The Birth of Jesus in History & Legend (Bart Ehrman)

welcome to the michael shermer show my guest today is bart ehrman the great biblical scholar and historian uh in conjunction with his seminar he's putting on a few days from now uh the day we release this on november 27th you have time to get the early bird special to sign up for his live seminar called did the christians story did the christmas story really happen the birth of jesus in history and legend it goes all day on december 5th from 9 30 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon eastern time you can watch the whole thing online of course i'll be doing that as well bart will be covering what we can actually know about the birth of jesus how can we decide whether he was born in bethlehem is it possible to reconcile the different gospel accounts was the story of the virgin birth a later fabrication what is the evidence for or against the many details such as the trip to bethlehem the visit of the wise men and the slaughter of the innocents how many of the most familiar parts of the stories come from later legends and much much more so in this conversation with bart we we just spent a few minutes on that because i didn't want him to give away the whole seminar here just on my podcast so and i'm very much interested in in some of the larger questions like um how do we know jesus actually existed good evidence for that okay what about his crucifixion what about the resurrection what about that he died for our sins the bart and i kind of drill through all those and dig down into what those mean and how christian theologians in the past and christians today uh tangle with those kinds of deep issues why the virgin birth why is that so important to christians well all right there's a historical context for that same thing with the resurrection story and other stories of miracles what the context was in the ancient roman world for why that was important to the early christians and then we also discussed the triumph of christianity that is the incredible rise from just a handful of followers at jesus time of his death to two and a half billion people today how does that happen and so bart kind of walks us through how that happened both historically and why just statistically you only need a tiny growth rate uh to get something like that happening cumulatively like compound interest and then we wrap up talking about the problem of evil which to me and to bart also is the biggest problem with all of christianity is that um you know why does an all-powerful all-knowing all-loving god allow suffering tsunamis childhood leukemia you know and so forth um and so we kind of go through the various arguments presented for why that's not a problem and then why we do think it is a problem so anyway do sign up for the seminar on december 5th you can do so by clicking on the link below and also check out uh bart's many books that i'll put in the biography below for him and his um great courses wondering uh teaching company courses on all these different topics i've i've taken most of his courses and read most of his books and i find them absolutely fascinating all right thanks for listening and here's our conversation uh between myself and bart herman all right bart ehrman you are back this is you're the first person to be on the show three times so we'll call you our returning champion oh my god okay yes i want a bigger problem that's right we're gonna go to the double jeopardy round here so uh just just to alert our listeners we are recording this on uh monday the 22nd of november this will be released on the 27th because on december 5th you are putting on a live seminar that goes all day 9 30 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon eastern time and we will provide a link below where you could register for this because if you register today or tomorrow that is saturday or sunday you get the early bird discount of 39.95 instead of the 49.95 or 50 bucks for the all day seminar so tell us what uh this is something new for you right i mean you've written a dozen books you've done you know a bunch of different uh teaching company courses and now you're venturing into putting on live seminars it's sort of a post pandemic new trend i think yeah well yeah i know it's funny i mean you no nobody wants to talk really about silver linings about the pandemic but given that um a lot of a lot of places have realized that there are uh opportunities that we simply didn't have before because most of us were uh very very nervous about technology zoom was a four-letter word now zoom's all we do and so um so the idea of this webinar it's going to be uh it's going to be an all day thing i've done a lot of these things uh for other organizations you know like for example for the smithsonian associates i'll do a a four day uh four four lecture all day seminar either live in washington or i've done them remotely as well and so my idea was uh just to do it without without the middle person just to do i mean it's the same thing it's just that the smithsonian's not involved and uh people uh i cannot reach out to a different group of people and so it'll be four lectures it's going to be on the topic um did the christmas story really happen and so it's a setup for uh the christmas season and to discuss what we can say and is legendary and what you know what's legendary in the accounts that we all know and and what you know what could there be any historical basis for any of it yeah the subtitle is is the birth of jesus in history and legend so let's just start there how how do you think about the difference between say empirical truths that would i would include as historical truths like jesus probably really did exist and here's the evidence for it that's a claim we can test versus legends or mythic truths truths that aren't whether they're true or not is irrelevant it's the meaning of the message or the morals oral homily or something like that uh particularly not only in our context today but would they have thought of it in the same way we would have say two thousand years ago ah yeah that's a more complicated question um because we do differentiate today between what we can establish historically based on historical criteria not just about jesus of course but about anything in the past abraham lincoln or charlemagne whatever and we have criteria that we follow as historians to know what probably happened what are later legendary accretions um it's a very good question what did ancient people think ancient people certainly had the idea of stories about historical figures that were not historically accurate uh that are meant to be stories so they had the idea of stories but they had a very different kind of attitude work toward what we would call fiction they didn't actually have a word that's like our word fiction um they did have a in greek at least they had the term uh mythos which what comes down to us as the word myth but it didn't actually mean quite what we mean by myth myth really just meant kind of pretty much what we think of as a story um often though it'd be a story that didn't have any historical basis but it was trying to convey some kind of truth my sense is that the early christians did not understand these stories about jesus as being that kind of thing being fictional accounts that are meant to convey truths i think they uh so far as we can tell based on everything everyone has said about it from the ancient world it looks like they thought these things really happened and so they would have classified those in the category that we ourselves would call it historical so they would have seen jesus of nazareth in the same light as as pontius pilate a real person who really lived and did certain things absolutely and not and you know and and even when you recount miraculous events they would have seen those those things had happened they didn't have a problem with there were issues about the stories of miracles in the ancient world people did have questions about miracles but it wasn't our set of questions our questions are always you know could miracles happen well no you know maybe people say no they can't happen and therefore a miracle story didn't happen and that was never ever really the view in the ancient world the question the ancient world was uh was okay given the fact that lots of miracles happen did this one happen and so all of life is kind of understood to be a miracle and so there was no inherent problem with miracles just which which miraculous things that allegedly happened really did happen yeah this sort of reminds me of back in the 90s there was a controversy over this book black athena about to what extent uh the greeks stole western philosophy from african sources namely egypt and then the question became was were the egypts black and anyway mary it's a big long book and i'm i'm unfairly characterizing it but mary lefkovitz the classist said that's the sort of question a 1990s american would ask not somebody that lived in ancient egypt like what color are we and why is this important yeah yeah well it's based on all sorts of race it's based on race theories that developed it developed in the 19th century and i i think she's right about that people what we think of as a race issue simply wasn't ever a race issue i mean even within christianity itself apart from sort of a lot of very interesting work that's more speculative but you know saint augustine he came from north africa you know so by our standards he would have been he would have been a black man and people don't think about it like that you know but and they in the ancient today we don't think about because everybody seems the best of us when a white guy but in the ancient world it was just was never an issue yeah it's like the what jesus looked like well he would have been you know a semitic middle eastern looking i don't know kind of worthy dark hair or whatever but in the these paintings you get you know he looks like one of the bee gees how did that happen yeah that's right well yeah i used to tell my students back when they knew who this was that you know that jesus didn't look like a california surfer he looked like yasser arafat you know that's right that's you know he says yeah that sort of long blonde hair with blue eyes yeah uh so there's no question in your mind that i you know there is some debate about whether jesus existed or not and i know you've engaged with some of the you know know jesus uh uh people that that that think that what what is the evidence we have that he really existed yeah i gotta tell you there are a few things that kind of um kind of pull my strings and push my buttons and that this is one of them because i actually i actually agree with uh the mythicist uh in terms of what they're to some extent about what they're trying to achieve which is to show that the christian story in fact is not rooted much of the christian story is not rooted in what we would consider the historical fact but i i think they take it so far that it just gets to a point where it's ridiculous um and so this really is a button issue for me um and not because i'm a christian obviously because i'm not and i i would have it wouldn't affect my life at all if jesus didn't exist so it really wouldn't affect my life a bit but i just think you know i think we really need to if we're going to talk about historical figures we need to apply historical criteria and not simply advance uh views that would be convenient to our own belief system our own ideologies i think you know doing history we had to do history so what evidence is there well you know i mean how much evidence does somebody need i mean we have we have we have four biographies of this man uh i mean yeah they're 30 40 50 years later but how many biographies do we have for people living in the first century yeah how many you know 99.99 like zero no buyer and we got four of them and the thing is these four are not just uh they're not people sitting down writing like ideas that they have in their head they're based on earlier sources and this can be clearly demonstrated that these gospels are writing based on written sources that were earlier than them that were all based on oral sources that preceded them and when you start adding up the independent sources that we're not collaborating with each other independent sources that talk about jesus in very similar terms it gets it's a large number and it's the idea that he got invented just would that would be a miracle right in addition to that we have one writer who actually knows jesus brother and you know and he knows his closest disciple personally knows them and writes about it so it's not he's not paul's not an eyewitness but he he knows his brother so i don't know i i just i get a little frustrated because i think that as admirable as some of the intention is i think that a lot i think memphis is basically shooting themselves in the foot because they have they convince those who want to be convinced and the people they really ought to be trying to convince just laugh at them are you kidding me jesus did exactly they literally at them and they don't like to hear that but it's you know i talk to people all the time when they hear this they just start laughing scholars non-stop just like yeah so if you want if you want to show the problems of the historical jesus that's not the way to go right right yeah sometimes it's i know who some of these people are the sense i get is there they just want to poke the hornet's nest and and say you see christians your guy didn't even exist okay so he probably existed okay good and he was probably crucified i mean the romans crucified everybody for anything right so that's not an extraordinary claim so i think that that needs only ordinary evidence but when you when you move up to say the resurrection uh no no the first of all there's other things like he died for your sins well that's not a question that you could you and i could answer is you either believe it or you don't it's kind of just a religious doctrine it's part of being a catholic or a protestant or baptist or whatever but the but the raise from the dead i mean that it could have happened he could have been the one and only and all the others were fake or or or not so how do you think about the resurrection in between those two mythic truths and empirical truths uh well i you know i i don't think that there's any way that you can marshal evidence for the resurrection it's a by historians can only establish the probabilities of what happened in the past by that by definition that's what historians do you know they could probably wrote the gettysburg address on a on an envelope you know but it you know it might have been a spare sheet of paper lying around i don't know i mean but you know you have to try to establish what probably happened with everybody julius caesar i mean just name your person and so the the difficulty is that resurrections uh by definition are not probable there are you can have a near-death experience that happens but you the idea that somebody dies and they are raised from the dead never to die anymore and to be taken up into heaven you know if there are seven billion people in the world now uh for how many of those people is that going to happen uh well zero suppose there's one person in the history of the universe that that's happened too well okay so what are they what you just discount up the odds well yeah well okay you know 150 billion i put it at a hundred billion dollars yeah okay 100 billion so what's the probability that some other explanation can account for things that for example some explanation that the disciples believed they saw jesus afterwards well one out of eight people in our country believes or will believe that they have seen a dead relative after after the person's been buried one out of eight and they really believe it and when that happens to you when your grandmother shows up in your bedroom two weeks later you really think she's appeared to you she's like and so um what what would be the chances of somebody thinking that a beloved a deceased beloved one appeared to them well one out of eight versus you know one of a hundred billion so if you're doing history and you're just trying to establish probabilities uh you know so there and there are lots of other explanations of course for the resurrection appearances and for so uh i don't i don't think you can establish it historically that's not to say it didn't happen christians think it happened and there's no way to prove it or disprove it but it's it's it's not based on evidence it's based on faith yes that's right yeah i'm finally telling this story so apologies to my listeners for hearing it again but at this conference i was at with richard dawkins and uh ken miller the uh biologist who was uh supremely excellent at debunking the intelligent design creationist arguments about the structure of the cell uh anyway he wrote this book explaining why the creationists are wrong and why the evolution theory accounts for all these things and then but in the last chapter he you know he has this by the way i'm a catholic and here's all the things i believe so uh at this conference richard kind of pushes him on this and says all right so jesus was supposedly born of a virgin let's say we found a piece of the true cross and there was a little bit of flesh on there we could extract the dna from jesus you know would he have the full complement of dna like the rest of us have or would he have something weird because he was fathered by the deity or whatever and ken could see where this was going and he just stops and said richard this i'm not claiming this is true in any scientific sense this i'm a catholic this is what we believe you know full stop it's like okay there's really nowhere to go from there it's like okay that's yeah yeah no that's right yeah the problem is with um with a christian apologists who um you know who want to defend the faith by arguing for it on and it's it's a strange situation but you have both you have roman catholic apologists and you have protestant apologists and they they have this notion that you can prove claims of faith you can prove the resurrection you can prove the inerrancy of the bible you can prove the existence of god and the oddity is that these people are more children of the enlightenment than most university professors because university professors gave up a long time ago trying to prove stuff like this but you know if you believe in objectivity you know this is completely an enlightenment project and so it's a very it's kind of an interesting phenomenon the last people on earth you would expect to be enlightenment people are you know people arguing for miracles yeah yeah yeah well so what you mean there is that uh you supposed to have evidence for your your beliefs not just i believe it just because my parents believed or my culture my friends or my religion and so i just do what i'm told no the enlightenment says no no you gotta have reasons all right so what are your reasons and you know you've engaged these people you know here's the six reasons we think jesus really died or the bible is inerrant or whatever and and they'll debate it to the earth's end just like flat earthers do or or uh you know any conspiracy theorists they mostly have a whole series of arguments nobody thinks uh you know i'm a pseudoscientist or i'm a quacker i'm just making stuff up people think they have good reasons for their belief and that's what you mean by the enlightenment project yeah well well yeah because i mean you know obviously before the enlightenment people had reasons but the reasons were set up differently like you'd have theological reasons but these what they're doing is they're claiming uh secular historical and scientific evidence you know for for a young earth for example you know they're going to cite scientific evidence you know or uh intelligent design or um you know the resurrection of jesus you know any these are objective facts and the best way to explain these objective facts is jesus really was raised from the dead well big very big problems with that line of argument so but if you go back to say thomas aquinas and his summit theologica where he presents these uh kind of rational arguments or or logical arguments for god's existence what was the intention of this just kind of reinforced this is what this is why we believe what we believe uh or to prove it to skeptics or what not so much to prove to skeptics i think um i think in thomas aquinas day of course it was really to support people and to provide them with uh ways of thinking about the divine that were more sophisticated than simply accepting it because your mom and dad told you so but that there's actually you know that there's a that christian thinkers have always been interested in getting people to christians to think and so that it was more that kind of thing um just as today a lot of these apologists who are trying to prove the resurrection or prove the bible's inerrant really are not trying to prove it to non-believers that's the pretense but that's not really what's going on when they write a book on this material it's not directed to a non-believer it's directed to believers to give them ammunition and to make them feel good about what they think and so that's that's why they i mean they rarely convince anybody else and they know that well this is a good time to kind of review your own personal history which i always loved and i will have properly introduced you in the in the video that introduces this episode but uh but i love your story because you were a believer and then you went to bible school then you went to an actual real theological institute and then you came out the other end uh rather differently in your thinking yeah yeah no i you know i i think one of the reasons i get invited to debate these uh fundamentalist apologists is because they know i used to be one of them so i would uh you know i believed all the i could i could prove the resurrection you know i had the argument that i do all this and so i i had got so i went to moody bible institute which is a bastion of fundamentalism because i was a born-again christian and intent on pursuing my faith and learning everything i could about it became fanatical about it and i no one level i don't regret that uh because if i hadn't gone that route uh i would never become a scholar never never ever nobody in high school thought i'd become a scholar but i became i can't became a scholar through the back door because i got so invested in the bible i just developed these study habits and these work habits and you know the brain's like this muscle you know you're working hard enough pretty soon even though like you don't have much there it's like you start bulking up and so uh and so i don't regret that but but i was very committed to this fundamentalist cause and it really was when i was in uh when i went to do my master's program at princeton theological seminary that i started rethinking things my professors were not fundamentalists and they had different views that i rejected outright but then the more i studied it i decided look you know at least i have to see whether there's evidence for what they're saying and after a while i started realizing oh my god i actually so i did i didn't become a non-christian at all i i became you know princeton theological cemetery is not a fundamentalist school it's a it's but it's a it's a liberal presbyterian school and i became a fairly liberal christian it was that for many years and it wasn't it was as you know it wasn't my biblical scholarship that led me away from the faith in the end it was is unrelated things it had to do with why there's suffering in the world whether you can explain that there's a god who's in charge right yep that's a good story and you wrote a whole book about that i i think let's just spend uh five minutes on what your content of your your seminar on the christmas story i don't want you to give too much away then people won't want to take the seminar so just kind of give us the you know what do we actually know about the birth of jesus and these was he born in bethlehem and what about the virgin birth and is there evidence for details like the trip to bethlehem and so on and was he really born on december 25th yeah all right snow falling all around the christmas trees up is all the whole thing yeah yeah the um right so the the way i'm setting this up is i'm going to be dealing with some of the uh important uh the important issues and and there are some things that people are fairly familiar you know obviously people there are a whole range of people who some people have no idea about any of this some people know it all intimately and so there's it's gonna be a little tricky because you've got to deal with things but but you know a lot i think a lot of general readers and certainly my undergraduate students don't know that uh the birth of jesus the the christmas story is only found in two of the books of the new testament out of the 27 and it's it's kind of interesting because the virgin birth is found in both matthew and luke it's not found in mark he didn't say anything about it not found john he didn't say anything about it well that's intriguing you know seems like a kind of important point if you knew about it when she's like mention it and paul doesn't say anything about it or you know and a lot in my part of the world in the south you know there are a lot of churches that say if you do not believe in the literal virgin birth of jesus then you cannot be a christian really and i think it's an interesting clay because does it mean that paul wasn't a christian because if he knew about it you know so anyway uh so i'm dealing with things on on a number of levels uh one will be things that many people don't know some will be things that most people don't know some things will be things that people know but um uh we have these two stories in the new testament and there are only canonical accounts of jesus uh birth and one kind of standard question is do they agree with each other what matthew says what luke says are they are they simpatico the the christmas story we tell every year takes matthew and luke puts them together and comes up with the big story where everything that happens in matthew and luke but you know come together but if you separate them and ask matthew's right that this happened can luke really be right that that happened how does that work exactly and so there'll be there'll be a lot of that kind of thing and there'll be uh discussions about you know can can historians talk about things like a virgin birth historians can certainly talk about whether jesus was born in bethlehem or not um and it turns out that there are some interesting historical arguments against it that even even some roman catholic biblical scholars have said yeah he probably wasn't born in bethlehem i'd be like priests who are like active biblical scholars because there's good reasons for thinking not and so i'll be talking about some of that kind of thing i'll also be getting into um stories that are not found in the new testament there's some really interesting that most people don't know about interesting accounts outside the new testament involving jesus birth one of them claims to be written by jesus brother james ah that's interesting and another account of jesus of jesus as a young boy that i'll probably get into is a five-year-old boy there's an account written by another brother of his judas thomas who's supposed to be his twin brother oh my god what yeah and so so there's so there's nothing and the interesting thing is that some of these other stories had a huge impact on christian thing today people don't read them but these stories by jesus twin brother uh thomas one of them made it into the quran oh wow oh my god i didn't know that weirdly and and yeah yeah and a number of them uh really influenced christians through the middle ages down to today so that for example you know how in all those uh medieval and renaissance painting when you've got jesus you know jesus is born you've got joseph mary and jesus and joseph's an old man what's that about yeah well that comes from this gospel allegedly written by jesus brother james and it's a full account of why he's an old man wow so stuff like that so i'm going to be dealing with yeah i've got four lectures it's going to be on all these kinds of things and it's gonna be a lot it's gonna be a lot of fun and by the way people are gonna have a chance to ask uh ask questions so after each of these four lectures i'm gonna have a question and answer session uh so people who are there be able to do that too yeah so if i recall mark is the first gospel that was written in the others or a decade or two after mark so if mark doesn't mention the virgin birth how do you think about the absence of evidence as evidence of absence or it's just he forgot or or it wasn't important to him yeah well it could be no right yeah yeah i don't think that he the fact that he doesn't mention it is not a persuasive argument that he didn't know about it but i would say it is interesting and worth considering did he know about it what makes it a little bit more interesting is that in chapter two of mark jesus is teaching so he's an adult now he's teaching he starts out as an indulgent mark he he's teaching these crowds and he's got these crowds around him and he's been doing these he's been casting out demons and things and it says that his mother and his brothers came to take him out of the take him out of the public view because they thought he had gone out of his mind interested his mother wow didn't understand that he was doing miracles i thought he'd gone crazy that seems to be unlikely if she knew that she'd that he was born of a virgin right he was his mother and so there so it's not just that he's not mentioned it's like there are other things that make you think ah you know it doesn't sound like he knows about it uh and in the gospel of john also there's there's something kind of like that because it's well it's different but it's in the gospel of john um jesus uh there's no mention of the virgin birth the gospel of john at all uh but at one point jesus enemies are upset with him about something and they're having an argument and they're trying to kind of dig it in they they use this ad hominem argument you know that's irrelevant to the point but like it's gonna take a dig at him personally and they say um we were not born illegitimately yeah interesting we weren't born out of wedlock in other words and it's like uh what does that suggest about what they think there are other rumors you know that jesus was that jesus mother in fact got pregnant by a roman soldier or that there's some kind of thing going on and you know maybe john knows about the app but doesn't know about so anyway so there are other things it's not just the absence of evidence i forget which comedian had a had a riff on that where you know she fools around with some guy gets pregnant and tells her husband uh let's see uh god did it oh okay exactly but in one of your courses one of your i think was one of your teaching company great courses where you talk about the the kind of the context of the time where it was not unusual for gods to come down and interact with humans and have sex with them and vice versa and people can become gods or gods can become human that so that that wouldn't have been that out of context at that time no it the idea that a god gets a mortal pregnant has found it you get it in greek mythology you get a roman mythology it's a common trope in the ancient world the difference in this case is that um depending on how you read it um there in these other cases the women are are not virgins i mean they really have sex and they have a lot of some of these accounts are rather graphic about how much sex they have with these gods and so like there there's physical union taking place and except for one hint in the book of luke it sounds like there's no physical contact involved she's still a virgin one of these other stories the one that outside the new testament written by jesus allegedly written by jesus brother james goes on to show that not only did she conceive as a virgin when jesus was born her hymen still hadn't broken she was still over that was the definition of virgin in the ancient world and it's a very interesting story where right after jesus is born a midwife but doesn't believe that she's a virgin and she gives her gives mary an internal exam to see if the hymen's still intact this is described in this gospel oh my god it's like whoa it turns out yeah she's still a virgin oh my god and therefore the obvious question is then how did it happen cesarean it's a miracle it's a miracle yeah yeah i don't know i guess that's the point right it's to establish jesus as somebody more than just another one of these greek gods or roman gods he stands apart from all of them yeah it's one-upping it yeah it's one-upping it yeah and so it comes down to us you know as as this super miracle that's never happened before i mean christians often make it the argument that this religion is unique there's nothing quite like it and you know when i read your books it's like well no not really i mean there's the particular concatenation of all the stories and of course that's unique but the elements are all there elsewhere virgin births flood myths the elements are there and yeah you get i mean look for this for jesus you have accounts of people who are born miraculously they're from a god and human people who are young wounder ken when it comes to religious things who wow the teachers who go on itinerant preaching ministries who tell parables and who cast out demons and heal the sick and at the end of their life they ascend to heaven i mean we have other stories like this so when people say like it's completely unique just because they haven't read very much you have to read you have to you have to do some reading to know what ancient people said one of the arguments i make about the resurrection is is if it was so if the evidence was so compelling why don't jews and muslims believe it and you can't just say well they don't understand the arguments if they read my book then they'd be christians it's like no they're you know these rabbis and these imams they're smart people they're well read they know the arguments they just don't accept the arguments so why don't jews and muslims accept jesus as the messiah well it's easier to answer for jews i think because i mean there's a very big problem for jews which is that um jews had set expect not set jews had a certain range of expectations of what a messiah figure would be and jesus ran completely contrary to all the expectations and so you know christians especially conservative christians talk about how jesus fulfilled all these prophecies uh in fact it's not right i mean the um when jews most jews were not expecting a messiah any more than them than most people jews they are my next-door neighbors not expecting a messiah to come next week you know they got other things on their mind and it was like that in the ancient world too but those who did have some expectation that there'd be a messiah figure thought that this would be some figure of power who destroyed the enemy either a supernatural warrior or a or a great you know hero of the of israel who would drive out the romans and set up a kingdom in jerusalem and christians started saying that this man who was crucified for crimes against the state is the messiah and jews jews said what i mean it's like uh so i can't use this illustration anymore with my students but uh what i used to say you know it's like me really telling you i think david koresh is the lord of the universe right right the guy who got killed in the fbi raid of waco he's yeah he's the lord of the universe you nuts no that's what i think yes it just doesn't convince anybody uh and so and and by the time islam came along it was you know six centuries later is a whole different ball game and they were they weren't about to kind of openly consider the christian claims because they had their their own thing yeah yeah yeah yeah that's interesting so um let's just hit some of the other highlights here of uh from your work um because i know you're limited on time and i want to watch that uh but uh oh it was it was the um uh the triumph of christianity i think actually i think that's what you were on the show for the last time right so how does uh an itinerant preacher who his handful of followers go this is the this guy's the messiah the son of god and everybody's going you're out of your mind all right how do you go from that to you know 2.5 billion followers today i know yeah it's quite a story uh that is what my book is about the triumph of christianity which by the way it just came out as a great course it just came out a few weeks ago i did a great course nice and uh on the same thing i think it's really really interesting stuff because it's a such a huge it's a huge historical issue you talk about a big historical issue if christianity had not taken over the roman empire uh the entire history of the west would have been completely different you know i mean it would have happened there had been some kind of history but we wouldn't have i mean you just think about western art or western music or western philosophy none of this it would have been there wouldn't be anything like it and so um you know it might have been better it might be worse i don't know but uh not to mention social policy politics god it's unbelievable so the question is how did it happen and that's what my book is about so you start out with this unknown preacher from a rural backwater of galilee who spoke aramaic had a few followers to be coming if in within 300 years you know there were uh there were millions of these people and by the end of the fourth century it's half of the roman empire and the official religion of the roman empire and then it becomes the religion of the entire west until now basically i mean it's not official but it's still it's the biggest treat so uh what i try to argue yeah it's a long argument [Laughter] but if i recall followers of jesus who believed don't you show you had some calculations in the book that you don't need a big growth rate just like a one percent growth rate uh you know this like in economics if you have a small investment and you just let it sit and accumulate for decades pretty soon you have a big payoff at the end uh this um you know compound it's like compound interest of conversion uh you don't need money yeah yeah yeah well that's i mean if in technical terms that's that's what technically that's what happens it's an exponential curve and so it's it's like your investments hopefully it's like your investments uh and so the way it works is that if you you know if you if you um if you got a hundred bucks you know and you invested and get one percent on you okay you make a buck that's nice but if you've got a hundred billion bucks and you get one percent it's a lot of bucks and over time like it just it starts growing exponentially and so the thing about christianity that made it distinctive in the roman world uh was there were two things actually there are thousands of religions in the roman world but none of them was a missionary none of them was really working hard to get converts even judaism jesus was not interested in making people agree with them and the reason was because of the second thing christians were the only christianity was the only religion that was exclusive that said we're right and therefore you're wrong now jews have that view about their own religions they thought well you know we're worshiping our god you do your own thing but it wasn't that like you're wrong and going to go to hell for most use there wasn't an afterlife it's just this you know we're the people of god this is how this is our customer this is how we want to live and and so just leave us alone please whereas christian said we've got the truth and jesus is the one way of salvation he died for our sins and if you don't accept his death then you'll still be in your sin so you've got to accept jesus or you're going to you're going to you're going to roast in hell and so they're they're exclusive and they're the only ones exclusive and they're missionary but it means that if they if they just convert you know if you've got 100 people in christians and they convert three people this year okay well you got 103. and then the next year you know you do that year after year after year and every time you convert somebody you're taking them away from the other religions and you're the only religion doing it and so over 300 years you need you basically you know you need about a growth rate of about 30 or 35 percent every decade a decade and so it's not it's three 100 of you need to convert about three people a year that's lower than the stock market and the stock market is pretty spectacular over the last century so that would explain how you get hundreds of millions and then and then a billion and so on just cumulative um right this idea of of uh jesus as a moral philosopher how do you think about the break between the old testament the new testament and jesus was kind of a a nasa feminist and he was his god that the god of the new testament was kinder gentler than the old testament god and so forth and that it was kind of a break in that even secularists like me could say well i acknowledge jesus was a great moral philosopher or teacher or something like that yeah yeah uh well so i i think i've got several thoughts about that um i write a book now on the uh book of revelation and uh and how the book of revelation what it what it's really all about and i for a long time i've been uh sort of taken aback by christians christians non-christians people generally you have this idea that the old testament is the god of wrath and the new testament god is a god of love and when people tell me that i asked him have you ever read the book of revelation it's in the new testament you talk about wrath oh my god he's not destroying the city of jericho he's destroying the world it's i think really significant and but one of the things i'm doing in this book this book it's a popular but fair trade you know general audience i'm i'm actually talking about the comparison of that revelation view of god with jesus own view of god uh and i think that jesus um i don't jesus did not invent the idea you know you should love your neighbor as yourself that's that's just a quotation from the book of leviticus it's the old testament law that says that but i do think that that was the guiding dictate from jesus understanding and his understanding of salvation that salvation comes to people who follow what god wants which is mean means you treat other people well and you help those in need and there are passages in g that i think jesus really said in the new testament where even people who are not jewish if they help others in need they're going to be welcomed into god's kingdom and the schmucks out there even if they're jewish forget it you're going to be cast out being jewish isn't going to hell and but it's not based on belief in my death and resurrection it's based on how do you live you treat other people well or not and i think that's contrary to the book of revelation i think revelations all about you've got to believe in jesus or forget it you're going to be destroyed yeah interesting because that's the last book of the bible so it's almost putting an end cap on it saying here's the final message you bet you better believe or else yeah exclamation mark boom that's funny i can't wait to read that book yeah lowers the boom how do christians uh deal with the problem of identity how can god be also jesus and the son of man and and the son of god is god and you know so in the holy spirit you know it's a trinity and you know this unitarians versus trinitarians and you know it's like if you just summarize in one sentence it was like so god sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself i mean this is what richard dawkins would call barking mad in that british saying right yeah well richard wouldn't know this but that was actually a particular theological view in the second century that got declared a heresy and so god is not doing this to himself yeah yeah that's called modalism uh so the idea of modalism so christians in this by the second century uh christians were saying that uh jesus is god they were also saying god is god and they're saying the holy spirit is god and they were saying the three of them are all god and there's only one god and so that's the doctrine of the trinity it's not um it's not that there's one so there are three there are actually three separate persons three individuals that are all god they're all equally god but there's only one god and of course that doesn't add up uh and it's not meant to add up it's meant to be a paradox and a mystery within christian theology but the heresy in the second century is what richard was describing bodilism says that they're trying to figure it out like how can christ be god if god's god is spirits god how do you but we've got one god how's that work and the way they did it the way these modalists did it is they said look uh i the way i put it for myself is i at the same time i am a a son and i am a father and i'm a brother there's only one of me but i'm in three different relationships and uh and god's like that to in kind of sometimes he's acting like a father sometimes affects his son sometimes like the spirit and it depends what mode he's in relationship with you yeah and so there's only one in three modes that was declared a heresy um because uh well for a variety of reasons some of the opponents of that pointed out just what richard was saying that it means that the father got crucified right the father the god god the father got crucified what and and so they called this they acted the person who came up with this was his church's story this church theologian called tertullian uh his name is tertullian he and he called this view patrick passionism patrip which means the father suffers and so he meant it as a kind of mocking it but so yeah so that view didn't win out and but also the view that there are three separate gods didn't win out because you can't have that we're monotheists and so they end up with this kind of this trinity mystery thing where you got three persons but only one god the unitarians are really not that different from trinitarians they're just and how it's just a matter of how they talk about the uh problem of identity and relationships and everything you just said yeah you know i i don't know if all unitarians have the same uh views about this because there were there been a lot of views over the years i think they're my myself you know i'm not an expert in unitarianism but the ones i know uh have a lot of them have very fuzzy views about all of this uh but the there have been other views that were very popular still i think are popular even among people who by claim to believe in the trinity they don't really understand that the three have to be equal i think most people think the father is like the top dog and that christ is the secondary level and the spirits below that and that's that's so there's a kind of a higher there's a hierarchy and uh you know that's perfectly fine and you could certainly use the bible to support that view because the bible doesn't deal with these issues but the trinitarian views the other one right so unitarian you know it says there's one god and i think some think that jesus is a human and others think that he's some kind divine being and and then since we're all born in sin and why do i need to accept christ as my savior to be forgiven for the original sin why can't god just forgive me why do we need the middle man and the sacrifice yeah well you know there are i know there are a lot of um of course there are a lot of theologians who are not fundamentalists and very very sophisticated theologians who teach you know teach at places like harvard and yale who are not you know they're they are not like hard they're very intellectual philosophically trained human beings who are i mean deeply philosophical in the in the regular philosophical traditions who will regularly say that the doctrine of the atonement is the biggest problem with christianity really why does christ have to die yeah yeah i mean like they can't explain it you know they they know all the explanations of course going back to i mean you mentioned aquinas and i mean there are all these explanations handsome it's like you have all these explanations but um the reality is that it's a bit of an embarrassment for a lot of theologians because you know when my uh when my my son does something wrong when he when he disobeys me i don't tell him that i have to kill his cat now to forgive him you know i'm sorry you got this cat here and somebody's got to die so i'll take the cat instead of you so i kill this cat you know i was like what no like why can't you just say okay so yeah okay you know okay i forgive you yeah yeah i mean it just seems like something or it's a test you know just let's let's see how committed you really are to this particular religion you have to actually make this leap of faith and accept jesus as your savior john 3 16 you know it's posted at every football game you know so god god so loved the world he gave his only begotten son and so on yeah i think what happened i mean i think historically to answer your question the way it worked was it didn't work that you had an idea and saw it being fulfilled what happened was they they came to think that jesus was raised from the dead their their teacher had been around and they were they they loved him they adored him they thought maybe he's the messiah he got killed he's not the messiah but then they saw that he was raped they saw that he was raised from the dead and it led them to a kind of a series of backwards reasoning they argued backwards from what they knew they knew he'd been raised but then they added well why'd he die i mean if he got raised he shows he's under god's special favor but is this what god does to the people he favors he has them tortured to death what kind of what why did god do that so they had to have a reason for god doing that well he must have killed him not because of anything he did he he's the one that got adored so it must have been he died for other people's sins and so these are people living in a sacrificial culture that the way you appease god is by sacrifices and so if jesus didn't die because anything he did wrong maybe he was a sacrifice well he was a sacrifice then his sacrifice somehow you have to accept the sacrifice for yourself and so you've got to believe in the sacrifice and so it kind of it works backwards to the doctrine of an atonement that's made necessary because jesus did die and he was god's favorite and you've got to explain how those two things relate to each other yeah another thing that always bothered me was this idea that uh you know that the kind of anti-semitic trope that the jews killed our lord and savior well first of all jesus was jewish so i mean it's not like there were christians and the jews wanted to kill the christians there were no christians in any case if this had to happen uh to fulfill the whole uh story and for you to be saved he had to die then you should be thanking the jews for killing or the romans or whoever for killing jesus that was part of the divine plan yeah yeah well you know the the last the last point you you made is a good one because you know it's very very weird i mean pontius pilate ordered jesus crucified and the roman soldiers crucified him but it's very weird that the christian line over the centuries has been the jews killed jesus why don't they say the italians killed jesus why don't they why isn't there anti-italian sentiment you know go go on a pogrom against you know the italians in rome wipe them out what i mean it's like it makes no sense yeah it's the jews oh come on so um so i uh yeah i know it's part of you know christianity is filled with paradoxes and it's part of in some ways it's the beauty of the religion that it's this it's this weird it's a weird set of paradoxes to to live you have to die that death brings life uh and that uh you know that suffering is good and that that uh suffering now it's like there's there are all these weird things the trinity this is paradox the idea that christ is both human divine it's a paradox did ju the idea that jews are free acting people who uh who have to kill the messiah they do kill the messiah and then they're blamed for it well why why i mean it's like they're do so it's well you know it's one of the mysteries you know they they were fated to do it but they chose to do it and so they're punished for choosing to do it even though they're fainted without a make sense this whole religion is kind of like that but it's kind of interesting that way yeah yeah and that wasn't interesting for jewish christian relations i was horrible for jewish great oh my god and you know it got worse because at first you know they said well you know you did it so if you repent you'll be fine by the end of the second century we have christian author we have a one particular uh christian author named melito of sardis who argues that jesus was god and since jews killed the jews killed him jews killed god and so this is the first uh the first charge of deicide the jews killed their own god oh my god so by the time we get to martin luther who is famously anti-semitic that was a pretty uh old tradition already he was just reflecting what a lot of people thought oh yeah yeah no no this was like he he inherited all this this had been going on for many many centuries right right and so it's a little bit hard for modern christians to get their mind around martin luther you know burning a synagogue full filled with jews like uh really but in his context that was prob wasn't that problematic yeah so that brings us to the thing is i yeah yeah please go ahead i'm just going to bring up the problem of evil just uh you know just kind of wrap up our conversation because that transitions nicely to that you wrote a great book god's problem how the bible fails to answer our most important question why we suffer um i mean just okay so maybe part of the answer is because jesus suffered something like that so that's part of it uh or natural evil you know earthquakes tsunamis and so on versus human evil genocide homicide so forth um you know the theologians make distinctions like that but still it just kind of comes down to this simple question like that the comedians and actor stephen fry asked you know he was asked what would you it turns out there's a god what would you say to him and he said i would say what's with childhood leukemia yeah me too i know you know i've had i've had several public debates with people who've wanted to argue that you can that problem suffering isn't really a problem with respect to understanding of god's purposes in the world and um i just find it very puzzling especially the natural disasters the things that you know you could i think free will could explain a lot of things you know i don't like you so i punch you in the mouth you know and so i knocked out a two sorry but i had my free will and i could just choose okay fine but you know natural disasters i had a debate i i had three debates with dinesh d'souza oh my god right on the problem of suffering yeah yeah and um uh he argued that i mean dinesh is he's a very smart guy i mean he's irritating about a lot of things those things but and i and i you know and i i like him on the personal level but he argued that the reason we have natural disasters is because god had to create the world that way and he literally argues that if god had not created the world with tectonic plagues plates then we wouldn't have had life and so we have to have the tectonic plates and the problem with tectonic plates is that gives you tsunamis and earthquakes yeah dinesh who said that you have to have a world with tectonic plates for life to exist well but that's how life came up well god's all-powerful right yeah was so you mean he could not create a world without tectonic plates to lead to life no he couldn't do that what what do you mean you think he's all-powerful and so like it makes no sense and like these arguments just strike me as really absurd uh and yeah people have free will but why do they have to have that much free will i mean you know why do you have enough free will to kill six million jews i mean can't can't there be some limits there are limits i can't decide i don't like you and so zap you with a brain wave so there are limits why aren't the limits better than this so like come on yeah i know dinesh pretty well too and uh yeah here he's grabbing from the scientific pool of explanations for things and then backing engineering it into his theology so the argument is that uh planets with uh geological forces that work like plate tectonics will give us things like uh you know different gradations of of uh ecosystems and maybe tide so you have to have a moon also that you know the water comes in and out near the land and the life maybe forms there and so you have to have all that kind of earth-like systems at work so which we've only discovered in the last you know half century of how that all works and and from there and there's still no consensus on how the origins of life would have begun in the ocean say you know what holds the molecules together into these protein chains and so forth um but but but by larger point is denis is is just basically backing into it saying here's what scientists tell us now let's see how we can square this with our theology it seems to me that the free will issue is also big because most christians think that miracles do happen so you'll hear the stories of you know oh i was supposed to be on this plane and then you know something distracted me and i didn't go and the plane crashed obviously god was looking out after me well why wasn't he looking out after the people on the plane because most of them were probably christians because we're in america what about them it's just it's unbelievable how shallow people's thinking is i mean you know that airplane thing just really drives me nuts but it goes down to kind of even kind of very basic like non-problematic things you know like i prayed in my you know i'm playing quarterback for my football team and i prayed man i was 12 for 14. 280 yards man we creamed them thank you god right right although i suppose they may say well i wasn't really petitioning the deity for a victory it was i'm thanking him so pray a different kind of prayer where you're just kind of acknowledging the good that god brings in the world well you get both i think you get both yeah but i you know when i was a fundamentalist christian i thought you could petition god and get your parking space right you know and then yeah so you but you can petition you for your parent who has cancer it doesn't work well god didn't want to give you that one well what's the point of the petition then if he's yes picking and choosing yeah there's the idea that well another one of denise's are or the arguments is uh you know god works in mysterious ways by which they mean you know god's world is different than our world and he knows what the end game is going to be you know and so this is part of the bigger picture yeah but isn't isn't there a way to unfold history in a way yeah that doesn't include a holocaust do we really need the holocaust as part of the the whole story no you know and if the answer is that god works in mysterious ways then you know the question is also why should i think so what i mean if you it's possible sure it's possible i mean i'm there might be reinforced guiding all this but what would make you think so and um so yeah francis collins has a discussion we'll find enough reason to think so yeah francis collins has a discussion about this in his book the language of god where he deals with the problem of evil about his daughter he talks about his daughter being raped as a young woman and how this horrible tragedy led to her you know sort of stronger character and developed you know a different kind of internal strength to deal with these kinds of things and so forth but again to me that's just kind of backing into it after the fact isn't there a way for for god to direct people to develop stronger character than horrible tragedies like rape or homicide or genocide or whatever i know why can't it be a hangnail that's right but i mean yeah you know the the thing is that you know and the you know i was i was when i wrote did this book how uh the pro that's god's problem i did this book i uh yeah that was the name of the book on suffering um it i was doing a radio interview in minnesota or someplace and some pastor was there they're going to interview the two of us because he's a local guy and he's actually a good guy he told me that you know two weeks before he'd been counseling this mother who's 16 year old uh daughter had been killed in a car accident and she he went into her home and was talking with her and she said i know why this happened he said oh really why he said i promised god that i would quit smoking i i didn't do it and so he took my oh that's horrible right what i mean what do you even say it's like so people come up with these things you know like you know people starving to death to me i had a debate with uh that guy's name this philosopher at oxford who we did this radio debate and he was arguing you know you know you need to look at the good side of the holocaust the good side you know because like you know because actually you know it makes us more noble when we realize that you know how precious life is it's made us more noble oh okay so six million people had to die so i'd feel better about myself great that's an interesting idea for an oxford philosopher all right right yeah i wonder if that was alistair mcgrath i think i've heard him make that argument in any case no no one's an after mcgrath he's a smart guy okay well it was uh what's that guy's name i i always wipe it out my head because i just got so angry yeah well i mean you could i suppose you could make an argument something a secular argument like out of the holocaust came international law against crimes against humanity the term uh you know genocide was coined by raphael lemkin in 1945 to describe what happened uh and you know the nuremberg trials put those kinds of crimes on the map as a as a notice to future dictators you know we're going to try you if you do this kind of thing and of course it hasn't completely stopped it but at least those kinds of events happen at fewer times and at lesser uh death rates so maybe there's a little bit of progress there but that's quite a reach to try to justify uh the holocaust is something that was yeah that's right i mean absolutely i mean there's some things that i'm just never going to look at the bright side of but most most kinds of suffering that i experience absolutely have a silver lining sometimes they're not they're not good but you know you can't find things in them um i don't find massive starvation of children in developing countries to have a to have a bright side there's no silver lining maybe a rabbi kushner don't like that rabbi kushner in his famous book uh when bad things happen to good people is that god just can't do it he's just limited he just can't stop tsunami yeah yeah yeah you know well when i first started thinking seriously about suffering i was teaching a class at rutgers on the biblical problems of suffering the bible says about it and i had my students read read kushner's book uh by the end of the semester my students are calling it uh uh when bad books are written by good people this explanation doesn't because he he tries to argue from the book of job that god's hands are tied he wishes he could do something but he can't my students are saying the book of job what that's not what it says it's just the opposite voice right okay well whatever when bad books are written by good people i gotta remember that it reminds me of christopher hitchens line about every everyone has a book in them and in most pla in most cases that's where it should stay very good yeah all right exactly all right bart thanks for uh coming on and and good luck with the seminar i will be uh logging on myself because i i want to get the whole story here so again that's on uh uh december 5th from 9 30 in the morning to 4 30 in the afternoon eastern time we'll provide the link below where you can sign up for it right now today or tomorrow you get the early bird special and uh keep up the good work tell me when your um your book on uh revelations is going to be out do you think in another year or two it'd be about yeah let us know at least we'll book end this conversation with that yeah it'd be great yeah i'd love to

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 118,398

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, anti-Semitism, Christianity, epistemology, human suffering, Jesus, mythology, problem of evil, resurrection, Science Salon, The Michael Shermer Show, virgin birth

Id: mj4_1X8bRIE

Length: 67min 48sec (4068 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021