Did Jesus’ Disciples Think He Was God?

[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 welcome back to misquoting Jesus this week we are talking about Jesus as God it's one of the central tenets of many denominations of modern Christianity and the Nicene Creed describes him as of one being with the father but just how old is this idea if you asked Jesus disciples if he was man or God would they have affirmed his divinity or accused you of blasphemy and if Jesus was divine then was he considered to be God made flesh a human with some Divine features or something else entirely as always Bart is here to shed some light on the subject and we're not going to be doing our weekly check-ins at the moment because we are filming in advance Bart is traveling in the UK and I'm on the Isle of Skye with my family and I definitely don't have internet where I am so yeah I do I have the Isle of Skye which is is beautiful and perfect so the next few episodes are just going to be us diving straight into it while we while future us enjoy uh family time but before we get into Jesus specifically I wanted to talk a little about the boundary between Mortals and the Divine worlds in the ancient world I feel it was a much more permeable membrane for ancient people than it probably is for us today you've got things like Divine kingship in ancient Egypt there's instances of human divinization in ancient Mesopotamia and then in ancient Greece of course you've got a whole host of figures who were born to Zeus and an immortal woman is this the kind of atmosphere that Jesus was living and preaching in right so uh you know I think I think the issue is that today most people who are in our in our culture think of the uh the separation between God and and humans as a a vast Chasm that cannot be breached I mean God is up there God is transcendent and it is he is um he has ways of communicating with us and dealing with us and we have ways of communicating with him but it is it's a vast casual that cannot be breached in Antiquity um throughout Antiquity uh in various cultures it wasn't understood that way at all from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Israel uh to Greece to Rome I mean it just um uh one way to think of it is as a kind of um that the Divine and human Realms are kind of on a more of on a Continuum and it's it's more like a kind of like a pyramid where you've got the the ultimate Divine being at the very top of this pyramid and below this Divine being our other kind of less powerful Divine beings but still an incredibly powerful Divine below them is another layer of divine beings they're not as powerful as those and you go on down until you get down to people who are so amazing they're not like us humans you know people who are so strong or so brilliant or so beautiful they just ain't human they're superhuman and then you get down to the rest of us peons and so so this so the idea though is that this is a um it's a kind of a Continuum and you certainly get that in Greek and Roman um in the Greek and Roman world that Jesus was born into where you you might have like a chief God like in Greece you might have Zeus but then under Zeus you might have the gods of Mount Olympus and then you've got Gods who are gods of the city and gods of you you have gods of forests and Meadows and streams you've got Gods of your household and then you've got some humans that are Divine like the emperor of Rome would be a Divine being um in some sense but it doesn't mean he's Zeus right he's much much more lower but he's above us and so that's the that's the kind of Continuum you get and you get it in Judaism as well this is the surprising thing to many people even within Judaism there's a Continuum because you you certainly have God Almighty the the god of Israel but below him there are archangels and they're angels and their seraphim and their cherubim and these are beings that are far superior and strength and everything else to humans and there are some humans who are superior to the rest of us so there's still a Continuum even the Judaism and that's that is the world Jesus was born into where most people in that world understood that the Divine realm was somewhat somewhat connected with our realm through through continuity so there's kind of gradations of divinity then for God specifically in terms of Greek and Roman Pagan religions how was it possible for someone to be both human and divine at the same time yeah it's um you know today when people think about Jesus they think that he he's he's Christians would say but of course these both human and divine and I think most non-christians understand that's what Christians say that he's both God and human and that seems uh unusual to us and most people think that's unique you don't have something like this and in fact you have it all over the place in Greek and Roman uh religions and in Greek and Roman myth where you have um you have various ways where a person can be both human and divine at the same time so there are several ways it can work one way is that in Greek and Roman mythology as in as in Jewish and Christian thinking sometimes a Divine being will become immortal for a time being for a period And so Zeus as you pointed out will come down in the shape of a of a human being because he's attracted to some woman and he wants to have sex with her and so he comes down as a mortal and you have Gods who come down to to talk to people and to advise people in human form and of course you get that in in Judaism as well throughout the Old Testament you have angels and things coming down as humans so one thing is a Divine being can become a human being temporarily sometimes a Divine being begets a mortal with a mortal woman so that the person who's born is has a Divine parent and a mortal parent and so someone like Hercules for example in the Roman tradition was born of of uh Jupiter and a woman uh and so he's kind of he's got both and there are other there are other instances that are even in some ways more interesting where you have a human being who's just a mortal being but because of some kind of spectacular characteristic either because the person is yeah totally powerful or totally wise and intelligent or or totally beautiful or totally whatever uh or totally righteous that they are uh at the end of their lives instead of going down to wherever one else goes when they die they go they go go up to live with the gods and they are made a Divine being and the interesting thing is you get that throughout throughout the world that Jesus was there and you it's not that everybody believed it but there's a widely held view in Greece Rome Israel I mean this was a held View how did then the Roman emperors play into this because they were it's my understanding they were divinised while still alive uh yeah how do I say eventually that's what happens is that even while alive they're considered to be a Divine being originally it didn't work that way uh the the idea that the emperor is divine starts out uh soon after the death of Julius Caesar who who was not an emperor he was he was uh he was a dictator of Rome proclaimed himself as a dictator for life and which meant he had Supreme rule which is why the many people in the Senate didn't appreciate that and then murdered him but then his his adopted son uh was a uh was a person named Octavius and he inherited Julius Caesar's uh power and wealth and he eventually became the first Roman emperor Caesar Augustus after Julius Caesar died Octavius proclaimed that he had been taken up to heaven to live with the gods and there happened to be a comet that was visible at the time in Rome and he declared that was Julius Caesar's um uh spirit going up to live with the gods and people people believed him this was a very convenient thing because he was uh Julius Caesar's adopted son which meant that if his father was God want to make him so he's the son of God this became a very useful uh tool for the Emperors to claim that they had Divine roots and so the initial idea was that when an Emperor died the Senate would vote and it didn't it wasn't glad that they were voting that he you know whether to decide who he was a God or another and whether whether to make him they weren't voting to make him a god they were deciding whether in fact he had been divinized or not and the good Emperors were understood to have been divinized and the The Wretched ones like Caligula yeah no he you ain't gonna be voted to be a God but eventually people like Caligula while living did want to be acknowledged as Divine beings um that obviously helps politically uh you're less likely to have a coup if you're trying to Stage a coup against a God and so um and so throughout the throughout the Roman Empire let me just finish this by saying throughout the Roman Empire the the um there there were um worship there was worship of the Emperor as a Divine being not as the ultimate Divine being not as one of the powerful Gods but as a Divine being on Earth this Emperor cult as it's called became very popular in parts of the Roman Empire and it was not started by the emperor and it wasn't started by the Senate local Aristocrats in the town say in the city would would petition for the right to have a temple uh to the emperor and if they were given that right they that was a status symbol for them and so the local Elites wanted to play off of this to develop their own power but among the masses appears to be have been widely believed that in fact this person is a is a Divine being who is here to to help us samples of Mortals in ancient Jewish thoughts Crossing that human Divine boundary yeah you've you you actually get it uh in all the directions that I mentioned you you certainly have um Divine beings who become human temporarily um there's some very interesting passages that I think people Overlook uh in the Hebrew Bible uh where this happens where it's actually God himself who appears to become human for a while and so one of the early ones is in um in Genesis chapter 18. uh Abraham is visited by three Heavenly visitants these Heavenly visitants are coming to see Abraham because they're off to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah the uh the place where lot his nephew lot is and they're paying Abraham a visit before they go off to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and we're told that there are three men and Abraham Cooks a meal for them and later we're told that two of them uh were angels and the other one is called the Lord and so it's God himself is with with these three is one of these three and so this is God who's taken on a human form to have a meal and to talk with Abraham um and so you get that sort of thing where a Divine being becomes a human being and you get this in a number of places including the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament and um uh and in um in Exodus chapter three the angel of the Lord appears to Moses uh then some then the passage continues it's actually the Lord himself and so there's this kind of continuity between the angel of the Lord and the Lord and they're both kind of the same thing in some way but other ways then could you either Mortals become God or God or Divine beings become mortal yeah and Judaism so I um you know it it's less it's less common for a Divine being to come down and have sex with a woman and create Offspring but that does happen actually it's it's another very strange passage in Genesis Genesis chapter 6 where um we're told this is right this is before the flood and we're told that the the sons of God looked down upon the daughters of men and saw that they were beautiful and so they came down and they cohabited with them and they had these offspring that are related to the Nephilim these Giants on the earth and that's that's in this this story that's why God had to destroy the Earth to get rid of these Giants but they're they're they're they're from a union of a Divine being an Angelic beings and Mortals and this this gets played out in later Jewish Apocrypha we have a book called first Enoch uh that's not in the Bible but it's it's a it was a very popular book that describes in detail who these uh Angelic beings were there were 200 of them it gives us their names and they come down and and they cohabit with these with these women uh in some ways the more the most interesting though thing that people would not expect normally is that within Judaism human beings are sometimes called uh Divine beings are made Divine beings this happens with Enoch um Enoch in the in the Old Testament is the great grandfather of of Noah and he was so righteous that he walked with God and so God took him as a very short little verse in Genesis 5 which was understood by by Jewish interpreters to mean that God took him up to heaven so that instead of just dying he he went up and we have we have a book like second Enoch the book of second Enoch where we're told that uh that Enoch when he was taken up to heaven became a glorious Angel and in fact more glorious than any of the other supernatural beings other other than God himself um but even more striking you have people you have you have uh Jewish Jewish writers who declare um that for example Moses uh Moses became a Divine being and is sometimes called God uh by Philo of Alexandria this Jewish philosopher calls Moses God he doesn't mean that he's God Almighty but he is he's been given all the attributes of God um and there are other figures too where you have this where there's there's a tradition that the rabbis hate it the rabbinic authors hated this idea but there are some traditions that that there's a second God there's somebody a god sitting on a throne next to the other God so they're two powers in heaven is how it's sometimes described within Judaism uh rabbis hated that and so they got rid of it so most people think Judaism can't have something like that but in fact they did in the days of Jesus how do profits fit into this kind of scheme of mortal Divine continuity are they are they human with some Divine characteristics are they kind of somewhere in the middle where do they land profits are normally understood to be a kind of a different category they're the ones that God has they're the human beings that God has inspired to speak his word they're rarely uh predicting that they're not predicting the distant future they are often predicting the imminent future but they they're mainly uh understood to be people who are speaking God's word that God has filled them with a spirit and they're speaking God's word to his people so it's a way of God communicating without himself becoming a human or without sending an angel down it's a just communicating through through a human being but the prophets are normally understood to be normally understood simply to be humans so you mentioned um just now that there are examples of there being two Gods on on the throne of Heaven are there any points where like Yahweh is considered to have an equal so is that what I'm asking really is there a precedent for the elevation of Jesus to like full status of godhood um yeah I think I think so I mean Moses as I said was is understood to be to have been exalted uh to such a state that he's he himself is called God and um you have you have you have a variety of divine figures in in Judaism it's so much so that's a little bit hard to categorize them all in kind of into just into discrete categories but the idea that God has another with him who is ruling with him uh goes back all goes back pretty far and before Jesus and it's for example it's one of the ways that some Jewish interpreters understood what happens in the Book of Genesis 1 when God creates humans God says let us create humans uh let us create man in our own image um and Jewish interpreter said well who's he talking to and it came to be thought that he's talking to the one who is uh his his co-creator um and so the idea that a human would be exalted to become Divine is found uh long before Jesus it's found in Greek texts kind of Roman texts and surprisingly it's found in in Jewish texts and so the idea that a human could become Divine is is is fairly standard in that world even for um maybe ancient Jews who learned more towards the monotheistic worldview would this still have been something they were familiar and comfortable with well some would be some were completely comfortable with it um and others were not part of the problem is that um let me let me let me give a little bit of background on this throughout most of the Hebrew Bible what we think of as monotheism was not really the dominant view monotheism is the belief that there's only one God that's it one God mono one God um throughout most of the Hebrew Bible though the idea is that there are other gods you're just not supposed to worship them um you're supposed to worship only Yahweh Yahweh is the god of Israel he's the one you have to work you can't worship other gods it wasn't the doctrine was not that there are no other gods it's that that you're not to worship them and you get this already in the Ten Commandments uh the first commandment depending how you number the Commandments but the first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me the Commandment is not you must believe there's only one God that's not the Commandment the Commandments you shall have no other gods before me which presupposes there are other gods that view is uh by Scholars is sometimes called henotheism it's h-e-n-o theism which is that not that there's only one God but there's only one God who is the superior Creator God that you're supposed to worship that there's only one for you is is that idea and that's that that's why we find out find through most of the Hebrew Bible but in some of the later writings like at the end of the book of Isaiah it's called second Isaiah which was written probably in the 6th Century uh BCE God declares uh Yahweh declares I alone am God there is no other uh to me alone shall every knee bow and every tongue shall confess there's no other God so there you start that that's a rare place where you find monotheism but the interesting thing is that even in the first century you have Jews who are claiming that some other being is the being that God is referring to that Enoch is the one to whom every Nisha bow and every tongue shall confess uh so Jews some Jews had had um restrict monotheists and others tried to figure out how you can have these other Divine beings and sometimes thought there were others who were at least sitting on the throne next to God thank you that's a much more I think complicated picture than I expect many people realize uh is going on uh so if we look then specifically at Jesus now we've got all of that kind of background knowledge do the gospels say anything about Jesus Divinity or maybe lack thereof uh yeah they do and and not just the gospels but throughout the New Testament the gospels are a little bit tricky because the gospels are narratives they're not uh statements of systematic theology and so you you don't have you know you don't have Matthew coming out and describing his doctrine of God you know he he's telling a story and so the it has to be read into it but it is interesting that in the New Testament you do get all three ways that I mentioned of humans and gods somehow being this you know a human being a Divine being you get all three ways I mean um you get you certainly get as I'm we'll talk more about this in a second but you certainly get the idea that Jesus starts out as a human who gets exalted to be a Divine being um you get with at the resurrection he's taken up into heaven and that's when he becomes a Divine being you find that in the New Testament you also find in the New Testament the idea that um that Jesus is born of the Union of a Divine being and a mortal being Luke chapter in Luke chapter 1 and 2 when you have a description of the Virgin birth the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says you're going to conceive a child and you know and she says how's that going to happen I've never had sex I'm not planning on having sex what do you mean I'm going to conceive a child and the angel Gabriel says the holy spirit will come upon you the power of the most high will overshadow you so the one born of you will be called holy the son of God is because she gets pregnant by the holy spirit that Jesus is the son of God it's a union of a mortal and a Divine being of some kind so you get that and then you also get the idea that Christ is a figure who came down from heaven he was a Divine being who became a human being you get that in the Gospel of John um in the beginning was the word the word was with God and the Word was God and the word became flesh and dwelt Among Us and so the word is a Divine being who becomes a human being and when it becomes a human being that's Jesus Christ for the Gospel of John so all all of these books do appear to think that Jesus in some sense is divine but they do it in different ways they have different ways of understanding how he could be divine he's either exalted or he's born or he's uh or he's brought down as a Divine being excellent that's a lot and again a lot of variety I think that like people probably aren't intensely familiar with if we look maybe like the gospels of Mark and John are there significant differences there on on Jesus divinity yeah I'd say pretty radical differences um Mark is our earliest gospel almost universally thought almost to be our first gospel written around the year 70s so you know 40 years after Jesus death in Mark's gospel Jesus hardly ever says anything about himself when he teaches he teaches about God and he teaches about the coming kingdom of God and he tells Parables about the coming kingdom of God and he the about the only things he says about himself is that he has to go to Jerusalem and be rejected and executed and then he'll be raised on the third day and Mark also Mark calls Jesus a number of things um the son of man the Son of God Messiah he calls him all sorts of things but he never calls him never comes out and calls him God um so that's Mark when you get to the Gospel of John you talk where Jesus hardly says anything about himself in John he gives extended discourses and his discourses are almost exclusively about who he is and in this case he he Jesus says that he he is a Divine being he is equal with god he has come down from the father and he's going to return to the father and he's the son of God but he's of equal status with God so he it's not he's not saying that he's Yahweh and he's not saying he's the god of Israel he's saying that he's a Divine being is equal with God um and that's how he's portrayed in the gospel itself he's called God uh in this gospel um and so it's a radical difference in both cases he's both he's Divine in some sense but it seems to be a very different sense where in John he just he's out there saying that he's God and that's what the author says about him so these those views probably represents quite a development from how Jesus may have been viewed within his own lifetime given how far removed they are chronologically speaking could we talk for a minute about the the pre-pauling Creeds that you find in Romans 1 3 4 and what that might tell us about the really early views of Jesus divinity um yeah so um it's hard to do this without getting into the weeds uh too much um but Romans is a letter written by Paul it's uh it's not the first letter he wrote he's probably the last letter he wrote that we have um and he's he's writing this letter to explain to the uh Roman Christians what his how what his preaching is about Christ because they suspect that maybe he's not on the up and up and he wants them to be on his side because he wants to use them as a mission base to go to to to further his mission um and so um he's writing to them and he introduces his gospel his uh his letter by summarizing his gospel which he says is the Gospel of Jesus Christ who was um the the the son of David according to the flesh but was the son of God in power according to the Holy Spirit at the resurrection of the Dead wait a second the resurrect what Jesus is the son of God at the resurrection and when you look at this closely when you read it very closely it looks like what Paul is doing is quoting a standard formulation of how earliest Christians understood Jesus um it would take a long time we could spend an entire episode on Romans chapter 1 verses three and four I one time wrote a 30-page paper on these two verses in graduate school and so there's a lot there and I was just scratching the surface but the basic idea is that Paul's quoting something they're familiar with so that it kind of calmed them down look I've got the basic view here that everybody else has Jesus was descended from David and so he was the he's the son of David he's the Earthly Messiah but he's also in some sense a Divine being because of the Resurrection The Holy Spirit made him made him the Son of God you think wait a second the Holy Spirit made him the Son of God what at the resurrection what but in fact you have this you have this teaching elsewhere in the New Testament explicitly one time he explicitly on Paul's lips in the book of Acts in Acts chapter 13 um Paul says that um that God made promises to the Jewish forefathers the ancestors and now he is fulfilling uh he's fulfilled them by raising Jesus from the dead and then he quotes the scripture to prove it as it is spoken in the second Psalm you are my son today I have begotten you wait at the resurrection yeah today I've begotten you so I'm not saying this is Paul's full theology because it's not but he is representing what were the earlier views among Christians that at the resurrection Jesus uh Jesus the Divine the the human Messiah was made into a Divine being God was rewarding him for his faithfulness by making him a Divinity and so that comes as a shock to people but that uh that I call that an exaltation christology which means uh Christ starts out as human but he's exalted to Divine status just as Enoch was and just as Moses was and just like the emperor just like romanulus the King was and the Emperors were he's an exalted being becomes an insulted being do we see a different idea of Jesus Divinity elsewhere in Paul or is this kind of consistent with what he says no the Striking thing is it's inconsistent with what he says which is why Scholars one of the reasons Scholars have thought this passage in Romans 1 verses 3 and 4 is not his own formulation it's not how he would have said it uh because but he wants to quote this so they'll be on his side about this thing his uh his own understanding of Christ is a little bit complicated because it appears to be a kind of a combination of both the idea that uh that a person can be human and divine by being a Divine being who comes down to earth for a while and also a human being who gets exalted to up to heaven you find this clearly in another passage that Scholars have long thought is Paul quoting something but this time it's pretty clear he holds to this one it's in Philippians chapter 2 verses 6 through uh six through eleven this is a a passage that Scholars have called the cross they sometimes call it the Christ hymn but it's not a hymn it's a poem some kind of poem so I call it the Christ poem and what it says is that um it's a fantastic passage it's one of it's one of it might be the most written about passage in the New Testament certainly the most written about passage in Paul by Scholars it says that cry it says Christ was in the form of God but he didn't regard equality with God something to be grasped after so he emptied himself and he became a human so he starts out in God's form so however you interpret that somehow he's he's formerly God he's in the form of God and then he becomes a human being and as a human being he's obedient to God and he suffers death even death on the cross so that's halfway through the poem and then Paul says therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that's above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord well wait a second so God highly exalted him gave him a name above every name so he was in the form of God to begin with and he became a human because he died God exalted him even more highly and he appears to have given him the name Lord the name of God in the Old Testament and that passage earlier when I quoted a second Isaiah and I said that God says I loan him God to me alone shall every tongue confess every knee shall bow that's what Paul's quoting he's saying that's going to happen to Jesus so now Jesus yeah well it's like now Jesus is the one you know who ever Jesus is being treated like Yahweh he's not Yahweh but he's being treated because God is exalted him that high so he starts out of a Divine being that comes down and then he's exalted even higher as the Divine being afterwards for Paul that's that's quite an understanding of Jesus that's really interesting and I love how diverse all of these these viewpoints are and how they're all represented um in the New Testament in something that I think a lot of people maybe think has a much more consistent View well and the interesting thing of course is people think that the consistent view it has is the view it doesn't have because this is people who have is like it's the Council of Nicea 300 years later is the view of the New Testament no they nobody that counts nobody in the New Testament you quoted the Council of nicaea earlier yeah the Christians in this period were not thinking that way this this was my my final question actually how do all of these different views of Jesus as Divine in some way differ to what a modern Christian might understand Jesus Divinity to be um so I'll uh I I have to answer it in two ways because what modern Christians tend to think at least almost every Christian I've ever known tends to think of have a view of Christ I mean committed Christians tend to have a view of Christ that is not the Orthodox view the view that they hammered out in early Christianity as the Orthodox view most people today I would say just simply understand that Jesus um Jesus is both God and human um and they most people have a kind of a fuzzy idea about it how it works but they do think that he was a pre-existent Divine being who was born through the Virgin Mary uh and then died for the sins of the world and then returned to his Heavenly realm and that he's somehow both human and divine um that that is the view that is an orthodox View and so far as so so far as it goes in early Christianity though they had to figure out how can he be both human and divine and I think what most people think today is that he's he's like 50 of each or something or he's like half and half um they my my sense is that most people today say that Jesus is human and divine but they really mean he's divine um if push comes to shove he's God and he's not really human he just he kind of seems human because you know people think that Jesus was you know he he was all-powerful he was all-knowing he could do anything he wanted on Earth well humans can't do that and they assume that you know Jesus could um you know Jesus could probably uh you know speak Swahili when he's a two-year two two month old you know because he's a human and he's God he could do that but so yeah so they think they kind of thing is 50 50 but it's really more Divine and the way it gets hammered out we'll probably have some some more episodes on this the way it ends up getting hammered out is that Jesus is fully God and fully man that does not mean 50 50. he means 100 100 he's 100 human and he's 100 divine and you say well yeah but that doesn't work that's right but that's the doctrine he can't be more one than the other he's both at the Incarnation he's completely human and completely Divine uh yeah so that's a view that the the New Testament authors were not uh deeply philosophical in their thinking in the kind of traditional Greek philosophical ways and they didn't have the philosophical categories to work that out especially the earliest followers of Jesus who don't even know Greek let alone Greek philosophy and you need deep philosophical categories to work out how you can have um one person with two Natures uh and and 100 of each nature in the one person these are these are categories that they just didn't have available to them yet well thank you very much that was really very interesting we're going to take a brief break and then we'll be right back we're skipping bus weekly update because he's off galavanting around uh the UK um but we'll be back with some listeners questions have you ever wondered where the New Testament gospels really came from were the books actually written by Matthew Mark Luke and John as everyone seems to say the answers to these questions may surprise you in fact what you discover May challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels if you're ready to learn the historical truth then you won't want to miss Bart ehrmann's free webinar did Matthew Mark Luke and John actually write Matthew Mark Luke and John in this 50-minute talk with q a you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the gospel's authorship such as why did early Christians say the gospels were written by Matthew Mark Luke and John if they're anonymous what's the best evidence that the gospels were written by the apostles were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books and last if the apostles did not write the gospels who did and where did they get their information don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels sign up now for free lifetime access to did Matthew Mark Luke and John actually write Matthew Mark Luke and John at barterman.com forward slash authors thank you 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 question for future segments please visit barterman.com askbars [Music] and we are back with some listeners questions thank you to everyone who sent questions in for Barts to answer we're just going to get going because we have some excellent ones this week uh did knowing Jesus name make it easier for pagans to convert to Christianity the questioner says that they were recently watching an interview with Karen Armstrong and she mentioned pagans knowing the name of their deities gave them a type of power over the deity and that the Jewish god purposefully withheld his name for this reason as pagans had a deity to pray directly to with a name in Jesus do you think this was a factor in converting pagans to Christianity as opposed maybe to conversing them to Judaism so I don't I'm not familiar familiar with what Karen Armstrong said she's obviously a very very fine thinker and a very important writer and so that the paraphrase of what she just said to this person was given um I wouldn't say is right and for one thing um God the Hebrew Bible God's name was known it just wasn't pronounced um and so uh he Jews knew the name Yahweh they just didn't say it and so um so there's that um I've so far as we know um almost all gods are named uh all Divine beings are named and Jesus name is simply his name Jesus it's just it was a common name uh in Antiquity and so there's nothing particularly special about it it's just that that was his name and so they did call Jesus God and of course they it helped to know his name to worship him there was there's there are instances in the Greek and Roman worlds uh where a God will be worshiped without having a name um sometimes though one kind of popular worship was a being that they just called the highest God because they didn't they thought he was Superior to every name um but in Jesus case yeah I mean they they could only worship the name but I don't think they there's no nothing to suggest that having the name helped convert anybody because all the gods had names virtually a question going off the back of that was it at all maybe not common but did it happen for pagans to convert to Judaism or because Judaism was very much an ancestral religion did that was that just not something that happened uh it did happen but I think what many people don't understand is that Judaism uh throughout history but especially in the period we're talking about now was not an Evangelistic religion uh Jews did believe that there was only uh the Yahweh was the only God they were going to worship and they had their own customs and culture and and rules and everything but they uh they weren't out trying to get converts I think a lot of Christians don't understand that I mean if you've got the right religion why wouldn't you convert to everybody most Jews didn't believe in an afterlife and this was their religion you can have your religion we have our religion uh and so it's more like you know so it's it was more of an ethnic thing and uh and it wasn't it wasn't exclusive that way uh so when Christians became missionary that was the unusual thing uh because Jews Jews were not uh even though people sometimes people say that they were they it does not appear that they were at all they would accept converts but often it was they would accept them reluctantly just like today I mean a lot of times a rabbi won't be too eager to convert somebody unless I'm in the really you gotta really want to I think okay thank you next question says in Mark like other gospels Jesus seems to be able to quote the Old Testament freely and they ask what's the best explanation for this and they that some options are given but the the sense that I'm getting is did Jesus actually have large passages from the Old Testament memorized or is this something that was likely inserted later by the writers of the Gospel uh yeah it's a really good question um I'd say ultimately it's impossible to answer we don't know um it seems unlikely that Jesus would have had access to uh to books or he could like memorize passages of the Hebrew Bible he certainly would have heard passages from the Hebrew Bible during synagogue worship services and maybe in other contexts the reality though is we don't know how much he quoted the Bible how extensively he quoted it when he did quote how long the quotation was whether he knew it where it was coming from how accurate he was we don't have any access to information like that most of the time in the gospels though he doesn't quote long passages in the gospel of Mark there's not really much in terms of he doesn't quote numerous verses you know Jesus doesn't the only place where he quotes an extended passage the only major place in the synoptic gospels probably in any of the gospels is in Luke chapter 4 where he quotes a long passage from Isaiah but the passage he's quoting from Isaiah he's in Luke 4 he's reading he's precisely not quoting it I don't know if that's a historical event I don't think I don't think Luke 4 is actually describing something that happened but I would say that Jesus was known to be familiar with important passages of the of the Hebrew Bible but there's not much evidence that he was quoting them verbatim uh for memory he may he may have been able to do that we I just what I'm saying is we don't know okay thank you since the New Testament did not contain verse or chapter divisions until the 15th century how did their introduction affect how people read and interpreted the texts um well chapters and verses came in at different times chapters came in earlier uh and uh in in the 12th century in the verses came in after uh the invention of printing in the 15th century so um uh right so how does one read it well the reality is most people couldn't read and so it wasn't an issue the reason you start putting in chapters and verses is to help with reference references so that if you're trying to describe where something is in the Gospel of Luke if you can say it's in chapter 10 verse 2 somebody can go right to it but if you say if you don't have that then you have to say it's after Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan but it's before he does this and then if people know the text well enough they can pretty much kind of Imagine where it is when you don't have that it's very it's very hard uh to track down a passage um when I when I was in graduate school we I was I was in interested in Greek manuscripts and we used to call it manuscripts just as an exercise a collating and manuscript is where you compare two manuscripts word for word in the same passage to see where the words differ the problem is these ancient manuscripts uh little manuscripts they don't have chapters and verses and we used to have Micro have to use microfilm and so we'd be I'd be in a microphone reader and I'm trying to look up John 14 right I've got this manuscript the entire gospels and I'm twirling the microphone okay where am I oh God that's that's still that's that's Mark something oh my God okay yeah then you go as they're like oh God you're going back and forth and you know if you don't have if you don't have a book of chapter verses that's just kind of how it is and so uh yeah so um so I think one advantage though one advantage of not having chapters and verses is we tend to think that when you go to the next chapter you're on to something else um but they weren't writing them in chapters and verses and so if you skip from first Thessalonians chapter four and you stop reading there and you don't continue to do first Thessalonians 5 because you're at the end of the chapter now you miss out what chapter four is talking about because you understand what it's talking about when you read chapter five but it wasn't chapter five it's just he just kept writing you see what I mean yeah no that that makes sense um question about the word faith in English when you talk about faith you're kind of presupposing um believe him something with no proof does the Greek word for Faith and early Christian understandings of Faith conform to how we would understand the word today or does it mean something different um I'd say in English that faith is a uh is a complicated word because it means a variety of things depending on the context you can uh you know Faith faithfulness being faithful uh it means um it has there's a general sense about it but it means something concrete if you're talking about say in a marital relationship being faithful or in Shakespeare when you talk about uh you know having faith Breaking Faith it has to do with like breaking a promise or something um but I think in English in English in Christian theology it's often thought about as having um believing something without proof that's that's mainly because of the book of Hebrews chapter 11 verse 1. uh the way it describes Faith um as the things uh hope for and uh Faith you know belief in things unseen uh and so the interesting thing is that in the New Testament there are various understandings of this term faith and it's often misunderstood especially with respect to the Apostle Paul for Paul faith is a very important thing um I guess I need to clarify this that the our verb believe and our noun Faith are the same root in in Greek so it's the same word so but we don't have we have the word you could do believe and believe but you can't do faith and like there's no verb and so uh so people tend to translate it the verb is believe and the noun is Faith and so you don't realize that's the same word um for Paul though Faith isn't just kind of something you can't prove Faith really isn't a uh intellectual Ascent for Paul faith is better understood as something more like Trust um where you trust something um and so you trust God to bring you salvation through Christ you trust Christ's death to be sufficient for salvation it's it's an attitudinal thing a relational thing not an intellectual thing uh when you get to Hebrews 11 it becomes an intellectual thing uh and so um so it's a complicated question it's really not not an easy one to answer it I will say though that faith in the Greek World generally this word faith pistus was understood to be kind of a secondary level of uh of um uh understanding something from the word knowledge interesting thank you very much and we have one final question before we wrap up the uh the question says that they are deeply committed to an historical critical approach towards the Bible but also understanding the texts without the translation the translators theological assumptions uh they're using a Greek scholar rudin's translation of the gospels and DB Hearts translation to try and get a more historical understanding of Mark's texts and its implications and they're asking what your opinion of Ruden excuse me what your opinion of region and hearts translations are in terms of historically accurately understanding the texts in an historically accurate manner well I haven't I haven't looked at I haven't you know studied those two translations so I don't have an opinion about them I'll say that it's impossible to avoid translator bias it's not that like it it's not like some have bias and some don't have bias every translator has biases so they have they have biases of their beliefs biases their philosophies biases of the World Views biases of their ethics biases of their understanding of language and how language Works um biases of how they interpret these texts you cannot translate a text without interpreting it it is a it's not humanly possible to do um even if you could you program a computer to translate you're programming the computer there's no way to avoid avoid the human element period um so the best thing to do if you don't learn Greek the best thing to do is learn Greek but if you don't learn Greek the best thing to do is to get a number of translations sometimes you can buy these Bibles that have multi-translation side by side and uh one way to do it is to read across the translations my everybody has their own perspectives on translations I the most popular translation into English is The New International Version which I like for its readability but I don't like because I think the but sometimes the biases get more in the way than others in my I mean everybody's biased but some really allow their biases to kind of to creep in more and I think the translators bias Creeps in more with the NIV I I especially like the new revised Standard Version because the committee that was doing it didn't have a single theological perspective the NIV translators all had to have a particular theological bet to be on the committee and the nrsv you have different people with different you know Faith commitments or no faith come in so what it wasn't as much of a problem but I think one good thing to do is just take a couple of translations and read them both and I don't know what you do when they disagree you go to the third I don't know I mean it's like learn Greek or ask Megan no email me and then I'll ask you on the episode if you're trying to get an historical understanding of the text is there a resource that can help with that yeah you know what I do with my students that I recommend every everybody who um who asked me this I what you really need is a good study Bible um with a good translation and again those will have biases in them but the one that I really like the best that I think is um I think it's the most useful is the Harper Collins Study Bible um it is done by a group of uh by a committee they're not they're different kinds of people who were on the committee of Jews you have Christians you have Protestants you have Catholics you have I mean it's it's not so it's not kind of towing a line it's really just trying to present scholarship that's done by Scholars whatever their particular views of things are and so of course there will be some kinds of biases but but the each book is introduced so the author the gives up to date scholarly understanding what when Mark was written who the author was where he lived what his themes are basic things like that then at the bottom of each page they'll have footnotes for difficult passages to explain what this word means in its contact or what this this sentence is probably taken to and taken to me and I think it's a very very helpful tool that everybody should have excellent I think I'm probably going to get one myself because I have several translations I have a few in Hebrew there's a Septuagint wandering around the house somewhere but a study Bible is not something we own um thank you for that before we finish for the week would you mind just summarizing what we spoke about um and if you have suggestions for resources that would be that would be great yeah so we were talking about um understandings of uh of Jesus as both Divine and human in earliest Christianity in the in the um uh in the New Testament especially and in it in its own historical context in its context there there were other instances of human beings who were also understood to be divine beings there are various ways that that could happen but you find these ideas throughout Greek Roman and and Jewish circles and the Christians also had this view specifically about Jesus and one big argument is that if you really want to understand what the Christians meant by calling Jesus both human and divine you have to understand what that would have meant in its own environment and so that's the reason for knowing all this other information one of the most striking things is that there were uh non-Christian Jews at the time who thought that there were there were beings human beings who had been elevated to a Divine status and so the idea that that happened to Jesus doesn't necessarily make him unique in that world it made him unique for Christians because the Christian said he's the one but others would have recognized would have recognized what all that meant and one of the very interesting questions is how does that develop without within Christianity how do do Christians always have the same view do they have different views over time does it develop and it absolutely developed I think um so I have a book on this called how Jesus became God um this is the a book that discusses many of the issues we talked about today and a lot lots of other issues um and there are other authors that you can look up who are good Scholars to deal with this uh uh one popular author is Larry Hurtado for example who has books on Jesus being a Divine being and how that works excellent thank you so much Bart it's been as always a delight audience thank you all for listening I hope you enjoyed the show if you did please subscribe to the podcast and make sure you don't miss future episodes remember also that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of bots courses over at www.boterman.com this question Jesus will be back next week but what are we going to be talking about yeah what is it a tenure and academic freedom uh next week we are um uh talking about something that is a little bit unusual for us we're going to be talking about the phenomenon within universities of uh tenure tenure for faculty members who's coming under increasing assault in some parts of the country now where universities are deciding to get rid of tenure for universities this is a very serious issue and it seriously impacts religious education and especially biblical education in the universities and so we're going to talk about how academic freedom and tenure are important for the kinds of things we're doing here on this podcast excellent thank you very much thank you all audience and goodbye [Music] there's been an episode of misquoting Jesus with bartum 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 bar turman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining us

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 94,910

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Id: jiTu-AOTvrM

Length: 57min 3sec (3423 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023