Interview about my Faith Journey and Research on: When Belief Dies

in today's episode you're going to hear from none other than professor bart ehrman i've been wanting to have bart on the podcast for such a long time and it's been so good to finally get a dating with him to be able to go through his story and his journey into academics and out of christianity as well as talking about his academic and popular work about his blog and yeah hearing his answers to some of my questions about the new testament christianity how things got started and also a really interesting one on how we use the greek new testament and manuscripts today in the translations of the bible that we have in our homes and churches so i hope you enjoy this episode and you're encouraged to go and check out bart's blog i'm a big fan obviously otherwise i wouldn't be involved with it and the fact that it's all for charity just speaks volumes about this man's heart and passion for the poor so without any further ado here's my conversation with professor bart ehrman [Music] welcome to when belief dies a podcast honestly reflecting on faith religion and life this podcast is all about listening we want people to share their reasons for faith or their reasons for non-belief so that we can better understand what has or has not convinced somebody of the claims that different religions profess this is a journey it's not a destination and i'm really excited to have you listening with us each week as we delve into different viewpoints from different parts of the world to try and uncover the truth enjoy the episode [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of when belief dies my name's sam and today i'm joined by professor barterman but it's great to have you on the show well thanks for having me so i've been um i've been chatting back and forth with you for a little while now and been getting involved with your with your blog and stuff and um yeah i i just couldn't help but kind of ask you to come on and and and share a little bit about your story and your journey and your work as well and just yeah kind of talk about the new testament with you essentially so i guess to kick things off bar it'd be really cool just to hear about your story into academics and out of faith i'm aware they weren't necessarily related but they're kind of they're two parallel streams that have kind of come together so if you wouldn't mind kind of yeah sharing shame with us that'd be fantastic yeah no i'd say actually uh i'd say they actually are closely related because uh when i was in um when i was in school um nobody thought i'd become a scholar i mean it's like you guys reasonably smart but like this was not my thing i was more into like you know baseball tennis things and uh social life so uh what happened when i was in when i was in high school when i was i guess a junior in high school i had a born again experience and became an evangelical christian and became extremely committed to my uh christian faith and when i graduated from school i went to instead of going to university i went to a moody bible institute which is a a fundamental fundamentalist bible college in chicago but uh because i'm so passionate about my faith i just i became a study addict i mean i just i would pull an all-nighter at least once a week studying you know and and on top of because i just wanted to learn everything i could about the bible and so it was like i was crazy and i you know when i wasn't like working on my classes i was just memorizing books of the bible it's like oh my god and so um when i graduated from there i decided to go to wheaton college um and um which was billy graham's alma mater and which for me was a step towards liberalism and so but while i was there i took greek and i realized i was good in greek and i was getting good grades and everything because i was studying so hard the whole time and um i decided to go into a career of academia uh but the kind of irony was i wanted to i wanted to become a scholar of the new testament i uh i was especially interested in the greek manuscripts of the new testament and trying to figure out what the original new testament said given the fact we had all these manuscripts had differences in them and you have to be a pretty good expert in languages to be able to pull that off and so i i decided to go to princeton theological seminary to study with the world's expert on this a man named bruce metzger and the irony of it is that in my course of my research i started realizing that my fundamentalist views about the bible were simply not true and that that the bible was not an inerrant word of god and um that there were mistakes and there were uh there are all kinds of mistakes and they're contradictions and discrepancies but they're also they're grammatical mistakes and there are uh you know historical mistakes and geographical mistakes i just realized they're mistakes and so uh i ended up changing my uh religious points of view uh and became a liberal christian for a number of years and went on and did a phd there with metzger and um started teaching rutgers university and so all so in many ways the faith journey was very much like uh very it wasn't just a parallel line they were actually closely interrelated and eventually i left the faith all together probably 25 years ago but that wasn't because of my um more than that maybe yes what 25 years is it wasn't because of my biblical scholarship so much as because of the problem i was having to try and understand how god could be in control of this world given how much suffering there is and it just you know i mean it just didn't make sense to me anymore so so i left the faith for those reasons not because of my academic study yeah that's super helpful that's it's a very similar story to me in regards to the why you left the faith and the kind of yeah the phd element isn't very similar to mine but um yeah i think a big element for me for stepping away from christianity was around this idea that um the god that i was taught the all-loving all-powerful god that knew me by name and cared intimately about me um didn't add up essentially to the pain and suffering that that we witness today and also historic like the the evolutionary story and accounts of of the world it's very tricky but i mean you then went and you then went and wrote i've seen many books but one of your books god's problem is almost like exploring the different sorts of um theodicies and ways that people try and reconcile gods with suffering how those things didn't didn't quite add up for you which i thought was a really a really good and interesting book i wonder if you can kind of share that's a little bit about about that but yeah no i yeah i'd be happy to i because i you know it's it's not that um you know it wasn't a revelation to me that they're suffering in the world i knew that and and i i tried to explain it and i um i had explanations that were satisfying to me at the time um i i mention that because i always have christians tell me well don't you understand it's because and they said you know they tell me you know is it for like i never knew that there's like anybody ever thought of something called free will you know or that you know that i didn't realize that you know whatever and so the whole the whole journey for me uh in terms of the suffering problem and that eventually led to me leaving the faith started when i was teaching at rutgers university in new jersey um i was um i think i just finished my phd or maybe yeah i just finished my phd and i was asked to teach a course in the department called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions and so the idea of the class was that i i would look at different ways different biblical authors dealt with this problem about why people suffer especially the people of god suffer if god has promised to help them and guide them and protect them and like it doesn't seem to be happening and so the you know the authors of the bible have to explain why and uh but i i jumped on the course because i i had thought for a long time that virtually every author of the bible is really concerned with this particular issue that you're calling the odyssey the question of how how there can be a just god if there is you know there's such suffering in the world and um you know it's it's in modern day since the enlightenment it's been premised on uh three statements all of which on the surface christians would say are true but when you put the three together they don't work and the three are the two of them and you just well you actually just said all three of them you know god is all powerful so he can do anything he wants anything uh god is all loving and so he really wants the best for people and there is suffering and so you know if if god wanted to get rid of suffering he surely could i mean he doesn't need to make it so that there are volcanoes you know or tsunamis i mean he doesn't have to be that way uh and and if he loves people i mean surely he doesn't want them to be drowned or to be you know immersed in lava or something so so but he doesn't and so the issue the issue then in in the modern philosophical discourse since the enlightenment has been how do you explain all three and you have to you have to work it out the biblical authors didn't have our enlightenment understandings of logic and this guy but they had basically they basically saw this problem and they actually said it sometimes in in a similar way and so my the idea for this class was we're going to look at you know what does the book of proverbs say about suffering what does when does the book of job say about suffering what is the book of ecclesiastes what does jesus say what is the book of revelation and the whole idea of this course was that they're all saying different things and that what the book of daniel says is really very different from what the book of jewels is in fact it's a contradiction and what um you know and what jesus says is not at all what the psalms say and so and so i was i was doing this with this class and trying to get them to see that there's these different i was i'm still a christian i mean but i i thought you know you got to wrestle with it you can't take it seriously and the it wasn't funny but the strange thing was this is like this is rutgers in the 1980s uh you know this would have been before your time in the mid 80s the only reason people went to school was so they could get a big get a job and make a big salary and so these are like middle class kids from new jersey who like were not interested in this kind of philosophical thing and they didn't see what the problem of suffering was what's the problem and so it is during a time one of these ethiopian famines uh that ended up killing two million people or some people two million people starving to death and the only way i could get them to see there's a problem here is i would bring in uh the front page of the new york times that would have a picture of a of an ethiopian woman who was starving to death with a child in her breast who wasn't getting any nourishment i wasn't getting any milk who was starving to death and i pointed this picture to the students i'd say like this is a problem if you believe in god this is a problem and then they finally kind of got it so so that that that got me going uh and for years after that i continued to struggle with it i read about philosopher said i want theologian said what biblical scholars said what regular folks say about the problem so i just got to a point where i said you know i just don't think you i don't think there is a god who's in control there's not i mean take a look there's not and so uh so i was probably about 25 years or so ago then i ended up leading the debate i think that that really rhymes or chimes with um the book of ecclesiastes where um if you i mean it was it was actually one of your books that pointed out to me i think it might have been your heaven and hell book actually but um essentially is this is this idea that um god was almost added to the narrative later and actually what we have to start off with is is this um is this almost not not atheistic but almost very kind of this this is all there is this life is all there is and it's fleeting it's going to go and actually kind of god then gets added into that i kind of almost wonder and this is quite quite a philosophical question but i kind of almost wonder whether we as humans have almost created a gods to try and explain the problems we have but then as we begin adding these sort of enlightenment and enlightenment tools to the mix we then begin to question our answer to the original question which is still the why is there suffering and pain why is this going on yeah yeah i mean the issue of like what starts religion is a really really complicated one and so i'm not going to i'm not going to solve that one here you know in universities i i suppose it's way this way it's probably this way in britain if they uh but and we will have my department religious studies we'll have a we'll have an introduction to religion class and the students spend the semester trying to figure out what religion means it turns out it's not easy let alone like where did it come from and so but but on kind of the most basic simple level i think that belief in superhuman beings is driven by uh both uh wonder and fear and that people look around the world and wonder how the hell did that happen you know lightning just hit my house you know we're used to causing effect because as human beings that's what we encounter in the natural world and so when things happen humans didn't god you got to figure out something well some other being kind of like us caused it you know or something like that or uh and then you know and then fear as well but then so when you have suffering um you know if you've got a if you've got a god if you end up as you do in the uh especially in the christian tradition but starting with the jewish tradition with the god who is who really is the creator of all and is sovereign over all and really has chosen people and really does love them and yet you know this is happening to them you've got to have some explanation and so the big explanation in the old testament of course is that the people of god have are suffering because they've offended god and they've broken his laws and so he's punishing them and so which is a still you know i mean that's still a very common view i mean it's kind of frighteningly simplistic and uh and scarily applied i mean when i wrote this book when i wrote this book how jesus became god i did when i wrote this book on god's problem god's problem about the problem of suffering i um i did a little i did a book tour around the country and talking to places on radio shows and stuff and i i met this guy in minneapolis a pastor who said you know he was a liberal pastor he's really smart and like you know he he was not a fundamental he wasn't a big believer in the bible but he wasn't he's a christian and he said you know hey ben a couple weeks before this he'd been visiting a parishioner whose daughter 16 year old daughter had died in a car accident and he's you know what you know there's nothing you can say i mean there's not you know you can just be there and help somebody and let them try and articulate their feelings but this parishioner this woman said that she knew why her daughter had died and he said oh really why she said well i promised god i would stop smoking and i didn't do it so he's punishing me and this guy says oh what do you what do you even say to this i mean it's like are you crazy of course that's not why there's not a y here and so but people want a y and so they settle for it yeah we do want wise don't we we're definitely y seeking creatures that's for sure think this kind of leads us quite nicely into into talking about the new testament and and people's derived kind of desire for there to be um why is that answer all our questions within the page of the new testament i think quite often especially the way that i was raised in the way that i kind of taught the bible when i was a church pastor and stuff is is is very much around this idea that the bible holds answers to everything if you look and ask the right questions and um i obviously don't believe that necessarily anymore but um i think we definitely i i definitely and this is something i'm reflecting all the time and told people things that weren't true because i hoped they were true um i had i hope that the bible holds these answers and therefore i can trust in the bible for those reasons um and this kind of brings me into this other point which when people leave the faith quite often they want to throw everything out they want to say jesus was a myth and he never existed it's all pretend you know we just need to kind of walk away from that and then i kind of find that also very problematic because i think there's a lot of good historical evidence that this person of jesus was real and i kind of wanted to ask you because often people might read your work or try and engage with you because they almost want you to kind of deconstruct their idea of christ and destruct their idea of jesus but you actually write quite vehemently about the historical jesus being an actual person and that we can trust the text at least that far i wonder if you can kind of like touch on that a little bit for us today but yeah no i you know this mythicist movement this uh you know the idea that jesus is a myth um it actually is not a new thing it started during the french revolution actually but uh every now and then there's people who say this it's just now with the internet people are saying oh really you know and it's it's a non-issue for scholars um it is it is not even it is not an issue for scholars period but for experts um and it's it's it's it's a little bit worse but it's comparable to uh what whenever my wife tells somebody that she's a shakespeare scholar the one thing they want to know is did he really write the plays and and she's like i'm sorry this is we don't even talk about this this is not an issue in shakespeare's it's not an issue and they don't believe it because it's all they hear about on the internet you know and so but it's like that with the mythicists um you know i know i know personally i know hundreds of biblical scholars i know and i know of thousands and so um yeah but you know there are people who think that and of course they do because that's what you know people say you know jesus wasn't it wasn't really a jesus he was a he was actually a fiction come up like because he was actually a sun god you know or something he'd come up with something and you could it's it's really not hard to explode all of that even though there are there are a couple smart people who who say it and so if you're smart and you say it then people believe you um i do deconstruct though what the bible says about jesus so there's no there's luke but i mean i don't think there's any for me there is zero doubt that there was a man jesus but the question is what was he like i mean who was he what did he do what did he say and you cannot just open the gospel of john and say well he said this it is really it's not that easy at all um we're talking about somebody who he's better attested than 99.999 of the world at the time literally uh far better attested than 99.999 percent of the world at the time but um the attestation is not the kind of thing that you have for the attestation of the existence of barack obama and so you know it's like we're talking about the angel world here and and the sources are um uh they're convincing on some points where there's there's on some issues about who jesus was there's very little debate among scholars but there are lots of big issues uh that are also hotly debated and it's much harder to say um did jesus give the lord's prayer it's much harder to answer that one than his dad said well you know did jesus exist yes he existed did he say the lord well it's it's you you it's it's not an easy question actually so i can obviously say a lot more about any of that that you want me to do so yeah no i really appreciate that i was going to kind of ask you i think sometimes for me it's all i i almost seek that sort of simple explanation like i almost kind of want to go well it you know the the the jesus that we read about in the gospel of mark is is closer to the possible original jesus because it's an earlier source right that's that's what most people agree on um it's just not that simple but do you do do you think that there was that sort of um pushing forwards of the narratives obviously kind of by the gospel of john you have those seven classic i am statements um do we do we as in scholarships scholars sorry do we have this idea from from from your field of expertise part where people are um agreeing more that jesus was probably more likely to be from like the jesus of the gospel of mark i'm not saying he was that jesus but more likely to be like that or do we think that it's going to be some sort of hybrid going on what what are your thoughts um so it's as i said it's an extremely complicated issue um because our sources are written decades after jesus our main our gospel services are decades after jesus but they they're based on sources that were earlier and we can reconstruct some of the earlier sources mark was almost certainly the first gospel um there are reasons for thinking that in other words i mean it would it would take it would take a long time to lay out all the reasons for why mark is almost certainly the first gospel but it's not like it's not guesswork there there's they're really good arguments for it um it's um its vision of who jesus was is roughly similar to what you it's pretty similar to what you get in matthew in many ways um not quite as similar as what you get in a loop but the three of them have so many striking similarities that and and not just those gospels but those gospels are based on these earlier sources like your listeners probably heard of q maybe and but then others also then there's m and then there's the l and these sources have a kind of when you dig down deep into them they have a fairly consistent vision of who jesus was and john's vision is very different and so john since um uh well for most of the 20th century john john was set aside as being a different point of view but it's not a modern thing in in as soon as we have christians talking about the four gospels at the end of the second century people are saying that john is a different item it's a they would call it the spiritual gospel by which they meant that it gave more kind of theological interpretation of jesus rather than nuts and bolts he said this he did that kind of thing and in very rough terms that's still pretty much what most scholars think um but so scholars have a number of criteria that they use to figure out what jesus really said and did and they're comparable to what you'd use for anything i mean if you're if you're trying to figure out if something you know who done it in a like you've got a criminal case and you're trying to figure out who did did did this person commit to crime or not there are certain kinds of evidence that always come out you know you want to know if there's anybody you want to know like anybody saw him do it you know if so if there are lots of people who saw him and do it can you get independent people don't confer with each other and say yeah yeah he did it you know uh and what if you get testimony from somebody who actually wants the guy to be proven innocent like his mother and says things that prove him guilty well if she's not saying it to you know she's not saying because she wants to she's saying because yeah i can't nah god didn't say it true yeah he did do that you know and so when you have a testimony like that that's like different people all agree on things that are contrary to their interests when in a court case that that's pretty good evidence and so historians use that kind of evidence not just for jesus but for you know julius caesar or for charlemagne or whatever i mean this is just how historians do their work and so they do this kind of work with jesus using the sources that are available to us to come up with some kind of sensible picture and it's just not the picture that most of us grew up with um you know from our evangelical background uh you know i i at least did not think that jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who thought that you know with within the lifetime of his disciples all of history is going to come to a screeching halt i just didn't think that uh and but that apparently is who he was um so so you uh you know i absolutely believe in deconstructing the image of jesus but i don't believe in dissolving it i mean i'd be happy to there's nothing you know nothing personally at stake here i mean preferences i mean i could i mean yeah it'd be great for me if i could show jesus great for me personally but it's just like a cat i mean he did exist so yeah i'd like to show donald trump didn't exist but i mean he does [Laughter] i like that and i think you also kind of see this within within within the epistles of paul and some of the kind of um the other letters that we have is this idea that jesus is going to come back soon just just keep being faithful to to the message that i preached to you and then you kind of see this oh oh he's not coming back in our lifetime what does that mean how do we how do we carry on now what does this mean for the next generation to pick this up and and carry on i kind of feel like this this is what this is almost what spurred people into writing the gospels and and these these epistles to a certain point where the epistles were were also kind of just encouraging people but um especially the gospels and maybe some of the later epistles you kind of had this this we need to keep this captured like we need to get this down and make sure it's passed on and make sure it's if there's there's some way that we can share this around because we're not going to be here anymore to preach on this and to share this is that is that right is that good for looking at it it's hard to know what really motivated these people because they didn't tell us we don't even know what their names were let alone what their motivations were but but it is interesting you know when you when you set up the gospels uh chronologically not you know i mean you just there are criteria for deciding which one was first that was second third and there are criteria people have but when you once you do it like you you've done that uh and you set it up so that for example you know mark is probably first then probably matthew then probably luke then probably john then say the gospel thomas which isn't in the new testament but you do that with respect to this question you're talking about you know the end coming right away and it's very interesting when you do when you just look at them chronologically because mark our earliest jesus is still saying before this generation passes away these things will take place and some of you stand some of your disciples won't die before you see it happen which is what what paul was saying a few years earlier paul expected that he would be alive when it happened and so you get that in the earliest gospel when you get to matthew you still have that emphasis pretty much uh by the time you get to luke a little bit later luke is kind of hedging his bets and luke luke isn't actually having jesus say it's going to happen in your generation luke luke is saying it's going to happen in my generation and so jesus isn't telling his disciples anymore because probably because they weren't alive and it wouldn't make sense for luke to have him say it when you get to john it's not about the end coming right away at all there's a few pla few verses where the kind of leftovers of this view but basically john thinks eternal life is now it's not something that's going to happen when some kind of disruption in history you believe in jesus you have eternal life if you don't believe in jesus you are condemned now you can and so when you get to the gospel of thomas later still jesus actually preaches against the idea uh that there's going to be this cataclysmic break in history and the kingdom of god will arrive he opposes it and so you line these things up and it's not hard to figure out quite a lot you know when you do the chronology why that is because they thought it was going to come right away it didn't come right away and so they had to change both what he said and what he meant yeah and this is this is something that you just don't hear in any like any church setting that i've ever experienced like you just don't hear people looking at the books read the new testament and books post new testament and go this this this is the this is the array this is the direction it's going in this isn't a completed volume which you're getting given as as as the keys to the car right this is actually much more of a yeah of a of a painting in in flow like there's there's almost like an artist who's actually painting onto the canvas and actually building up the story and that's what that's what we seem to have well you can't you can't get that in protestant churches especially because protestant churches are very big on going back to the original and so the idea that the religion develops in any kind of legitimate way is you know that's catholic they believe in that later tradition stuff we believe we get back to the original and so so you can't really get very much but i will say that in liberal protestant seminars mainline protestant seminaries uh in the united states and probably uh in britain as well the um uh this is what's taught i mean students seminary students learned i this is i learned it in seminary at a presbyterian at princeton seminar which is a present this is where i learned this material my classmates all learned the material they learned all sorts of stuff that they'd never tell anybody in their churches and i think it's really not right i mean i understand why it's job security they get fired i think really but i mean you know and i'm not saying you know i don't think that you have to i don't think a pastor has to preach this from the pulpit you know that jesus said is going to come in the lifetime of his disciples he was wrong you know you don't expect that from a pulpit but they do have education classes and you kind of wish that adult going to adult education classes in churches would get educated like they might learn something that these people learned in seminary instead of this kind of schmuck the schlock that they learned because you know everybody's afraid to say something [Music] hey i want to take a minute of your time to talk about supporting when belief dies this will always be an advertisement free podcast and for that reason i hope you will be willing to share this episode with your friends and family subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app and check us out over on youtube finally i want to ask you to consider supporting the show financially you can support the show on patreon with a monthly gift or a one-off donation via paypal everything that you give goes directly towards running and improving the blog and podcast take a look in the description for all the links and thank you for supporting the show right let's get back to this week's episode yeah yeah you'd hope i still remember when i was um so i was a youth pastor before i began kind of um being a being a preacher pastor of the church that i've left and um it was really interesting so we went to this sort of a youth event and i was very much um getting into kind of reading more about the new testament and i just read um entity wright and marcus's borg um book jesus two visions where they kind of look at the different sorts of um accounts we have of jesus and they kind of give their two different visions of what what this means um and um basically i walked into the bookshop as there are lots of these sorts of christian camps and for youth and there are loads of empty right books loads of like you know um andy stanley books and um you know the case for christ by lee strobe and all these sorts of books i was like why do you not have anything whether like an an author as you clearly like and someone who's got a different viewpoint just having a dialogue rather than just going straight for something else like a dominate crosstown or something like that why don't you have something that's at least kind of showing them that there is there is other other opinions and they're like we just don't want anybody to be led astray we don't want to to challenge anybody's belief because because it's so rooted in if if you don't believe this specific thing you're going to go to hell and you want to be saved you aren't going to be included it's a very worrying situation it is and it but you know it goes all the way back in early to early christianity that uh you know that i think people people in our environment tend to think that um religions are naturally exclusivistic that you you know like if you if you're one thing you're not another thing you know so if you're a christian you're not a jew and if you're if you're a you know you're not a roman catholic and it's likely you know if you're a muslim you're not so you have these exclusive and in the ancient world that christianity emerged out of uh the only thing close to an exclusivistic religion was judaism and uh and jews were not exclusive in the sense they said well you either agree with us you're going to hell because they didn't believe in the afterlife anyway it's just you know this is our tradition and so you know they weren't exclusive in the sense they said you need to accept this is there exclusive in the sense of yeah well this is all we're going to accept everyone else was a polytheist so like 93 to 95 percent of the world was polytheists which meant they worshiped men to gods and nobody said look if your worship my god's zeus if you were to lose i'm sorry you got to give up apollo no you just okay i haven't worshipped this but maybe i will now you know okay yeah oh and i worship with freedom that sounds good all right you know i mean you just you add things on and christians came along and said um no there's only one god and christ is the way that you have access to that god if you don't believe in christ uh you will be punished in this life and after death and christians come up with the idea of heaven and hell is a place where you're going to you know those who believe in christ will go to heaven and those who don't will go to hell and you had to believe the right things about christ right you couldn't you couldn't like be one of these heretics you know who believed like a gnostic or something or you know whatever and you you've got to be you've got to you've got to toe the line and that idea of towing the line came down through the middle ages down to today through the props and reformation down there i mean and so you know that there's one truth there's one god he's got one son who is one person not two people and not jesus and christ he's one person jesus christ there's one faith one lord one baptism it's all one and so you gotta believe the right one and so uh yeah so that's why they don't promote like um uh open minds they promote the truth yeah yeah i think that that fits really nicely into something that i um i wanted to chat to you about as well which is this idea of kind of creeds and how um people use creeps to almost capture theology and and and their truth um and a lot of christians especially notice this probably more of like american style preachers people like andy stanley kind of um one of their big arguments for saying that christ you know really was god um who came and died and rose again um they they they point to things like 1 corinthians 15 3 to 5 and they'll say things like you know this is a a creed that paul has captured within his writing and this shows that right right you know from a couple of years after jesus died people were sharing these sorts of things and and saying that god you know this man jesus was actually in fact god and they were trying to work out what that meant for them i would love to hear your thoughts on that because i mean i definitely see a lot of christians holding on to things like that as as as the proof that it was right from the moment that they realized he'd risen from the dead from from going to his tomb that they believe this um yeah i kind of yeah go on then go for it so uh well i'll say several things about it i mean uh first of all um i i agree that first corinthians 15 3-5 which is it's the passage where paul's reminding the corinthians what he taught them and what he reminds me says that i taught you first importance that christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and he was buried christ was raised from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures and he appeared to cephas into the twelve uh and so that's that's the thing um scholars have long understood this to be a creed that paul was quoting it's not um the re one of the reasons for thinking that is that the um the literary quality of it is uh unusual for paul it's if you actually put it out in the greek it is very balanced and it's a systematic statement where like this point corresponds to that point this point to that point this point to that point and it's terse and it's not like his normal writing so it looks like he's quoting some that's right paul was writing this in the mid uh 50s i do not understand why everybody goes around saying this thing was composed two years after jesus died where does that come from well i mean what i don't get it i mean i really i generally don't get it i mean i do get it it's so they can prove how early it is but what's the evidence it just means that this is something that paul taught the corinthians before he wrote first corinthians and so it could have been in the year 51. why does it have to be 32. so so i'll say that so i think that's a crazy argument and i have to say apologists just tend to come up with crazy arguments why don't they come on good arguments that's not a good argument and i know people like william lane craig go around saying this stuff come on what's the evidence maybe they've got the evidence that just don't tell me i don't know but so um so there's that i will say two other things though first of all that crete says nothing about jesus being god the creed is about jesus dying and being raised from the dead in fulfillment what the scriptures say i second thing i think that the earliest christians did believe that i think that probably not long after jesus death some of these followers came to think he got raised from the dead absolutely how else would we have christianity if they didn't say that he's a dead guy another dead prophet oh god we lost another one you know no i mean they thought he got raised from the dead and the third thing i'll say is i mean um so uh i you know i've changed my mind about this in the last 10 years but i think probably they did think he was divine in some sense that when he got when he got raised from the dead for the early christians that meant he was taken up to heaven the early christians did not have the view of the gospels that jesus hung around for 40 days or whatever and was like eating fish with his disciples they thought that the reason the tomb was empty is because god had taken christ out and taken him up to heaven this idea that a human being could be taken to heaven is widespread i mean there's not a lot of instances of it but you get it in greek greek uh myths you get it in roman myths you get it in uh people living in the time of jesus versus you know people who are really julius caesar is taken up and what happens to people who are taken up whether it's the legendary romulus or the historical julius caesar or if it's um enoch or elijah or you know in all cultures greek roman and jewish in that part of the world they all thought that if somebody was taken up to heaven they were made into a divine being of some kind which meant that unlike the rest of us they're not going to die they're going to live forever why because god likes them or the gods like them you know zeus likes this person or whatever and so when the christians said that jesus got taken up i mean their only conclusion from there had to be he's been made a divine being that's a far cry from the nicene creed that that is not that christ always existed as one substance of the father by whom all things were made if that's that's that's a whole later thing first corinthians 15 has nothing to do with that other than the fact that it's it's the beginning of it but you know so yeah i don't know if that that speaks to what you're at after yeah yeah yeah it's nice that's really helpful i've always found it to be a very challenging um a challenging thing to understand because as you said it doesn't make sense that it happened just a couple of years after jesus died and and and supposedly rose from the dead it's um i'll tell you why i think people say that and i think it's because they don't understand what a term means i might be wrong about this but scholars call that a pre-pauline pre-pauline fragment they call it pre-pauline because it existed before paul wrote it in this letter that's what they mean by pre-paulie but i think people who aren't trained in this field see pre-pauline and they assume that means previous to paul converting to believe in jesus that's not what the word means but i just i just realized this a few years ago that must be how that what they're thinking because somebody said to me but it's pre-paul line well that this means it's written before paul wrote this letter no no that means before paul was a christian why not say it pre-pauline means is before paul was born this thing about christ showed up in you know 3bce [Laughter] well that was making sense either does your argument that's amazing yeah no i think i think you're absolutely right i think that that's the only way that it makes sense right is this idea that um saul became paul shortly after jesus died after the stoning of stephen and on the road to damascus and they must think that it was written before that that these people were sharing and disputing that report scholars use that to mean something technical and people don't understand what that means apparently even you know christian apologists who at least have been to college they got to know this they took classes surely they took classes on something so i think another really interesting thing about all of this is um especially from your book misquoting jesus um something i i wasn't really aware of and it makes complete sense was that um you kind of expressed throughout your book or especially the first few chapters um how the people copying the the letters that they had of the new testament before christianity um became kind of the accepted like roman kind of religion in in 313 when constantine uh almost became a christian used quotation marks there because we're not quite sure what he actually did believe but um anyway yeah so basically christianity then becomes this this more dominant religion which then kind of gets funding to be able to kind of have people properly copying these texts but before that it was people who were um wanting to kind of copy it so someone could read it out we wanted that a copy they had was wearing out so they wanted to make sure it was all written down but these people weren't um weren't kind of um paid or um academic in their in in in the way they copied these texts i kind of want if you could kind of chat us through the sort of um discrepancies that we see within the different sorts of scoping styles kind of post and then pre-313 if that's all right yeah yeah the history of copying the new testament is very interesting this is what uh this is what i did my phd in that particular area that's why i spent the first 20 years of my scholarship off because that are those issues so i've been long interested in them it's there's a kind of a funny phenomenon that most people haven't really thought reflectively on which is you know in in judaism they had this they they when jews in the middle ages were copying manuscripts they did not make a mistake if they made a mistake they threw the manuscript out i mean it was like they they had rules they could not make mistakes and same with islam i mean you get two copies of the quran it's the same book i mean there are and christians didn't do that it's it's a little bit weird but uh i mean that's why i pointed out it was a little bit strange the christians didn't do that because you'd think they would have done that they didn't but in the middle ages coughing practices are pretty well set and most christian copies of the middle ages are pretty good they're they tend to be monks in monasteries who do this this is what they do they copy texts yeah in the first three centuries you didn't have monasteries and you didn't have christians probably were not trained to be scribes they probably the earliest christian churches whoever happened to be the early scribes copying text you know whoever's copying the gospel marked for the first time there's almost certainly just somebody in the congregation who's got this book and they want another copy of it and this person happens to be able to read and write for whatever reason he does something that requires reading and writing and so he's the guy so he copies it no he's not a trained he's not a xerox machine and he's not a trained copyist he just says he probably makes some mistakes and then some other person wants that copy and so they copy it when they copy that copy you know they're also not a trained professional and um they might be good they might be not so good we don't know but but they copy the one that had some mistakes and they copy the mistakes and then they make their own mistakes and so you know another person comes along and copies that person's copy of the copy and then they replicate and it goes on like that they keep being safe and replicating mistakes and the only time you can correct a mistake is when you realize wait that doesn't make any sense uh i think the guy i got who made this copy must have messed up here i'm going to correct that and you correct it but there's no way to know whether you correct it correctly because you're not looking at the original you're just trying to figure out what it originally said and so you know you might be doing this in ephesus so mark maybe did his thing in rome you don't even know mark it's like you're just copying this book and you're trying to make a correction so but now if you if you miscorrect a mistake then you you know you got you got the original text and you got the mistake and now you got the mistaken correction of the mystery like it goes like that for a few centuries uh and so um the reality is we don't have we don't have mark's copy we don't have a copy of any the original of any of the books of the new testament we almost certainly don't have any copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the originals and with mark's gospel the first the first copy we have uh is uh from about the year 200 so it's about 130 years after mark and this copy we have from the year 200 contains portions of half the chapters we don't have a complete copy of mark until about the year 370. so about 300 years after it was uh after his maid so the big issue that scholars have have had and the reason i got into this in the first place is the interesting question we have lots of these manuscripts later manchester hunt we have we got a thousand we got thousands of these later greek manuscripts over over 5600 uh complete or partial fragmentary manuscripts but they all have differences in them so we're not speculating that the scribe might have changed we've got thousands of these manuscripts and they have hundreds of thousands of differences in them literally hundreds of thousands the the best estimates lately are that there are four hundred thousand differences in our man manuscripts of the new testament the greek manuscripts the new testament um so that's not good news but but so that's bad news but the good news is that the vast majority of these 400 500 000 differences whatever the vast the vast majority of them are completely insignificant and don't matter for anything and probably the majority of them are misspelled words like you know who who cares if you misspelled the word jesus as long as you know it's not about jesus i mean you might leave off an s or something but it doesn't matter so most of them don't matter some of them do matter and some of them matter a lot like the effect some of them affect what a verse means some affect the meaning of an entire passage some of the affect how you interpret an entire book and the problem is there are a lot of these that really matter are once the scholars can't agree on what the original was uh and so yeah so my book misquoting jesus is about that about how like how it's not like you just pick up a bible and start reading it and you're reading like what paul wrote you're you're reading an english translation of a greek text and the greek text is reconstructed by scholars based on manuscripts and i'll have hundreds of thousands of differences in them and so like it's a complicated thing yeah yeah i've often wanted as well is obviously a lot of the printing presses especially in the kind of um bygone ages when when people were printing the new testament it was often a christian organizational charity or you know kind of printing press that would publish these things and i kind of wonder today if you know you pick up the niv or you pick up the esv or whatever it is you pick up and obviously a lot of these are still overseen by christians who wants the text to potentially say the most christian message that it can say and i kind of often wonder i mean i might be wrong i can be wrong on this it's something i've not really kind of pushed before but i've often wondered whether they would be picking potential greek versions that would align more with the theology they want to kind of back up with their with their bible does that do you think that could ever happen um i it could happen i don't think it does quite that way uh virtually all these translation committees are translating the same text and so this so this this volume is called the novum testamentum uh grikey by uh it's called the nestle all on uh because the this this kind of edition was started by a guy named nestle and then it it got taken up by a guy named and so um this um this one i just got this one because it's a it has it has an english side in it uh that has both the our nrsv and the niv that has the greek science i like this for my classes because i can i can read the greek but like students will say yeah well my translation says you know as i can see trying to figure out how they did it all the translations that you would get today virtually all except for like the new king james or something but the esv or the rsv the nrsb the new jerusalem they're all basically translating the same greek but there are two there are two things to be said about this so this greek was constructed by a group of scholars based on their study of all the manuscript the most important manuscripts and my mentor bruce metzger was one of the one of the people five people who did this and so um uh so this is very this is about this is as good as we're ever gonna get probably uh as close as we're ever gonna get but there are two provisos one is that at the bottom of the page i don't know if you can see this but at the bottom of the page there's a list of differences among the manuscripts and um this list is a really partial list i mean it is like a really partial list but it tells you important differences among different manuscripts and some translators will decide you know actually the thing in the apparatus is probably the original reading and the one in the text is probably not the original reading and that's a perfectly legitimate judgment because you have to decide uh in places and it is true that some people will decide in line with their personal beliefs sometimes without they won't say that you know but it just kind of accidentally happened to be the reading that makes better sense for what they personally believe the other thing the more the more problematic thing though is how you actually translate the greek because there are ways to translate degree so that it doesn't look like there's a problem but it's not a good translation of the greek and you get this even in the best translations just as one example one of the striking things in the gospel of john is that there are various places where like that there's an inconsistency of some kind and so for example um in uh it'll say that um you know jesus is doing something um in jerusalem and um and then the next line will say then he went into the land of judea well that didn't make any sense because jerusalem was in judea it's like you know you know that uh you know that he uh he was in leeds and then he went into england he was like uh and so what some translators including the nrsv do is they translate to say so he did this in jerusalem then he went into the countryside of judea now it's not a problem but it's not what the word means it's kind of kind of close to that it's not that's that is not what it means uh and so translators can do that and some translations are much worse at that than others the new international version is probably the best-selling translation at least in america probably in the world the new international version and it's translated my original greek teacher is one of the original translators of it so i i appreciate it i appreciate the committee um and and a guy i co-wrote a book with uh is now like the head of the was the head of the revision company so i i know so i know these people and so they're good people they're good these people are both excellent scholars but they all have to be evangelicals who believe that the bible is infallible and there are places especially in the old testament or they just change things i mean it's like uh you shouldn't do that you know just let it say what it says yeah that's that's fascinating thank you for that i've always i've always wanted that and i've never i've never known the answer so that's really really helpful um okay okay really interesting um i'm kind of aware that i could i could ask you questions uh until until the cows come home but um what i really wanted to touch on kind of finally about really was um talking about kind of your work and especially your blog and um yeah how useful i found it so i mean i've been doing a few kind of audio recordings um of your blog posts and for your kind of um gold gold uh subscribers to your podcast and your blog sorry and um yeah i found it a really valuable resource for learning more about this stuff because i mean i've got i've got a degree in biblical studies and theology but i'm learning so much every day from just kind of logging on and and reading things myself um and yeah i just wanted you can kind of give us um give us an an insight into your blog and also into kind of how you how you work and what your current projects are and what your kind of hopes are for the next year or so if that's okay yeah um so um you mean with respect to the blog or otherwise in terms of my prospects yeah yeah what did you talk about well let me talk about the blog for a few minutes so um so uh somebody a long time ago suggested i do a vlog back in the early like 2010 or something i said no i don't do a blog it's too much work why would i do that the guy said you could charge for it i said i got plenty of money i'm fine i don't want charger he said you can give the money away oh huh now that's an interesting idea so i thought about god it's so much work i don't know i can't i finally two years later i decided okay i'm gonna do that i'm gonna start a blog and see if we can raise any money for charity so in 2012 in april 2012 we started it i got a i got a a guy who could do blog construction uh we did could do the technology and he would do the technology and i would write the posts um so that was april so yeah so that's almost nine years ago now i have posted ever since then i post five or six times a week every week and i don't believe i've ever missed a week since april 2012. um it covered i post about a thousand twelve hundred words uh a day uh five five times sometimes six a week um on everything having to do the new testament or early christianity or cognate topic so so i mean i have yeah historical jesus the writings of paul uh you know how we got the bible the books that didn't make it in the bible the other gospels uh persecution in the early church women in the early church jews and christians you know the conversion of the emperor constantine you know uh how christianity took over the empire just like you know you name it but also greek and roman religion and uh from the time what that was like and judaism early judaism hebrew bible so i'm not an expert on these other things as much as i am on the new testament in early christianity but i i have secondary expertise in all these areas i've taught phd level stuff in most of these areas and so i you know it's just stuff i know people can make comments on any blog post and they can ask questions and i answer the questions every question and so uh yeah so it takes a chunk of time but we do it to raise as you said to raise money for charity and we just started a new system where um people can join the various tiers and they just want to read what i've got to say they join account the lower tier bronze i mean that's you know it's the nuts and bolts that's what they want they want to hear what i have to say every day so they do uh or if they want to make comments it's a higher tier if they want an audio version of it then they join a higher tier and that's where you've come in sam so sam we really appreciate you doing these readings uh because it's great and uh you know we everybody in america loves the english accent [Laughter] they've all added 40 points to your iq which is already very high so you're doing great so um uh people people won't know this but my wife is a brit and so my family thought so i spent a good time bit of time in england and uh and so uh yeah so i'm joking on that although she too there points her right you do it she does not need help um so anyway so that's so that's it and so right now i'm in the middle of this very long thread i've been doing for where did the trinity come from and you know like i could answer that in a thousand words but i decided to devote a very long thread on i've been spending about three weeks on it so far i've just gotten to how it is jesus came to be thought of as god i'm not even done with that one yet and so uh it's yeah so um but then i entered you know i i have some people do guest posts so anyway if people are interested they should just check out the barterman vlog just just look it up online and they'll get it and they can see what the options are and every penny goes to charities this this last year we raised 220 000 for charity um i don't know what the pound exchange rate is right now but it's it's a lot a lot of pounds too um this year i'm i'm thinking we're going to raise a quarter of a million uh 250 000 and so um and it's just growing it's growing we're getting more members all the time it's growing and growing so so yeah what do i do i mean you know i teach my day job is teaching it's like this so i just you know i taught a class last day and uh you know so i teach um at unc chapel hill uh so uh in addition to those two things i do my research and that's that takes a huge amount of my time i'm just finishing a i've just published a book on heaven and hell a few months ago on where the ideas of heaven and hell came from and the argument of that book this would be the kind of book your listeners would be interested probably is that i argue in the book that heaven and hell the idea you die and your soul goes to one place or the other to be rewarded or punished is found nowhere in the old testament and it's not what jesus taught so where'd it come from that's that's the issue of that book so i'm i've just finished doing a scholarly book that is related in a way in many ways the scholarly book is about um trips that are kind of their journeys to the realms of the dead by living people uh so this is a scholarly book and so that that phenomenon is called catalysis catalysis means going down and so like you have like you have a greek person who goes down to hades to see what it's like and so this is i'm interested in the christian materials from the second third and fifth up to the fifth or sixth centuries where you have a guided tour of heaven and hell one of which was influential on dante later the apocalypse of paul so i deal with those creation materials in relationship to greek roman and jewish predecessors so that's kind of thing i'm doing i my next book i'm just i'm just finishing that up now my next book is going to be for general audience it's going to be about the book of revelation and how people misinterpret the book of revelation and have no clue what it's talking about especially the people who write books about it they generally have no clue and so it's going to be about it's going to be contrasting what scholars know about the book of revelation with what you find in the popular press it's i started out it started out being a book about how people think that it's predicting what's going to happen in our in the near future and i try to i'm going to show that actually that's not what it's about at all even though everybody reads it that way and that actually that's not how historically that's not how the book was read people would be surprised they thought people think well it's always been around that way no it hasn't so yeah so that's the next so the thing is i've always got books going and i try to write books for a popular audience and i try to write books from scholars and so i'd kind of alternate but the scholar ones took a lot more time yeah it's a definitely a massive skill set to be able to do all that that's for sure i was going to kind of ask you so obviously someone kind of hears his this podcast here's about you thinks i want to i want to get involved there's the blog which is a very accessible good way to kind of engage with your work but if you were to recommend a book for them to kind of start on that kind of urban journey what what would be the book you'd want people to turn to first it really you know my books the books for popular audience have been geared toward different they're all on different topics and so my my suggestion usually is to pick the topic you're most interested in um my best-selling book is the one you mentioned misquoting jesus for some reason when they published it in england they called it whose word is it i have no idea why they called it that but uh so you can find it probably in england or that or you can probably find it or miss quoting jesus because that's the one that's sold um but it's the same it's the same book just a different different title on it um if people are interested in this question like where heaven and hell came from that's my most recent book it's just called uh heaven and hell a history of the afterlife if they're interested in why what the bible says about suffering and why suffering is a problem for christian faith it'd be the one we talked about god's problem um but you know i have books on my other most recent popular level book was on how christianity took over the roman world which is a pretty big thing because if it hadn't we'd still be worshiping zeus and so like the entire history of civilization would have been different we wouldn't have had the kind of art and music and philosophy and literature that we've had it would have been huge people don't realize how huge it was and it wasn't a you know foregone conclusion it was like you know barely may well not have happened so my book that book is about that that's called the triumph of christianity um and so and so uh people could just look me up and they'll see a list of my books and you know pick one they think's interesting absolutely but it's been so good chatting to you today thank you so much for coming on the podcast you're welcome thanks for having me i hope you enjoyed this week's episode to leave any comments or thoughts you can head over to youtube and to follow us on social media or to see where else we are online hit the link in the description thank you to all our regular givers for making this dream a reality i'll catch you here at the same time next week enjoy the journey you

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 34,093

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Id: Knktrd_jQkM

Length: 64min 16sec (3856 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021