Was Jesus a False Prophet?

[Music] welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart ehrmann the only show where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little-known facts about the New Testament the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity I'm your host Megan Lewis let's begin welcome back everybody to misquoting Jesus today we are going to be talking about Jesus as an apocalyptic Prophet which we spoke about I think two weeks ago because last week was your interview with the Ukrainian gentleman which I'm sure everybody enjoyed very much because it was fascinating um and we should kind of talk about how you are we haven't spoken for a couple of weeks yeah I'm doing well I'm doing well I'm um you know we're we're uh barreling now to the end of the semester and uh the um it's always the best of time and worship times for professors because you're not only trying to get to the end but you're thinking about all this grading you got to do and so the uh every every every colleague I know in the universe um you know even the ones who really really love teaching do not like the grading but the grading is really important because if you if you take it seriously it's a way of trying to guide students into how to to develop their intellectual skills their communication skills and so it's important to take what they uh hand in seriously but in this particular case for me this semester I'm teaching this class on Jesus in scholarship and film and one of their final writing assignments is that they are to write so so just to explain this they're reading a bunch of gospels from outside the New Testament and inside the New Testament they're seeing a bunch of films about Jesus and we're analyzing all these from you know we're involved in analysis of these but their final writing assignment is they have to write their own Gospel and it's to be a kind of a fictional account uh taking the Viewpoint of somebody um within the gospel story and developing their own ideas about Jesus through this gospel and so yeah that kind of grading is fun to do that sounds like a really fun assignment actually I used to when I was a student I really enjoyed it when instructors were a little bit more creative with what they assigned to test our knowledge that's awesome yeah well I wish I'd come up with it myself but my uh there's a novelist in the South named Reynolds price that some people will know he was a great great novelist and a great great man but he he gave me this idea and he was a creative writer so yeah oh yeah so uh yeah how are you doing yeah okay doing doing pretty well actually it's been a bit of whirlwinds I think I've mentioned before that I run a small non-profits called humans against poor scholarship uh and April is the really busy month for me because we interview the short lists that uh we we put up of um PhD students who are competing for funding for their summer research projects so I've got two more sets of interviews this weekend and then I think the voting will start to choose who who gets the funding so it's it's a lot of fun but I am a little bit tired do you get you get a lot more applications than you have funds to distribute yeah we this year we had 30 applicants um we got the short list this is the first year we've actually done a shortlist ordinarily we interview everyone but last year it was it was just too much I have help for the interviews but there are only so many people who are willing and able to sit down for an hour and talk to a bunch of grad students about their work uh so we got the short list down to 20 which is still a pretty impressive number of people to interview but we only have so we give two thousand dollars to each student and this year we only have two grants available so it's it's a little bit of a blood path well you know if they would just watch the misquoting Jesus podcast they would know how to interview [Laughter] you see but looking forward to today's conversation which is Jesus as an apocalyptic Prophet did he believe the end of the world was coming uh what did the gospels say on uh his thoughts and given that the end of the world did not come if Jesus was preaching the imminent end of the world does that make him a false prophet uh so this this is going to be fun I think and we've covered different aspects of apocalypticism since we've started the podcast it's been one of the recurring themes this year I think every episode we've touched on it we've said we will focus on Jesus and apocalypticism at a later date so here we are uh we did not we did not lie to you um but before we get into my questions why is this important to think about and to discuss um people of course have different ideas of who Jesus was not just regular old folk but regular Scholars who've long debated what what Jesus was like and what he said and did for for centuries of course everybody just assumed that what the gospels said is what happened and that there's no you know there's not much mystery about it Jesus said to do this that and the other thing and he did this and the other thing this is what he taught and and with the enlightenment Scholars recognized that the gospels were more problematic than that as historical sources and had to develop ways of using them to establish what Jesus really said and did in the early 20th century Albert Schweitzer wrote his classic work which is arguably the most important book about Jesus written in modern times or ever the quest of the historical Jesus where he went through what everyone what every scholar had said about Jesus since the enlightenment since the 1770s and he tried to show what the problems with their portrayals were uh it's a very witty it's a great great book to still to read today even if it does get to get in the weeds in places but it's it is a superb book and and Schweitzer argued that Jesus is best understood um not just as a kind Rabbi who's teaching about love or not just you know not just this that or the other thing he was specifically an apocalyptic Prophet who is anticipating that the world as we know it was soon to end with an intervention of God um and this this portrayal upset a lot of people and continues to upset people because um that prediction of Jesus did not come true and um and so how could it be right but it that view of schweitzer's caught on and has been the majority view among critical Scholars for over the last hundred years or so and so um so it's an important view it's a view that many people don't know about and they certainly don't know the evidence for it and it causes problems for many people for trying to understand Jesus because they believe in Jesus and so how how could he be wrong about that and and so there are a lot of issues tied up with it thank you and regular listeners will be very familiar with this concept of apocalypseism already but for those who are maybe new to the show could you give a very brief description of what that is so apocalypticism is a term that Scholars have invented to to describe a certain way of looking at the world in Ancient Judaism from around the time of Jesus this view apocalypticism started about 200 years before Jesus life and became a dominant view in Judaism in his day it's called apocalypticism from the word apocalypsis which means a revealing or an unveiling and the idea is that God had revealed the secrets that can explain why this world is such a mess the secrets are that this world is is divided roughly into two categories there are the forces of of good in the forces of evil and these forces of Good and Evil are doing battle with one another with God who is in control of the forces of good with his angels and his archangels and other powers and the devil having his own sort of resources and they're battling it out and the world is controlled now with by the forces of evil but God is very soon going to intervene and Destroy these forces of evil so that the suffering people are experiencing now with Wars and starvation and earthquakes and natural disasters and just everything that's making people suffer will be taken away and God will introduce a new world a new kingdom on Earth where that he will rule rather than the forces of evil and most apocalyptuses thought that this this end of time was upon us and that uh that it's going to happen very soon now so what does it mean then when we say that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet so this um to say that he's a prophet means that he was he understood himself to be speaking God's word people misunderstand this term Prophet because of modern connotations and in modern connotations a prophet is always somebody who's making specific predictions about the future you know so you're predicting things and and Prophets did do that but in the in the Hebrew Bible tradition that Jesus was standing in um prophets were not so much predicting about they weren't focused on the events to come so much as on trying to declare God's will for his people and in almost every case people were messing up in one way or another and prophets were speaking forth God's word and so they rather than being foretellers of the future so much they were mainly fourth tellers telling forth God's word so to call Jesus a prophet means that he believes that he was speaking God's message to his people and it did have future implications if he's an apocalyptic Prophet then he's a prophet who is standing within this apocalyptic tradition who sees the forces of evil and understands that God is going to destroy them and that it's going to happen pretty soon uh were there other apocalyptic prophets in the ancient world or was Jesus a one-off oh no no he definitely was not a one-off um even in the New Testament um there are other apocalyptic prophets including for example Jesus predecessor um this is a fairly important Point John the Baptist Begins the gospels Jesus gets baptized by John at the beginning of his ministry in uh in the gospels and we know something about what John the Baptist was doing and why he was baptizing he was proclaiming that God's judgment was soon to arrive and that God was going to destroy those who were opposed to him and so John the Baptist was urging people to repent and turn their lives around and return to God and to God's ways so that when this judgment coming judgment arrived they would they would survive it it's significant that Jesus is is associated with John at the very beginning of his ministry before his ministry because it shows that he's aligning with his apocalyptic message that John is proclaiming at the same time we have other other apocalyptic groups uh in Jesus world the group that produced The Dead Sea Scrolls is usually thought to have been a group of Jews called the essenes who also were anticipating an imminent uh Judgment of God and arrival of a it can be a major battle that's going to be fought and God's going to destroy the forces of evil we know that there were Pharisees Pharisees subscribed to this apocalyptic worldview and even though they're Jesus enemies in the gospels but they had the basic worldview of an apocalyptic sense of things and so we also know of apocalyptic prophets by name outside the Bible Josephus mentions several of them um he named one named fudis for example one that he calls the Egyptian and these are people who are proclaiming the coming end and it continued after Jesus day Josephus has a long story about somebody else named Jesus a guy named Jesus vandanias who about 40 years after Jesus was making a specific prediction that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed in the Roman war and he was a real pain in the neck for for Jewish authorities in Jerusalem who who arrested him and and flogged him and um and punished him and because he was saying that that the end was coming soon and for him it did during The Siege of Jerusalem apparently a stone catapulted into the city killed him about Jesus message compared to his prophetic peers um well of course every everybody has a different message um you know nobody's saying exactly the same as everybody else the basic message of Jesus would have been consistent with other apocalyptic prophets that got at the end is his near God is soon to intervene God God will destroy the forces of evil God will bring in a good A Good Earth a good a good Kingdom a utopian kind of a kingdom so that would have been consistent there are several things that Jesus preached that appear to have been distinctive to him one thing is that he appears to think that he would himself be the king of this future Kingdom that he would be the future anointed one which is the term for messiah that Jesus appears to his followers appears to appear to have thought that he would be the Messiah some of them did and he may well himself have thought that he would be the Messiah Jesus was just he wasn't unique but he was distinctive in emphasizing that in anticipation for this coming Kingdom What mattered was not um the sacrifices that you performed God in the temple um or keeping the rituals of Judaism and it was not personal Purity it wasn't purifying yourself of either of sin or of uncleanness What mattered were your actions toward others how how you behave toward other people who are especially people who are in need will be determinative of whether you enter into the kingdom or not it's Jesus even taught it's not about following me it's about following my words but you don't have to know me to know my words what matters is that you help those who are in need and if you do you will you will enter the kingdom if you ignore those in need it doesn't matter what your sacrifices are what your Purity is you will be cast out thank you um do we know how these apocalyptic prophets were viewed by the general population were they taken seriously or were they more people on a street corner with the end is near signs they're probably were a bit of both I mean um the uh one of the funny scenes in the Life of Brian is you have this lineup of these these apocalyptic preachers who are just saying kind of weird wacky things and a couple people are looking at them at the time you know kind of a scam it's like oh my God and so so there may have been people like that we know though of others that did have large followings because this was a widespread and popular view in Judaism at the time at least in Israel um Joseph has mentions uh a couple of apocalyp prophets with large followings that were seen to be a threat by the authorities and in most instances the authorities come out and get them and um sometimes there are massive Slaughters uh that Josephus mentions about these people so um I think this was kind of the Zeitgeist it was the um people were feeling like you know they were living at the end of the age and that God was soon going to do something about it and not everybody was but I mean enough of the population that these some of these people made a difference if Jesus was anticipating as these other apocalyptic prophets were that the kingdom of God was going to be a physical reality before the end of his life is it fair to say that then he wasn't expecting to be crucified this is a very big question and I have to say that um a lot of people get upset with me when I tell them what I think about this uh I I think that Jesus really did anticipate that he would be the Messiah of this coming Kingdom I've got reasons for that that it'd be fun we'll do a whole episode on that did Jesus think he was the Messiah I think the answer is yes but he didn't think that he was going to be the political ruler who's going to drive out the Romans with the sword he wasn't he wasn't a messiah that people were expecting to be like a warrior king like David he thought that God he had an apocalyptic view God was going to destroy the enemy and that God would appoint him to to to to uh to be the ruler and so Jesus I think certainly uh expected expected that much and I forgot the question um do we think he was expecting to be crucified oh thank you thank you so since since Jesus thought that God was soon to intervene within his generation he tells he tells his disciples that they're gonna some of them will live to see it and then you know they'll be alive and his generation is going to see it I think that's what Jesus anticipated um he went to Jerusalem the last week of his life um in all the gospels and I think this is historically completely credible that he had been preaching up in Galilee which was a remote rural area he could not have had a large crowds because there weren't large crowds up there and he and he isn't spending any time in the maiden cities in tiberias or or uh and so you know the the places where um where people would have would have been would have amassed uh he didn't spend time in the cities he spent time in the countryside and so he probably didn't have large crowds but he decided the end of his life to take his message to Jerusalem that people need to repent because this kingdom is soon to arrive and he took his message to Jerusalem thinking probably that you know it's people will repent now that the message will take hold um but uh so I don't think I don't think he went to Jerusalem to die I don't think he went to be rejected I think what happened is he got on the bad side of the authorities partly largely because of his Proclamation that God was going to destroy the powers of evil and he identified um the Jewish leadership as among those who would be destroyed and that the temple itself would be destroyed and they didn't like that and it ended up leading to his death I think so I don't think Jesus was anticipating being crucified I think he was anticipating that the kingdom would come but after his death his disciples had to make sense of it because they thought he's the Messiah he'd be the future ruler of the Kingdom but instead of taking over the kingdom he he was destroyed publicly humiliated and tortured to death and um once they became convinced that he had been raised from the dead then they redefined things and they said well that must mean that he had to die because if God raised him God must have wanted him dead and why would God want him dead it must have been a sacrifice and if he was sacrificed there must be a sacrifice for sins and they developed this idea that Jesus had to be sacrificed for sins and once they developed that idea very quickly they started saying that's what he had in mind all the time all along and that's why in the gospels then you have Jesus predicting that he's going to be crucified it's because that's how the later followers understood him but I don't think that was the plan in Jesus for Jesus himself do we see much variation in how the gospel writers deal with Jesus somewhat Unexpected death or is it um relatively homogeneous um as you once you get to the gospels our first gospel is is Mark probably it's written about 40 years after Jesus death uh in Mark Jesus anticipates his death and the whole Gospel of Mark as we as we said in an earlier episode the whole Gospel of Mark is trying to show that this is what the Messiah has to do and Jesus knows it um that view is um is is accepted and even you know more pronounced as you get through as you go through the gospels chronologically uh it's really the entire point of Jesus life is his death and so all of the gospels um all four gospels have a portion the first portion of the gospels on his entire Ministry which for example in the Gospel of John the Gospel of John it takes um the ministry takes three years and that's narrated in 11 chapters the other the other 10 chapters are about his last week and so it's they're they're really focused on the passion narratives and that's the point for them um I don't think it was the point for Jesus that he was going to be crucified but it's understandably the point for the Christians because he was crucified and if he's the son of God he surely knew he had to be crucified and it meant that he had to be crucified and so that becomes the point then of the Gospels thank you if Jesus believed the end of the world was coming before his the end of his lifetime and he was obviously then crucified does this make him a false prophet right this was a difficult question for many people to ask um uh so part of it is it depends what one means by a false prophet um if you mean simply that they predicted something that didn't happen um well yeah and that means we're probably all false prophets but the term false prophet tends to have this very highly highly derogatory uh character to it like there's something kind of wicked about them or just they're they're so thoroughly self-deceived you know or they they're big on themselves and I don't know if that's appropriate for a figure living two thousand years ago that we can't really even talk to to question to find out what they were saying or doing what I will say is that I think it is clear that Jesus um is predicting that the end was going to come within his generation um we have sayings to that effect by people who are writing after his generation and that that indicates they didn't make it up uh this has been a tradition that is floating around for um for a long time and since it's the idea that you can find in Jesus predecessor John the Baptist he John one of one of the saying of John the Baptist that is really interesting is where John the Baptist is recorded as saying before Jesus starts his ministry John is preaching to other uh to other Jews and he's saying that the ax is already laid at the root of the tree every tree that does not bear fruit will be cut down and cast Into the Fire okay so this is that old image that you find in the Old Testament that God's people are to bear fruit they're they're to they're to do what he wants them to do and if they don't bear good fruit they're going to be destroyed but the key and so John is saying this which is said throughout the prophets of the Old Testament you need to shape up or you're going to be wiped out but John says the ax is already laid at the root of the tree that means the the toppings ready to begin it's it's like it's it's it's ready to start and so John said that uh after Jesus death the Apostle Paul expects to be alive when it happens Paul in First Corinthians 15 he says Jesus is coming back in judgment and um Paul expects to be one of those alive at the time says that in First Corinthians 15 and for first Thessalonians 4 he includes himself among those who will be alive when Jesus returns so this was the prediction of the people before Jesus that he followed in his prediction of people Jesus own followers afterwards and so I think it is something Jesus said so are they all false prophets well you know I guess you could say everybody's a false prophet but it doesn't really get you very far I Think Jesus did anticipate that this was going to happen within his generation and it did not happen and so he was wrong about that uh I mean I think he was mistaken um but I don't like the term false prophet for that I think I I prefer to think of it as a calendrical mistake I got the calendar wrong and of course Christians have great ways of kind of dealing with that right already in second Peter in the New Testament you have an author who claims to be Peter who probably wasn't Peter who's trying to explain you know well yeah we said it was coming soon and everybody's making fun of us now because it didn't come soon he said look with the Lord of days as a thousand years and a thousand years is one day so you know you can't do this by a human calendar which I've always thought is kind of a funny rationale because I mean it's not a funny rationale it's an understandable rationale but today you know we have people today say the end's going to come soon it's coming very soon and I tell them that's right you know if it's coming in three days you can start looking for it around 5023. [Laughter] it'll be soon [Laughter] leads into my my very last question you see Divergent ways of explaining the lack of the end of the world in early Christian uh Cults and sects or does everyone kind of go with oh it's coming we just got the data a little bit wrong no they actually change it and it's interesting it's very interesting to see how how it happens you can you can line up the gospels chronologically just you know which was written first second third fourth and and onward and uh and just within the gospels the gospel writers over time start changing how Jesus describes it um and it's and so when you set up the gospels chronologically you're not doing it on on the basis of this right you figure it out on other ground but once you set them up chronologically it's very interesting in Mark's gospel our first gospel um and in uh what is considered the Q source that that's the source of sayings that you can find in uh both Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark and the idea is that they got these from another source that Scholars call Q Mark and Q would be our two earliest sources and they are thoroughly apocalyptic in their understandings of Jesus they portrayed Jesus making apocalyptic claims including the idea that people alive in Jesus day will see it happen Jesus tells his disciples some of you standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God has come in power in Mark chapter 9 chapter 13 He says this generation will not pass away before all these things take place when he's on his trial before before a Caiaphas the high priest Caiaphas Jesus tells him that he Caiaphas will see the son of man coming on the Clouds Of Heaven to judge the Earth that he Caiaphas will see it so in Mark our earliest gospel Jesus is definitely proclaiming this get to Luke written later these these sayings all get changed so that Jesus is not quite claiming this anymore Jesus is saying it's going to come soon but he's not saying like in my generation you know you all aren't going to do you you all be alive when this happens he doesn't say that anymore why would why would Luke get rid of them saying that anymore well Luke's writing about 80 or 85 it's been 50 years since Jesus death uh you get to the Gospel of John and there is no Proclamation about it coming soon in the Gospel of John the entire idea is that eternal life has started now for people who believe in Jesus so there's not an apocalyptic message and so you see you get from an apocalyptic message in our earliest sources to a kind of a modified not really strictly it's going to happen soon kind of message to a non-apocalyptic message of Jesus when you get to a later gospels like the Gospel of Thomas outside the New Testament it's probably written about 30 years or so after John we'd guess um in the Gospel of Thomas you have sayings of Jesus where he preaches against an apocalyptic message where Jesus declares that the apocalypse message is wrong and uh and so as time goes on things change and since since the end doesn't come people change Jesus teachings so much so that eventually of course the idea that the Judgment Day is coming soon According To Jesus is no longer the teaching of Jesus when you get into the second and third centuries it's like it's there are a few people who still think this that that it's going to be coming soon but it virtually dies out and it's not until modern times that Scholars have recognized that this is in fact what Jesus taught but these teachings got muted in large part because his followers didn't think that he'd say something that was wrong and so they they changed what he said thank you so much I think that's an excellent place to stop for this week we are going to take a very brief break and then we'll be back Bart is going to share his weekly updates and then we have another round of outsmart parts [Music] if you're enjoying the misquoting Jesus podcast you'd probably like my online courses as well I produced a number so far with multi-lecture courses on the New Testament gospels and the books of the pentateuch Standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus and a six-hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead if you're interested check them out at barterman.com you'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code MJ podcast welcome back everyone we now have Bart's weekly update [Music] Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr ehrmann's book releases speaking engagements hermanblog.org happenings and online course launches but what do you have for us this week well I'm um I'm having a great time right now working on my next book I'm I'm doing something I've never done before for a book I mean I you know I've read a lot of books and I always do it the same way which is I I just read massively I read massively and uh scholarship I read scholarship you know and I take notes and I take notes on everything I've written read and stuff and ancient sources modern sources this time I thought you know I'm just going to read and so I've been reading uh I mentioned this before I've been reading ancient moral philosophy Greek and Roman moral philosophy and so I'm you know from Plato and Aristotle up to the stoics and the epicureans and the Skeptics and and I'm just reading uh both secondary literature and primary literature and it is fantastic just understanding how ancient people understood what it means to live a good life and how to be how to be virtuous how to be a good person how to live and the reason I'm doing this is because I'm I'm realizing this is so different from the teachings of Jesus uh and so my next book is going to be on the the radical intervention that Jesus makes in the ethics of the day and all you have to read is a bunch of this stuff and you realize you know you read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius an Epictetus and you read you know all of these ethicists and uh realize man this is not what Jesus said and so uh so anyway so I'm just it's it's great and so my update is I'm just reading moral philosophy I think I've probably mentioned this too I have read zero moral philosophy I did a lot of Classics in my undergraduate degree and never took any of the philosophy or ethics classes I was firmly in the literature Camp um yeah but it sounded very interesting well you know the deal is a lot of a lot of Classics it's turned around a lot now but a lot of Classics people don't go into this later period and which for them a later period but Epictetus I'm telling you Epictetus is discourses you want something that will just change your life Epictetus [Laughter] he was a slave he was a slave he had been a slave to a uh to one of the main henchmen for uh Nero and uh and he's all about how you can't let external circumstances affect your inner well-being and uh man it is powerful that sounds like a good lesson to be to be going on with really yeah well thank you for sharing uh we are going to now have a round of outsmart but where we test the limits of Bud's knowledge of biblical trivia Dr Roman has written six New York Times best-selling books and holds a PhD from Princeton it's not often you'll see him made a fool but it doesn't hurt to try it's time for outsmart Bart [Music] are you ready Bart well I've never been yet so this week's questions are coming from Japan I am really sorry if I mispronounced your name but thank you so much for sending in your questions question one what does the name Melchizedek mean what does the name Melchizedek mean okay so McKenzie does show up in the uh in the New Testament in the book of Hebrews but it's because of a uh because it's a reference to an Old Testament passage where um Abraham who has been off fighting uh fighting the people who have taken his nephew lot captive uh he he wins his battle and he comes back and he meets with this king of of Salem the town of Salem who's named Melchizedek Melchizedek means literally king of righteousness and this is a very interesting um passage because um Abraham makes an offering to Melchizedek gives him a tithe gives him a portion of his spoils and the New Testament writer thought that this was very interesting because um Melchizedek came to be in a kind of a symbolic figure for Jesus because in the Old Testament Melchizedek doesn't he doesn't mention anything about his lineage and so the book of Hebrew says he didn't have mother or father like Jesus and he's the king of righteousness like Jesus and Abraham the father of the Jews gave offerings to him to Jesus and so it becomes an important important figure so I'm sorry to give a long answer but I had to kind of extend it so I could remember what Melchizedek meant and context is always welcome okay king of righteousness um question two what was the name of the high priest's servant whose ear Peter cut oh God was it Melchizedek close it does begin with m a big begins with an M it's a malcus I think yes absolutely which is a um it's a yeah it's interesting because it's a he it's a it's Roman name it ends with U.S if it were a Greek name it end in OS and so that's a little bit weird because he's he's a he's a servant of the Jewish high priest so why is they have a Roman name um this is a puzzle I hope the next question is not to solve the puzzle it's not it's not it's it's like this last question is a little bit tricky well possibly a bit cheeky on the part of of our our listener this week uh by which agents did Martin bodmer procure most of the bodma papyri through which agents did Martin bodmer acquire most of the bodmar papyri I don't even know what the bottom of papyri is the bottom of papyri were a it was a discovery made in Egypt of of ancient papyri that included um biblical texts that were published in the early 1950s and they included some of the oldest uh oldest biblical texts the New Testament document some of the oldest New Testament manuscripts that we have and so they're an enormously uh significant uh Discovery for so the deal is just for readers aren't quite familiar with this whole thing most of our so the King James Bible is based on handwritten copies of the New Testament that were available at the time when the King James version was done in the early 17th century but since then we've discovered earlier in earlier manuscripts and in many places these earlier manuscripts of the New Testament we discovered are different from the later manuscripts and Scholars tend to think these earlier manuscripts give us a more accurate understanding of what the authors actually wrote um the bodmar papyri include um two a couple of manuscripts that are really fantastic especially p75 which is a um a copy of portions of Luke and John which is uh it's one of our oldest manuscripts and it's a very fun it's an excellent text it looks like the Scribe is preserving things fairly accurately and so this was it was a major Discovery um and so the question is what agents did Martin bodmer use and that I used to know the answer to that back when I was a manuscript guy back in my my early career uh this is the kind of thing I worked on a lot were these manuscripts especially p75 and p66 and such but I uh I I really used to know this because it was an interesting answer so I have never known the answer to this question um but it's fociantano um I might not be saying that correctly yeah yeah I forget I forget this there's something significant about it too that's the name yeah so sorry thank you thank you for taking such a valiant stab at all of these questions and again two out of three okay I don't think that's a bad thing at all no no look if I were playing baseball man absolutely um before we finish for the week could you just summarize what we spoke about and let people know where they can find more if they're interested yeah so one of the one of the prominent discoveries of modern Scholars about the historical Jesus is that it looks like these um these passages in the New Testament are correct when they indicate that Jesus thought that the end was coming within his own uh generation he was an apocalyptic Prophet who was uh who understood that the world was controlled by forces of evil but the God was ultimately Sovereign and would destroy those forces of evil to bring in a good Kingdom on Earth Jesus thought this was going to happen in his lifetime or at least in his generation and so we've been discussing whether that makes him a false prophet or not because it didn't happen and I I indicated that I I'm not comfortable with the term false prophet because of its negative connotations although I do think Jesus was mistaken about when this was going to take place and that over time when Christians realized that it wasn't going to happen right away they started changing how Jesus talked about the kingdom and about God and his role in it and these changes reflect a in the fact that that what Jesus anticipated actually didn't happen thank you so much and you mentioned I think the last time we spoke a book that you'd written about this Jesus apocalyptic Prophet for a new millennium did I get the title right you did yeah so this book came out along it came out almost 25 years ago now but it was um I wrote it 25 years ago I wrote this book because there had been a lot of Scholars writing books about the historical Jesus in the 19 late 1980s 1990s and almost all these books were arguing that Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet um because that had been the majority view forever Wilson since the early 20th century and I thought you know the reality is most Scholars think he was but these books are being written by people who say he wasn't and the reason is because nobody writes books to explain what everybody knows and so what you know you don't you don't back up something that people just know is right I thought but the reading public out there doesn't realize that in fact this this view of the apocalyptic Prophet is still the dominant view by a long shot I thought I better explain to people what the view is and why Scholars hold it uh and so that was why I wrote my book uh Jesus the apocalypse Prophet but at the same time other people started writing books that have very similar views in in Broad Contours I mean like deal Allison's book on Jesus and Paula frederickson's book on Jesus and it's become people realize yeah this still is the dominant View thank you so much for your time and expertise audience thank you all for listening I hope you enjoyed the show if you did please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes remember also that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com misquoting Jesus will be back next week but what are we talking about next time well we're moving on from Jesus and the crucifixion of Jesus to the death of his Apostles uh how did they die do we do we know what happened to them the reason this is important to me is because all the time I have people tell me that the Apostles of Jesus believed he got raised from the dead and they were martyred for believing it well they wouldn't have died for a lie so that shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead and my question to them is always how do you know that how they died exactly how do you know what happened to the apostles and I always get hit with a black stare so we're going to talk about how did the apostles dine do we know and how would we know but thank you so much for that uh audience thank you again for listening I hope you can join us next week thank you everybody and goodbye this has been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart um we'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on barterman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining us

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 105,177

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Id: h6-8AoJQ_p4

Length: 44min 3sec (2643 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023