Smithsonian Part One - Christianity’s Most Important Convert

Smithsonian associates sponsored lecture part 1 presented by Barty airman Christianity's triumph how faith conquered an empire Christianity's most important convert the Apostle Paul I'm Mary McLachlan I'm a program coordinator with a Smithsonian associates and I'd like to welcome you today to our seminar that looks at how Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire it is a great pleasure to welcome our speaker dr. Bart Ehrman back to the Smithsonian I know that many of you here in the audience today are already acquainted with Bart he has presented many many outstanding programs for us over the course of the past 14 years relating to the New Testament and the history of early Christianity and he has developed a very strong and loyal following among Smithsonian associate members professor ermine is the James a gray distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of care North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he has taught since 1988 he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and early Christianity having written or edited 31 books including 5 New York Times bestsellers his books have been translated into 27 languages professor omens work has been featured in Time Newsweek The New Yorker the Washington Post and other print media and his television appearances have included NBC's Dateline CNN The History Channel National Geographic the Discovery Channel PBS and NPR excuse me he has won numerous university awards and grants including the 2009 JW Pope spirit of inquiry Teaching Award the 1993 University of North Carolina's undergraduate student teaching award the 1994 Philip and Ruth Edelman Prize for artistic and scholarly achievement and the Bowman and Gordon gray Award for Excellence in teaching well thank you we need to to the lights thank you let there be no light right ah well it's a pleasure to be with you is the sound working is this kind of echo we hear but you can hear it okay yeah it's good yeah good good okay great so uh right this this seminar is on the triumph of Christianity in the ancient world and this is based on the book by a similar title the triumph of Christianity the book actually is being published on Tuesday but the publisher graciously allowed for books to be available today for everybody wants to buy them and they it wasn't sort of being good hearted about it they want to sell books it's not like they're being generous or something things so let me say something about the title before I get into my my talk I've had a lot of colleagues of mine who also teach early Christianity who have questioned the title the triumph of Christianity isn't that like being a little bit triumph allistic about it like you know this is the greatest thing that ever happened and you really want to say that and and all that so the deal is that most most trade books books written for a general audience the publisher decides what the title is rather than the author this became crystal clear to me with one of my early books my book misquoting Jesus so so the book misquoting Jesus I never liked the title for that book the book the book was about how Christian scribes in the early centuries changed the the text of the New Testament an they were copying it where they they change what it said so that either accidentally usually by accident but sometimes on purpose they would alter its words so that in the history of the text being transmitted the text got changed and so what I wanted to call the book I there was a title somebody suggested to me that I really liked which I wanted to call it lost in transmission and I thought that's great they that captures it lost in transmission my publisher decided they didn't want to call it that and the reason was they thought that if somebody goes into the Barnes Noble and looks on the shelf and they see lost and transmission that they would think it was about NASCAR I told them that you know in my part of the world that would improve sales so would they as it turns out though this particular title the triumph of Christianity is the one that I I suggested to them it will be clear throughout the course of these lectures that it's not because I am approaching this historical phenomenon from a triumphal istic point of view I don't celebrate it as a fantastic thing but I also don't denigrate it as a bad thing I'm neutral as a historian there are certainly good things that happen when Christianity took over like the history of the West I mean our culture is dependent as I'll be arguing is what we think of as high culture literature art music and philosophy and I mean all of that would have been massively different if if Christianity had not taken over the religions of Rome so so it it's a great thing in many ways for many of us but there are a lot of things lost as well when one side wins another side loses and so there are losses and we'll be talking about both win wins and losses so anyway that's that's just about the title let me give some introductory comments which I see I've already started giving so the historical and cultural impact of Christianity I don't think there's been any force in Western civilization that has been more influential than Christianity for the last 1700 years there's no institution that's been more powerful than the Christian Church I mean it's not so much the case today in our in a our increasingly secular world but you just think about the history of Western civilization for the last seventeen hundred years what what institution has been more powerful than the church and that it's it's not I mean you can you can gauge this this into not just in terms of religion but in terms of politics culturally socially just about every way if you actually look what happens from the from the early Middle Ages through the Middle Ages do the Renaissance to the Reformation to modernity as we know it it's the Christian Church and in terms of culture I mean you you simply can't understand Western culture without understanding the impact of Christianity literature think about the literature over the last seventeen hundred years much of it has been most of it I mean the vast majority of it has been Christian until recently recent times but even recent literature is dependent on its own heritage and its heritage as a Christian heritage or music I mean you wouldn't have had Baroque music if he hadn't had its predecessors its predecessors go back into the Middle Ages and that's all music to develop in Christian circles and so the it's massively important that Christianity became the religion of the West and so that's what the topic is what's striking is that Christianity didn't start out as a powerful religion at all in the New Testament which I think it's got to be right about this particular point after Jesus death there were there a group of people came to believe in him his eleven men disciples and a handful of women Mary Magdalene and a few other so so say twenty people after Jesus death came to think he got raised from the dead and in some sense began to believe in him okay these twenty people are lower-class illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the Roman Empire they are nobodies three centuries later there are something like three million believers Christian believers in the world three million the Roman Emperor Constantine converts in the year 312 I'll have an entire lecture on Constantine to be our last lecture the Roman Emperor himself converts in 312 by the end of the fourth century half of the Roman Empire is Christian and by the end of the fourth century Christianity is declared the official religion of Rome and my question is so yeah by the end of 4th century 30 million believers that's half of the Empire and so my question is how did it happen how do you get from 20 people especially 20 people like that to 30 million people how that happened and and it ended up affecting the entire history of the West a ways that are virtually incalculable and so that's what the topic is I've been interested in this topic for a very long time and I I wanted to write this book for a very long time and I kept putting it off the reason I kept putting it off is because it seemed to me it was such a big topic there like so many things involved with it and it's there it's complicated and so I kept putting it off until finally I decided okay it's time to do it and so I did it and so that's what these lectures will be about we're going to start in these lectures with the person that I think is the most important convert to Christianity in the history in the history of the religion many people would say that Constantine's conversion is the most important but Constantine would not have converted Paul had not converted I think the Apostle Paul is the most important convert for reasons that I will explain in this lecture this lecture will be entirely about the Apostle Paul so what can we say about Paul as is true of every historical figure if you want to talk about somebody you need some sources of information and so what what sources of information do we have for knowing about this Paul otherwise sometimes known as saul of tarsus by the way sometimes people think that when Paul converted that his name was Saul and he got converted and then his name became Paul see no review say yes you've heard that that's wrong that's not actually the case Saul is this Hebrew name Paul is his Greek name he himself never calls himself Saul he's called Saul in the book of Acts in the New Testament before he converts but he's also called Saul after he converts and so it just depends whether you're talking Aramaic speaking Aramaic or speaking Greek what you call this guy what are our sources of information there are 27 books in the New Testament twenty-seven books in the New Testament all together thirteen of them claimed to be written by Paul 13 of the 27 books claimed to be written by Paul scholars today doubt whether six of those were actually written by Paul scholars have reasons for doubting the six of those go back to Paul they these other six look like there are other authors claiming to be Paul when they're not Paul so whether you think that or not you've even got 13 letters or you've got nine letters you've got basically everybody pretty much agrees that there are seven layers that Paul wrote so well that's a good source of information for somebody if you've got there if you've got their letters if you want to know about Paul's biography these letters are useful but they are of limited usefulness because Paul rarely gives autobiographical information in his letters just as when you write your emails you usually don't say much about your autobiography I mean every now and then you might say something off the cuff but you just don't talk about your honor-- biography when you write your emails he didn't say much about his auto buyer on occasion you will and that's useful for them trying to reconstruct his life there's another source for knowing about Paul which is the New Testament book of Acts the New Testament book of Acts the fifth book of the New Testament after the Gospels Matthew Mark Luke John then the book of Acts the Gospels are all about the life the death the resurrection of Jesus the book of Acts is about what happens to his followers after his death and how they spread Christian throughout the Roman world in the first 30 years so it's about the spread to Christianity by the Apostles of Jesus and the main figure in the book of Acts is the Apostle Paul he's the dominant figure for the final two thirds of the book of Acts well that's helpful you've got a history that has Paul as its subject that's good the problem with Acts using it as a biographical source for Paul is that we're not sure about its accuracy the reason we're not sure about its accuracy there a couple things one thing is it appears to have been written about 20 years after Paul's death and even though it's traditionally said to have been written by a companion of Paul named Luke there are real serious reasons for doubting that so the reason to doubt that is because in a number of places the book of Acts will talk about something that Paul also talks about in his letters and when you compare what Acts says about Paul with what Paul says about himself in in these various places they're almost always discrepancies that make it really hard to think that this person actually knew Paul because we have Paul's words about this particular subject and acts as this about it and they seem to be different from each other so people use the book of Acts to try and reconstruct what Paul's life was all about but they have to use it fairly gingerly you can't just kind of trust everything it says automatically there is there are other sources for Paul especially legendary accounts starting in the second century we start getting legendary accounts of Paul including the most important legendary account is a book called the acts of Paul which is a it's an account of Paul's missionary escapades and they're very interesting and they are clearly legendary one of my favorite is yeah Paul in the baptized lion and so there's this story where in the acts of Paul where Paul has been he's been arrested for engaging in Christian activities and they decide to throw him to the wild beasts in the Arina and so they take him and they throw in the arena and they throw it they let the beasts out and this big lion comes up to Paul and everybody is watching this with great interest because nothing more than a little blood and gore and so so this is gonna be great the lion comes up to Paul looks at Paul Paul looks at the lion and Paul says aren't you that lie and I baptized and the line replies yes Paul I am what are you doing here well they captured me just like they captured you how are we gonna get out of here and then God sends a thunderstorm it hails it kills all the other beasts Paul and the lion escape the lion goes back to the mountains Paul goes on to his missionary journeys and life goes on so right so we we get we get stories like that in the acts of Paul which are great they're entertaining but it's not as if these are historically reliable accounts of what happened to the life of the Apostle and so we know it's nice to have them and they're they are worth they're absolutely worth studying but not so much for knowing about the life of Paul so the short story is our best source is Paul's letters but they don't give us a lot of information they give us enough to get for what I want to talk about today the book of Acts can supplement that and later legends not so much let me give you a basic timeline so we're on the same page chronologically almost everybody agrees that Jesus died around the year thirty of the Common Era it might have been year twenty-nine it might have been the Year 33 but there are reasons for putting it right in there somewhere around the Year 30 of the Common Era so ad 30 Paul persecuted the Christians as we'll see in a minute before he himself became a Christian and you can map out Paul's chronology to show that probably he was persecuting Christians for a year or two maybe around the Year 32 or 33 the way we get to the years for Paul is that in a few very precious places Paul will say three years after that I did this and then they'll say you know 15 years later I did that and so you can actually add up the numbers and if you have some points of reference you can put it all together and they're scholars they're actually scholars you spend their whole lives trying to figure out Paul's chronology which isn't the sort of thing I wanted to do on a Friday night but there are people who do that and so this is pretty widely accepted he's persecuting Christians 32 to 33 he converted around the Year 33 so about three years after Jesus death is when Paul converted after persecuting the Christians he goes on his missionary work trying to convert people principally pagans Gentiles to the faith and it's about a 30-year ministry the first letter that he wrote that we have is for sessile onehans first Thessalonians is usually dated to 49 of the Common Era 49 50 right in there somewhere so it's about 20 years after Jesus death this is Paul's first letter it's the first writing of any kind we have from a Christian this is the earliest Christian writing the letter of first Thessalonians Paul's final letter is his letter to the Romans written around the Year 62 and it's usually thought that he died in the year 64 that that's probably right but it's not it's not absolutely certain but it's almost certain to sometime around that okay so that's that's just a basic timeline so we see what we're talking about let me talk a little bit about Paul's life and focusing on his original his original persecution of Christians one of the most important things to understand about Paul is that he was a highly religious Jew he started out as a highly religious Jew in one of his very few autobiographical statements he points out in his letter to the Galatians that he was he was born Jewish he had Jewish parents he was circumcised and he was highly religious he was zealous for the traditions of the Jewish fathers more advanced in religion than others of his age if it's age group he tells us he was a highly religious Jew what would that mean in the ancient world well it will help to get some basic sense of what it meant to be religious to you in the first century and so I'll give you a very quick what run-through of some of the important points first it would mean that he was a monotheists as we'll see in the next lecture the vast majority of people living in the Roman Empire were polytheists they believed in many gods Jews were the only people who believed that there's only one God or at least they believe there's only one God who is to be worshipped Jews worshiped one God not many gods at this time there are various estimates but most people think that the Jewish population of the Roman Empire was maybe 5 to 7 percent 5 to 7 percent of the Empire was Jewish the Empire's usually said to be about 60 million people so we're talking about 4 million Jews in the world and so they're not it's not a massive it's a small minority and one thing that makes them stand out is they think there's only one God this God is the God who created the world the God who created the entire universe at one point chose his people Israel was chosen by God to be his people and so they worshipped God and he is he is their God this one God has in fact made a covenant with the Jewish people a kind of agreement a kind of like a peace treaty with them that in exchange for their devotion he will protect and defend them that is at the very heart of ancient Judaism we are the people of the covenant we are the people that God has chosen and if we follow what he tells us to do he will continue to be our God he has saved us and now we we follow his will so there's a covenant and that covenant involves the law the law sometimes called the law of Moses because it was widely thought that is found in the Bible that the law of God was given to this great prophetic Savior figure from many centuries earlier Moses who had been used by God to bring about the exodus of the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt and then gave them his law the law consists of the ten commandments of course but it consists of all of the commandments that you can find in the Old Testament there are by number 613 of these Commandments now my students in Chapel Hill which as you probably know is in the Bible Belt my students typically think that Judaism is a really harsh religion filled with laws that no one can obey and the idea is that God gave Jews a bunch of hard laws so that so that they wouldn't keep them and since they wouldn't keep them they'd go to hell and and then what he did is he sent Jesus because everybody needed him because everybody was going to hell and then they realized oh it's much better to believe in Jesus then go to hell and so and so Christianity is the solution to the problem caused by Judaism and in this view the Jewish law is this burden this onerous I who can possibly keep this law so far as we know there weren't any Jews who thought that in the ancient world the law was not a huge burden and frankly it wasn't all that difficult I mean you know thou shalt not murder oh no I can't stop myself oh it's just so tempting so I mean so I'm there there are there are laws that might seem kind of they seem strange to modern people but look we have strange laws - I mean we have all sorts of laws about what you can ingest for example you know what kinds of things you can put in your mouth and and or how old you have to be to put them in your mouth or whether you can ever put them in your mouth and and it's like we have all these 613 what we have more than 613 traffic laws and so we our law code is amazing I mean so so 613 laws it's not is not that big a video so Paul like other Jews thought the law had been given by God is a great gift it was not seen as a burden and it was this is the key point the law was not the way to earn salvation it's not that you earn salvation by keeping the law you were already saved by God you were a member of the Covenant the law is how you respond out of gratitude to God the laws involve how to worship God their laws about how to worship God and their laws about how to behave in your community so this is great God has told us how to how to live this life and so we've seen as a great joy to follow and a great thing to have Paul was a certain kind of Jew that we know about from other kinds of writings from the time that scholars would call an apocalyptic Jew most Jude I probably it appears that most use of the time at least you know it appears that most use of this time had a kind of apocalyptic bent the word apocalyptic comes from the Greek word apocalypse which means a revelation or a revealing and unveiling Jewish apocalyptic God had revealed to them the secrets that could make sense of what's happening here these were the heavenly secrets that made sense of earthly realities in particular apocalypta sustain why the world is in such a mess many of us are wondering that why is the world in such a mess Jewish apocalyptic cysts thought they solved the problem it's because there are forces of evil in the world that are creating havoc you have droughts and famines and earthquakes and tsunamis and floods and epidemics and wars and rumors of war and you have just awful suffering in this world why because there are forces of evil that are in control of this world temporarily soon God is going to intervene and destroy these forces of evil and bring in a utopian state and so these Jewish apocalyptic cysts believed that they were living at the end of the age and that the things had gotten just as bad as they could possibly get and God was soon gonna intervene and make things right again when God did that he would raise people from the dead God is going to make it right not only for people happen to be living at the time but people who died already so that you shouldn't think that you could side with the forces of evil and therefore become rich and powerful and influential and then die and get away with it you can't die and get away with it because God's gonna raise you from the dead to face judgment and there's not a sweet thing you can do to stop him if on the other hand you have suffered unjustly God's gonna raise you from the dead and bring you into his utopian state the kingdom of God there's going to be a resurrection of the Dead at the end of the age Paul thought this before he became a Christian there were Jews in Paul's day who were expecting that this great deliverance of God would come through the future Messiah the term Messiah is frequently misunderstood today the word Messiah actually comes from the Hebrew word mashiac Misha Jacque is a word that means anointed anointed one anointed one the the Greek equivalent of mashiac the Anointed One is Christos so we get the word Messiah from the Hebrew mashiac we get the Greek word we get the word Christ from the Greek equivalent Christos it's the same word Messiah Christ same word the Messiah why do they call the Messiah The Anointed One this is a reference originally probably to the king of Israel the king of Israel was understood to be God's representative on earth when a person became a king when the man became King there was a there's a thing that happened the coronation ceremony where he would have perfumed oil poured on his head as a symbol of divine favor so he was the literally the anointed one he was anointed with oil in the Old Testament God promises the great ancient king of Israel David that he David would always have a descendant sitting on the throne in Jerusalem David would always have a descendant on the throne David was a great warrior who destroyed the enemies and set up God's kingdom and it was great the ancient golden days of Israel and he would always have a descendent on the throne and that that actually was true for about 400 years until the Babylonians came in and wiped out the nation of of Judah and destroyed Jerusalem and took the Jewish King off the throne and there's no Jewish King some Jewish thinkers thought that look God had promised we'd always have a mashiac we'd always have a king on the throne not a king now on the throne God's going to bring a king under the throne in the future he'll be like David he'll be a descendant of David he'll be a son of David he will be a warrior who drives out the enemy and sets up the kingdom just like David and so the Messiah is going to be a figure of grandeur and power a mighty figure who will destroy the enemy and rule God's people in in Jerusalem that's what Paul and other they were expecting when they when they were thinking about the future Messiah a lot of Christians today think that the Messiah was somebody who was supposed to die for the sins of the world and be raised from the dead that's not an expectation that any Jew had it's not an expectation that it needs you had at the time the Messiah is supposed to be something else wasn't supposed to die and be raised from the dead which brings me to the Christian claims about Jesus in Paul's day that led to his persecution Christians claimed that Jesus was the Messiah so I'm talking about the year 31 the Year 32 just a couple years after Jesus death the the Christians are saying Jesus is the Messiah and most Jews thought that's crazy what the Messiah supposed to be this figure who destroys the enemy and sets up the kingdom who was Jesus he was a crucified criminal he didn't destroy the enemy he got publicly tortured to death by the enemy he was humiliated and tortured to death that's the Messiah that can't be the Messiah are you kidding me it's like it's the opposite of the Messiah and so this idea of Jesus being the cyllage is ludicrous how many people do they laughed at the idea most Jews laughed at the idea Paul didn't laugh so much Paul actually got angry about it this led to Paul's persecutions of the Christians Paul thought that it was blasphemous to say that Jesus was the Messiah because he was just the opposite of the Messiah he clearly wasn't and not only that but there's something fairly specific about Jesus in particular that showed he could not be the Messiah which was this it was his mode of execution that he was crucified he was nailed to a wooden stake a tree the reason that was a problem was because the Old Testament self in the law of Moses it says explicitly cursive is everyone who hangs on a tree cursed is every one or cursed is anyone who hangs on the tree Jesus was hanged on a tree that meant he was under God's curse and so the Christians are saying that the person that God cursed is the one who was favored of God they are so wrong about that and it's dangerous and Paul apparently tried to stamp it out Paul himself says that he persecuted the church violently and tried to destroy it we don't know what exactly Paul was doing in the book of Acts what in the book of Acts this is something I don't think you can trust him out the book of Acts what what Acts says is that the high priest in Jerusalem gave Paul the authorization to go out and arrest Christians and take them back in to take them back to jail the reason I don't think that that's plausible is well there aren't Jewish jails but we don't have any records than anything like a Jewish jail a jail for Jews I mean what is that and and the Romans don't care if somebody's blaspheming the god of I mean Romans don't care about that so they're not going to romans j roman jail so what is that I don't know what it is but it really doesn't make any sense well if that's not it what is it I don't know I mean it may be that Paul's just beating people up he may just be taking him out beating him up or maybe he's using the synagogue as it had some kind of internal punishment within its width the synagogue authorities we don't really know what we do know is that he had a major turnaround and Paul who had been persecuting the Christians became one himself the one who was opposed to Christ became an apostle of Christ our sources of information about Paul's conversion the most important source is Paul does say something about it in a couple of places in his letters the accounts that most people know today are based not on his letters but on the book of Acts so when people today thing about Paul's conversion blinded by the light falling to the ground hearing Jesus call out Paul Paul or Saul Saul why do you persecute me that whole scene on the road to Damascus that's from the book of Acts it's recounted in Acts chapter 9 it's we're counted two more times in Acts chapter 22 and action chapter 26 and what's interesting is the three accounts don't agree with each other in some times in just little details so and in one of the accounts we're told that the Companions who are with Paul they they heard the voice but they didn't see anything when Christ appeared in this blinding light and says you know Saul Saul why are you persecuting me they heard the voice of they didn't see anything the other account says they saw the light but they didn't hear anything it's just the opposite or one account says that Paul's supposed to that a one account says that the people with them are our left standing and the other cow says they all fell to the ground says just the opposite one account Paul is told go to go into Damascus and Ananias this person there will tell you what to do next the other cap Paul's not told to do that Jesus tells him what to do next so these are odds with you no it doesn't look like he's trying to get his story straight so it's a it's a little bit problematic but we do have Paul himself talking about it and what Paul says does agree with Acts an important point namely that there it involves some kind of visionary experience now whenever st. Paul had a vision I'm not I'm not saying that he saw something that wasn't really there I'm just saying he actually saw it he saw something if you're if you're a Christian you would say most Christians will say well he saw Jesus because Jesus appeared to him you're not a Christian say he was having a hallucination but either way I mean he's seeing something and so all I'm pointing out is that this was a visionary experience involving involving vision what was the vision that's what was the vision Paul Paul himself is explicit Paul claims that he saw Christ alive he saw Christ alive and this is about three years after Jesus death and so he had some kind of vision of Jesus Paul mentions it in a couple of places and what he says in Galatians is that this is the point at which God revealed his son to me som this is when God revealed his son to me in other places he talks about seeing Jesus after his death what matters for our purposes here isn't so much whether that really happened or not whether you really saw something or he just had a hallucination what matters are the implications that Paul himself drew from seeing Jesus several years after his death several implications what what ends up happening is Paul has to start making sense of what it is he's just seen he believes he's seen Jesus alive what what can that mean and Paul starts trying to figure out what it means there are several implications first eschatological implications the term eschatology means the your understanding of the end times what's going to happen at the end all of us have an eschatology all of us have an idea of what's going to happen at the end some of us think Jesus is going to come back sometime next month some of us think we're going to blow ourselves off the planet next month some of us think that we're gonna die our souls going to go to heaven or hell so I think we're gonna die or in cease to exist we all all of us have some kind of idea of eschatology Paul had an eschatology Paul thought that the that God was soon going to intervene in history and destroy the forces of evil and raise people from the dead if he thought that at the very end of history as we know it there was going to be a resurrection of the dead what would he think if if he came to believe that somebody had been raised from the dead he would think that it started the resurrection has begun that's why he calls Jesus the firstfruits of the resurrection first Corinthians 15 he talked about Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection this is an agricultural image the farmer when it comes time for harvest goes out first day of harvest brings in as some of the crops that night they have a big celebration celebrating the incoming of the firstfruits and when does the farmer go out to get the rest of the crop does he wait 2,000 years no he goes the next day Jesus has been raised as the firstfruits which means it's started and everybody else is going to follow suit that's why Paul this confirmed to Paul he's living at the end of time so the end has started Christological this is this is big why Jesus well the only way Jesus could be live now is if he came back from life and the only way back from the dead and the only way he could come back from the dead as if God raised him from the dead if God raised him from the dead then God really does favor Jesus but he cursed Jesus so how does it work well Paul has to figure that out but the first thought is I was wrong he really is the one who's favored by God he's not a false messiah he really is the Messiah and so his understanding of Christ his Christology his understanding of Christ develops that he comes to think that Christ really is the one favorite of God but how do you make sense of it he was crucified on a tree well this leads to his soteriological conclusion soteriology is your understanding of salvation your understanding of salvation how does one get into a right relationship with God salvation how does one get into a right relationship with God Paul's soteriology as he tried to make sense of how Jesus could be crucified if he was the Messiah because that's just the opposite of what you would expect of the Messiah Paul had to make sense of how God could have cursed Christ if he was God's favorite one Paul reasoned apparently he reasoned that if God if Christ was God's favored one is shown by the resurrection then he must not have been cursed for anything wrong that he had done and Paul came to the conclusion that Christ was cursed for the wrongs other people had done Paul came to think that Jesus was a kind of sacrifice Paul was a citizen of the ancient world he knew how sacrifices worked in pagan religions and in his own Judaism sacrifices there are never reasons for sacrifices in the ancient world but one of the reasons for sacrifice in the ancient world is as a kind of substitute the animal gives its life so that you don't have to give your life it brings about a kind of atonement where God is satisfied with the sacrifice of some other being other than yourself and since Christ would not have been killed for anything wrong he had done because these gods favored one he must have died for others and so the reason he got nailed to a cross is because he had to be a curse because he had to become a curse for the four other people which means that salvation comes through the death of Christ the death of Christ is not a miscarriage of justice it's not just like you know something wrong that happened to Christ on one weekend or or it's it's not just an accident it's it was God's plan because God obviously did it because God raised him from the dead so God must have meant meant for him to die and so it's the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes all the difference this is how God has brought about salvation but that has large implications if God brought about salvation through the death of Jesus then I don't want that one yeah if you brought about the salvation through the death of Jesus that means that a person is an right standing before God not just by being a member of the Covenant but by believing in this death that is a sacrifice for sins but if it's the death of Jesus as the sacrifice for sins that put somebody and keep somebody in a relationship with God the laws got nothing to do with it if a curt of a person could stand in the right relationship with god by the law all they'd have to do is become jewish and keep the law but if you can become right with God by being Jewish and keeping the law there'd be no reason for God to have Christ sacrificed since he was sacrificed the laws got nothing to do with it and that has huge implications because it means that people who are right with God don't have to be Jewish and that means that the salvation of Christ can go to Gentiles who can become followers of Christ without being Jewish before Paul came to this realization the Christians maintained that yes Jesus salvation brings in Jesus death brings salvation and since Jesus is the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people of fulfillment of the Jewish law then you have got to be Jewish so yes you can believe in Jesus become Jewish then you can believe in Jesus and so any believer Jesus has to keep the law they have to observe the Sabbath if they're a male I'm sorry to say you've got to get circumcised you've got to keep kosher no more ham sandwiches no shrimp cocktail you've got you got to start keeping the law that's what the but then Paul comes along it's whoa no in fact the laws got nothing to do with it and this leads to the personal implications Paul realized that he himself had been called by God to take the message to the Gentiles Paul called himself the apostle of the Gentiles Paul knew that in the Jewish Scriptures there are passages that talk about the Gentiles flocking to Jerusalem to accept the worship of the true God Gentiles would come into the fold there would be a light to the nation's a light to the Gentiles who would enlighten the Gentiles about God's salvation Paul came to think that he was the light to the Gentiles Paul himself was the fulfillment of Scripture whoa Paul did not think small Paul thought he himself was the one who had been predicted by the Hebrew prophets to bring the message of the God of Israel to the Gentiles who didn't have to become Jewish they only had to believe in Christ and so Paul began an apostolic mission his mission field Paul maintains that the other apostles were to minister to Jews they were to convert Jews Peter James the other apostles they go to Jews Paul watts go to the Gentiles well who are the Gentiles of Gentiles as everyone else in the Roman world so the Roman Empire is in dark here you can see it's a rather large place going from Britain and Spain all the way over to to over here at the this end of the Fertile Crescent to Mesopotamia Europe southern Europe and around the Mediterranean Paul understood his missionary field to be from just north of Palestine all the way over to Illyricum he established churches in Syria possibly Syria Cilicia up here in Asia Minor this is Galatia through here along the west coast of Asia Minor in Macedonia and akia which is Greece in macedonia today he wanted to go to rome he writes his letter to the romans saying he wants to go rome because he wants to use rome as his base of operation to go all the way to the west as far west as he could go spain and so he's he's going one place to another in order to make converts among the gentiles how did he do it this is an interesting question suppose you are a Christian missionary in the year 50 and you want to go start a church in someplace you've never been to before and so say you got to go to ephesus and you're gonna start a church there and you don't know anybody in ephesus how do you do it I mean do you just like show up in town and set up your soapbox and in public and start preaching and hoping people will pay attention to you well there's no evidence that that's probably what happened what what a lot of people have thought is that what Paul did is he'd go to a city and he'd go to the synagogue he's Jewish goes to the synagogue other Jews there and they've got a lot in common they're all Jews and then he starts telling them that actually you know the Messiah has come and he starts telling them about the Messiah and that he converts some people and then he starts talking to their friends who are their Gentile friends and their neighbors and they starts and so he spreads from the synagogue out that is entirely possible that is exactly what happens in the book of Acts that's how he does it in the book of Acts so that makes sense the problem is when you read Paul's letters Paul talks to his congregations that he's writing his letters to and indicates that they are former pagans there's nothing to suggest that these people are former Jews it looks like he's converting pagans well is he doing it through the synagogue or not well I don't know but Paul himself actually gives a different way of proceeding he talked about a different way of proceeding this was recognized about 20-25 years ago by specialists in the New Testament who came to realize that some of passages in Paul indicate that he converted people by preaching on the job so Paul says in 1st Thessalonians he's reminds the Thessalonians his first letter he reminds the Thessalonians that when he was with them he was working day and night while preaching the gospel to them it used to be thought that that meant he was preaching a day and night but that's not what he said he was actually working and he says he was working day and night so as not to be a burden to any you preaching the gospel so he's actually working a job now in the book of Acts we're told that Paul was a leather worker usually it's translated that he was a tent maker made tents well it might have been tents tents were made out of animal skins well a lot of things were made out of animal skins so Paul may have just started a Christian leather goods shop in the town he goes in and he starts and if he if he was working with leather as his occupation it's a portable occupation he'd just take his knives and his alls and his other tools with him as he went from one place to another and he'd go into a town and he'd set up a small business there'd be other leather workers in town he they're always located in the same region all the trades are locating the same part of town he goes into town starts up a leather goods shop maybe rents out an apartment above to live in which is a common arrangement and he works the whole time day and night people come into the shop and he starts talking to them and he you know it's a lot more or loose about about this kind of thing back then they sit in they have conversation they have long conversations Paul talks to them and after one starts telling them about Jesus and how Jesus is the Son of God the savior of the world sent from the true God and Paul talks to them and first they think he's a little bit crazy but they think what's kind of interesting they come back and and eventually say you know three or four months later he actually converts somebody and he converts say converts a man and the man has a wife the man make sure his wife believes - and his children and then they start talking to the next-door neighbor comes to talk to Paul and they thought and it goes on like that and so you know after eight or nine months he's got it he's got a small community of people who are Christians and then once he's got that small community they're meeting every week and they're talking to their neighbors and friends and things and they're starting to spread a little bit and then Paul goes to the next city and does it again he's planting churches probably by working on the job what is he telling these people he's telling them first of all that they worship gods that are powerless and worthless and of no use to them what Paul says in first Thessalonians is that he convinced his listeners to turn to God from dead idols to worship the living and true God and to await his son from heaven Jesus Christ who saves us from the wrath of God that is coming he teaches them that their gods have no power but his God does have power Jesus is his son and if you believe in him you'll be saved when the end comes that's what he's teaching people it doesn't seem like that would convert anybody but he doesn't have to convert a lot of people he just needs to get a start Nate's and convinced one person and then he can convince another person and the church starts to grow how did he persuade anybody it is interesting that what Paul says is that he convinced them by doing miracles really yeah that's what he says three times in his letters the Holy Spirit worked through him doing American we don't know what he means he doesn't tell us what he means presumably his readers know exactly what he's talking about because they were the ones there it might be that what he's calling a miracle we might think isn't such a miracle like you know he actually converted Fred over here you know who would have thought he would convert you know maybe the boy has a miracle you know so he's doing something I don't know or he's or maybe he's healing people so I don't know what he's doing but he says is because of his miracles and the thing is he was preaching a miracle he's preaching that Jesus was raised from the dead that's an amazing miracle and he could preach that one with conviction because he could say with conviction that he saw Jesus alive three years after he died he saw him he could say it with conviction and over time it convinced people and people then started to convert what was Paul's abiding influence well his influence on on the history of Christianity is immense I mean 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament written by him another book book of Acts is written about him some more than half of the books of the New Testament or pretty directly related to Paul but I would argue that his most important influence on the history of Christianity had to do with his realization that a person could be a follower of Jesus without being Jewish this transformed what Christianity was Jesus himself was completely Jewish nothing non Jewish about him he was completely Jewish he was circumcised he followed Jewish customs he kept the Jewish law he became a Jewish teacher he got Jewish followers he taught them the Jewish law he was thoroughly Jewish his followers after his death were Jewish and they thought that anybody's gonna be a follower of Jesus it has to be Jewish he's a Jewish teacher you're gonna follow a Jewish teacher you got to be Jewish Paul came along and said no what matters is that Jesus death and resurrection bring salvation now with that the other people would have agreed yes that's what brings salvation what Paul said is the conclusion therefore is that the law doesn't matter Gentiles must not convert to be Jews because if they do they're saying that they that the law is what brings them into a right relationship with God but it's not the law it's only the death and resurrection of Jesus and so this is a religion for Gentiles not only Jews if that had not happened Christianity would have remained a sect within Judaism and it would have had the historical significance of the Sadducees now many of us know something about the Sadducees but it's not like they're affecting our lives Christianity would have been like that that's why I think Paul is Christianity's most significant convert because he transformed the religion into a worldwide religion and it became very quickly a religion of Gentiles as it continued to be down through the centuries thank you very much I will take questions for about 13 minutes in the back yes good question he's asking about his vision of Christ is there any evidence that he actually saw Jesus while he was alive and the answer is absolutely no I Paul apparently did not see Jesus when he's alive which then naturally leads to the question how did he know it was Jesus that he saw I think you were a nametag hi I'm Jesus I don't know I mean it's like you get this in the Bible right when Jesus in is Jesus in the Gospels goes up on the Mount of Transfiguration and it takes his three disciples with the Peter James and John and he's up there and then mo that Moses and Elijah appear speaking to Jesus how do they know it's Moses and Elijah right is this like you just kind of know these things apparently I'd I don't know I haven't had one of those yes for sure so yeah yeah yeah so wouldn't Christianity have an easier time spreading than Judaism because you I mean the main thing of course the circumcision I mean if you you know I mean it's not a very effective evangelistic tool to say he yeah so right so yeah probably what I'm gonna be arguing is that Judaism actually wasn't very missionary anyway like they weren't really out trying to convert people they just wanted to be left alone to worship their God and so but I would say that that's right that if if they had remained a sect within Judaism it would have had a very hard time converting Gentiles yes yes in the back here then I'll get to the back yes yeah yeah so Jewish apocalyptic thought is known to us by a number of texts from from the ancient world the first so okay so I'm gonna kind of complicated but the the last book of the Hebrew Bible to be written was probably the Book of Daniel he doesn't seem that way because it's kind of in the middle someplace but it probably was Daniel written in the second century BCE and it's the first text in the Hebrew Bible that talks about an individual resurrection of dead people at the end of time Daniel chapters 12 verses 1 through 3 that that there's going to be a resurrection of dead people after Daniel was written there are other Jewish texts that talk about this and they they understand resurrection as a kind of theodicy so a theodicy theodicy as you know is that is a way to explain how there can be such suffering in the world if there's a god who's in charge of it the odyssey literally means the righteousness of God I mean how can God be righteous given everything that's happening here and he's supposed to be in control what these what these Jewish apocalyptic says said is that God is in control ultimately but he's letting things run their course now but at the end of the age he's going to intervene and he's going to resolve all of the evil that's happening but it's not just going to be for people who happen to be alive at the time there'll be a future resurrection of the Dead and so Daniel 12 and then other Jewish texts that are in the Jewish apocryphal texts that didn't get into the Bible maintain this and so this was a widespread view is a view for example of the people who produce the Dead Sea Scrolls is view of the of the Pharisees is one thing that separated the Pharisees and the Sadducees the Pharisees believed in future resurrection of the Dead and so forth and so on so this that Paul himself says that he was a Pharisee before he became a follower of Jesus and so he just had this this view of Resurrection does that answer your question no there's no hell yet the idea the original idea for the resurrection appears to be that people are brought back and there is a judgment but the people people are who are not righteous are zapped or zapped and destroyed and the others are given eternal life and eventually there's a development of the idea of a hell yeah [Music] and how did Paul make the conclusion that Jesus the first person that he believed was resurrected was necessarily the first of the good people as opposed to something that he in fact was the first of the bad people given the fact that Jesus had suffered first bill yeah yeah good question did you all hear that no okay all right so the basic question is if Paul thought that at the end there's a resurrection and a good will be rewarded bad will be punished why does he think that Jesus is one of the good why not think that he's raised and he's one of the bad because after all I mean did you know get publicly humiliated and tortured to death and so the answer to that is similar to what I was saying before when when Jews at this period thought about a future resurrection they appeared to thought that when when there's a when people brought back into the body the wicked are going to be destroyed at that moment and so and the the the righteous will be rewarded and Jesus wasn't destroyed for Paul for Paul he you know he'd been raised three years earlier and Paul appears to have thought that Jesus had come to him from a heavenly existence in in the ancient world there are a number of stories about people who are taken up to heaven after their death in the ancient world you get this in Jewish sources but you also get in Greek sources and in Roman sources of somebody's taken up into heaven and when somebody's taken up into heaven after their death they're made into a divine being this their divinized they're made it because they're living with the gods or with God and so they're made a divine being and so Paul thought that when Jesus was raised from the dead he was actually taking up to live with God and so he was a holy divine being and so he wasn't seen as somebody who was wicked and destroyed other questions yes in the back the Roman tyranny over yeah yeah so what role does Roman tyranny play sorry when you asked that question I had a flashback to the life of Brian remember that passage in that part of the life of Brian where they're saying what were the Romans ever done for us and they start listing all of us like so for some people the Roman tyranny wasn't much of a tyranny is a pretty pretty good thing I mean you know it's like we have roads now and we have so but there were people especially people and there were people in Palestine who did feel in fact that the Romans were were tyrants and that we're making life miserable for us and it's usually thought that this kind of apocalyptic thinking is encouraged by those situations of oppression that people who are really suffering are the ones more likely to subscribe to this view you know it's only gonna be a little while we just need to hold fast for a little while and God will soon intervene and then we'll be rewarded oh just hold on for a little while longer and so there's probably something to that so a lot of these apocalyptic texts that we have from Judaism did probably originated in in ancient Judea or an ancient area of ancient Israel the ferret if Paul is a Pharisee he's picking up from from other Pharisees who also have this idea so the problem with the rock probably the Roman tyranny in the in Israel was I mean most people you know nobody likes being a conquered people so I mean with Romans conquered you nobody likes that but it is especially bad in Israel because well we still have this today I'm there there were people in Israel who thought this is our land this is God gave us this land and so it's not just that it's a political nightmare it's also religious nightmare and so it exacerbates the problem and that is that probably contributes to this kind of apocalyptic fervor that we see at the time yeah yes 20 believers would love to the others at Jesus preached what about the other people the people what I'll talk about these 20 people one of the others of Jesus preached to what I'm talking about when I say about the twenty I'm talking bout people who believed he got raised from the dead it's kind of interesting that in the New Testament those the disciples for example the eleven disciples are not said to go to Galilee to hook up with all these people who these thousands people who'd heard Jesus preach why is that and you know he'd say you wonder well that would seem kind of like a natural missionary field but the fact you've heard Jesus tell parables doesn't necessarily make you inclined to think he got raised from the dead right so if he has these these you know he's talked about sores to go out so seed you know or talked about a prodigal son or something he's like there's no there's nothing there that necessarily makes you think oh he's likely a likely candidate to be raised from the dead and so it appears that the Galilean mission didn't go very far if there was one yeah it's interesting yes was this idea yeah so the idea of Jesus dying for sins is this I did it that you could have a sacrifice for the sins of others is that a new thing or was that around and so but I think the kind of closest analogy maybe well actually I would say that that this is a view that you get throughout a variety of religions at the time you get it you get it in Judaism probably with the Jewish idea of the Day of Atonement so in on one day of the year on Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement the the pre the high priest would go into the Holy of Holies which was the the the curtain doff area within the temple this cubical room that had nothing in it but God was thought to dwell there and the the Jewish high priest would go behind the curtain and would perform a sacrifice for his own sins and then perform a sacrifice for the sins of the people and that would be the atonement then for and so that would become a Jewish way of doing it and in in enrollment religions there are often civic sacrifices where you know the city would come together and they're you know you get your hundred a hundred people together and everybody's just watching while they sacrifice you know an animal and then they they all they have a big party they eat the eat the meat they cook the meat they eat the meat but the sacrifice is thought to make the God this particular God satisfied with the community and so you get you get kind of comparable ideas but especially that the day of atonement thing I think and so that's why the the Christian authors like in the Gospels they portrayed Jesus as an atonement for sins because they're there linking it to the Jewish idea of day of atonement I think I have time for one more question I need to stop yeah so she's asking you in Jerusalem you get James the brother of Jesus appears to become the leader of the church probably the first leaders Peter but then James kind of takes over James becomes a big figure in Jerusalem and she's asking what about know that we're gonna be talking about what happens with the Jewish Jewish Christianity is it spreading I'm not going to talk about that so very much because it was by the end by the end by the time of Paul the vast majority of people converting are Gentiles the Jewish mission never really took off very much there are pockets of Jewish Christians that go on for several centuries actually who continued to claim allegiance to James but they're very much on the margins within Christianity there there's tiny slices here and there they never become a major force and they never seem to have much impact really throughout throughout the Roman world so I won't be saying too much about them because I I'm gonna want to talk about kind this big phenomenon of how you end up with 30 million people almost all of them are Gentiles I need to stop here I think we've got a 15 is that right dude I Mary is it time for me to stop that's now right back at 11:00 great okay thank you

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 82,284

Rating: 4.7724204 out of 5

Keywords: Smithsonian Associates, Ripley Center, Triumph of Christianity, Smithsonian, Bart Ehrman, Roman Empire

Id: A5XGMeCn1Mc

Length: 70min 19sec (4219 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019