Did Jesus Even Claim to be God? Bart Ehrman Says No...

we don't have a consistent independent narrative what we have are independent narratives that contradict each other that are all written 40 50 60 years later by people living in a different part of the world who didn't know any eyewitnesses who aren't even speaking the same language I mean so what do historians do with sources like that they don't simply accept what they say because they happen to agree with their religious views I am firmly convinced that Jesus never talked about himself as God if you ask any Jew living in the first century you know you know you you think that person is a messiah you mean he's God they said what what do you mean no I said he's a messiah and so as I claim you know if you claim to be you know the Prime Minister your god what we don't have groups of people saying they saw Jesus we have individual writers we have late writers saying that groups of people saw him and that isn't the same thing foreign [Music] welcome to within reason my name is Alex O'Connor and I'm joined today by perhaps the world's most famous New Testament scholar Dr Bart ehrmann Dr Roman thank you for being here thanks for having me it's a it's a real pleasure to to sit down with you when thinking about what to spend this time talking about I was a bit struck by the by the breadth of your work and a little bit paralyzed in terms of choosing a conversation topic but I think that the majority of my listeners will know you in the context of your your critical scholarship and some of your debates that you've had with Christians about the nature of the New Testament and the nature of Jesus so I wanted to begin by asking in your view the figure of Jesus the most important figure in Christianity and if Christianity is true the most important figure in history what can we know about Jesus of Nazareth right okay so uh right this is the sound bite right what can we know so this is this has been uh this has been arguably the major problem one of the major problems of the study of of Christianity uh not just the New Testament um ever I mean the first one of the first one of the first people who um tried to start studying the New Testament from a critical point of view in other words not simply accepting it as a inspired word of God that is infallible but started examining it from a critical perspective was Hermann Samuel ramaras in his his book got published in the 1770s but it had to do with who was Jesus really and um he ended up arguing that Jesus was a a political Insurgent who wanted to overthrow the Roman Empire but this uh and this this view is you know reappeared over time raise the Aslan has that view and this in his book Zealot yes uh but it started the idea that in fact you can't just use these gospels as saying it as it is you've got to examine the gospels to see where they're accurate where they're inaccurate how do you know how do you know what's historical and so I would say that Scholars have huge a huge array a range of a range of opinions about this this question I would say that most Scholars would agree at least most critical Scholars would agree that Jesus at least you could say that Jesus was a a Jewish preacher Who Came From Galilee who um uh had was a was lower class who started an itinerant Ministry of some kind where he was he believed that he had come to understand the the truth of God and so he saw himself as some kind of prophet and he believed that God's kingdom was soon to arrive on Earth and that people needed to repent in preparation for it and um that many of the other Jewish leaders didn't really understand what God wanted but he did and uh and so his proclamation of of Ethics about how to behave I think are historic many of them are historical were intended to get people to turn their lives around so that they could they could be uh prepared to enter into this Kingdom he eventually made a trip to Jerusalem the last week of his life and got in trouble with the authorities who had him arrested and then crucified under Pontius Pilate so I think you can say that much probably uh what about the sort of content of the of the moral message and the the claims that he made and the the events that surround His Life In The Gospel narratives how much of this can we say confidently is historical it's very difficult because Scholars have different assessments my assessment is that a lot of the materials we have in the gospels uh are uh these materials are put onto his lips by later storytellers many of them promote a later Christian agenda which makes them a little bit uh suspicious and so we have to develop criteria for knowing uh what I would say about his ethical agenda is that by and large he uh he accepted um the kinds of views that you find in the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament especially authors like Amos and Isaiah that God was far more concerned with ethical behavior and how you treat one another than he is with a sacrificial ritual and other other kinds of cultic practices and so I think that basically I think he probably did say that the two greatest Commandments are you should love God with all your heart soul and strength and you should love your neighbor as yourself these are two quotations of scripture and that he he emphasized that over anything else but it wasn't for reasons that people today have ethical messages I mean most of us today want to be ethical either because possibly we want to be a good person or we want Society to work in the Long Haul Jesus wasn't really concerned about those things so much he certainly wasn't concerned about Society for the Long Haul because he didn't think there was going to be a long haul he thought that God was going to intervene and Destroy This current order and bring in a new order a new kingdom of God and so he wasn't really concerned about how we get along that way but he was concerned about how people could enter into this coming Kingdom and so the ethics are rooted in this apocalyptic message that the end is coming soon and you need to get ready for it that's something you've mentioned I think three times now is G Jesus's view that the world is about to end of course at least in what we would consider to be the short term it didn't what what what are you talking about when you say so confidently that that one of the things we can really know about Jesus is that he believed in the coming apocalypse and how do modern Christians react to the fact that that didn't seem to occur one thing Scholars do is when once they recognize that there are materials in the gospels that don't actually go back to Jesus they're they're long you know we we could have an hour-long discussion just about that one little single topic but there are clearly things that are not don't go back to Jesus in the gospels there are contradictions in the gospels there are implausible statements there's statements about things that I mean there there are lots of reasons for thinking this once you have that down as uh once you recognize that then you have to develop criteria for how you decide what actually did happen and what didn't happen this is true not just of Jesus it's true of every figure from the past um how do you go about establishing that somebody actually said and did what they're recorded saying and doing if you have sources that are written decades later by people who didn't know the person and who have actually uh obviously changed things in places so with with that in mind what you look for are materials that are found in multiple sources that are independent of each other and one of the things that you find in all of our earliest sources about Jesus is that he's preaching about the coming kingdom of God um this first first words that are recorded in Mark chapter 1 verse 15 Jesus says the these are his earliest gospel the first words he says the time has been fulfilled the um um the kingdom of God is near repent and believe the good news so the time is fulfilled means that God has allotted a certain amount of time for this crazy world to run its course um but that the time is up the times fulfilled so the kingdom of God is near means that God God is going to wipe out what's now and bring in his kingdom and so people need to repent prepare for it that basic message you get in uh get consistently in Matthew Mark and Luke and in what we reconstructed the sources of Matthew Mark and Luke um as time goes on you get less and less of that perspective so that the Gospel of John doesn't have that perspective the Gospel of Thomas preaches against that perspective so uh the reality is that the uh the earliest sources are consistently portraying Jesus as proclaiming this message some of you standing here won't taste death before they say the kingdom has come in power this generation will not pass away before all these things take place so what do Christians do about that well they reinterpret it uh you know so he didn't he didn't really mean that he meant something else maybe the church was going to come or he meant that the Holy Spirit would come on the day of Pentecost or he meant this that or the other thing but he didn't mean what he's actually said to have said and and what's going on there in your view is that just people sort of coping with the idea that that this didn't come to fruition or do you think there is a sort of legitimate uh interpretation of these verses that means such that Jesus didn't actually think the world was literally about to end um I wouldn't say it's an illegitimate interpretation because interpretation it depends what you're trying to do with an interpretation if you want to know what Jesus really meant that's one kind of interpretation but you could also say well you know what does it mean for me today that could be a different kind of interpretation that could be legitimate but if you want to know what Jesus meant you have to put him in his own historical context and when you do that and it's pretty clear he's predicting that there's a coming End of the Age and this problem about what to do with it has been around as long as there have been Christians because the earliest Christians expected it to come right away uh the Apostle Paul thinks it's going to come right away his followers thought it was all going to come right away it didn't come right away so what do you do well what the early Christians did is they started changing what he said so that when you get to the Gospel of Thomas he preaches against that message um the that there's an imminent coming Kingdom um but again what people do then is they try and spiritualize it so that he can't he's not saying something wrong he's just um you know he's being he's giving a spiritual message rather than a literal message when you make a when you turn this into a critique of the Christian message and you say it seems here that we have uh Christ and his early followers predicting a near end of the world that didn't actually happen as you say people are able to interpret these verses differently but do people that you put this criticism to at least accept that that is the most natural reading of these verses uh depends which person I'm talking to and so I have um uh where I teach I teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which is in the South American South and most of my students are highly religious who come from religious backgrounds or at least they were raised religious or not necessarily now that they're uni but but they um so they they um they try you know they try to figure this out and a lot of them just say yeah Jesus wasn't really saying that um but I have other people who are friends who are academics who are Christians um and um who are of new New Testament Scholars but are still committed Christians who are even ordained ministers and they'll say yeah that's what Jesus said but um you know Jesus was human some of some of them will say look if you believe in the Incarnation which is part of the Christian doctrine it means he really became a human and if he really became a human then he had he had human foibles and he had he had human limitations and so he got things wrong and so that's one way to do it um another way to do is just say look he got the calendar wrong but he got the the idea right the right the idea is that we should be fighting against the forces of evil just as God is and that eventually God's going to Triumph and so you know okay you got the calendar wrong so some people aren't as bothered about that as others now of course modern Christians think that Jesus made a slightly more radical claim as well than just that the world was going to end or some certain sort of moral teachings they seem to suggest that he was also walking around claiming to be God yes it's one question to ask whether Jesus was God yes the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God yeah I find to be one of the most interesting in biblical scholarship and I wondered what your views are on the matter yeah so I think it's right to differentiate between those two because a lot of people don't um the question of whether Jesus was God is I agree is completely independent of whether he ever said he was it's also independent of whether he thought he was but we have no access to his thoughts uh we do have we have access to some limited extent to his words I I am firmly convinced that Jesus never talked about himself as God and one way to demonstrate that is to line up our sources of information about Jesus chronologically and so I mentioned earlier that we have the first three gospels Matthew Mark and Luke these are called the synoptic gospels because they they agree in so many places in their which stories they tell the sequence of the stories even word for word verbatim agreements that everybody pretty much agrees there's some copying going on somebody's copying somebody um Scholars have worked on this since the 19th century have said that um Matthew and Luke both had Mark as one of their sources so you had Mark as a source Matthew and Luke copied mark But Matthew and Luke have a number of sayings of Jesus not found in Mark and so most Scholars today continue to think that Matthew Luke had access to some other source of written source of information that they call Q Q is a is a list of is a group of Jesus sayings that Matthew and Luke had access to Matthew has some materials not found in Mark or Luke so they say well that came from some other sources and Luke has some material not found in Mark and Luke so that's other sources okay so you've got yeah Matthew Mark and Luke but you also have q and m Matthews special sources and L Luke's special sources if you look at all of that material Matthew Mark Luke q m l okay all of that together Jesus never calls himself God all of our earliest sources where Jesus starts calling himself God is the Gospel of John our last source and so to my thinking um you have these sources of information about Jesus so I've just laid out six six sources six pieces of information verses one the six are all earlier than the one it seems to me completely implausible that six authors would describe the sayings of Jesus knowing that he's called himself God and neglect to mention that part like that that isn't important enough to bring up and so I think it's completely implausible people might be surprised to hear you make this make this claim that in all of the synoptic gospels we don't get Jesus claiming to be God yeah is this not is this not the case in in any instance sort of Jesus imply that he's God at certain points it depends how you read these passages if you think what kind of passages are we talking about that people generally point to in the synoptic gospels in the earlier sources that say well Jesus seems to be implying he's God because of course people will will want to say that okay maybe Jesus wasn't walking around saying that he was God yeah but maybe doing so wouldn't have been a particularly great strategy maybe in order to have enough time to have his message understood by his early followers and to sort of conduct his ministry before eventually being killed if he just immediately started claiming to be God he'd just be you know killed straight away and so what he needs to do is is get the message across get the important moral teaching which are the most important part of his ministry and then allow future Generations after he died to realize the truth yeah no that that would be a plausible way to argue I'm not convinced by it it's what I used to argue when I was an Evangelical Christian and so I'm familiar with it um you'd have to say that the gospel of John's wrong then because in the Gospel of John he does to claim to claim Divinity early in the ministry and throughout the ministry second thing is it'd be a mistake to say he was covering it up so that they wouldn't kill him any earlier because he's actually not crucified for being calling himself God his Divine claims have no no relationship to any of the crucifixion narratives um and so it's not that that's going to get him in in trouble uh so so I mean what is it what is the the oh it's pretty clear when you when you read the trial narratives Pontius Pilate kills him for claiming to be the king of the Jews and that's a political claim and so pilate isn't concerned about Jewish theology uh uh the term Messiah in uh in Jewish most Jewish thinking at the time and in certainly Roman understanding of Jewish thinking is that the Messiah is the future anointed one the king of Israel that's the literal meaning of the word Messiah yeah it's the name Christos is the Greek word is the Hebrew word it's referring to the king who gets anointed during his coronation ceremony to show that he's the favored one of God yeah in the recent coronation of King Charles it was chrism oil that was rubbed on his yeah none of us knew that was gonna to happen because it's been over 50 years since we haven't seen any of this but so you have this you have this interesting uh the word origin of Christ Messiah just just means anointed one and of course this is a a I suppose Jews at the time would consider the anointed one to be something like an early king of Israel so they envisioned this Messiah figure not as not as God no not as God the Messiah was not God but as a political leader and this is this is perhaps where some people might stumble and I remember when I first started considering the idea that Jesus maybe didn't even claim to be God yes one of the things that I would think about is all of these times that he would refer to himself as the Messiah the Son of Man this kind of thing and and you forget that it's only today that we yeah make these terms synonymous but at the time the word Messiah the term son of man the term Son of God and the term God a a not sort of they're not the same thing next to each other but the problem is it's I think historically since all these titles get attributed to Jesus that he's Messiahs and a man Son of God law Lord God all these things that they all then people just assume they all are different versions of the same thing they are not different versions of the same thing if you ask any Jew living in the first century you know uh you know you you think that person's a messiah you mean he's God he said what what do you mean no I said he's a messiah and so it's like claim you know if you claim to be you know the Prime Minister your god what yeah and some of your Prime Ministers definitely have not been God I can tell you yeah so what verses are we talking about when when people want to say yeah in the synoptic gospels yeah Jesus here is claiming to be God because like I said a moment ago some people suggest that he's not going to outright claim that he's God but he's going to do things and say things which implies yeah that will later be seen as evidence of such what what kind of things well the one that people point to most frequently is a little bit difficult to unpack but it's it's the passage in Mark chapter two where um Jesus is uh he's in a house it's crowded people are all around and there's fellow who's a who is paralyzed and he's being carried on this this cot this palette and they can't get to him he's four guys are carrying he can't get through the crowd so they take off the tiles of the roof and they lure him down into the house and Jesus sees the man sees their faith that they know he can heal him and he looks at the man and says your sins are forgiven and the Pharisees say wait a second only God can forgive sins and Jesus Jesus says um look which is easier to say that your sins are forgiven or take up your palate and walk and obviously the easier thing to say is your sins are forgiven because there's no way of showing that it's work whereas if you just take up your palate and walk it doesn't do it then you know it didn't work right so so uh he said to show that this the son of man has Authority on Earth to forgive sins take up your palate and walk the guy gets up and walks out and everybody's amazing whoa what so what that how how that was interpreted when I was in Evangelical and still is today but most probably most readers is only God can forgive sins Jesus shows that he could do the more difficult thing healing the guy and since he can do the more difficult thing it means he can do the easier thing which means Jesus is claiming to be God right that's that's the typical explanation sure and I think it's completely wrong hahaha it's Jesus enemies who say that God Can Only God can forgive sins that's an important Point yes second Point Jesus does not say in order to show I'm God take up your palette and walk he says in order to show that the son of man has Authority to forgive sins well who's given him the authority yeah God has and in fact uh near the end of the Gospel narratives we have Jesus sending his disciples uh to spread his message but also giving them the power to forgive sins yep and and that's the thing if you have authority somebody's given you the authority and the other the other point that most people wouldn't have any way to know is that uh as the great the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders uh pointed out um in the temple when Jewish priests would perform a sacrifice when they would somebody would bring a you know a lamb or something there'd be a sacrifice once the sacrifice was performed the priest would pronounce that their sins had been forgiven they had that Authority as priests what Sanders argued is that what Jesus is claiming is not to be God he's claiming to have greater Authority than the priests that this is an anti-priestly polemic it's got nothing to do with Jesus Calling himself God that just as the priest can forgive sins actually Jesus can yeah I mean I I think when you say if if he has Authority he has to be given that Authority I don't know if that's quite right in that yeah you would want to say that God has the authority to forgive sins but okay it's not that he's given that but but to me this this verse uh describing Jesus sending out his disciples is really telling because he says to his disciples after the resurrection as the father has sent me so now I send you and he gives him the authority to forgive sins now I think to myself if people make the claim that well Jesus was forgiving sins only God can forgive sins and therefore Jesus must be God if Jesus gives the same authority to his disciples that would make them Gods too but no I mean they're clearly not Gods but if he says that as the father has sent me so now I send you yeah we must think that surely The Authority that Jesus has been given to forgive sins in this uh in this respect is given to him in the same way that he gives it to his disciples that is not bestowing Divinity upon them but just the authority to forgive sins and nothing more I agree with that and it's also important to note that Jesus doesn't say I forgive your sins yes he says your sins are forgiven and surely people don't think that when a priest's pronounce forgiveness of sins that he's claiming to be God if he says your sins are forgiven that's that's and so that's why I think it's been a bestowed Authority not but I I completely agree it doesn't mean that everybody who pronounces forgiveness of sins is thereby claiming to be God by the way I should mention that you have a an entire course on this very question of did Jesus claim to be God which is available on your website the the link you can go to is barterman.com God man and that will take you to uh this this course that you've produced on this very question yeah um amongst uh sort of wealth of other courses that that you've produced so if anybody's interested in going into more detail on this question barterman.com forward slash God man I'll put the link in the show notes or in the YouTube description as well um of course the Gospel of John things seem to change yes what do we have in John we have uh before Abraham was I am yeah now to me this is one of the most powerful uh indications of Jesus claiming to yeah claiming to be God here do you think that when it comes to instances like that and and perhaps we should explain why it is that saying before Abraham was I am you know would would be such a powerful statement uh actually yeah let's do that first like people you'll often hear in this discussion Jesus said before Abraham was I am what's the significance of that well two things one is so he's referring to Abraham the the father of the Jews who lived 1800 years earlier and in this in the conversation he's having with his Jewish opponents they're they're saying you know how do you know about Abraham you know you're not not even 50 years old and he says well uh before Abraham was I am so on one level he's claiming to have existed before 1800 years before 1800 years ago but the second thing is he says I am now that phrase I am is a complicated uh complicated phrase as it turns out uh ego Amy I am um sometimes I said sometimes it just means you know if somebody says you know uh oh are are you the leader of this group yeah Echo Amy I am you know it's his way of saying saying yes sometimes but uh in the Gospel of John it takes on special significance because Jesus repeatedly says I am this that or the other thing so I am the bread of life I am the light of the world I am the resurrection and the life these I am sayings are very important because every one of them is indicating that he ha he's the one who brings salvation that is the the power to bring Salvation but in this particular case in John 8 58 when he says before Abraham was I am he doesn't say I am something else I just I am that's significant because in the Old Testament in Exodus chapter 3 where Moses is uh being told by God to go to the uh go to the Israelites and tell them that you know they're going to be set free and go to the Pharaoh and demand that he led to those people go he says well if they ask me you know what's your name what am I supposed to say and God replies I am tell them I am has sent you and so that comes to be taken as the name based the basis for the name of God I am and so if Jesus says I am and he's referring to himself he seems to be claiming the name of God from the book of the old from the name of Yahweh in the Old Testament and so uh his Jewish opponents take up stones to Stone him to death yeah it may seem a little far-fetched to uh to a modern reader that this is the claim embedded within that statement but but that that phrase I am is is hugely significant in the Old Testament and it does seem that in The Narrative of John's gospel this is what the the this is what people interpret him as trying to claim they do yeah absolutely so the question is firstly do you think if this is an accurate account of what Jesus said that that's what he was doing and and secondly uh do you think that it is an accurate account or something that Jesus said oh I'll do the second first I don't think there's any way it's an accurate account I mean if Jesus was going around claiming the name of God for himself uh as as in the Gospel of John then um no he wouldn't have survived he would have been stoned to death I mean it wouldn't have been legal for them to Stone him they would have stoned it probably but so but the other thing is if he had been doing that why is all these other earlier sources just didn't think it was important enough to mention that bit I mean just beyond belief I think that that these other early authors including not just these gospel authors but Paul tells us a lot about Christ and certainly understands Christ in some sense to be a Divine being he never indicates that Jesus called himself God if Paul knew he called himself God you'd think he'd say it I maybe wouldn't but I mean so my point is that all the earlier materials say nothing about this our final gospel sometime near the end of the first century what is this like 65 70 years after Jesus death finally he's saying these things well it seems unlikely that everybody earlier doesn't say anything about it yeah so so you're not just making a claim here that well we have this one statement in the Gospel of John it's not really corroborated so we can't know if he said it you you're making a claim that you positively think this wasn't said I don't think it was said and I think it's consistent with John's portrayal of Jesus otherwise right because John begins this gospel with in the beginning was the word the word was with God the Word was God the gospel ends with Thomas declaring Jesus my Lord and my God and throughout the gospels Jesus this isn't the only Divine claim he makes right he says you know I am the father are one and once again they pick up the stones to go after him or to his disciples they say Lord show us the Father and Jesus says well if you've seen me you've seen the father so you there's like all of these things and you just don't you just don't get this in the earlier sources yeah I mean a statement like that if you've seen me then you've seen the father I mean the the sort of trinitarian Doctrine is of course that the son is God and the father is God but it's not that the son is the father so to say something like if you've seen me the son you've also seen the father I understand if he said something like if you've seen me then you've seen you've seen God this would seem to sort of confirmed this yes trinitarian well I wouldn't call it trinitarian because I don't think you have Trinity well I shouldn't say trinitarian yes but but I think it's clearly a Divine claim yes it's not just that you know um like I mean if you told me that look you know look at me you're seeing God here I wouldn't think this is like a normal claim of a human being yeah but but Jesus what I'm saying is Jesus isn't claiming he's not saying if you've seen me you've seen God but if you see me you've seen the father isn't this troubling to the doctrine of trinitarianism which once yeah no a distinction between the father and the son even if both are God yeah well it is the whole trinitarian debate of course um had a number of sides to it with different people arguing different things and people would take different verses in order to and so you know one of the yeah we talk about the trinitarian debate for a long time too but one of the big questions early on was whether Christ really was the father um so in the second century one of the most prominent uh forms of understanding the relationship of the father and the son is that uh Christ was the son his father was the father but in fact they're the same thing just like I myself am a son and a father at the same time so to my to my father I'm a son and to my son I'm a father and you know to my brother I'm a brother so I could have like I've got three modes of existence but it's just one of me and there were people who said that Christ was like that that God was like that there are three of them three relationships father son and spirit but they're just three modes of existence of the same being and that ended up being declared heresy you've got to have three separate beings but the three separate beings are all equally God so in that reading of it if you've seen me you've seen the father because they're of the same substance see for that this is the later debates you don't get that in the New Testament now if Jesus didn't make these claims yeah if Jesus didn't say these words yeah then whoever sat down to write what we now call The Gospel of John what was going on was he just making something up was he just writing fiction purposefully was he trying to mislead people I doubt it I mean we don't know what's in his head obviously right I don't think so and I don't think it's just John I think everybody who in the early church who is telling stories about Jesus which would have probably been just about everybody in the early church I mean Christians are they're trying to convince other people to become followers of Jesus um first of all I mean you're trying to convince a family member or a neighbor or a business associate to become a follower of Jesus they never heard of Jesus why are they going to why are they going to give up their religions to become a follower of Jesus you've got to tell them stories about Jesus so in order to convert people you've got to do that and Christians are spreading throughout the entire Empire they're you know they're not converting millions of people or anything or even thousands many thousands but they're you know one at a time they're telling stories and they're converting people but then once they're converted they continue to hear stories in the communities about Jesus to help them understand who he was what happened to him why it happened to him what he taught how you're supposed to live based on his teaching so people are telling stories the whole time stories change in the process of retelling and there's no way to prevent that they do and so when people tell a story about Jesus that is not historically accurate it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying about it or that they're trying to deceive anybody they're trying to they're trying to explain something that's really significant to them and things get exaggerated things get changed things get made up and it's not a matter of willful intent or or deception it's it's just the way storytelling works but of course everything you said about these these these attributions in John's gospel surely the author would have thought of this too I mean to to sit down and think well I have this this idea of writing about Jesus is claiming to be God but yeah it sort of hasn't existed until then this this isn't something that's been done isn't this no he doesn't know that he hasn't read Matthew Mark Luke or mq and L he hasn't read these things he's been in a Christian Community for probably decades and within that Community the way people are talking about Jesus is that he's a Divine being and so this this view develops over time within his community so he thinks this is the commonsensical view um and so he's not I don't I don't think he's just he's coming up with this I think this is based on a long history within his own Community um that uh where these views have developed and there's been a lot of interesting scholarship on that for about 50 years about what's happening within John's Community leading to this exalted view of Christ but um I so I think it's there in his community I don't think it's something he's inventing now another sort of interesting uh example of a gospel narrative which people might have good reason to think was invented by the author I think are the birth narratives found in only two of the gospels with some discrepancies and seemingly written in in some cases with uh motivations in in mind uh these are earlier and these are in gospels which at least in the well they as you said earlier they seem to be sort of aware of each other's existence and copying each other you know aware of earlier gospels um because the the the birth narratives occur in the synoptic Gospels in this instance are we not provided with with an example of clear evidence of forgery I mean somebody sort of creating a story which seems to sort of not exist anywhere else putting it in in their gospel narrative in some cases seemingly in order to you know fulfill a fulfill a prophecy or something like this like is this an example of something that we can we can confidently say that the authors who are writing about it didn't actually think or have good reason to think that it happened uh I don't think so I don't think that's right I think that in fact I don't think Matthew and Luke so it's in Matthew and Luke and um they both have the they both have a virgin verse Story and you're right they have they have things in common the things they have in common are the very broad things Jesus has a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph and she gets pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Jesus gets born in in Bethlehem so that he's born of a virgin in Bethlehem that's basically it but all of the other details are different um that means though that if if you've got a virgin birth story of him being born in Bethlehem and they both have it most Scholars think that Matthew and Luke did not know about each other's work okay that means that idea was floating around more broadly that it's not made up by either one of them see what I mean because since they both have they neither one of them made it up but the details are all vastly different one of the things I do with my students at Chapel Hill is I have them they don't know they don't know what they're going to find and I don't tell them what they're going to find they know the Christmas story because every year they you know they go to church and they hear the Christmas story where you get the wise men and you get the Shepherds you get the juice when you get the Herod slaughtering the Innocents and things so what I have them do is I re have them read Matthew and just make a list a b c d e this is this is the list of what happens in Matthew this this this this is then I have them read Luke and make the same list for Luke this this is this then I have them compare the lists and to find out what what's different and is there anything that cannot be reconciled it blows their minds because I mean people can do this very easily just do it you realize whoa like Matthew has all of these stories that no Luke doesn't say anything about Luke has all this stuff and not in Matthew and in fact there are points where they they cannot be reconciled such as such as what what are we talking about here uh well for example in Luke's gospel after Jesus is born um um this is I'll give you an irreconcilable one yeah after after Jesus is born um his parents uh have him circumcised on the eighth day and then after 32 days um the um they the Mary has to make an offering uh in the in the temple yes uh to to cleanse herself for for her ritual impurity for having given birth she does that and So within about a month and a half and then they go straight back to Nazareth where they came from okay um all right so uh basically a month and a half after Jesus birth they returned to Nazareth which is about 100 miles to the north up in Galilee they're in Jerusalem in the South 100 miles north to get go back home to Nazareth to uh to Nazareth in Matthew's gospel Jesus is born and um Joseph has warned that Herod is now going to try and kill the child and so uh Joseph takes the family and goes down to Egypt and obviously I mean it takes a while to get to Egypt it's it's they go down to Egypt and they stay there till Herod dies and then they want to return uh and they when they hear that Herod dies word gets to them then they come back they can't resettle in Bethlehem like they want they've resettled in Nazareth okay so if all that's right if if if Matthew is right that they went down to hair to Egypt for months or years or however long how can Luke be right that they immediately returned to Nazareth and and what is the answer to that question for from a from a sort of uh I don't know I mean you have to make something up I mean what do people I mean presumably this is something that that Christian Scholars are aware of what are they yeah um right so I guess to reconcile it you'd have to say something like they uh so one way to reconcile would be to say that um so they returned to Nazareth and then they decided to come back to Bethlehem and they stayed in Bethlehem for a while and then they found out about Herod found out and then they fled to Egypt then they returned to Nazareth I mean you have to come up with some complicated scenario um but my point is is that I don't think that um Matthew and Luke were my this is my ultimate point I don't think they were making up the story I think both of them had heard stories and the a big problem with with the gospels is that they are written the earliest gospels probably Mark it's probably at least 40 years after Jesus death by somebody who wasn't there and Matthew and Luke are 50 60 years after Jesus death and they they weren't there they weren't Aramaic speaking Jews in Israel they they spoke Greek they lived in some other part of the world and they've inherited stories and so my sense is that most of the time they're just giving their version based on stories that they've heard in their own Christian communities do you think there's any instances in any of the Gospel narratives where writers are purposefully inventing events or sayings to serve a theological purpose oh yeah I think there are I think there are some places where you can identify it and I think there are a lot of places where they're just you know you just can't you just can't know you know if Matthew has a story that's only in Matthew there's technically no way to know whether he just came up with that himself and there's a lot of that kind of thing where you can't know there are places where um it's pretty clear somebody's just coming up with something like um I mean it's not clear if it's necessarily the author but somebody's clearly coming up with something I mean I mean the idea in math here's an example in Matthew Matthew explains why Jesus was born in Bethlehem but he came from Nazareth and he says that that the reason they moved to Nazareth was to fulfill the scriptures that says he shall be called a Nazarene yes but the problem this is part of Matthew's whole thing where Matthew's always saying Jesus did this to fulfill what the prophet said he's going to be born in Bethlehem gonna be born of a virgin he's going to be called a Nazarene well the other times when he says that you can actually find the verse he's talking about and you might be misinterpreting it but at least you know what the verse is there's no verse in the Bible that says he shall be called Nazarene and let's just let's just restate that for for our listeners because Matthew continually throughout the gospel is saying that and and this occurred to fulfill the prophecy to fulfill the scripture and you look in the Old Testament and you find oh there's the scripture and he's sort of got this story that fulfills the scripture here the idea that Jesus comes from Nazareth is to fulfill the scripture that says that he shall be called in Nazarene yeah and we look for that line it's not there and it doesn't exist yeah what's going on there well there are a lot of theories about it and I mean it doesn't it doesn't look like probably Matthew's just like lying about it probably there are lots of explanations the most popular explanation is that he's referring to a mess allegedly Messianic Prophecy in the book of Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 9 verse 1 we're told that um that the um that there that David will have a successor who will succeed him on the throne and they'll come from the Nazar of David uh the root of David uh so it's like a tree metaphor like the tree has roots and so the root uh will grow into a tree and the one of the fruits of the tree will be this Messiah and so it comes from the root of David and the word for root in uh Hebrew is not tsar and it sounds like Nazarene and so it's yeah so it's it may be that he has that in mind for example but if if that is the case yeah we're essentially talking about like a mistranslation yeah it's a mistranslation it's a misunderstanding it's somebody made it up I mean Matthew may have made it up somebody made it up that's but so you say that this is this is like a popular explanation when I when I when I ask like how do I explain this I mean it's easy enough for for an atheist or an agnostic or non-Christian to explain it but I mean like as a Christian scholar surely that kind of explanation isn't available to you because it essentially says that the gospel yeah this this important gospel author just made a a translation blunder well okay so one thing I'd say is that not every Christian is a fundamentalist who think that every word has to be inspired by God I mean this idea that every there can't be any mistakes in the Bible is a really fairly modern idea um most Christians throughout history haven't really had that view of the Bible at all so it's not whether it's it's not like Christian versus a non-Christian I'd explanation because within Christianity there's an enormous range sure and Christian Scholars just would basically agree with most of the things we're talking about here if they're critic historical Scholars the the scholars I studied with for both my masters and my PhD I went to Princeton Theological Seminary and this is where I got most of this stuff from these people were ordained ministers most of them but they said yeah of course that's not you know they didn't have this fundamentalist view of the Bible so in this particular case what a critical scholar would say that when Matthew says uh the scripture says he shall be called a Nazarene it he's not trying to give a Verbatim quotation he's trying to say that this is somebody who would be a Nazarene and that that he's misinterpreting Isaiah 9 1 not Tsar to refer to and that's what he's thinking and you know he got that wrong but that's that's what he's doing can I ask you about mistranslations of Old Testament verses in general are there sort of uh other examples of what we might consider to be translation blunders in the New Testament oh boy yeah Arthur Matthew's kind of famous for this uh the uh the one that's the most famous one is again in the birth narrative in Matthew um both Matthew and Luke as I said um have Jesus born of a virgin one of the interesting differences is why he had to be born of a virgin in Luke's gospel Luke Luke says the reason he had to be born of a virgin it's it's in the enunciation the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says you're going to conceive a child she says what never had sex I'm not going to have saying no no the holy spirit's going to get you pregnant and the the angel sister in Luke 1 35 the the um the Holy Spirit shall come upon you the power of the most high will overshadow you sow that the one born of you shall be called holy the son of God so Mary gets pregnant by the spirit so that Jesus is the Divine Son of God in Luke uh that's not Matthew's view Matthew doesn't say anything like that Matthew says that she had that she had to be a virgin to fulfill the scriptures because the scripture says that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and you shall call his name Emmanuel that's a quotation of Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14. in this case it's really there Isaiah 7 14 is there and it says something like that it's a good stuff but it's a good you thought that it's actually in the old it's a good start it's a good start so it's there the problem is that Matthew is quoting it in the Greek translation of the Old Testament and when you actually read the Hebrew it does not say a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and in fact when you read it in the context of Isaiah it's clear as day that it's not talking about that it's not talking about a messiah at all is that so I mean because the I the the word used in the Hebrew Old Testament is the word Alma yes which can mean virgin yes it can also mean what young woman well it doesn't mean it means young woman but it's young woman irrespective of whether she's had sex or not sure um and the Greek translation in the Septuagint which is the the Greek version of the Old Testament for our listeners the the New Testaments written in Greek that's right the Old Testament is written in Hebrew right which means that the New Testament writers were reading a Greek translation of the Old Testament when they wrote the New Testament uh and the Greek version of the Old Testament uses the word is it parthenos that's right which does mean virgin well it also means young woman so you said a moment ago that you think it's it's I mean I've heard before that there's a bit of a sort of translation problem here but you said it's clear that this is not what's meant In this passage oh yeah how do we know that well nobody reads the passage that's the thing people people read the verse yeah so the passage is really quite clear so the the deal is is that um um I Isaiah so it's written by a fellow named Isaiah in Jerusalem in the uh in the 8th Century BCE and he's a prominent figure in um at the time in Jerusalem the uh the king of uh of Judah ahaz is um is under threat two opposing armies have have laid Siege to the city of Jerusalem and it looks like Jerusalem is going to be destroyed and ahaz is freaking out about this he calls in the prophet Isaiah and Isaiah says that God will give you a sign to show that it's not going to happen that you're not going to be destroyed the sign is that a young woman who has conceived will bear a son and when the sun is holding is old enough to know the difference between Good and Evil can eat Kurds and Whey and knows the difference between good and evil these two kings will disperse they will be gone they're not going to and so he's saying give it time and they will go away of their own you don't not even going to have to fight the war he's so so there are two translational issues one is he doesn't use the Hebrew word that means a woman who's never had sex bethulha he uses just a word for a young woman um any and the Hebrew tense is the young woman has conceived she's pregnant before she gives birth I mean before the child she Bears is very old you won't have these political problems anymore so it's a young woman has conceived it's not a virgin will conceive and it's not talking about a future Messiah it's talking about some woman here who's pregnant who and about what's going to happen to the city so it's not even a Messianic prophecy it's not a prophecy of a future Messiah so what do you think the the Virgin birth story comes from do we have New Testament authors making this up to fulfill what they think a prophecy says when it actually doesn't is it a sort of narrative that maybe already exists in a in an oral tradition that's put into writing and then subsequently people look at this this passage in the old in in Isaiah and say oh well maybe that's what it's referring to I mean what's going on here where does it come from so I don't think either Matthew or Luke could have made it up because both of them have it independently of each other yes so that's so it had to be floating around before them I think um and there are debates about where it came from there are there are all of the options are really pretty interesting one option is that somebody came up with it to say that it fulfills Isaiah 7 14 that you know they oh yeah yeah that's why and so they kept they bring his ah so she had to be a virgin uh another option is that um in the Greco-Roman World more broadly uh within Greece and Rome Roman thinking there were numerous stories of uh Supernatural births where a great figure either an emperor or a a great warrior or a great philosopher or whatever the birth wasn't normal that a God had gotten a woman pregnant and it may be that that the Christians living in the Greek and Roman World um who you know come up with the story to show that Jesus had a special birth like that so that's another explanation third explanation which is also interesting is that we have some evidence to suggest that many people suspected that Jesus had an unusual birth and that he somehow he was born out of wedlock they didn't have a normal he didn't Mary wasn't married didn't have a husband and that the Virgin birth story arose in order to explain oh yeah it was a special birth in fact this is what happened you know God got her pregnant right might be a combination of all those things but or two of them but um so we don't know for sure those are three of the three of the interesting ideas any more uh translation issues of this genre of that oh well no there's all sorts yeah um but you know usually I would say in most cases uh the translation issues are related to the difficulty that you mentioned that that the the biblical the New Testament authors are writing in Greek themselves and I don't think any of them knew Hebrew myself this is debated among Scholars I don't think I don't think they could read Hebrew uh any of them and they're reading it from the Greek the Greek old testament which it was trying to translate the Hebrew into Greek and anytime he translates something you can't there's no such thing as a complete correspondence between what you're and so the Greek translators of Isaiah were not probably trying to make this into a Messianic prophecy but um and so uh yeah so but somebody else could take the translation and make it that way so throughout the New Testament you have this problem that the New Testament authors are quoting Old Testament passages and so yeah yeah you said there are lots of examples of of that yeah well their entire books written on this what kind are we talking about sort of like small uh sort of instances where like something seems to be mistranslated or have gone wrong we're talking about quite a large significant um theologically there aren't huge there are ones that are kind of on this magnitude because this this is one that's dealing with the Virgin birth yes you know and so um but you know there are there are other instances where it's it's not a missed it's not a there's some a lot of instances that aren't necessarily mistranslations but they're certainly unusual understandings of things I mean just to stick with Matthew's birth narrative for example when um I mentioned that Joseph takes Jesus and married down to Egypt and and the question why is why does it take him down to Egypt why isn't he just like why doesn't he like go to Nazareth and Matthew says that the reason he goes to Egypt is to fulfill what was spoken of by the prophet uh and he quotes Hosea chapter 11 out of Egypt have I called my son yeah now Hosea so this isn't a translational problem because he's actually quoting what Hosea says but Hosea is talking about the Exodus from Egypt that God took the people of Israel out of Egypt and made them his son and so so Israel is portrayed as the Son of God and in scripture and places and so out of Egypt have I called my son and Matthew says so it's a reference to the Messiah out of Egypt have I called my son now in reference to Jesus right Jesus comes up now in this particular case it's a kind it's an even more interesting um situation in terms of the interpretation because it's in this case Matthew isn't saying something like um this thing in not necessarily saying that this thing in Hosea isn't referring to anything in hosea's day it's referring to the Future that is what he's saying about Isaiah 7 14 the Virgin birth that's not about Isaiah's time it's about the future but in the case with Hosea he seems to be saying that yes God called the people of Israel out of Egypt and saved them and it's foreshadowing what's going to happen with the Messiah who's going to come out of Egypt to save people and so it's it's more like the Fulfillment of scripture isn't that the scripture has predicted something that's yet to happen is that something happens in scripture and Christ fulfills it fills it full of meaning so fulfill in the sense of feeling full of meaning and so it seems like it just seems strange to me if if that isn't the most natural reading of that Old Testament verse why somebody would just adopt it ah because um these are people who firmly believe that Jesus is the Messiah sent from God they they don't think God like came up with this idea like late in the game they thought this had been the plan all along and they had to then find out where God gave hints about it and so they they search the scriptures for indications that this happened and you know probably the most obvious place where this happens is actually the a set of verses that um many Christians today still use to show that Jesus is was predicted by scripture which is Isaiah chapter 53 which isn't about his birth but about his death Isaiah 53 is about the suffering servant of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible and it's a passage that was written when um the nation of Israel had been taken into captivity into Babylon and were being punished for the sins that they committed according to Isaiah but that in this part of Isaiah Isaiah saying that the people are going to be set free from Babylon and able to return and within that context he has this passage in Isaiah 53 about some figure who has suffered for the sins of others he calls him the suffering servant of the Lord he was wounded for our transgressions he was bruised for our iniquities the chastisement for our peace was upon him by his wounds we were healed Christians read that and they said it's referring to the Messiah this is this is talking about Jesus he's the one who suffered for the sins and it was never read that way by Jews ever before this Jews read it well actually Isaiah tells you who it's about he calls it the suffering servant of the lord and there are four sections of this part of Isaiah that talks about the suffering servant and in a couple places he tells you who the servant is uh in chapter 49 verse 3 Isaiah says you are my servant o Israel whoa Israel is the servant that suffers they've suffered for their sin for the sins of the people but then Christians read this and say well it's referring to the Messiah so there again it isn't a mistranslation per se but it's explaining something in light of their faith in Jesus and so you know I think I think a lot of atheists would say yeah well they're just making stuff up but I think it's more complicated than that I think that it's more that people are always reading texts in light of how they understand the world before they read the text and you read a text in light of what you think and believe and presuppose and so different people read texts differently based on that Christians are doing that but non-christians are doing that to everybody's doing that and so I mean and it's true of any text uh you know it's true of poetry have different interpretations of poems depending on how you how you read things we we spoke earlier about some sort of historicity surrounding Jesus and I asked you what it is that we can know about Jesus that question often comes up in the context of arguments in favor of Christianity in saying that a certain group of facts that we can know about Jesus seem to indicate that a man died and rose again I wonder why I had you here to get your your views on this uh I had an episode with William Lane Craig and he put forward a historical case for the resurrection of of Jesus of Nazareth and I remember in that podcast I I sort of listening back had wished that I pushed back a little more and a lot of people actually noticed and they said you know I'm surprised that you didn't really sort of give them a bit more grief for it yeah but I figured that uh perhaps rather than making a botch attempt at doing it myself it would be better to to ask you I mean his view on the matter along with many others is that we have a few facts about Jesus that we can pretty confidently say are true firstly that you know A Man Called Jesus existed and was sort of going around teaching and ethical code of sorts and gaining followers got into disrepute with the Roman authorities was killed by crucifixion and that afterwards groups of people claim to have seen him do you think that all of these facts are sort of well established yes so given that how to explain the the the uh you know the the fact that all of these are true at the same time oh well I don't stay in trouble at all think of the I mean we have other figures in history for for whom we have things like that with those four facts I mean Romulus the founder of Rome um I don't know if he was a historical figure or not but people thought he was and and he certainly uh ended up somehow leaving the Earth and people their eyewitness is saying that they saw him alive afterwards I mean do we have sort of firstly that are the sources as reliable are they as well attested well that's another question see that's not one of your four things okay yeah but I guess what I'm asking about is is when we say that these facts are well established the historian Livi so he's a Roman historian and he reports that um or apollonius of Tiana um we have um we have eyewitness testimony to his being raised from the dead um or what eyewitness testimony we're talking about like who who is it that followers of his like groups at the same time they sort of all see him sort of all in the same room or oh no but see now you're getting into the facts see yes so so the question is what are facts so if you're just talking about those four elements then we certainly have those four elements so they're not difficult to explain uh what William Lane Craig wants to do though is to take those four facts and start adding others to them as if they're the same value what other facts are we talking about here like well he says that we know that there was an empty tomb and you don't think that that's the case I don't know and one of the things that I think Dr Craig might say on that point is that if people were claiming to have seen him if people were claiming that this man had risen from the dead the tomb was there it was something people could have gone to check and it would have probably been one of the first things that they did upon hearing that this Jesus figure had risen from the dead if there were no empty tomb surely someone would have discovered this this is not yeah good evidence confirming the idea that there was in fact a yeah he presupposes that he was buried in the Tomb this this is one of the facts that uh that William Lane Craig thinks we we can say as well established that he was buried in a tomb that's important to him you don't think so no I don't I mean that's what that's the thing he takes these four things that you know basically everybody would agree on you know there's a man Jesus got killed and later people said they saw him alive so that that's fine and those four are easily explained um was there an empty tomb there are very big problems with thinking there was a tomb at all he's presupposing that the gospel story is right that Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus the afternoon he was crucified and put him in a family tomb and on the third day women came and found the tomb empty um okay so what is our evidence of it well the evidence of course is only in the gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John they say that um and it was the tradition that Christians had had for for a very long time so it's certainly the the Christian tradition but there are lots of reasons for doubting that it's right that he's he's never taken very seriously that you know he's I know he he I don't know if this was on your uh your thing or not but somebody last week was interviewing me and replaying some things that where he was trashing me for some debate we had 20 years ago or he said that you know the only reason I reject uh Resurrection because I've got some kind of warmed over human understanding of things and I've never read Hume you know it's like it's just such it is just so wrong it's just like it is just I mean it's just factually wrong but but apart from that uh you know he says that I'm not a I'm not a historian I don't know what he thinks I do know what he thinks he is I am he thinks that I'm a textual critic whatever he thinks that is and it's that's just completely wrong too it's just like he knows nothing about me but he's making stuff up so um historians look at what you know about the situation at the time period and I'm not sure William Craig's even read any much history about the time period but one thing to look at is for example just as an example what do Romans do with crucified victims um so we have we have records of uh we don't have lots of Records I mean one of the really interesting things that people don't realize we have no literary description of a crucifixion from the ancient world like nobody describes how they did it hmm like um were they typically nailed we know they were nailed sometimes because we have some Nails um that with DNA and we've got that organic material were they tied were they cross beams were they Stakes where I mean like there's all sorts of stuff we don't we don't really know we do have a number of references to what Romans did once the person died on the crosses and the accounts are consistent that what they did is they left them on their crosses as part of the humiliation yes um that they would decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers and so we have off the cuff remarks and a number of sources that that's just what they did um and so there are debates about that we can have debates about whether that happened within Judaism or not people say yeah Jews didn't allow that it's absolutely right Jews didn't allow it but the Jews weren't killing it the Romans were killing it yeah and so and so forth and so on so um I don't I don't know of any instance where we have a verified account of anybody being buried on the afternoon of their crucifixion in a known tomb so How likely is it that they made an exception in the case of Jesus I mean we think it would they would because you know he's the son of God and so he's exceptional but I mean pilate didn't know that Jesus was the son of God he was just one of the guys he was crucifying that it's still quite an exceptional case I mean pilate seems quite distressed at the fact that Jesus ends up going to according to home to crucifixion well according to the gospel now but this is a this is a a possibility it's possible it's possible you've said about one of the other two guys if it is true that you have an instance of a pilot really not not thinking that this man ought to be crucified and asking the crowds no but I don't think that's historical why would we think that's historical I guess I'm not trying to make the case that it's that that we can know that this is the case but this might be an explanation as to why we do have an instance of the Romans making an exception because Jesus was exceptional not just because he was the son of God because of course I don't believe that in the Romans wouldn't have believed that but that it was still an exceptional case why I guess in in the case of pilate this might have been someone who you really didn't think deserve to be crucified why because this would be the case if the gospel narratives are correct if what's written there is correct that's right you know I'm not claiming to be able to say that we know that they are but if they were this would offer an explanation I have an exception but the argument then is if the gospel narratives are correct then the gospel narratives are correct and so that's not an argument but it seems to me that that that might be the case if the narratives were written so as to obviously given explanation as to why Jesus was taken down from the cross if it was clear that yes the gospel writers are explaining why he would be allowed off that's right it doesn't seem particularly plausible to me though that the idea of presenting pilate as slightly disturbed by the idea of Jesus being crucified was a a device that was used to explain uh why Jesus would have been taken down from the cross when Romans didn't usually no the reasons the reason for showing Pilots disturbance is something else the reason that the so um when you when you look how Pilots portrayed in the gospels in Matthew Mark and Luke uh and then you even add on later gospels like the gospel Peter and later gospels when you do that and you line them up chronologically a pilot gets more and more Disturbed and he starts uh in Mark he and kind of Jewish Council kind of they agree okay he needs to be crucified in in in uh in Matthew's gospel he washes his hands and says I'm innocent of this man blood and the crowd cries out his blood be upon us and our children when you get to Luke a little bit later pilate declares Jesus innocent three times and he sends them off to Herod who declares him innocent when you get to the Gospel of John he declares him innocent three times and it says in John the chief priests and scribes insisted to be crucified and when you read it in the Greek it says pilate then handed him over to them to be crucified to the chief priests and scribes when you get to the gospel of Peter it's even more pilate gets increasingly innocent proclaiming Jesus Jesus innocence um why is that well Scholars have long enough the answer to this one if Pilot's not at fault then who is it's just damn Jews they did it to him so the reason for Pilots exoneration is in order to heighten Jewish culpability I don't think that the historical motif if you actually know anything about pilot I mean if you read the descriptions in Philo or Josephus this was not somebody sat around agonizing about crucifying the wrong guy um and to think that Jesus is the exception just means that we're so used to thinking of Jesus as the exception but for pilate he's just one of these troublemakers he's calling himself the king of the Jews crucify him but now a moment ago you said that okay uh you know William Lane Craig is is wrong because he says that we can know those notes to him and we can't it seems to me a relatively minor detail in that you said you know we have these these four facts uh including that Jesus was crucified including the groups of people claimed to have seen him after he died and you say and these are not sure groups of people claimed okay because this is what I wanted to to pick up on when you said that this can be easily explained what what is it that you think can be explained the fact that we have records of groups claiming see Jesus the fact that groups did actually claim to see Jesus the fact that individuals claim to see Jesus what are the things that you think oh this isn't troubling for us to explain without having to invoke a resurrection I don't think it's troubling to invoke the idea that there were individuals who claim they saw Jesus alive afterwards I don't think we have good attestation uh for it I think Paul Paul the Apostle Paul claims he saw Jesus alive a few years afterwards and so I think you know I don't think he's lying about I think he probably thought he saw Jesus Paul also being our earliest source of the New Testament claims at one point that Jesus appeared to 500 people that's right that's right this seems to be some good evidence that we do have oh no I don't think so I I Paul Paul knows there's a story that 500 people saw him but I don't think that's evidence that 500 people saw him that that's a claim and so a claim isn't evidence evidence is when you try to substantiate the claim and so how do you go about establishing whether 500 people actually saw Jesus well you look at what Paul says and then you see are there other sources to corroborate it um Paul's writing before the Gospels none of the gospels mentions anything about this or the gospel sources so Paul's our only source and um so is he right or not well it seems like a 500 people saw him that this would be something that other people would mention um so I don't think we know um the thing about seeing things is that we we have all the time we have people who see things that aren't there and a lot of a lot of Evangelical Christians say look if you've got group Visions you can't have group hallucinations that's right yeah yeah so how do you explain mother Mary showing up to hundreds of people at one time well I think I I understand what you're saying that we have examples of of groups of people claiming that they've seen something that we don't actually believe they did however it seems in the case of the the group uh sightings of Jesus of the Gospel narratives we're talking about a sort of a man like physically walking into a room interacting talking with these people it's not like sort of seeing a vision of of wearing we have modern accounts of Jesus showing up today in uh in all sorts of circles but basically but I don't suppose that we have accounts of a man who dies being seen by groups of people physically In the Flesh talking to them interacting with them allowing them to sort of touch his hands and appearing to people who spent significant periods of their life following them and so and it's not like they could have been mistaken about it yeah definitely we certainly do have that of individuals in the ancient world we have we have accounts of Romulus appearing to a senator and uh and explaining what's happened to him and so I think that you know and my my view of this is that um the kinds of evidence we look for for Jesus needs to be the kind of evidence we allow for anyone else and so it just it's striking to me that Evangelical Christians focus on the Jesus materials but they don't look at Traditions that are comparable from the same period or since and so they say well you can't have group hallucinations but they think that's exactly what you have when the Blessed Virgin Mary shows up or they say it's different because Jesus disciples saw him well okay well that's true of apollonians of Tiana or or that they'll say well but so many people have come to believe this that it just it's implausible that would happen if so many people believe well there are Bill about two billion people in the world who think that Muhammad was physically taken up into heaven so do you use the same do you use the same criteria or do you make exceptions in your case but to have all of these things together in one example I mean I mean you're you're quite right that you have a sort of an ancient account of an individual claiming to see somebody and then you have a modern account of groups claiming to see a vision of something and then you have lots of people coming to believe something that they didn't see themselves but put them together groups of people yeah seeing a sort of physical uh yeah a physical sighting of a man who they used to know and followed around and lots of them coming to believe that that's the case all together seems to be that's right a higher standard none of those people in any of those groups attest to it you see what I'm saying we don't have groups of people saying they saw Jesus we have individual righteous writers saying that groups of people saw him and that isn't the same thing you actually do have groups of people saying they saw Mary and so so that's stronger evidence and it's not just that I mean it's just about anything I mean the bailshamtov um the best this Jewish holy man um who uh you know we have we have accounts of his miracles that are that are written by the son of his personal secretary who got this information from two independent sources that all were that were eyewitnesses to these miracles there are there's not a Christian on the earth who thinks that these things happen but the attestation is better than the miracles of Jesus so so what I'm saying is historians don't make exceptions on religious grounds historians look at evidence and evaluate and try to establish what is most likely the most likely explanation for the evidence and what is the most likely explanation in your view for for these facts what what do you think happened is someone lying is someone mistaken I don't think anybody's lying dude this whole thing I just think you know I think I think a lot of atheists have this kind of binary right if it didn't happen then somebody's lying about it and that's just crazy I mean all of us have stories told about us that are not necessarily some type of people lying about us but sometimes people just don't know any better I mean William and Craig thinks that I like I was trained as a textual critic he honestly thinks that it's not he's not lying about it he just doesn't know I wasn't trained as a textual critic so so he doesn't know that so people don't necessarily lie um I think what I'll in the case of the stories about Jesus I think the most my my opinion is that the most plausible explanation is this we we have you know we know that Paul said Paul says that he saw him and I don't think Paul's lying about it I think Paul saw something he thought he saw Jesus a couple three years afterwards um we have pretty good evidence to suggest that Peter was claiming that he saw Jesus I mean he's he's the he's Paul says he was the first uh to see Jesus and in the gospel accounts he's one of the early he's there Mary Magdalene I would suppose Mary Magdalene probably has some kind of vision of Jesus my my sense is that these three people independently saw something they interpreted to be Jesus they may be um they maybe had a vision of some side they mistook an identity what they had they had they had a dream I don't know they something happened to them uh each of them and they told others who told others who told others and the story is propagated this kind of thing happens all the time and so when you get uh both the synoptic gospels oh uh and and the Gospel of John but I guess not in Mark but you do get a sort of an anticipation of a group appearance in Mark at the end of Mark but two of the synoptic gospels and in John when we have a sort of written account of group a group of people physically in a room seeing the figure of Jesus is is this just a story that sort of develops out of nowhere I mean if this event didn't occur but shows up in all of these gospels no crowd of nowhere it occurs because people are saying I've seen Jesus but if if you think it's it's plausible that individuals might have seen Jesus yes and maybe there are some sort of ideas floating around that you know this person taught they saw Jesus this person thought they saw Jesus but the idea of a group of disciples sort of all getting together in a room some of them saying that they've seen Jesus and Jesus appearing to sort of vindicate his his resurrection to them is this the sort of thing that can just sort of develop is this sort of like uh how do rumors start anyway I mean how do rumors start that you know that uh you know a thousand people saw this thing you know uh you know 20 people saw this UFO where's that come from it's not that somebody's lying about it and it's usually not that 20 people saw it so it just happened that kind of thing happens when you tell stories but I want to insist that we don't have any of these group members saying that it happened the other thing we haven't pointed out is you can't just take the gospels that face value for this because when you compare their narratives of the Resurrection they're more contradictory than the stories of the birth narratives we don't have a consistent independent narrative what we have are independent narratives that contradict each other that are all written 40 50 60 years later by people living in a different part of the world who didn't know any eyewitnesses who aren't even speaking the same language I mean so what do historians do with sources like that they don't simply accept what they say because they happen to agree with their religious views they evaluate them in light of what we know at the time their consistency even though if they see if they collaborated with each other these are the kinds of things that historians do when you do that with these sources I just don't think that you know you you make a compelling case what you end up saying is that there was one man in the history of the human race who was raised from the dead and we know that because some people said so living decades later I mean you know if I I mean you just think what would analogies to that be I mean would you like um you know if you if you take a cup of coffee and pour cream in it and you Stir It Up it's always going to mix I mean the law of entropy the law the second law of Thermodynamics with entropy requires it to be mixed up you can never stir it long enough to unmix the cream right I mean you can't you can't it's a law of physics it's never happened never never happened if if somebody says they solve somebody to do that 40 years ago and they said you know there are 100 other people who saw him do it would would a physicist believe them no it can't happen so the fact you've got somebody saying that 100 people saw it is not compelling evidence when it comes to something that is a love law of physics they're also saying that people who at the time that this purportedly happened claimed that they saw what they saw no we don't know that we don't know that the disciples themselves claim to have seen Jesus the only one we know is Peter and what what do we know about Andrew's vision of Jesus well I I suppose not much but it's nothing it's it's also that Peter was willing to be put to the death for this belief was he like to reference again I guess we don't have we have no evidence we don't know we don't know that do we not know at all why Peter was put this is another thing people say all the time I get this one a lot yeah where people say look these disciples had to believe in the resurrection because they went to their death for it they died and for believing it and you might die for the truth you're not going to die for a lie I get that all the time and when I then I asked him how do you know how uh Andrew died how do you know how Bartholomew died how do you know how Peter died was he crucified upside down how do you know that when you ask them that they have no idea and the reality is we have no record of the deaths that within I mean you get later Legends by the end of the second century early early third Century you start getting Legendary accounts of the deaths of some of the Apostles so we have legendary accounts of John who by the way did not die for believing and he died as an old man according to the legend you have Peter and Paul and and Thomas and Andrew you've got four accounts of people who were killed for their faith these are legendary accounts that even evangelicals will read them and say yeah yeah it didn't happen that way I mean for example when Paul gets killed in the act of Paul end of the second early third Century uh his the Executioner lops his head off cuts his head off and out of his neck Sprouts milk [Laughter] so that's our account and so uh so okay so when people say that all the disciples have died for their faith well what's the evidence of that hmm yeah okay interesting I just just to to wrap up I wanted to ask to to revisit where we were before we started talking about the resurrection and in fact to take it back to the beginning if if Jesus didn't walk around claiming to be God the historical Jesus I mean like the things that we think he actually did say yeah who did Jesus claim to be in your view what did he claim to be doing yeah I think Jesus absolutely saw himself as a prophet of the coming Kingdom he thought the kingdom of God was soon to arrive and people needed to prepare for it and so I think he modeled himself on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who were warning people that danger was imminent and they needed to protect themselves from the danger by returning to God but I think there was more to it than that I think that Jesus probably did see himself as the king of this coming Kingdom I think that he thought that God was that God was going to make him the king um I don't think that's what he proclaimed publicly we have no record of him saying that in public um in in our early sources but it is the charge that was brought against him at his trial I think it is pretty clear that pilate killed him for claiming to be the king of the Jews and he wasn't claiming to be the current King because there wasn't a kingdom um and so I think he probably was so I think what happened is that Jesus was telling his insiders that that the Kingdom's going to come and um and I think he told them that he was going to be the king one reason for thinking that is because there's a saying of Jesus that I think we can establish is probably authentic what what Scholars do is they go through every saying of Jesus they get through every line they get through every word to try and figure out did this happen or not they say this or not there's this one saying that almost certainly Jesus said I think which is he's talking to the 12 disciples you get this in Matthew and Luke and he says to them uh and I think in the Matthew version he says to them um that u12 speaking to the 12 disciples when the kingdom comes u12 will be seated on 12 Thrones ruling the 12 tribes of Israel 12 12. I Think Jesus must have said this because Judas is one of the twelve he's talking to yeah and a later Christian if you're trying to ask what would a Christian make up a Christian is not going to make up a later saying where Jesus is saying that Judas is one of the going to be one of the 12 rulers so I think the same probably goes back to Jesus if that saying goes back to Jesus yes I think it must that means that his 12 disciples are going to be ruling the 12 tribes well who's going to be ruling them the 12. I mean he's the one who chose them and it's his teachings that are going to bring people into the kingdom I Think Jesus thought he'd be the king and that he told the twelve um and so pilate found out Divine in any sense no do you think no Jesus wasn't claiming any form of divinity I don't think so no I don't think a Jew I don't think a first century Jew living in the 20s in Israel would have had any way of imagined that he was he was God hmm well as I say more detail on this is available in your course did Jesus claim to be God available that's b-a-r-t-e-h-r-m-a-n.com forward slash God man I'm also told that you can access all of the courses that you have available by going to the link barterman.com forward slash Alex this has been created as a way to direct people to okay all of the various courses across the sort of wealth of different theological and historical topics if listeners are interested links will be in the description as well and of course this is available this material in writing the the did Jesus claim to be God's stuff probably most evident in we have it here it's been in the background the whole time hidden away uh we have how Jesus became God this is probably the book that I'd Point people to if they want to talk about the the digits Jesus claimed to be God question how Jesus became God will also be linked down in the description below along with you can see a few other of your works that we've managed to sleep in the background quite conveniently a bit of product placement for you there um but it's been a it's been a fantastic and wide-ranging yeah exciting yeah this is good no important things and yeah yeah thank you Dr Bart Ehrman thank you for coming on the podcast thanks for having me if you enjoyed that conversation then thanks I'm glad remember that all within reason episodes are also available on podcasting platforms like Spotify and apple podcasts and you can watch more full episodes with the link that just appeared on your screen thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 860,186

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: 2STiabRV8TE

Length: 91min 12sec (5472 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023