Who Chose the Books of the New Testament?

[Music] welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman 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 today on misquoting Jesus with Bart Airman I'm going to be talking to Bart about exactly how the New Testament got the form we see it in today what's called the Canon who decided it when was it set and what exactly was left out during the conversation I suspect we'll also touch on the non-canonical Christian writings we won't dwell on them this week but I promise there will be episodes devoted to them in the future so do not worry about that we'll get back to it um but before we start but how are you doing how's your week going my work's going great I'm at my uh we we have a mountain house uh in the western part of North Carolina and uh it is cold and sunny and Brilliant and uh right now it's just me and my dog and uh so uh I I did want to ask you something uh about your personal life just now per se but uh you know you said you do this as serology stuff and could you just could you could you just say like Assyria what uh just like give me some give me some up here yeah yeah so it's um like the the cultures and language of um ancient Mesopotamia which is um Iraq and modern Syria uh what was like Babylonia if you're familiar with the Old Testament the nearest syrians are involved in the whole Mesopotamian um like culture Spectrum um so a series kind of a broad term for anything yeah including Babylon and yeah it's um that's exactly how the field got his name is a little bit um convoluted but when the languages in one Keen air form which is the writing system it's these little tiny wedges when that was first kind of rediscovered by Western scholarship um the language was thought to be Assyrian and there is a dialect called Assyrian but the language the languages are Acadian and Sumerian so that's where the Assyrian connection comes from um it confuses people because you say Assyria and they they think maybe you're mispronouncing Syrian yes um yeah like no we're kind of but no not really yeah right right okay no I didn't know that about that whole whole okay great okay good I'm glad you're hosting this because I'm learning things already oh but I'm always happy to help so we should we should talk before we get into the weeds really why is the New Testament Canon an important topic of conversation you know it's it's really interesting to me just as uh as somebody who's been in this field for a long time I probably I guess I've been studying the Bible for seriously for about 50 years now and it's really interesting to me that just over the last 20 years or so this has become a topic maybe 30 20 25 years this has become a topic of General conversation among people um when I started out teaching in the mid 80s nobody like lay folk had no questions about the Canon or or like how we got it or any and these days it's like the the one thing people want to ask me about and I think it's because starting with uh Elaine pagels who's uh uh was a professor at Princeton University she wrote a book called the Gnostic Gospels back in the late 1970s and people started realizing we there are other books out there that were written by Christians and they we got these other gospels and then they were like whoa we've got acts we've got letters we've got apocalypses and people started realizing got this other stuff out there and then the natural question was well why do we have these 27 then why not why don't we have the gospel of Peter you know we've got the gospel of James why isn't that in there you know we've got Letters by Paul that are we've got a apocalypse appear who who decided that and and you know how do we know they're right and so that's so nowadays that is really it really is one of the most common questions uh that I get uh which makes it for me it's always been it's always been an interest in me I was interested in this 50 years ago but then all of a sudden like you know hey the world's caught up with me you're on the edge of a cutting Trend there yeah people usually don't say that about me it's not really the thing you associate with Academia in general is it no so um the very very basic level then when we talk about a Canon what exactly are we talking about well the word Canon itself uh means uh it it's a word it's a Greek word Canon and it means a straight edge or a straight edge can be used to uh for you know like if you're if you're into construction you need to you need to cut your board straight and so you the Canon is what gives you the straight line uh for things but it also can be used as a ruler so it can give you uh how you know how long it needs to be and so a Canon when it applies to a group of books is the the kind of the the limit for uh the book and so it's it's the circumscribed extent of the books that are in that collection and uh when it gets used in religious context it also means it's it's the right these are the books that tow the right line and so uh so the Canon of the New Testament or the books that the um that the church fathers decided were the authoritative scriptures the ones that were inspired by God it's these books and no other and so they follow the the Canon and and you the word gets applied broadly of course you have a can of the Old Testament and you've got a Canon of Shakespeare and you've got a Canon of English literature and so so it's a widely used word but it basically just means a collection but it comes from this idea of there being a straight a straight line excellent thank you so who worked out what should be in the New Testament Canon that seems like a very important thing yeah so that's a big it's a very big question my my first my first PhD seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary was with a uh my my mentor Bruce Metzger who is an expert on the Canon and my first PhD seminar we spent the semester just discussing this question uh you know where the can and he wrote the authoritative uh book on it and so it's it's a big question you know what uh you know how did it happen so I'll give you the very short story because we'll talk about more of this throughout our discussion today and and I I think we're probably going to have a lot of episodes dealing with various aspects of this because there's a lot into it and and a lot of stuff that's really interesting um but the basic idea is that the early Christians started out with a Canon of scripture because Jesus was a Jew his followers were Jews and they already had their Bible now the Hebrew Bible that the Christians would call the Old Testament was not set in stone yet but just about every Jew throughout the world at the time believed that the first five books of what we call the Old Testament the the pentateuch Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy those five books were called the Torah the law and everybody agreed those were inspired by God and were authoritative and most Jews agreed also that there were lots of other books that were Authority many of the the prophets for example that you get in the Hebrew Bible and and the Book of Psalms for example and so so they had they had a group of books that they thought were authoritative uh what ends up happening is that after Jesus death his followers of course have modified their beliefs their they were Jews and they continued to be Jews but they now they believed in the Jewish Messiah but there were different different people who were Jesus followers who had different views of his significance and the significance of his death and how one attained salvation and what how do you relate to the the Jewish law now and and how do you behave as Believers of Jesus as opposed to other people and so people had different opinions and people people were writing things and people started writing accounts of Jesus life uh that different from each other and people started writing letters explaining how you ought to behave and what you ought to believe and sometimes they were different from each other and it got to a point where church leaders had to say well which lunch of these are we going to accept you know which which are authoritative and so the way it comes about is the church leaders had to make decisions and there were long debates about it that lasted for a very long time because different leaders had different opinions because different leaders had different theologies and different beliefs and different practices and different rituals but eventually over a course of centuries as it turns out over a course of centuries these decisions were made and it's really not it's about three or four hundred years before pretty much everybody's on the same page a long and involved process wasn't a everyone just had a meeting one Friday afternoon and decided so we like these ones and we don't really like these ones so that's these are the 27 we're going to keep yeah no that's a surprising thing for my students here at Chapel Hill is you know most of them just kind of think I think like most people do that the Bible descended from Heaven these 27 books descended from Heaven a few weeks after Jesus died no no it didn't work like that and so there were long protracted debates and the other thing that we'll we might be getting into more but uh if not now later is there never was a church Council that decided this uh there never was an official vote uh which until way way later but I think most people most people today at least in in our generation uh adults in our generation get a lot of their understanding of uh Christian history from that uh inimitable uh Authority Dan Brown in his book The Da Vinci Code I tell my students look if you want to know about the history of the Middle Ages don't do it by watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail do you want to get your history and if you want to get your history of early Christianity don't read The Da Vinci I mean read The DaVinci Code we don't do it for your history because in in the Dominico Dan Brown says well now it seems like everybody thinks that at the Council of nicaea they decided which books would be in the New Testament the councilman I see was in the year 325 and that's absolutely false that's not true we know what happened in the Council of nice here we have records from what happened in the council nicaea they didn't even talk about which book should be in the news it wasn't an issue this is not the issue at the Council of nicaea and so that's completely wrong and so uh and there were later councils that stated their opinions about it but they were never like worldwide ecumenical big councils that were kind of official the official word until the 16th century the Council of Trent in the middle of the 16th centuries the first big Council that actually made a decision and so by then of course it was a it was done deal for the New Testament but what was lived out then and what happens to the texts that were left out right so that's that's the interesting thing and because um for throughout history Scholars have known that there were other books available but for the most parts we didn't have the books we we had some of them we have a we have a gospel for example that claims to be written by Jesus brother James that is about his ER Jesus uh actually it's mainly about the life of Jesus uh mother Mary in order to explain why she was chosen to be the one who would bear the Son of God and James Jesus brother writes this account of Mary's birth and her upbringing in her life and then the birth of Jesus this is a it was a popular gospel throughout the Middle Ages very very popular in some ways is more popular than uh the New Testament gospels but we know that because the artwork if you look at Medieval artwork scenes from this Proto Gospel of James as it's called or everywhere in in medieval art but so we knew we knew of some books but most most of the book we know about now are that we actually have have been fairly recent discoveries including for example a gospel Peter that was discovered in the 1880s which is an amazing amazing account of Jesus uh trial death and Resurrection because in this account there's actually a narrative of Jesus coming out of the tomb which you don't get in the New Testament very very interesting and we have a gospel allegedly by Thomas who is thought to be Jesus twin brother not not just a brother but his twin brother uh Judas Judas didymus Judas Thomas is his name and uh and it's a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus half of which we don't have in the New Testament the other half are kind of like the news and so we have these books right now and uh and we have letters uh allegedly written by Paul week in the New Testament we have first and second Corinthians outside the New Testament we have third Corinthians and in one part of the church it's still accepted as part of the Canon uh and so uh not in protestantism or Catholicism uh you know and we have we have an Apocalypse of Peter and we have an apocalypse so Paul is so yeah there are lots of other books out there and this is what these are called the new the Christian Apocrypha and they are very very interesting in their own right but they're interesting historically in part because some of them almost made it in that is interesting um and this you kind of briefly touched on this do different denominations have different canons then when it comes to the New Testament um the um the uh major uh denominations have the same New Testament uh and so the Catholic Church the uh all the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Protestant churches uh have um have the same the same Canon but there are uh the ethiopic church traditionally has had a different Canon for example in the Armenian Church and so the smaller smaller denominations within Christendom have some additional books that we don't and um which replicates what was happening in early Christianity up through the 4th Century uh we have fourth Century Greek manuscripts of the New Testament so a couple of our very best manuscripts of the New Testament include other books uh for example the the very famous codex called Bible manuscript made in some ways the most important one we have is called codex sinaiiticus uh it was it's called that because it was it was found at uh on Mount Sinai at St Catharines Monastery in Mount Sinai and it's a very old fourth entry manuscript and included in its uh in its collection of New Testament is the uh the letter of first CL I'm sorry I'm sorry the the letter of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermes which you know nobody but scholar Scholars know about it but most people don't know but it it almost made it in the New Testament the shepherd affirmness it's an apocalypse why why were things left out then the theological reasons people didn't think they were reliable well so there were debates uh up and down the line that started uh they started in the second century we have records of debates uh is this book inspired scripture or not is this one in is this one out so you start getting these in the second century they become more pronounced in the third century and then really become more heated in the fourth century and the um when you read these discussions um discussions by say people like uh the SEC late second century Church Father irenaeus or the third Century origin or the fourth Century father of church history as he's called eusebius he wrote a 10 volume history of the church that we still have that traced the history of Christianity from the days of Jesus up to his own time uh he they discuss you know which books ought to be in and they never say okay these are our criteria and then lay out there and then they don't do it like that but when they discuss the books it's pretty clear what their criteria are they the the only books they're going to to allow in the New Testament are books that are either are written by or by an apostle or by somebody who's a close companion of the of an apostle and so uh Peter and Paul are in but if um if somebody else writes a really good book like Justin Justin Martyr Roman in the middle of the uh seconds he writes a really good book yeah well it's not going to be in there because it's not written by an apostle so it's got to be written by an apostle it also has to be widely used in the church they get very concerned that we're not going to pick a local favorite here if it's not widely used if it's not widely disseminated that probably shows that God didn't want it for the general church and so it's got to be widely deceptive it's got to be Apostolic it's got to be it's a widely disseminated the term for that usually is Catholic that doesn't mean like Roman Catholic the word Catholic means Universal uh and so it means it's being used universally throughout the church so it's got to be Apostolic it's got to be Catholic like and it has to be orthodox the word Orthodoxy is a word we'll be using a lot in this in this podcast it comes from two Greek words which mean correct Doctrine or right right opinion or correct Doctrine or true teaching something like that and so if a if a book taught things that were deemed heretical deemed false teachings they weren't letting that one in there's no way that one was inspired by God and so it ends up being kind of a circular process uh in one way it's circulars because the way they decided if a book was Apostolic was if it was orthodox the way they decided it was Orthodox was that if it agreed with the dominant theological view in other words their point of view so if if a book subscribe to a theology that was contrary to the point of the theological perspective that that the church fathers had then it could not have been written by an apostle and so you see it's kind of a circular reasoning it's not that it's written by Apostle therefore this theology is correct it's this theology is incorrect therefore could not have been written by an apostle and so that's why books like uh the gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas and these other books a lot of these other books got excluded for that reason that's interesting thank you um so you've explained that the formation of the Canon took a while because people were kind of discussing what should and shouldn't be in has it then since it was formed has it changed over time at all uh yeah so that's that's a really good question and it um so um these debates went on as I said starting the second century by the end of the second century most of the people who were um in what I call the proto-orthodox tradition I guess I better explain that term so the Orthodox tradition is the the people have the right opinion and and the right belief and of course every the problem is everybody thinks that they are Orthodox right everybody thinks they got the right opinion if you don't believe me ask my neighbor he thinks he's got the right opinion and so everybody by definition thinks they're Orthodox but the the term Orthodox comes to be used for the the group that supported the point of view that became dominant within Christianity and so for example as found in the Nicene Creed of the fourth Century these are people who agree with these basic assertions of the Christian faith opposed to the Heretics who think something else the this position did not become the dominant position within Christianity until about the late third or early 4th century and so that's when we can start saying that this is the view that's Orthodox it's the view that that most most people in the tradition agree with even with a lot of people who disagree so when I call up somebody proto-orthodox I mean somebody who holds these views before it becomes the dominant position okay so by the end of the second century proto-orthodox Christians uh pretty much agreed on the four gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John um there was some disagreement about other books which letters of Paul um including whether Paul should be in at all uh which letters of Peter which letters is John etc etc uh the first time anyone came up with our 27 books you know the first time anybody said okay these are the 27 was a uh was a bishop of a very powerful Bishop of Alexandria Egypt very influential named athanasius athanasius um uh Alexandria was a large church it was an influential church and athanasius was its bishop and every year he'd send out a letter to the various churches in his jurisdiction not just within Alexandria but throughout Egypt and this was a letter of advice and it was telling them all sorts of advice is an annual letter in his 39th letter the 39th Festival letter it's called which was written in the year 367. so 367 CE that's the he he listed what he said these are the scriptures these are the ones you can read in church and they are 20 our 27 books so two things about that one is that's 300 years after these books started being written and so there were debates until then but the second thing is it didn't and that didn't end the debate there continued to be debates on into the fourth fifth centuries uh to some extent um what ended up happening is as I said there was never a vote but basically because there was a kind of an informal agreement and because scribes who were copying books only copied the ones that everybody pretty much agreed on it it wasn't every first set in stone but it basically was and it after that it really didn't change throughout throughout the Middle Ages like there weren't you know within within the Catholic church or within the Orthodox Church there were never proposals for other books and and there there are not serious proposals today even though you get sometimes you get Scholars you wish this book or that book was in yeah it ain't going to happen and so it's it's uh yeah it's been pretty well set in stone even though there was never a vote thank you could you maybe give us an example of one of the debates that people went through during the the formation of the Canon yeah well um so one of my one of my favorite non-canonical gospels is the uh is the gospel Peter um this was discovered in the 1880s uh in uh in Egypt and um it was discovered in a in a small collection of books that was uh in in a tomb some French archaeologists were digging up uh it's a cemetery an ancient Cemetery in a place called akmem Egypt uh and they uncovered they found this book as a 66-page book and had it had three main kind of writings and associology including a section of what we've come to call the gospel Peter it actually it's a it's an interesting book for lots of reasons one is that um it actually claims to be written by Peter and the reason that's interesting is because Matthew Mark Luke and John do not claim to be written by people named Matthew Mark Luke and John this book actually claims to be written by Peter and so whoever's writing and saying I'm Peter yeah you're not it was written later but um it's one of the reasons is very interesting is I said that it has an account of Jesus coming out of his tomb and uh um it it's a very interesting account because when it comes out of his tomb they've posted a guard at his tomb the Romans have to make sure that nobody will steal the body and uh two Divine beings Angelic beings descent the guard is watching and this these two Divine beings descend from heaven and they're seeing this happen the stone starts rolling away from the tube and they're just Frozen in Terror then what is this and then the the two these two angelic beings go into the tomb and as they're looking three people come out of the Tomb two of them are as tall as a mountain and the third one that they're supporting between them is taller than a mountain and then behind them walks out the cross and a voice comes from the voice comes from heaven and says have you preached to those who are asleep in other words has the gospel message been taken to the realm of the dead and the cross replies yes whoa that would be great to have in the New Testament and you think well that couldn't be in because it's too crazy right no actually the reason it didn't get in isn't because it was thought to be too crazy um the re because you know there are congratulations happen the weird things that happened in the New Testament too they just don't seem crazy because you know you're used to reading them um the reason it didn't get in is because there was a there was an early Church Father who read this who actually approved of it a proto-orthodox church father named uh serapian who approved of it and and but then he found out um then he found he he told his churches that it's okay yeah it's okay to use this around around the year 200. but then somebody told him actually who had someone else would actually read it said you know it has a heretical view of Jesus uh this gospel actually has been used by people who claim that Jesus was so human So So Divine that it wasn't really a human being and so it's got a false teaching about Christ and so then he read it and said oh right he said well most of it's fine he said but there are a couple of additions here that seem a little like it could be heretical and that may have been one of the additions he saw that we don't have the whole thing now we only have this little fragment so um so that was a debate over christology a debate over whether Christ was fully human or not and it was deemed that this gospel could be used by people who said he's not fully human and so they said so that it can't be written by Peter then and if it can't be written by Peter it's because it doesn't belong yeah interesting thank you um when we look at the kind of the trajectory of Christianity as a religion do you think that the creation of a Canon a specific Canon rather than keeping the more like the Myriad of Christian texts available had an impact on how the religion developed yes I do I think it made a huge impact I think um for for two reasons um one thing is um by this well so they did they they decide they decide what to uh include and uh deciding what to include has serious ramifications um for example if you have only one gospel instead of four then you get they then you get one one perspective on Jesus and most people who read the gospels carefully if you read Matthew carefully and then read you know John carefully you realize you know they're telling very different stories and they've got very different perspective and they're emphasizing very different things and so you could pick one of those as the authoritative account and there were there were people who thought that's what you should do but by including four you get four different perspectives and these four different perspectives um it it makes it it makes it a more interesting uh phenomenon because then they're all authoritative they're all true and yet they're different and so how do you deal with that um and the way you deal with it is that you read them against one another so that the rough edges of each one is taken off so that if one is so that so that you've got to reconcile them if they're all authoritative and so if if uh if Mark for example has a very strong emphasis on Jesus being uh very very human but he never has Jesus Calling himself God and if you've got the Gospel of John where Jesus goes around calling himself a Divine being who is on the who's equal with God and on the same level of God but you know he he doesn't in places he doesn't look very human I mean so you got both of those things together well how do you deal with that well do you deal with it by putting them by Smashing them together so you get both that he's fully human like in Mark and he's fully Divine like in John and so then when you read mark you read Mark in light of John and so people today who don't pay close attention to it when they read Mark they just simply assume that Mark's Jesus is just like John's Jesus and so it has a huge effect because it means that you're you're taking different points of view and figuring out how they can all be the same so and so when today this is the common way of reading uh of reading the Bible and it has been for years for centuries which is that you assume look it's it's one book right it's between two covers and so since it's between two covers it's all the same book I mean when you read a book you know if you read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens you don't assume that chapter one is written by a different guy from chapter two it might say something the opposite but when you take a collection of writings by different authors written at different times with different perspectives different theologies different uh and you put them in one volume they might be different from each other but you don't notice it because you just assume it's all one book so one thing it does is it it flattens out the differences and in what what kind of enriches the theology because it allows you to have numerous theological views that are all right at the same time but the other thing it does by having a Canon is is it excludes other views it excludes a lot of views and so um you don't have gospels in you don't have books in there written by people who are uh who uh hate Paul for example there were Christians who hate Paul and we have writings by um by people who hated Paul we have writings claiming to be by Peter that say that Paul is the greatest enemy of the church uh allegedly by people that's not going to get in there but the letters by Peter that do affirm Paul such as first and second Peter those do get in and so you're excluding some things and by including lots of things you're you're kind of enriching the Theology and making all these books read against each other thank you did um do we have evidence that the church fathers while all of the books in the gospel are in the gospel in the New Testament are taken as authoritative do we have evidence that early Christians or the church fathers viewed one or more books as maybe more authoritative than others uh yeah absolutely we absolutely do and it's clear in a lot of different ways one way is to see which ones they quote the most um it's interesting that among the gospels Mark is quoted by far the least of all the Gospels and there might be various reasons for that but the main reason is probably that the vast majority of Mark is replicated in both Matthew and Luke Matthew has over 90 percent of Mark some of it word for word the same and so I think a lot of and it's a lot longer it includes a lot more of Jesus teachings like The Sermon on the Mount and so I think a lot of people thought well I've got Matthew why do I bother quoting Mark and so so there's that so it's not necessarily as more authoritative but is is more widely widely read um there are some books that made it into the New Testament that were not seen as authoritative At All by many many people um a book like second Peter for example there were lots of debates about whether II Peter should be included in the New Testament by Church fathers into the fourth Century um there is a very famous teacher in Alexandria Egypt at the time of athanasius named uh didymus he he was blind from being young he's so people call him the didymus the blind I've had a personal affection for didymus the blind for a long time because I wrote my dissertation on him but uh but didymus um outright said that second Peter was a forgery he says it's it's forged it does not belong in the New Testament and so it was not quoted as an authoritative tech for a long time until it finally got in um and that's true of a lot of a lot of the shorter books like second and third John and uh James and Jude Revelation was really tricky a lot of people didn't like Revelation until the 4th Century people were saying yeah no this is not part of scripture uh and so but there are other books that were and um Paul becomes a very important figure and Matthew and John become the most important gospels thank you I just want to we'll have um episodes in the future for those listening specifically on the individual gospels and their differences and and what they're trying to express um why if Mark is replicated almost in its entirety in Matthew why was Mark included then in the Canon yeah it's a good question and it's it's one that's not easy to answer as it turns out but the you know because we don't have any information on it other than it was always accepted and I think it's always accepted because it was our first gospel Mark was written before Matthew and Luke uh and and both and all three were written before John uh Mark um was um uh was used as a source for Matthew and Luke which means Mark was in wide circulation Matthew and Luke probably didn't they didn't know each other personally uh they lived in different cities in different times and they both had Mark which shows that you know just 10 years later it's widely circulated so it's one of these books that just gets read a lot because it's in wide circulation uh much more widely in the first century than either Matthew or Luke because he was around for for 10 or 15 years longer uh and so it was just kind of always there and there was nothing wrong with it I mean you know okay Matthew Luke replicate most of it uh there were some things that people had problems with Mark um including fact I'm sure we'll get into some episodes that Mark at the end of March Jesus gets raised from the dead but nobody sees him he doesn't show up to anybody and and in fact the disciples never hear that he never learned that he got raised from the dead and mark whoa and so so there were problems with it but but but still they thought it was um they thought that it was uh you know a reliable gospel for as much as it gave and so they included it interesting and that raises one more question for me before we um we draw the discussion to a close were the church fathers and the people putting these 27 books together were they aware of the relative historicity of each of the SE did that have an impact on what was included yeah this is a great question and a an unusually interesting one I think and part of what we have to it's hard for us to think like this but we we ourselves in you know in modern times think a lot about what historically happened and we and the disciplines of History developed after the uh Enlightenment but there were historians of course in the ancient world um uh but they they didn't have they didn't have our abilities to decide what actually happened because they just didn't have they didn't have they didn't have libraries for the most for most people they didn't have they certainly didn't have data retrieval systems and things that we we have and and so but people in the ancient world were concerned about what happened when you have a historical text most people were uh broadly they didn't have the tools that we have to make those decisions though the church fathers were concerned to have gospels that recounted what Jesus really said and did and they were also concerned that the book of Acts which is not about the life of Jesus but is about the life of the early church accurately of course ordered what actually did happen and so they didn't approach it the way modern historians do and so their conclusions were often different but this was something that they were concerned about and it but the way they decided this thing when it came to things like the historical Jesus and what happened in the life of the Apostles after Jesus the way they decided this was less by rigorous historical examination of the sources the way we would do it today and more Again by this thing about whether these views were widely accepted and were Orthodox and so you have gospels for example of Jesus as a um as a young boy who is a uh is a five-year-old boy who makes uh Clays makes mud sparrows uh on a Sabbath and gets in trouble for it because he's breaking the Sabbath by making things and the way he solves the problem when it gets upgraded by his father for breaking the Sabbath is he speaks to The Sparrows and tells them to come alive and they come back they come to life and they fly off chirping so like well that's a good one and you know but I think for all I think a lot of people look at that and said yeah that's a great story but I don't think that happens and so you know probably stuff like that you know they were concerned to that extent uh they want they did want things that were historical but they didn't have the modern historical methodologies or abilities to to make the kinds of distinctions that we make today excellent thank you and I think that's that's an excellent place to end today's discussion um we're going to take a brief break but we will be right back with Bots weekly update [Music] if you're interested in the gospels of the New Testament the Book of Genesis the resurrection of Jesus the historicity of The Exodus or anything else connected with the Bible you should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more if you'd like to learn about the courses check them out at barterman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code MJ podcast [Music] foreign are you a curious person with a passion for learning but don't want to go back to school you need to take a look at wondriam the streaming service that provides classes on just about everything of Interest the Crusades Neuroscience Beethoven photography travel and lot sales all presented by true experts in accessible terms for a free trial go to barterman.com wondering if you decide to subscribe to wondrim this podcast will receive a referral fee but that'll have no effect on the cost of your subscription and you'll be supporting our show [Music] this is bot'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 so Bart what news do you have for us this week yeah well you know um I'm not sure I've got any news because I I I I lead the academic life I I've got to say that the thing I've really uh think about that I've been enjoying about being an academic I'm I'm on I'm on sabbatical this semester and uh most people think oh great you know you get six months off yeah what are you doing going to the beach yeah I ain't going to the beach but uh what I am doing uh is um I'm expanding the kinds of things that I can do academically because I have more time and I've started reading um my next book is going to deal with ancient Christian ethics I'm sure we'll talk about this to some length but but I've been reading uh Greek and Roman ethics especially uh Ethics in the first and second Centuries by Greek and Roman authors I'm a big fan of a an author named Epictetus he was a slave who became a stoic philosopher and his writings are fantastic and so I've been having the greatest time uh getting up in the morning and reading Epictetus and so but it's really it's the kind of thing people ought to read this I mean when I tell people like you really really yeah yeah I know really and they do they say wow that's pretty good oh yeah it is good it's very challenging I'll I'll talk about Epictetus sometime in the future that sounds wonderful we'll have to do an episode just on F generally and how Christian ethics relate to uh well you know I'm writing a book on this is what my next book is going to be on is how it how Christian ethics uh in some ways it's just like everybody else's ethics but in other ways they really change things and it's important to see how that happened well wonderful thank you for giving us a little teaser of what's to come now it's time for questions from listeners where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans if you'd like to submit a question for future segments please visit barterman.com askbars foreign ERS from questions from our listeners um based well based on dealing with the Canon um so it seems like much of the Christian Apocrypha so those are the books that did not make it into the Canon were written after the canonical gospels and Epistles I could see Christians using this observation to argue that the correct books became Orthodoxy are there non-canonical books that were written before canonical and to what extent do canonical books truly present the proto-orthodox viewpoint uh okay it's a great question and so um uh right we have as I said we have all these gospels and other books I um what I would say is that the four gospels we have are the earliest ones that survive uh there certainly were other gospels written before all of these that we don't have anymore that if they're discovered would be apocryphal gospels one reason we know that there were earlier gospels is because the author of Luke um we call him Luke begins his gospel by saying that he had many predecessors who wrote accounts of Jesus words and deeds and so there were gospels floating around that Luke had access to including for example the gospel that Scholars have called Q which was a source for uh Matthew and Luke and so we so there are certainly books floating around we also have some books that survive were probably written before our uh uh our books of our existing New Testament it's usually thought that second Peter was the last New Testament book written written probably around the year 120 or so um and uh uh there are there are Scholars now who think maybe the book of Acts was written that late as well I'm not I'm not quite sure if I agree with that but but anyway second Peters usually date around 120. we have a number of book Christian books that were written before that some of which people thought belonged in the Canon a book called first Clement um that is uh a letter written by the Church of Rome to the church in Corinth was written in the 90s um The Gospel of Thomas uh may have been written before II Peter the gospel Peter um possibly uh was written before um um uh II Peter and so there are these other books so these aren't necessarily all the earliest books the dedicate is another book it's written before uh the uh much of the new test so it's not that these are the oldest um being the oldest does not make them the most historically accurate uh the way to think about this is if um if somebody today writes an account of uh Thomas Jefferson that improves on a biography of Thomas Jefferson written in 1920 you wouldn't say that the 1921 is is more reliable because it was in 1920 you know it's it's earlier but you have to check to see if it's reliable and that's true of the New Testament books as well thank you so do you would you say then that um the canonical New Testament books accurately represents the proto-orthodox viewpoint um yeah it's a tricky question because proto-orthodoxy usually is defined by theological views that are supported in the New Testament but um but the thing is the the New Testament also was used by groups that were not proto-orthodox and so uh various groups of various groups that later came to be called Heretics uh were very fond of many of the books of the New Testament and claimed that these New Testament books taught their views and so I'm sure on the podcast we'll talk on a number of occasions about the gnostics and many Gnostic groups Love The Gospel of John for example or uh Gnostic groups love Paul uh or when they loved and so and very various heretical groups groups that came to be seen as heretical also use these books so I would not say that these New Testament books are strictly speaking proto-orthodox they were used by the proto-orthodox and the proto-orthodox were comfortable with them but so were other groups thank you um and our second question uh why did Martin Luther exclude the Apocrypha from the Protestant Canon Ah that's a good question um the Apocrypha that this uh that is relevant for this is not the New Testament Apocrypha the Christian Apocrypha but the What's called the Old Testament apocrypha and even that term is a little bit complicated uh the Old Testament Apocrypha are roughly speaking a group of books number them 12 or 15 depending on how you're counting um that are found in the Greek translation of the Old Testament but not are not part of the Hebrew Bible most Jews in the ancient world were not reading their Bible in Hebrew because most Jews didn't live in Israel and they lived somewhere else and if you're living in France and you're a Jew you're not reading in Hebrew you know or or in Asia Minor in Rome or whatever and so people Jews throughout the world were reading Greek and the Greek translation of the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible included these 12 or 15 additional books um and uh they were not accepted by Jews worldwide as authoritative they were not included in the Hebrew Bible and so uh but they were accepted by Christian groups because the earliest Christians also used the Greek Bible and these were parts of the Greek Greek Bible and so they were widely used and and were seen as having some kind of authoritative status throughout the history of Roman Catholicism when Martin Luther began the the Reformation in the early 16th century he decided that since uh the he decided the Hebrew Bible alone would be those would be the books the books in the Hebrew Bible it's not clear if that's because he thought these were the ones it's not clear what his actual motivation is but it is commonly noted that some of these apocryph some of these books in the their deuterocanonical or apocryphal can be used to support certain Roman Catholic uh doctrines that Martin Luther opposed including the doctrine of purgatory uh Purgatory is a Roman Catholic Doctrine Martin Luther and the Protestants rejected purgatory and it it could be seen as being taught in some of these books and so so it may be may have been for theological reasons or it may have been for historical reasons that he thought the Hebrew Bible books were or could be both I see thank you fascinating as always thank you to everyone who sent in your questions if you have questions that you would like to ask Bart in upcoming episodes please submit them at www.barterman.com forward slash ask bot um but before we end for the week would you mind just summarizing what we've talked about today well I I would say this is one of the most uh interesting topics and important topics for people who are not Scholars uh because uh they wonder you know why do we have our new testament why these 27 books and the things to remember are that these 27 books did not start out as the Bible uh when who when Paul wrote his letter to the uh to Philemon he didn't think well this will be part of the Bible uh he he they were they were writing books for their reasons and over time Christians wanted to have books that were authoritative to guide their Christian beliefs in addition to their Hebrew the Christian old testament which they already had and they had to decide which book were authoritative and so they debated this because there were different books with different points of view just as there were different groups that had different canons of scripture eventually as proto-orthodoxy became Orthodoxy and became the dominant view of Christianity Orthodox people agreed on the on the four gospels the letters of Paul Etc and uh this became the Canon it was never official decided at a church Council never decided by a vote it simply became an informal agreement that just about everybody subscribed to and it's the Canon then that's come down to us today wonderful thank you um that was as always very very interesting um thank you audience for joining us I hope you learned something new I know I did I always do um please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes and if you want to learn even more about the New Testament and early Christianity you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses at www.barterman.com this quoting Jesus will be back next week but what is our next discussion topic it's actually related to what we did uh this week we were talking about the Apocrypha and I mentioned a gospel allegedly written that somebody claimed to be Peter wrote and other books of people claimed by peer next week we're going to talk about that phenomenon um you might call it uh pseudopigrapha which is a fancy word for what we say today as forgery if somebody claims to be a person they're not and they write and they want to convince people they are that person uh how often does that happen in early Christianity d uh is it a common practice throughout the ancient world generally was it an approved practice and is it you know is it acceptable as people tend to think and is it appropriate to call it forgery uh or is that a loaded term so those are the kinds of things we'll talk about next time wonderful thank you but thank you everyone else 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 bar turman'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: 121,649

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Id: 9Rm1VJk1Qfk

Length: 52min 0sec (3120 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022