The Gospel Truth: Sometimes A Little Hazy

this is fresh air I'm Kerry gross what is the story of Jesus's birth how did Judas die what did Jesus say when he was crucified it depends on which gospel you read Bible scholar Bart Ehrman says there are irreconcilable differences among the Gospels those differences and what they tell us about Christianity and the authors of the Gospels is the subject of Aaron's new book Jesus interrupted Erman is a distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and he's the author of many books about Bible history including the bestseller misquoting Jesus as a young man studying at the Moody Bible Institute he was an evangelical Christian who believed the Bible was the inerrant Word of God but later when he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary and started the read and started reading the Bible with a more historical approach analyzing the contradictions among the Gospels he lost faith in the Bible as the literal word of God he now describes himself as an agnostic Bart Ehrman welcome back to fresh air in your book Jesus interrupted you compare the Gospels and discrepancies from one gospel to another in everything from factoids to what Jesus said before he died why is it important to consider these discrepancies I think it's important to know that each of these authors of the New Testament had a different message what what people tend to do is allied the various teachings of Saint Matthew Mark Luke and John so that if Matthew portrays Jesus in one way and mark portrays him in a different way what people do is they conflate the two accounts so that Jesus says and does everything that he says in Matthew and in mark but when you do that you in fact Rob each of these authors of their own integrity as an author when Matthew was writing he didn't intend for somebody to read some other gospel and interpret his gospel in light of what some other authors said he had his own message and so recognizing that there are these discrepancies is it kind of a key to the interpretation of these books because it shows that they each have a different message and that you can't that you can't smash the four Gospels into one big gospel and think that you get to get the true understanding let's look at one of the most significant moments in the story of Jesus and that is Jesus's death on the cross in mark Jesus dies in agony unsure of the reason he must die and he asked God why have you forsaken me whereas in Luke he prays Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing can you talk about those two different points of view of what happens to Jesus as he's dying on the cross right people don't realize that there is that these are very different portrayals but when you read March account very carefully Jesus seems to be in shock he doesn't say anything the entire time he's mocked by everybody by the Roman soldiers by people passing by in Mark's Gospel he's mocked by both robbers who are being crucified with him and at the end his only words are are his his cry of dereliction as it's called my God my God why have you forsaken me and then he cries out and dies and that's it and so it's a story that's filled with pathos and and emotion and Jesus is clearly in a great agony going to his death whereas in Luke you have a very different portrayal Jesus isn't silent in Luke while being crucified when they nailed him to the cross he prays for those who are doing this Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing while he's hanging on the cross he actually has an intelligent conversation with one of the other people being crucified one of the one of the others mocks Jesus and the second person tells the tells the first to be quiet because Jesus hasn't done anything to deserve this and he turns his head to Jesus and he says Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom and Jesus replies truly I tell you today you will be with me in paradise and so jesus knows fully well what's happening to him and why what's his Y it's happening to him and he knows what's going to happen to them after it happens he's going to wake up in paradise and this guy is going to be next to him and the most telling thing of all is that in Luke instead of crying out my God my God why have you forsaken me instead that Jesus says father into your hands I commend my spirit and so what happens is people take this account of Luke where Jesus seems to be calm and in control and knows perfectly well what's happening and combines it with mark where Jesus is in doubt and despair and they put the two accounts into one big account so Jesus says all the things that he says in mark and in Luke and thereby robbing each account of what it's trying to say about Jesus in the face of death and those two stories are so contradictory it kind of makes no sense to combine the two I think I think it makes no sense because mark is trying to say something quite specific about what it what it was like for Jesus to go to his death and if you in court if you bring into mark the details from Luke then Mark's message is lost Jesus is no longer the way Mark wanted to portray him and then of course what people do is they also bring in what Matthew has to say and then they bring in what John has to say and you end up with this massive account in which Jesus says and does all of these things which is unlike any of the Gospels so in effect what people do is by combining these Gospels in their head into one gospel they in effect have written their own gospel which is completely unlike any of the Gospels of the New Testament what's typically brought into the story of Jesus is final moments on earth from Matthew and John well an example from John is that Jesus is hanging on the cross and he he cries out I am thirsty and the author tells us that the reason Jesus said he was thirsty wasn't so much because he was thirsty but because he wanted to fulfill the scripture because there's a scripture he brew Bible passage in Old Testament passage where talks about being thirsty and so in John's Gospel in particular Jesus death isn't an agonizing moment for Jesus it's an opportunity for Jesus to fulfill Scripture and so you combine that with what's going on with mark and Luke and then you throw in throwing the material from Matthew and what you end up with is this famous this famous idea that Jesus had seven last dying words the seven last words of the dying Jesus which important in churches today that celebrate these seven last words but in fact they're not found in any gospel there they represent conflation of the accounts of Matthew Mark Luke and John now let me bring into these versions of Jesus's last moments on earth a story from the Coptic apocalypse of Peter which is what what is this book well this is a book that was discovered in 1945 in Egypt along with a number of other Gospels that are are apparently were written apparently by Gnostic Christians Christians who believed that the way of salvation wasn't through believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus but in knowing the truth about who who they really are and and about who Jesus is and the truth that Jesus reveals and so the Coptic apocalypse of Peter tells an alternative version of what happens when Jesus is crucified and to modern modern readers it sounds very peculiar indeed Peter is is standing on a hill talking with Jesus and then all of a sudden he sees down below an image of Jesus being arrested and he can't understand how he's seeing both things at once but then he sees Jesus get crucified and above the cross he sees another image of Christ who's laughing and so him Peter said Peter sees three different representations of Christ and so to the Christ next and we said yeah it's what am I seeing I don't understand and Jesus replies to him that the the soldiers think that they're actually crucifying him but they can't crucify him because he's a supernatural being they're only crucifying his earthly shell his body but his real self is above the cross laughing at them for their foolishness and thinking that they can hurt him the Christ when in fact they can't harm him at all because he's not a physical being does that story in a way combine the two conflicting stories of Mark and Luke because you have like the mortal Jesus being crucified and but that's just a shout his shell but the more that the spirit of Jesus is kind laughing at the Romans who don't realize that they're just killing a shell and not not the soul or not the spirit so you've got this in way you've got the suffering of the body but the transcendent soul so you've even weight got to Jesus's there one is suffering and one who can also say forgive them father they don't know what they're doing yeah no that's a vert that's a really interesting way to look at it because the Coptic apocalypse of Peter was written after these other Gospels and and they may well have known them and in a sense you could say that it is even more influenced by something like the Gospel of John because in John's Gospel John is the only gospel where Jesus is explicitly identified as himself being a divine being being being himself God in the other Gospels he's talked about as the Son of God but but in Jewish circles the Son of God wasn't a divine being the Son of God was always a human being but in the Gospel of John Jesus is absolutely a divine being and so when he gets killed in John's Gospel there's there's some question about well how physical is it really I mean if Jesus talks about his death as his exaltation in the Gospel of John and so it's his chance to return to his heavenly home and that's kind of like what happens in this Coptic apocalypse of Peter that that the death of Jesus isn't a serious moment of agony it's simply a way of Jesus getting out of this world another difference in from one gospel to another that you write about in your new book is John's version of Jesus has Jesus talking about himself and proclaiming who he is saying I am the bread of life I am the light of the world whereas in mark Jesus teaches principally about God in the coming Kingdom and hardly ever talks directly about himself what can you elaborate on those two different visions of Jesus right some a lot of people read the Bible don't don't see the difference because I guess because of the way they read the Bible which is they simply open up and read a portion here or a portion there but they don't do a careful comparison of what one author says with what another author says but the reality is that when you read Mark's Gospel which is probably our first gospel Jesus says very little about himself he talks about how he must go to Jerusalem and be rejected and be crucified and then raised from the dead but he never identified himself as as divine for example it never close says I am the son of God the only time in Mark's Gospel that he admits that he's the Messiah is at the very end when he's put on trial and the high priest asked him are you the Messiah and he says yes I am so Mark's Gospel Jesus is not interested in teaching about himself but when you read John's Gospel that's virtually the only thing Jesus talks about is who he is what his identity is where he came from he came from above with the father where he's going he's returning to the Father and he himself is in some sense divine as he says in John chapter 10 I and the father are one or as he says in chapter 8 before Abraham was I am Abraham was the the father of the Jews who lived eighteen hundred years before Jesus and Jesus actually appears to be claiming to be a representation of God on earth this is this is completely unlike anything that you find in mark or in Matthew and Luke and it historically it's it creates all sorts of problems because if the historical Jesus actually went around saying that he was God it's it's very hard to believe that Matthew Mark and Luke left out that part you know as if that part wasn't important to mention but in fact they don't mention it and so this view divinity of Jesus on his own lips is found only in our latest gospel the Gospel of John so so do you have any explanation about why John's version of Jesus would be so much different than the other Gospels what what scholars have thought for a long time now is that John is the last gospel to be written and that the that the understanding of Jesus had changed dramatically in the years between the Gospels that specifically John's Gospel was written in a community that was a heavily persecuted Christian community but that started out probably as a community of Jews worshipping in the synagogue who had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah but had been kicked out of their synagogue probably because they were trying to convert people and people didn't want to be converted and they ended up making themselves into a nuisance and they got kicked out of their synagogue and so they started their own community of faith and in that particular community the community that John out of which John wrote his gospel this community tried to understand why it is we been rejected by our Jewish families and friends and the way they started imagining it was that the reason they've rejected us and have rejected Jesus as the Messiah is because Jesus actually doesn't come from this world and these other people are thinking just in worldly terms they're from the earth and Jesus is from heaven and they can't understand a heavenly being because they are earthly beings and so with this process of thought over time Jesus becomes more and more of a heavenly being who's a mystery on earth that only the insiders can understand and so with the passing of years Jesus develops a kind of exalted status in this particular community until by the time the Gospel of John is written Jesus is understood as being equal with God himself a divine being who came down from heaven to reveal the truth that can set people free so that those who believe in Him will have eternal life up in heaven with God and so this is a distinctive teaching of this particular community that a understanding that developed because of the social history that took place before the gospel was written now earlier we were talking about contradictions in the Gospels about Jesus's final moments on earth there are different interpretations in the Gospels about why Jesus died you write that for Mark Jesus's death as an atonement or as for Luke it's the reason people realize they're sinful I need to turn to God for forgiveness can you discuss these two interpretations right this is another thing that a lot of people don't don't pick up on because everybody assumes that the entire Bible must have the same view about why Jesus died but in fact if you read the different authors there are there are markedly different views the the earliest account we have of Jesus life of course is the Gospel of Mark and in mark there's a fairly unambiguous view in marks in Mark's Gospel Jesus States during his ministry in mark chapter 10 that he the Son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many so this encapsulates Mark's views that Jesus death somehow brings about an atonement for sin that because Jesus dies people can have a right standing before God through through the death of Jesus Luke was writing probably 15 years maybe twenty years after Mark and and actually knew the Gospel of Mark he he reproduced a good bit of Mark's Gospel in his gospel in the Gospel of Luke what is striking is that he took out this verse that where it says where Jesus says that he come to give his life as a ransom for many Luke Luke took out that verse and when Luke portrays the crucifixion of Jesus there's nothing about the crucifixion scene that makes you think that this death is meant to be an atonement for sin in fact Luke also wrote a second volume that we have in the New Testament he also wrote the book of Acts which talks about the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire and there are a number of sermons in Acts in which the Apostles are trying to convert people and in these sermons they talk about the death of Jesus but they never mentioned that Jesus death is an atonement for sin instead of what they say is that Jesus death was a huge miscarriage of justice the people who did it are guilty before God and they need to turn to God so that God in repentance so that God will forgive them in other words the way the death of Jesus works in Luke is not that it brings atonement for sin it's the occasion that people have for realizing their sinfulness so that they can repent and God will forgive them so that's a pretty fundamental difference in the perception of the symbolic significance of Christ's death absolutely and it's it's not the only these are not the only two views there the early Christians had a lot of different views about the significance of Jesus death but the thing that made them all Christian I think is that all of them thought the Jesus death in some way was important for for human beings standing before God but as it turns out there are some groups of Christians in the 1st 2nd century who didn't think that the death of Jesus actually mattered that much for salvation and so some of the Gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament see the death of Jesus is just kind of a blip on the screen what really matters isn't Jesus death what matters is the secret teachings that he delivered and it's the secret teachings that can bring salvation this is a few that ended up being opposed by by other Christians and so the books containing this particular view didn't make it into the Canon one of the things that Christians say about Jesus is that he died for our sins so how does that statement fit into these conflicting stories about Jesus's death well I think that that statement would be true for some of the authors of the of the Bible who do think that Jesus died for sins this is true of mark and it's true for example of the writings of the Apostle Paul but I don't think it's true for the Gospel of Luke in the Gospel of Luke Jesus dies out of the because of a miscarriage of justice he's an innocent man who's unjustly put to death and the way it relates to sins isn't that he dies for sins he dies and when people realize this huge mistake they made and crucifying Jesus they feel guilty and they turned back to God and God forgives them so that the death isn't what brings about an atonement for sins it's it's a forgiveness that God gives them and the death of Jesus then is simply an occasion to repent this is fresh air I'm Terry Gross back with Bible scholar Bart Ehrman his new book Jesus interrupted is about the contradictions in the different Gospels versions of Jesus's life and death Erman also analyzes what those contradictions tell us about the authors of the Gospels and early Christianity Herman is a distinguished professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he's also the author of the Celer misquoting Jesus in which Gospels is Jesus portrayed as an apocalyptic cyst right so this is a this is a term that scholars have used about Jesus that he was an apocalyptic cyst for over a hundred years this was a view that was popularized especially by Albert Schweitzer before he became a great medical missionary he wrote his most important book the quest of the historical Jesus in which he argued that that Jesus had an apocalyptic view which was the view that this world we live in is controlled by forces of evil but God is soon going to intervene in the course of affairs and overthrow the the forces of evil and bring in a good Kingdom on earth and in three of our Gospels Jesus takes on this point of view predicting that the the end is coming soon and people need to repent and prepare because the kingdom of God is soon to arrive and when Jesus talks about the kingdom of God in these ways he doesn't mean heaven when you die he actually means a kingdom here on earth there's going to be a kingdom that's going to be ruled by God as opposed to these crummy kingdoms ruled by Rome or whatever whatever other power now God's kingdom will arrive so this point of view is taught prominently in Matthew Mark and Luke are three earliest Gospels in Mark's Gospel Jesus is quite clear that this end of the age this cataclysmic judgment of the world is going to happen very soon as he tells the disciples in mark some of you standing here would not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power whereas he says later in mark chapter 13 after describing how the heaven will turn dark and the moon will turn to blood and the stars will fall from the sky in other words the whole world is going to be uncreated when this catastrophe hit and he says to his disciples this generation will not pass away before all these things take place and so this is this is a view found in the earliest documents we have about Jesus so if you write as an apocalyptic fist Jesus preached that you should change your behavior not necessarily for moral reasons not to make life on earth better but to save your soul and get entrance into the kingdom of heaven when the apocalypse comes is that fair yeah that's right that's right I mean today today people have all sorts of grounds for ethics but but one of the major grounds that people have is they they think that you should be ethical so that we can all get along for the long haul you you know to make earth a better place for everybody and so because that will put us in good stead over a long period of time well Jesus didn't think there was going to be a long haul so when people say that Jesus was a great teacher of ethics I think that's absolutely true but one needs to understand that his ethical teaching is rooted in a completely different world view from the one that most people have today for Jesus the reason that you needed to start following God and doing what God wanted you to do the reason to behave ethically is because the Judgment Day was coming and it could be some time next Thursday and you need to be ready for it by behaving in the ways that God wants you to so that when this cosmic judge of the earth arrives and catastrophe starts happening you'll be on the right side and you'll be able to enter into this good Kingdom that God's bringing because if you disobey God and you're acting badly you're going to be destroyed when this cosmic judge arrives but I know I've read several scholars of the historical Jesus who see it very differently and they see Jesus as the social activist of his era somebody who who worked on behalf of the poor who had eagle egalitarian impulses who was almost a socialist in his thinking that's right there's a wide range of opinions about who Jesus is and in the last twenty years there have been people who wanted scholars who have wanted to redefine Jesus so that he's not an apocalyptic sist the majority of scholars don't agree with that but but but there is something to be said about Jesus as a social reformer and somebody who promoted egalitarian principles but the reason is not the one that sometimes given the reason the reason Jesus wanted to reform society and supportive things such as the roles of women in society and such is because he thought that's what the kingdom was going to be like in the kingdom there's not going to be inequality there's not going to be oppression there's not going to be war there's not going to be there's going to be equality of all people and so you should start implementing the ideals of that future Kingdom in the present could you say that the you apocalyptic utopian vision of what the future would be like is used but by Jesus is a kind of metaphor as a utopian ideal that should be that one should strive for even if one can't fulfill it on earth one should strive for this utopian ideal did you see in the middle work where like that it was like he literally believed that there would be an apocalyptic end times and then a literal heaven right there are scholars who want to see all of this talk about this coming judgement of the earth and the catastrophes that are going to happen as as pure metaphor and I think the reason they want to see it that way is because if you think that Jesus literally thought that there was going to be a coming end of the age well it didn't happen and so Jesus would have been wrong and some scholars are uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus could be wrong I think the only way though to decide whether this is metaphor or meant to be taken literally is by looking at what other Jews in the first century were saying and as it turns out there were a lot of Jews who were talking about the literal end of the world as they knew it including for example John the Baptist who thought that the end was coming right away and that people needed to prepare where they would be judged including the people who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls which are filled with this apocalyptic kind of thinking and including Jesus own followers the Apostle Paul definitely feels that Jesus is coming back right away the Jesus is going to be this cosmic judge and that the the earth is going to be transformed and Paul describes it not in metaphorical terms but in literally what's going to happen at the end and so I think that I think the desire for Jesus not to be literally meaning this is is rooted in an understandable theological move that you don't want to have Jesus say things that didn't come true but if you actually situate Jesus in his own historical context this is the sort of thing that a lot of people expected was going to happen just as just as people today I mean in evangelical Christian circles today there are many people who think that Jesus is coming back and they don't mean that they don't mean that metaphorically they think that Jesus literally is going to come back and I think they had their predecessors in the first century I'm interested in what you think of the popularity of that point of view and there's a Left Behind series of novels which have sold a remarkable I don't haven't figures on hand but like tens of millions of copies and and that's a novel a series of novels based on the apocalypse a lot of people today believe in the rapture that the second coming of Jesus is imminent and the people who are believers will be will rise to heaven will be raptured to heaven and everybody else will be left behind to face the trials and tribulations and Wars and plagues and and so on and and there are several very politically powerful people who believe that now yeah that's right and you know the Left Behind series sold far more copies than The Da Vinci Code as hard as that may be to believe but in fact it did and what's striking is that this idea that we are now living at the end of time and that that current events are showing us fulfillment of Biblical prophecy exactly the same thing was being said ten years ago about things happening ten years ago and ten years before that and ten years before that and ten years before that you can go all the way back in Christian history and every decade thought that they were living at the end of time and that the prophecies were being filled in their own day you can trace this back through the Middle Ages all the way back to early Christianity in fact you can trace it back to the Apostle Paul and the historical Jesus people have thought this from day one and what I sometimes tell my students is that you can say two things about these people who think that the end is going to come within their lifetime one thing is that every one of them bases it on the there are certain interpretations of the of the Bible especially for example the book of Revelation and the second thing you can say is that every single one of these people has been completely wrong the point though is that this view actually does go back to the historical Jesus Jesus also predicted that the end was going to come within his generation and and of course it didn't how did the historical approach to reading the Bible affect your faith well you know we Eve told us before that you had been a devout evangelical Christian you studied at the Moody Bible Institute then you went to Princeton Theological Seminary and there undertook a historical reading of the Bible as close to a devotional one so what impacted the historical reading of the Bible and seeing the contradictions many more contradictions and you've been telling us about it today but you know from one gospel to another how did that affect your faith right so when I started off studying the Bible I I had had this born-again experience in high school and had become a an evangelical Christian in some ways I suppose I would have been classified as a fundamentalist I believe that the Bible was completely inerrant that there were no mistakes in it whatsoever of any kind when I when I took Greek in college and realized I was pretty good in it I decided that I wanted to pursue the study of the Greek New Testament largely for religious reasons because I thought these are the words that God has given us and I want to know these words in the original language in Greek and so I I went off to study the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary because the the leading scholar in that field a man named Bruce Metzger happened to teach there Princeton seminary the faculty there did not share the view that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God most of them they were they were all Christians and many of them had very high views of Scripture but they they were not fundamentalists or even strong evangelicals many of them recognized that in fact there are lots of discrepancies in the Bible and that the Bible might convey the Word of God but the very words were not dictated by God in any way and so I resisted that view for a long time while I was in seminary and then I went on and did my PhD at Princeton also with Bruce Metzger but the more I studied the Bible the more I started realizing that in fact you know I I could say there weren't any errors in the Bible but the closer you look at it sure looked like there were errors in the Bible and many many of the ones that got my notice were very small little details here and there discrepancies between what one gospel says and another gospel says or discrepancy between what the the New Testament says versus what the Old Testament says or or discrepancies within the Old Testament and I got to a point where I started realizing that I couldn't reconcile all of these discrepancies and you know many of them are just quite clear contradictions some of the ones we haven't actually talked about on the program so far but I got to a point where I realized there are contradictions and once I said that it had a serious effect on my face because my faith was rooted in an inerrant revelation from God and I began realizing that in fact this revelation was not inerrant this revelation in fact had errors and once I started seeing errors I started finding them everywhere we you kind of posed the question in your book is faith possible after you studied the Bible historically and you start to see these contradictions and discrepancies from one story of Jesus to the other right so the reason I wrote this last chapter is faith possible is because some people who have read some of my earlier books have said that once I realized that there were differences among our Greek manuscripts that we don't know what the original text is that because of that I became an agnostic which is not just wrong but a little bit crazy I mean I didn't become an eggnog because I realized that there were differences in our manuscripts and in fact I didn't become an agnostic when I realized that there were there were discrepancies in the Bible or contradictions for about 15 years I continued to be a very devout Christian went to church every week confess my sins believed in God believe Christ was the salvation for the human race and all and all the rest but I did start developing a different view of the Bible that I started seeing it less as a literal word from God and more as a set of books that contained important spiritual teachings by by roots by religious people some of whom were religious geniuses like like the Apostle Paul for example or the authors of the Gospels who had real insight into the spiritual world and so it's not that they gave an inerrant revelation but they but they had insights into the truth and they had different insights into the truth so that marks views were different from Matthews because Mark had a different perspective than Matthew and I came to think that you can't just reconcile the two because that that when you reconcile Matthew and Mark and pretend they're saying the same thing then you're not paying attention to what either one of them is saying and so for about 15 years or so I continued to be a Christian of a more liberal persuasion and the reason I left the faith ultimately had nothing to do with my historical study of the Bible per se what really did me in was the subject of this other book I wrote God's problem the problem of suffering I just came to a point where I no longer could believe that there was a good and powerful God who is in control of this world given the state of things here you used to be devout here now and agnostic he used to believe in Heaven and Hell which is a quite a motivational motivator and and also if you believe you're going to have and that's cause for a feeling of inner peace yes and a sense of meaning on life for life that life is just you know a kind of stepping stone toward and after life profound afterlife so now that you no longer are a believer and therefore you probably no longer believe in heaven and hell has it changed your motivation for what you do on earth and has it changed your sense of what the meaning of your life is it's a great question you know what happened with me with respect to heaven in hell I guess is what happened with a lot of the Christian doctrines is as a historian I came to see where these ideas came from and I realized that these ideas didn't descend from heaven one day soon after Jesus death but in fact the doctrines of heaven how were human creations that the humans came up with these views of heaven in hell and in my book I explain a little bit how that happened that that doctrines of Heaven and Hell developed within early Christianity that they weren't actually the teachings of Jesus or of his early earliest followers but they were later developments as were the doctrines of the Trinity for example the divinity of Christ but as to what effect that had on me personally I one of the reasons I was afraid to become an agnostic was when I was still Christian as I thought that if I became an agnostic I would have no grounds for ethical behavior I'd have no moral compass and I thought that that would probably lead me to become a completely life sensuous reprobate but but as it turns out that's completely wrong I I think I actually have more of a sense of the meaning of life now than I ever had as a believer there are lots of reasons to behave ethically I think many of us are simply hardwired to want to love our neighbor as ourselves and to try and do unto others as we'd want them to do unto us and I think that since life is all there is this life is it that after we die we no longer exist that we should grab life for for everything that it can give us and we should live life to its fullest and should enjoy it as much as we can because this is not a dry run for something else this is it and we should help other people who are suffering now so they too can enjoy life and so in fact my giving up on the sense of an afterlife has made this slide for me much more meaningful Bart Ehrman it's great to talk with you again really appreciate it and thank you so much okay thanks for having me

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 71,132

Rating: 4.77459 out of 5

Keywords: Terry Gross, Fresh Air, Jesus Interrupted, Agnostic, Atheism, Bart Ehrman, Christianity, Jesus Christ, God

Id: qFWlPaxAUgE

Length: 37min 58sec (2278 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017