned earlier with communication how aware would the general population of the Empire have been of Constantine's conversion yeah I always think of the Mali python uh Holy Grail since you brought it up earlier but you know these people in England in the Middle Ages start talking about like having a new new ruler or new king and the peasants don't even know they had a king so it's that kind of thing uh yeah we'll we'll know that what's going on with the emperor yeah it's hard it's hard to say sir I would say probably not in the rural areas in the urban areas maybe because one of the things Constantine did once he converted was he um not only made Christianity legal he started favoring it with Imperial favor which meant he dumped a ton of money uh into the church and he passed legislation that gave leaders of the churches special privileges and he he built huge he himself funded big basilicas in in uh in cities and so he clearly Christianity was being highly favored and I think people absolutely recognize that people who had any kind of connection with government um just on the local level would have seen that now Christianity is is starting to thrive because of all this and I suppose people just wandering around the streets if they lived in an urban area would probably have noticed oh look there's a new church um that wasn't there how strange yeah yeah we're not talking about you know the small Baptist Church on the corner we're talking about you know Cathedral type things and big big churches and the uh people being employed doing that uh people are uh you know the Bishops are starting to acquire Syria's power uh locally uh one of the one of the pieces of legislation that ends up getting passed is that Bishops leaders of the churches do not have to fulfill their civic obligations of Civic obligations for the elite in the Roman world were very onerous uh because if you were if you were made like a major uh figure in the local government you're expected to fund the local government you had to pay out and many people went bankrupt because they they had to pay for this as Elite in the Empire but the the law got passed that if you're an elite and you convert you become a bishop you don't have to do that whoa that's a nice deal yeah so people notice I'm sure the big question without a time machine it's really hard to say for sure I think but do you think that Constantine's conversion was genuine like there might be a sense that it was motivated by political reasons given that Christianity at the time was growing but not massively powerful that seems relatively unlikely to me but what's your sense foreign so this is the this is the big question and it's another one of those questions that people um people are most interested in you know was it genuine or not um I um I used to think that it was not genuine or that I questioned it whether it was genuine for for years again until I actually spent the time to do the research and most people today who do the research say yeah no it was genuine um the big question was raised in the 1850s there was a a German scholar who wrote a book uh called the age of Constantine whose name is Jacob Burkhart and he um he argued it was not genuine that uh that Constantine had um political motivations for um wanting to appear to be Christian and so when you know the the typical the typical claims about that are that Constantine wanted a uh and a unified empire and it was hugely fragmented at the time um and he wanted to have a unified empire and the value of Christianity was that it worshiped one God it said there's one way to Salvation Christ as the one son of God there is one Faith one Lord one baptism it's all about Oneness and so if everybody is is devoting themselves to a religion of Oneness it will facilitate social Oneness and so the idea is that he he converted just out of a power play because he would then become the in fact the leader of this unified church and would be and it'd all be won and so Burke argued that and he had evidence for it that he and he and others um so um you know so it isn't just kind of made up people have reasons for thinking but they're also reasons for not um but so what is some of the like the evidence that we have that maybe this was a political uh move on is patent and maybe some of the counterpoints there yeah yeah yeah well I mean the evidence for it sounds convincing until you hear the counter evidence I think but the the evidence that it was purely a political move is uh there there are several things one thing is when um when Constantine converted he he continued to use Pagan imagery on uh in his public propaganda so one of the ways Emperors use propaganda the most common ways the way they printed their coins and their coins would have a um have an image on them and Constantine's coins before 312 the year he converted had um an image of Saul and wiktus the the sun god uh and sometimes with him he and Saul and wicked us next to each other and after his conversion and continued to have this Pagan God on it well okay so it sounds like he's Pagan moreover they you know when public uh public information about Constantine didn't really talk about it being a Christian when there through the art of Constantine that's still in the Forum in Rome has an inscription on it that attributes his victory over Max Sanchez to Divine help but there's nothing about the Christian God on there and why wouldn't the Christian God be mentioned if that's really the point of this thing also people point out that he didn't act like a Christian I mean when he when he became emperor he had served under galerius I mentioned earlier the another senior Emperor who is who died but but Constantine had galarius's 10 year old son murdered assassinated and then later he assassin he had his own son uh assassinated in Constantine's own son and his former wife assassin his wife assassinated and so like what this is he ain't acting like a Christian and the the other thing then is that he didn't get baptized till 25 years later on his deathbed people say look it sure doesn't look like he's a Christian so those are the arguments the countermark there are good counter Arguments for all of those plus positive REMC really was a Christian what are some of the counter arguments then like why why would he keep using Pagan imagery off to his conversion well it's important to recognize what kind of pagan imagery it was because the Pagan imagery is of the unconquered Sun and one way to think about Paul about Constantine's conversion is that that early on he became a heinotheist not early on a couple years before as the panagist says in 310 he became a hemotheist worshiping Saul and witness and one way to understand is conversion in the year 312 is that he finally realized that's all Invictus the unconquered son was Christ Christ the the and so Christ is the unconquered son so I think what he ended up thinking isn't that he converted from the worship of like Apollo the unconquered son to Christ he came to realize that Christ himself was the unconquered son so he would use the imagery because that's as an image of Christ for him um the idea that the public celebration of his conversion or of him doesn't or his conquest of Rome doesn't say anything about the Christian God makes sense that inscription on the arch of Constantine he didn't write the inscription this is made by by Builders who are making this Arch who are not Christian and so they just say he's helped by a Divinity so that's not very convincing either in terms of him not acting like a Christian um yeah well most Christians I know sometimes don't act like Christians and if you you know you can't really Define Christians by whether somebody you know behaves well and just kind of speaking practically if if Constantine decided to rule his Empire by following the dictates of The Sermon on the Mount he wouldn't have lasted a week I mean it's just the reality of the situation um and so and in turn the deathbed conversion the deathbed baptism thing really means nothing a lot of a lot of Elites in the Roman Empire waited till their deathbed because they were convinced by these scriptural passages that say that if you if you sin badly after your conversion you lose your salvation like in the book of Hebrews chapter six and so they they just waited because they didn't want to you know botch their chances there's positive evidence that he really did convert he his writings and his the speeches he gave I mean they are crystal clear that that he I mean at least he says that he really is committed to Christ and it's not just that he says it he gets involved with Christian controversies in the Aryan controversy and in the fourth Century about whether the Christ is really God or not he was actively involved in these things so it's pretty clear he really was he really was a genuine conversion even if of course there were political issues connected with it but but yeah it was a generation so much part for sharing your knowledge on this subject we are going to take a brief break then we will be back with news of an upcoming event and finally some listeners questions this is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr ehrman's book releases speaking engagements hermanblog.org happenings and online course launches [Music] I'm Bart ehrmann and I'm excited to announce an unusual conference for anyone with the slightest interest in biblical studies the conference will be called new insights into the New Testament a Biblical conference for non-scholers it'll be held over two days on September 23rd and 24. this conference will be a two-day virtual event for people who are interested in biblical scholarship which are not themselves Scholars the conference will include 10 lectures each by a different established expert in the New Testament and each with a q a our theme will be the New Testament Gospels [Music] I don't know of any conference like this ever a series of lectures on the New Testament by established and acclaimed Scholars directed to non-experts each lecture will present current scholarly insights in accessible terms to the General Public for this event we've chosen 10 of the top scholars in the country all of whom are highly Adept at explaining the results of important and ongoing research in intriguing terms to the non-specialist the lecturers include internationally known experts in numerous subfields of New Testament studies here's who we'll have Amy Jill Levine is internationally known as a vibrant lecturer and an unusually astute scholar of Jesus and the gospels she's a professor of New Testament emerita at Vanderbilt Divinity School a Jewish scholar training Christian ministers Amy Jill is the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome's pontifical Biblical Institute the Allison is an Emeritus professor at Princeton Theological Seminary with numerous erudite Publications used widely by Scholars he's recognized everywhere as a leading Authority on the historical Jesus and the gospels Mark goodacre professor and chair of the Department of religion at Duke University Mark is internationally acknowledged as a leading expert on the synoptic gospels of Matthew Martin Luke our expert lectures include public figures well known to the general public interested in biblical studies candida Moss is a professor at the University of Birmingham she's a regular columnist for The Daily Beast and a prize-winning author on numerous topics related to the New Testament and early Christianity whose work has appeared in the New York Times The Washington Post the Atlantic Monthly Politico CNN and slate James Tabor has been a well-known public scholar for decades who's written numerous books and is a frequent consultant for such venues as the New York Times The Wall Street Journal Harper's Vanity Fair Der Spiegel the London times and all the major news networks among our presenters are Scholars who are challenging and transforming some of the orthodoxies of New Testament scholarship on the Gospels including Hugo Mendes my colleague in ancient Mediterranean religions at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill whose ongoing work is revolutionizing our understanding of the Gospel of John undermining the orthodoxies that most of us were trained in and most of us have taught for decades Robin Faith Walsh at the University of Miami has burst onto the academic scene with one of the most widely discussed works of biblical scholarship in years which is meant to disrupt our scholarly view of the authors of the gospels and their sources of information we'll have brilliant Scholars of New Testament manuscripts and Archeology who are highly active in both erudite scholarship and public discourse Jennifer knust professor at Duke University who has produced highly acclaimed books ranging from issues of sex and sexuality in early Christianity to the manuscript tradition of the New Testament and who's widely regarded as one of the leading textual critics in the world today and Jody Magnus a distinguished professor at UNC Chapel Hill who is arguably the best known and most prolific archaeologist of Israel in the days of Jesus with award-winning books on archaeological issues connected with ancient Judaism Jesus and the New Testament this is a pretty amazing lineup I'll also be giving a talk on a topic that I've never presented on before I'll be emceeing the event and running all the Q and A's for my colleagues as I said there's never been anything quite like this event in the history of biblical scholarship Scholars of this caliber delivering results of their new testament scholarship in understandable terms to an audience of non-specialists you would expect an event like this to charge something like five hundred dollars for in-person attendance and maybe 150 dollars for virtual but this remote conference will cost only 59.95 and if you sign up by August 26th the cost is just 49.95 in addition if you purchase a ticket for the conference whether or not you actually come you'll be given lifetime access to the recordings that will include the lectures the Q and A's and additional materials you'll have no travel costs no hotels no personal expenses just a series of lectures by true experts over two days each of them followed by a live q a delivered to you in the comfort of your home this is about as good as it can get this is going to be an amazing event I hope to see you there [Music] welcome back Bart so you are organizing a brand new conference it is going to be on September 23rd and 24th do you want to tell us a little bit about what it is uh yeah I wish this were my brainchild because uh it was uh uh Chris Huntley who uh who organizes uh our podcast and just about everything else in my professional life came up with this idea and oh my God so what would we would have a remote conference uh I've never heard of a conference like this ever uh we're going to have 10 speakers who are the top top some of the top level Scholars of the New Testament in the world um and they're going to be each of them giving a lecture for Lay people for non-scholers on issues connected with the gospels each one will be a different lecture and they um and there these are all people who know how to communicate to uh to people who are not Scholars about scholarship and that's what I'm all about is Scott presenting scholarship to non-scholars and these people are all really Adept at it and they're really and so we're gonna have these 10 things each one will have would be like a 50-minute lecture followed by a a q a after each one it'll take place over two days and um I I think it's going to be brilliant because anybody you know you you can sign up for it and you just do it at home you don't have to travel to you know to Los Los Angeles or something for it just like you'll have it and you'll have it as a course afterwards it sounds really fantastic and I have to say as someone who's been to multiple academic conferences the travel and finding a hotel and it's it's exhausting so I am personally looking forward to being able to watch this from my living room but then also watch it as and when I feel like if I can't catch all of them live I can come back and and have a look again later when I have time um so we we're going to talk very briefly about two of the presenters first up is uh candida Moss who is well the title of her talk is babbed reputation who was Jesus actual family which sounds fascinating yeah so you know I'm not privy to what the what she's actually going to say but I have a pretty good idea Canada Moss is really she's one of the most public figures uh in religious studies in the in the country she she writes a column for The Daily Beast and she's always writing for the Atlantic Monthly in the New York Times and the you know for slate I mean she she is a very uh very prominent figure and she's uh she's she's really bright she did her she did her undergraduate at Oxford and then she did her PhD at Yale and uh she's written these books that have made an impact on scholarship especially on Christian martyrdom and she deals with how Christian understood the body and disabilities and she's really wide-ranging but but a superb New Testament scholar but this this this talk she's going to be giving uh you know who really was Jesus family I mean there have been questions over the years I mean you have the stories of the Virgin birth but some people think well you know it sounds like there were some stories about an unusual birth what was unusual about it and who who really was the mother and who was really the father it becomes a bigger big issue uh and so um that'll be the kind of thing I imagine that and then after candida Hugo Mendes is going to be talking and then his top his talk is how to decipher the symbolism of the fourth gospel yeah so Hugo I've known for a number of years now because he's my colleague at UNC Chapel Hill and um I did we did a podcast so people can see him on one of our earlier podcasts where he we discuss whether the Gospel of John was forged Hugo's Hugo's he's got an interesting background he did a PhD in a Linguistics it wasn't even connected with religion he's like this expert in all these on Linguistics but he also knows all of these ancient languages it's kind of mind-boggling you know like he you know he does Armenian and Georgian and you know a bunch of Semitic languages European and Greek and Latin of course and all sorts of stuff but he went from that to be to go to Yale and get trained as a new testament scholar and he's a he's a really Pride New Testament scholar and he's he's writing a book on the Gospel of John um I'm I'll tell you I'm so impressed with his new testament scholarship that I have I've I was asked to do an eighth edition of my new testament textbook which is widely used throughout colleges and universities in in the country and I I just felt too overwhelmed with other things I asked Hugo to be my co-editor so my co-author so Hugo's co-edited my co-authored my my eighth edition so I really so um so his topic is the symbolism of the Gospel of John and man does he know that stuff he's he's taught taught me a lot about what's going on in the Gospel of John uh some in terms of the symbolism because there's a very symbolic metaphorical stuff going on there the name of that conference is new insights in the New Testament it will run from September 23rd to 24th and will include 10 fantastic Scholars each speaking for about 50 minutes on the subject of their choice the cost is 59.95 you can get 10 off using early bird registration which is available through Saturday August 26th you can learn more or sign up at www.ntconference.org and I think it sounds absolutely fascinating in a great easy way for people to learn a lot more about the New Testament okay we are now going to go to some listeners questions now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans if you'd like to submit a quest in for future segments please visit barterman.com askbars and we are back okay but are you ready for some listeners questions it's been a while yes okay I hope uh we hope I am let's get a selection I think uh so first question is there a chance that the Roman myth of Saturn returning to end the reign of Jupiter and Usher in a new golden age made Roman pagans more likely to understand the message of Christianity um yeah so it's it's hard to say we don't have anybody uh that I know of reporting that that had any influence on their conversion um uh there are a number of things about Christianity uh that would have been palatable to Roman sensibilities religious sensibilities that could have been one of them I mean the um uh the idea that with Christianity a new world is beginning uh people had ideas of new worlds beginning within their own religious traditions and they had they also had views of you know religious Divine men like Jesus and they're so there are enough similarities that uh that some people might have cordoned on for one reason or another we don't have any references to that particular belief being influential but linked to that um same question it says since the planet Saturn is linked with the Jewish people by Roman writers as early as tacitus is it possible that this astrological symbolism lent Credence to Christianity and philosophically oriented Pagan circles uh once again I'd say we don't know we do have um we do have Christians who convert who are philosophically oriented going back at least to uh to Justin uh in the middle of the second century and then going on up into the the third and fourth centuries um to my knowledge we don't have anybody mentioning uh this particular uh phenomenon as as having an influence on on their thinking about either uh the similarities of Christianity to Pagan is making the converter what is the origin of the ritual of baptism although there are antecedents in Jewish religion we now associate this ritual primarily with Christianity do we know how this transition took place and why it's usually thought that the transformation happened with Jesus predecessor John the Baptist John of course was was Jewish and within within Judaism for uh basically forever there had been uh cleansing rituals involving water um normally in Jewish cleansing rituals these are repeated events as needed and so people would go through a number of baptisms or a number not just being dunked underwater but being um you know using water for for purification it appears that John the Baptist um we don't know if he actually came up with it but he's the first we know of who did this maintained that a person needed to have a complete immersion in water as a uh to symbolize or to be connected with their repentance for the Forgiveness of sins so that um so that when God's kingdom arrived very soon they would be cleansed and ready to enter into it and so John's Ministry involve baptizing people for the coming Kingdom Jesus himself was baptized by John there's mixed information in the even in the New Testament about whether Jesus himself baptized followers um but certainly after his death it became the standard view with Christians that Jesus had been baptized we too are baptized in preparation for the kingdom the theology within Christianity took uh various turns very interesting turns so that Paul has a very different interpretation of baptism from uh the interpretation of John the Baptist and and the New Testament interpretations are all very different almost all all modern forms of baptism have different theologies than what you find in the New Testament but the practice itself appears to have originated return do you think the fact that dying and Rising deities are relatively common and normal in Pagan pantheons had an impact on how easily early Christianity took hold amongst the pagans particularly if we compare its poor reception amongst the Jews um I personally think that this idea that you will find all over the Internet and in many books and many people saying that that there were lots of pagan dying and Rising Gods I think that that's not true um I've written about this a a good bit and um what you get in paganism is you you never get a um you never get a Hume a Divine human who dies and comes back from the dead gets resurrected from the dead in Pagan religions you have um you have some beings who never actually die who come back and you have some people who die and never come back as back to Earth but maybe go up straight to heaven but the idea of a human Divine human dying and then physically being raised from the dead isn't present in uh Pagan religion and people you know people who know the materials will come up with well yeah what about this what about that but if you actually look at this at this at the um the primary sources themselves and read them carefully I'm not convinced it happens what you do have of course are people being taken up to heaven um at death uh and they die and they're taken up to heaven not that they become you know back on Earth as a human and that certainly I think affected Pagan's understandings of Jesus that he was the one who who he was one who was taken up to heaven and made a Divine being and so I think that played a huge role but I don't think that you know there were lots of gods who died and then came back on Earth as a god thank you one final question what are your thoughts on the ideas argued that Christianity wasn't intentionally created religion by the Roman Elite um that's a very modern idea I've never understood why anybody thinks it's true I know there are books about it by people who in fact don't the books the books about it are written by people who actually don't know much about the Roman world or Roman religion or early Christianity uh there is absolutely I would say that there is no way the Romans invented Christianity and if you just if you actually just know if you can read the sources the people are saying this thing you're just making stuff up and some of them have made significant money doing so but I'm um there's not as there's not a Roman historian in the world who thinks that or a ancient historian or a new testament's caller or anybody who's skilled in this stuff so I you know it would take a long time to explain it but the very the the way they work out these hypotheses just show they just haven't they either haven't read ancient Roman biographies or ancient Roman histories early uh Jewish histories early Christianity they just don't know the primary materials to think this is a possibility thank you but before we finish for the week would you mind summarizing what we talked about and maybe give them the name of your book where they can find out some more yeah well my book is called the Triumph of Christianity and it's about how Christianity spread from its Small Beginnings to becoming the the main becoming the religion of the West for centuries and centuries how that happened our discussion has been about a key moment in that which is the conversion of Constantine and Constantine is a major figure in Roman history quite apart from Christianity he was the second longest ruling Emperor who made the biggest changes of probably anybody since Caesar Augustus so he was really huge in terms of Roman social and political history but also because of his religious conversion in the year 312 we talked about what hap what led up to the conversion and what we know about the conversion and what kind of sources of information we have about the conference and whether it was really genuine or not and we do have sources we have sources by people who knew him who talk about it and it appears from everything we can see that it it that it was a genuine conversion but I've also argued that it's not that he did not make Christianity the state religion and his conversion is not what is the is the reason thank you so much for that and thank you for sharing your time and expert teeth audience thank you all for listening I hope you enjoyed the show if you did please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of bots courses over at www.barterman.com Miss quoting Jesus will be back next week but what are we talking about next time well next time we're talking about something that's kind of distantly related we're talking about where the Trinity came from and that's distantly related to Constantine because he called and officiated over a council the Council of nicaea that was instrumental in the later development of the full doctrine of the Trinity so we'll be talking about what the Trinity is most people don't even get that don't get that right because misinformation we'll talk about what the Trinity Doctrine is and where it came from wonderful thank you everybody and goodbye this has been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart um we'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on barterman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining us [Music]

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

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Length: 63min 17sec (3797 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023