Did Jesus Even Exist?

Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrmann, the only show where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the emergence of Christianity. I'm your host Megan Lewis, let's get started Hello everyone and welcome back to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrmann. Today we are going to talk about Jesus. Big surprise, given the name of the podcast, was he a real person? How do we know the answer to that? question and to what extent can historians trust the sources they have to trust when looking at this, but before we get down to it, but hello, how are you?

Yeah, I'm doing it, I'm doing it better now, um, you know, UNC, uh, with with Greed, they started instituting something they call wellness days where, every once in a while in the semester, like three times in the semester. , they will have a day where they just stop attending classes, so yesterday we had a wellness day and oh my gosh. God is that cool, so I teach. I usually teach a couple of classes on Thursdays and it was off and man, it makes a big difference and for the students as well they're a little exhausted and uh it's um, yeah, so, so.

Yes, it's a good thing, so I'm flying high today. I feel like this point in the semester is always so hard because you're so close to the finish line and you've been going for so long, but you still have to do the last thing, yeah, I know, I mean, it's just weird, it's a weird cycle of teaching because it's not normal like most people's job, it's not a nine to five thing and it's not, you know, it's just that it's a completely different sequence and to outsiders it seems a little comfortable and I get it, but oh man, it's not and uh, uh, anyway, yeah, uh, yeah, how are things on your end?

Uh, okay, actually, I've spent the last week kind of panicking because we're going to take all the kids home to see my family for the first time since the pandemic started, which is very exciting, but Of course, because we haven't been anywhere. I haven't kept up to date on the status of our passports for several years, which means everyone needs a new one and as I'm a British citizen I have to FedEx my old passport to the UK. Yes, as part of the application process, so it was a little more stressful than I would have liked, but everything is lined up for that and we should do it once, so how many of you get on the plane?

It's me and the five kids. I hope you have some coloring books and stuff like that. Yeah, well, luckily our oldest daughter is turning 16 at the end of this month, so I have him as a sort of surrogate adult to help at least keep everyone in one place, which is always tricky. you got four that can just wander around on a whim you know they could charter a plane because of me yeah yeah okay good luck with that but it'll be great yeah thank you yeah it'll be awesome but definitely uh I need some luck, um, we should start talking about Jesus, and before we begin I want to give a quick warning at the beginning to say that we are not talking about mythicism, which is the idea that Jesus is a mythical being. a mythical figure who was created without any historical relationship to a historical fact, um, which is a big enough topic to need its own episode and I'm not

even

sure my definition was accurate.

Today, what we are focusing on is what Sources we have for Jesus as a historical figure and whether we can trust them when we begin to reconstruct this part of History. Obviously this is a pretty important question, but why do you think it's worth discussing? You know, um, you're right, no. I don't want to talk about Methodists today except to say that you know there are people who say they didn't

even

exist

and that's what mythicism is, you defined it correctly, it's the idea that Jesus That itself is a myth and that is not a topic that is seriously debated among experts in the field, but who are the New Testament scholars?

But anyway, they're very concerned about what kind of evidence we have for Jesus, not just the

exist

ence of him, that guy. Many of you know this because the evidence of what he said and did, of course, is evidence of his existence, but the fact that we have sources that know that all the sources agree that they existed, but that still doesn't help you much to know who it is. was and what he taught and what he did and what happened to him and that's why it's very important for people to understand what kind of sources of information we have for all of that and that's a topic that academics really have I struggled with uh for a long time, so the Academic consensus is that yes, Jesus was a historical figure, so when we try to determine if a person really existed and we have to rely on historical data, but what data do we have from the ancient world regarding Jesus, well, we have a lot more. which, you know, 99.99 of the rest of the population, because you know, and the reality is that in the day of Jesus, you know, there are probably about 60 million people in the Roman Empire at that time and we have very, very little information about many of them.

I mean, for most of them we don't have any information. It's probably about four or five. Well, it's a little difficult to say how many Jews. who were in the Empire at the time, but it's usually set at around five or seven percent, so okay, so there were three or three to five million Jews in the world at that time in Jesus' day, so that Jesus would have been living in the first century of the common era. It was um and so they say the first 30 years and in those years we know that outside of the Bible we have very little information about any of them, but in the case of Jesus, you know we have, we have, we have records.

We don't have contemporary records, we don't have, in other words, the people who knew Jesus at that time didn't leave us any writings about him, but we still have sources of information far beyond what we have. For most people, how much of a problem is the fact that we have no contemporary records of Jesus? Obviously we would all prefer there to be some kind of census, perhaps having your name and place of birth and family ties. and all that kind of stuff, but we don't know, it's a problem determining who he was and, in fact, whether he actually existed, it's not so much a problem of whether he existed because you know, things that we'll get into once we get to it. let's know. to talk about those those mythical ones, but because we have so many records from so many independent sources, uh, that's pretty clear that he existed, I mean, and one of our sources is in the New Testament, the apostle Paul, who actually knew Jesus, brother, I mean, so you know that if Jesus didn't exist, you think his brother would know, but then Paul knows one.

Paul knows some of Jesus' disciples and he only mentioned some casually, he doesn't mention them to prove that there was a Jesus, he is just you. I know he is mentioning it and therefore he is not an eyewitness. Paul Paul didn't know Jesus during his lifetime, but he knew people who did know Jesus and he met with them, talked with them, spent time with them and that's what you know. That's one thing, but it's a big problem that we don't have contemporary records if we want to know exactly what he said and did. Our main sources of information are the New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are. written between 40 and 60 years after his death, um, and so, uh, they raise, they raise a lot of problems for academics, but one thing I want to emphasize from the beginning is that there are a lot of people who say that we just can't trust them at all because you know they are in the Bible and you have to get out of the Bible and for a historian that is nonsense.

Matthew, Mark and Luke did not know they were writing the Bible. They weren't writing scriptures, they were writing stories of Jesus that they had heard and read, uh and um, that had been in circulation for years, that's both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that there are all kinds of stories floating around out there. about Jesus everywhere, in many parts of the world, just third when these guys are traveling, which shows that there are independent lines of transmission that go out with these oral traditions and historians love to have independent lines of transmission. about someone because of their independent lines, they haven't built on each other, uh, and then you know you can, that helps you get information, so you can't just dismiss the gospels as historical sources because In the Bible you have to treat them as sources historical sources written by people who did not imagine they were writing the Scriptures, they were simply writing their stories and therefore are as valuable as historical sources as any other historical sources, so when we look at the gospels, to what extent can we trust them as historical sources?

There are contradictions and obviously very legendary mythical elements. They think about the miracles that are reported. Matthew and Luke give two contradictory reports about the birth of Jesus, so how can we trust them? When faced with evidence like that, how do we decide which is closest to historical fact? What is, perhaps, a legend that formed around Jesus after his death? Yes, basically since the Enlightenment, scholars have realized that the gospels are not objective biographical accounts. of what Jesus actually said and did, for some of the reasons you mention when you compare the gospels with each other, there are discrepancies and contradictions, many of them in minor details, many, many minor details that are just stark. contradictions and uh, but in other places that are really important, important events about the life of Jesus that are reported very differently in ways that can't be reconciled if you look at them closely enough, most people don't look at them. up close, of course, they are simply friendly. to read them quickly and say yes, that's saying basically the same thing and that's fine, but when you really look at the details they're quite different, these books are written 34 well, they're written 40 50 60 years later by people who didn't know Jesus, They did not live in Israel, they did not speak the language of Jesus, Aramaic, they spoke, they spoke Greek and they are basing their stories on stories from Oral Traditions about Jesus that have been circulating for many years and as you know, the stories change when they are told and become to be told and retold and retold so those are all the disadvantages of the gospels and your question is then well, what do you do about it?

I mean, how do you do it? Is there anything reliable there and how do you know? And that, of course, is the big problem that scholars have struggled with for many years, so it's one of the things that historians look for when they try to understand in The historical event are multiple sources, as you said transmission streams. independent. You've said that we have these independent currents for the existence of Jesus and I wanted to ask about the gospels specifically since Matthew and Luke are written using the gospel of Mark as a basis. Do we count them as three distinct sources or are they more appropriately considered as one Witness?

That's a great question and the answer is yes and yes, so the deal is that Matthew Mark and Luke are very similar to each other just like you. Point out that scholars have long called them synoptic gospels, synoptic means to be seen together, and because they tell many of the same stories as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the stories are usually in the same sequence first, this happened in this and this and This also has many changes, but the basic skeleton is very similar and sometimes they say them in the same words, word for word, the same thing.

You will have an account of Jesus doing something and you will have a sentence, it is the same sentence in all three now, my students sometimes have a hard time believing me when I tell them that if you have two sources that report something and they are the same word for word, then someone is copying someone they don't know. They don't believe me on that, so I do this little exercise when I teach this in my class. I'm teaching a New Testament class and I'm trying to explain why the synoptic gospels have these similarities and I'm like, yeah.

Someone has to be copying someone and they don't believe me, so what I do is I go to class one day when we're going to talk about this and I come in and I'm a little late to make sure everyone is there and I start making noise in front of class, I take something out of my bag and then I turn off the lights and turn them back on and fiddle with the computer, then I put the books back in my bag, take out my coat and put it on. back I like to do things and they look at me saying what's going on and after about three minutes of doing this I say, okay, I want you to take out a piece of paper and write down everything that you just saw me do um and uh, so, they write your descriptions, okay, like 300 people in this class, 350 people in this class, and I do this and then I say, okay, I want to take, I want to take four volunteers here andI just pick up four at random. articles and I start reading them.

I said let's do a synoptic comparison, let's see how many of these have the same sentence word for word and all of you, the other 350, um, see if I have any of the sentences that exactly like any of these and I check and do a comparison and they are all different like you know they often mention similar things about taking something out of a bag or turning off the lights but they have never done it. same phrase and uh, and you know, I've done this for over 30 years. I've never had it where someone does it the same way so when I'm done I say, okay, what would you say if I took it back? two of these things and they had a whole paragraph that was word for word the same and they were all saying oh someone cheated.

I said yes, yes, someone had a copy house, would you get it? I mean, if you had it, I said, you know and you know if you get the same thing word for word, how else could you explain it and some guy on the back road invariably raises his hand and says it's a miracle, it's a miracle, actually it's not, don't you know, even if someone is copying something, doesn't it mean it's not the United States? It could still be a miracle. I am not excluding a miracle. I'm just saying someone copied someone, so with the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, you get it, okay, you get those similarities, so isn't it just one source?

That means that if everyone is copying the same thing, they are all from the same source and the answer is partly yes and partly no, partly yes because scholars since the 19th century have recognized that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their independent sources had access to a copy of Mark and constructed their gospels from the accounts found in Mark, but they also have other material not found in Mark and that means they did not get it from Mark if they did not give it . Note that they got it from an independent source, so some of the material in Matthew and Luke that is not in Mark is word for word the same, as if you knew the beatitude of the Lord's Prayer, very similar word for word in places, so the thought. the idea is that they got it from another source, either Lou copied Matthew or Matthew copied Luke, or they got it from another source and there is good reason to think that, in fact, they got it from another source that scholars have called Q , so you have Mark and you have q and these are independent sources, but Matthews has many stories found in Matthew and Luke has many stories found in Luke, so they pull them from Mark and Q, so the obtained from other sources.

So these are all independent streams of tradition, um Mark q and what they call Matthew sources and Luke sources and then you get the Gospel of John, which has a bunch of stories that are not found in any of them, those are also independent sources and then They are asked about other gospels outside the New Testament, like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter, do they get all their stuff from the New Testament gospels? No, there are many things and they are not in the New Testament gospel. so you get independent sources of information and what you look for in these independent sources of information is the same type of information, you don't look for agreements word for word because that would show borrowings, but if you have, suppose you have I have sources a lot of sources where Jesus speaks about the kingdom of God using a parable about seeds, that is obtained a lot in different sources, well, that is an independent certification that Jesus probably spoke about the coming kingdom of God using parables about seeds.

I'm not sure, you know it's not certain, but it makes it more likely the more independent sources you have that say something like that. I see, thank you very much. So you mentioned before that the gospels date from several decades after Jesus' death. They don't always agree with each other and since some cases are a bit unclear on the details, what can we say with any kind of certainty about the life of Jesus? And this is where the rubber really meets the road, because what? Scholars are the people who are really serious. Scholars on this, of which there are many who have spent their entire lives just on this question, um, smart, intelligent people who can not only read the Greek of the New Testament, but generally understand Aramaic. and they know Hebrew for the Old Testament and they know French and German and Italian scholarship and they spend their lives studying all this stuff like this is what they study and what scholars do is look at a variety of Basically they go line by line by through all our sources, the gospels in the New Testament, the gospels outside the New Testament, the things that Paul says, the things that they mention in other sources of various kinds and they evaluate all the possible data and They do this to try to establish the basic contours of Jesus' life, what he stood for, what he basically preached, but also down to the details.

Did he say this? Did he say that? Do this? He does that and applies a set of criteria that are comparable to what historians do for each field. I mean, anyone who's studying Thomas Jefferson does the same thing or Julius Caesar or Charlemagne. You take the sources and apply critical criteria to them, so one of the criteria is the one we mentioned a moment ago, independent certification, but another one that is important to understand the historical Jesus is when you realize that the people who They tell stories about Jesus they tell them precisely because they are trying to proclaim something important about him.

They tend to be Christians if they say something that is really the kind of thing they would want to preach anyway. You're not quite sure if that goes back to Jesus or not, because it may be someone who made this up to develop their own views, but if you have something really no one would make that up about Jesus because that doesn't make him look good, or that introduces a real problem for the early years. Christians Christians would not have wanted to invent that. If you have something like that, then you think, yeah, well, okay, that's probably historical, then because no one would have invented it, and so you have various kinds of criteria that you would use. for any historical figure you use for Jesus and when you do, then you know the question is what can you say about him.

There are some things I would say you know. 99 of all those who study this carefully would agree. I mean, basically, I mean Jesus was from Galilee, he was from the northern part of what we consider Israel, he came from a little place called Nazareth, he was lower class, he was a um, um, he became a teacher. He left his house to dedicate himself. in a traveling preaching ministry he had people following him around um who uh who thought he was a very important teacher possibly a prophet possibly a messiah the last week of his life he went to Jerusalem to proclaim his message and he went on the wrong side of the law and he offended um apparently offended the Jewish authorities there and was handed over to the Roman authorities who considered him a troublemaker and crucified him for claiming to be the future king of the Jews um so much, almost the entire world. would say and there are many more things that other people would say, but that basic structure that basic structure is one that almost everyone would agree to know that we have no contemporary references to Jesus, so even if most people were illiterate it would be which I think is a well agreed upon fact if there was an itinerant preacher wandering through the desert causing a disturbance.

Wouldn't we expect the Roman authorities to write about him or is it because our modern sensibilities about Jesus are such an important person? he must have been a very important person in ancient times, yes, I think he is a modern sensibility, I think he is a modern sensibility, uh, because it makes common sense to us that if someone is an important figure, he will appear in the newspapers . and newspapers will be around for centuries, so it all makes sense to us, it didn't work that way in the ancient world, um, we don't have, we don't have contemporary records about almost anyone in the ancient world, I mean you. just think, for example, who would have been the most important Jewish figure of the time, let's say the first century, the most important Jewish figure for us during the first century for historians is the Jewish author Josephus um Josephus is a historian who was very involved in the Jewish uprising from 66 to 70 that ended with the destruction of the temple.

He was a leader of the Jewish troops there. He ended up being captured by the Romans and was eventually appointed court historian. by the Roman emperor Vespasian and he wrote a lot of books that are our best sources of information about first century Judaism and for the history of Judaism in the period it was tremendous, he was a very involved, very important, upper class elite aristocrat, uh. in the history of Israel at that time, who our most important author is, is never mentioned in contemporary sources, so, is it like that, or you think of, you think of Pontius Pilate, then Pontius Pilate would have been the most powerful figure in, um, in Jesus. day um he um in Judea he was governor for 10 years between 26 and 36 CE now we have a couple of sources from his time, but they are not written sources per se, we have an inscription that was discovered that refers to Pontius Pilate uh and um that was discovered in the 1960s which is a stone slab in caesarean section and that's why it mentions his name and says he was a prefect and we have some coins but if you talk about other people writing about him there is no written record of him in the first century and he was the most important figure in Judea at the time, so the idea that there are no writings about Jesus should not be used as an argument about anything because who have we written about? records of Israel at that time, nobody basically, that complicates things, but the scholars, of course, are very aware of it and what the scholars do is take the records that we have that come later, which are similar to the records.

We have from other people, I mean Pontius Pilate, he ended his rule in the year 36 of the Common Era and we have some references to him later from a Jew who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, Philo, who writes almost at the same time than Paul. probably 20 years or so after Pilate's Rule and then Josephus, and again, it's decades after this very important person, so we go about understanding Pilate in the same way we try to understand Jesus. , we look at our sources, consider their biases see if they support each other independently and then make a judgment about what they probably said and did so far, as far as we can tell.

Thank you so much. I think it's a wonderful summary of how we use ancient sources to the best of our ability. although maybe not the sources we would like, if we could wave the magic wand and just have what we needed, you know, evangelicals get mad at me. Evangelical scholars get mad at me sometimes because they say, look, what would you want, you know? I have these four gospels and we have, you know what you want and I tell you this in all seriousness. Well, what we want is about a dozen sources written, you know, while Jesus was alive or immediately after, that are independent of each other.

I basically agree with what he said about what he did well that's completely unreasonable like you asked me what I wanted you didn't ask me what I like what was possible you asked me for my wish list I mean nowadays it's hard for us to establish what top politicians actually said, I mean, are you watching MSNBC or Fox News? I mean, what you know and these are contemporary sources the next day and it's very difficult sometimes, I mean, if you have a recording, wow, it doesn't always work out, but but. uh, but you know, if it's antiquity, there's a lot more uncertainty and most historians live with uncertainty when it comes to understanding Seneca, for example, or even Nero, but uh, but I don't. like uncertainty, but Christians don't like uncertainty when it comes to Jesus, but we're in the same boat, we're just actually in a harder boat with Jesus.

There are many things we can say. There are absolutely many things we can say. I can say a lot more than the general outline I just gave you with relative certainty and scholars can evaluate what's more certain, what's less certain, but that kind of uncertainty just comes with the territory when it comes to the ancient world, but thank you. Thank you very much for answering my questions. We have some news. I think we talked about it a couple of weeks ago. You have a new course, um or webinar, I can't remember which one and the live recording is on April 15th.

Can you tell us a little? about that, right, yeah, April 15, so this used to be kind of like D-Day tax day, fortunately, this time it's the weekend, but it's D-Day in another sense because it's a talk that we're . Le courses the lecture will be on the rapture, the second coming of Jesus, and this is um The Rapture is this idea that has existed in an evangelical Christian circle since the 1830s, not since biblical times, since the 1830, whichJesus is returning to lead his followers out of the world before a seven-year tribulation period of horrible suffering on Earth when the Antichrist arises and then all catastrophes will break out.

The followers of Jesus would be taken out of the world at the Rapture so I don't have to experience that and this has been has been in evangelical circles since the 19th century, but it really started to take off in the 1890s and is common knowledge today. common among evangelical Christians that this is going to happen and a staggering number of people in our world believe that it is going to happen and it is going to happen soon, so my lecture will be about that about uh, the fear, the fear among evangelicals since which was before I was in college, but when I was in college, the fear was that you'll be left behind, you don't want to be left behind, and that's my, that's the title of the lecture you'll be left with a story of the Rapture and That is why he will try to explain how the Bible you will not find the Rapture in the Bible not even in the verses that everyone says refers to the Rapture.

Don't talk about a Rapture, people did not believe in a Rapture for the vast majority of the Christian church. I'm going to explain where it came from and why it's not a biblical concept and I have to say, given the conversations you and I have had about the Apocalypse. I also wouldn't want to be left behind if this was a real thing that was going to happen. So it's called the webinar. Will it be left behind? A story of the Rapture. You can sign up. the live recording taking place on April 15th and the cost is 14.95 even if you don't attend the live recording you can still access the recordings of the report uploaded to Bart's website and you can learn more about it and sign up at www.barterman.com forward slash left behind now we're going to have Bart's Weekly Update this is Bart's Weekly Update where we can catch up on the latest news on Dr.

Ehrman's book releases talks on the happenings of hermanblog.org and the online course launches, but what do you have for us this week? Well, you know, I've been since my book on Armageddon came out, you know, a couple of weeks ago, so I'm still in the middle of doing it. I did a lot of podcast interviews and for this, I had a few, some good ones. I did the Sam Harris podcast and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and they're both always great. It's fun because they are fantastic interviewers and now I still have a lot of those coming up so almost every day I do some kind of podcast or another and it's actually great, it's a lot of fun because you can talk about your book and different people have different podcasts.

It's very interesting that these different podcasts because sometimes someone like Terry Gross will be everywhere, you know, and she will be right. objective, but she knows she's not a Christian, obviously, nor does she believe in this, and other people are really great interviews, they're Christians who are really interested in this, they know it and they know everything about it, and then, to Sometimes you really get into it. interesting people who don't know anything about it and so they ask a different set of questions, so it's different every time and it's really interesting and you never know what to expect, so yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah.

I still have some of that stuff ahead of me and that's all good, it sounds like a lot of fun and a lot of work too. It's not a lot of work because I don't have to prepare. I already wrote the book. I'm glad you're at least enjoying it and let's move on to our listeners' questions. Now it's time for listener questions where Bart answers real questions submitted by misquoting Jesus fans, if you'd like to submit a question for the future. segments, visit barterman.com, ask the bars, thank you, okay, we have a good selection of questions from the audience this week.

I'm going to start right away so we can answer as many as we can, so the first question, let's assume we only have the gospel of Mark. as a narrative, um, a first century narrative gospel and Paul's references to having met brother Jesus are not preserved, are historical scholars likely to conclude, based on Mark's gospel alone, that Jesus is a mythical figure, So he's a mythical figure, probably not? I mean, I think that if you have an extensive biographical source for an ancient person that is much better than what we have for any other ancient person and there is nothing in particular that would cause suspicion that the person has been invented in this account, as historians would think. that you know that these Miracles that are being told or the account of the Resurrection are probably not historical, but they would almost certainly conclude that this person really existed and try to find out what he was, that's what we do with almost everyone else. source I mean, you know, we have, you know, when you have a single, basically a single account of Apollonius of Tyana, uh, people don't believe that someone just made it up, they think that it existed and that you can say some things about it based on it. in this one source and so no, I don't think, I don't think people would consider Jesus a myth if we had one source, thank you, what do you think about John P Mayer's hypothesis in a marginal Jewish volume two that the deadline ? statements like Mark 13 30 this generation will not pass until these things happen do not come from the historical Jesus but come from the early Christian community.

John Myers' multi-volume work on the historical Jesus is an important work by a person who he calls very seriously, uh, he was a Roman Catholic priest, he died recently, but he is a very, very excellent historical scholar. He and I disagree on several things and I believe Jesus himself predicted that the end was coming. his own generation, this is not just in Mark 13-30. It is the constant motif found in his preaching about the coming end and what is surprising is that we have evidence that something similar happened. preached by other apocalyptic Jews in his time was preached uh seems to have been preached by John the Baptist his predecessor certainly was preached by the apostle Paul who came after him is in the synoptic gospels as I said it is a belief of the synoptic Cosmos seems to be the belief of the early Christians and so it is attested in the types of circles that he ran in before his ministry and it is attested by his followers after his ministry and his ministries what connects the two connects his predecessors with his followers and would be very strange if he himself didn't predict it because everyone around him did and that can be documented so I don't think many Christians just don't want to say look Jesus.

I couldn't have said that because you know it didn't happen, but historians don't worry about that kind of thing about whether a prediction comes true, they want to know if someone predicted it or not. Excellent thanks. Next question, did the historical Jesus have? delusions of grandeur at the thought that he would be named King of the New Kingdom or does this conviction somehow come from a place of compassion Despite how difficult it is to discern the motivations of historical figures, is it still possible that Jesus was a decent person to the light of his inflated claims about himself um I'm not sure how many inflated claims Jesus made about himself people think in terms of the Gospel of John where Jesus says things like I am the father are one you know or before that Abraham was I am and he makes very exalted statements about himself and John that he doesn't make in Matthew Mark and Luke in Matthew Mark and Luke um, if we take our first gospel of Mark, Jesus doesn't say much about himself, he said that yes it says that.

He will go to Jerusalem and will be rejected by the scribes and the elders and will be manned and executed and then raised from the dead, but it is not clear that that is what the historical Jesus said, in fact, we should have an episode about this, I don't believe it. Jesus was predicting his death at all, eh, I don't think he anticipated dying, but this is where the idea of ​​greatness comes in because I think Jesus imagined that he would be the one appointed to be the ruler of the coming Kingdom, he believed that the kingdom would come within of this generation, that a heavenly figure would come and judge the Earth again and would reestablish Israel as a sovereign state and that Jesus would be made king.

What Jesus meant, I believe, when he suggested or perhaps even told his disciples that he was the Messiah, then it is a vision of greatness, I suppose it is, but I don't think we can use our psychological categories of today to understand to someone two. A thousand years ago, in a completely different historical and ideological context, Jesus was an apocalyptic like other apocalyptics who thought that God was going to intervene soon and destroy the powers of evil and that was not the case, do you know if today you have people on the corner of the street saying? you know the end is near and you know it, and by predicting exactly what is going to happen, you would say yes, okay, that person is crazy, but you wouldn't say that about ancient apocalyptic thinkers and you probably shouldn't say that about modern thinkers either. .

They have their own ideologies. You know, we all have ideologies that are crazy. In 200 years people will think that almost everything we think is crazy, but that doesn't mean we're crazy. So I don't do it. You do not know? I believe Jesus had apocalyptic hopes and expectations. I think they were wrong. I don't know if they had visions of grandeur because there's no way for me to know if you know it was a little extreme. The best way for me to do psychoanalytic analysis, and I don't think it's the most useful way to try to do history, is to try to psychoanalyze someone rather than trying to understand what they mean in their own context.

Thank you. There are some? non-canonical gospels that claim to be written by Jesus and if not, why not? A couple of things about Jesus writing in the New Testament. It is said that Jesus can only read once in the New Testament in Luke chapter four, it is the only place where Jesus reads and so the question is that Jesus was illiterate, he is not said to write anything in the gospels except that unoriginal story of Jesus and the woman who committed adultery where he writes on the ground, but that was added by a scribe it was not originally in the gospel in the gospels um there is one place where Jesus writes in the New Testament is in Revelation chapters two and three where but he doesn't put pen to papyrus he dictates letters to John of Patmos who writes them, it was considered writing in the ancient world, so the question is: is there any non-canonical account of Jesus writing?

There is only one, but there is one that no one knows except scholars. There is a correspondence with a king of Odessa named abgar uh this is an apocryphal account cited in eusebius and um so uh eusebius is a 4th century church historian and he reports that the king of Odessa apgar was very ill and uh during the lifetime of Jesus and wrote Jesus a letter saying you know I am very sick, I understand that you can heal people, could you come and heal me? and Jesus Christ Jesus writes him a letter and says: Oh, I'm sorry, you know basically the basic Covenant, I'm sorry, I have other things. in my hands I have to be crucified, you know, so he has to be executed so that he can't come, I'm sorry, but after he dies, I will send one of my followers and then you have the account of from um of Thomas really went to Odessa and healed the king and converted the whole city, so that is the only writing we have from the hands of Jesus, why don't we have gospels written by Jesus?

I think the gospels that we're in circulation were attributed to the followers of him uh and I just thought they were telling the stories that there's no reason to make up anything about Jesus writing something. It would be interesting if we found something like that, but you know, I don't have it yet, thanks and our last question today, would you consider the Book of Ezekiel an early example of an apocalypse or Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy as a late revival of the gender? In other words, do either or both of these works share substantial meaning? Continuity with the Book of Revelation um, I would say more or less um, so Ezekiel is not exactly an apocalyptic text, although you could think of it as a text that could be used by later apocalyptics.

This will be what I don't want to understand. too deep in the weeds here um, but apocalyptic texts are generally um they are texts that use high level symbolism in Visions uh to explain the realities of Earth that cannot otherwise be explained by simple means. Ezekiel is kind of so you get these Visions uh in Ezekiel, very, very strange visions that are just as strange as the ones you get in Revelation and other places and the Book of Revelation, of course, used the author of Revelation used Ezekiel, but Ezekiel doesn't have the idea that apocalypses tend to have that you get these powers of Good and Evil that are in combat with each other.

Ezekiel is still very much into the Israelite addition that God is sovereign and his heart is mysterious, but he doesn't have like a devil he is fighting against or powers of evil. God is causing punishment against the Israelites and if the Israelites repent God will return. to return them to his favor um apocalyptic texts tend to emphasize not that God is punishing his people but that the forces of evil are punishing his peopleUm, the first place where something like that apocalyptic vision is understood in the Old Testament is in the Book of Daniel, chapters 7 to 12, the last book of the Hebrew Bible that Dante Dante wrote.

In a sense, what The thing about Dante is that just in terms of form, Dante is describing a journey, a journey, a guided tour of Hell and Purgatory and the Blessed Realms, etc., and that idea of ​​a journey. uh, to heaven and hell is found in the early Christian traditions, my recent book, Journeys to Heaven and Hell, is about the early Christian precursors of Dante. The Book of Revelation is something like that, but not the one that really starts to work is The Apocalypse of Peter, uh, in the second century, and then you get an apocalypse of Paul and you get several Travels narratives where someone sees the Realms of the dead and describes them as a motivation for how people should live now and that's what my book is about and tries to situate those journeys in Christianity in light of similar Greek, Roman and Jewish texts going back to Homer's Odyssey and the needs of Virgil Zeneida and then they address other Christian texts, so Dante is more in that line that scholars call those types of texts catabesis texts catabesis means to go down and then Odysseus descends to Hades and you go to the end of the other world and Dante is more in that vein than directly in the apocalypse vein thank you very much and before we wrap up for the week, would you mind just summarizing what we talked about and where people could find more if they're interested in this topic?

So there are questions about how we know what Jesus really said and did, very deep, probing questions that scholars have long asked historians working on the historical Jesus almost never say well, there is no such man, there was a man, and we have better sources for Jesus than for almost anyone in his time, but they are still very problematic. It is difficult to establish the details of the life of Jesus, so scholars work on this by applying various criteria to our surviving sources to try to understand the life of Jesus and the basic outlines are agreed upon by most scholars with many, many scholars.

There are differences once you go beyond the very broad scope, but we can certainly say that Jesus existed and that he was a Jew from Galilee who was a preacher who had disciples and ended up making a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover festival where he was arrested and crucified That's pretty safe, although the details are where it gets murky and you've written a book or two about this, haven't you? So my first book for a popular audience was about this, Jesus, the apocalyptic prophet of the New Millennium um another book that is um takes what I thought was a really quite interesting approach it was called Jesus before the gospels where I studied memory? what do we know about memory?

How does memory work? Do people remember things? Do they remember things wrong? False memories come to mind and how that affects Oral Traditions about Jesus. Did everyone remember things accurately in the ancient world because people couldn't write or is it just a modern myth that oral cultures pass on their Traditions accurately and I apply it to the traditions of Jesus to find out what we can say, he really said and made given the memory problems and wonderful oral traditions, so there are some reading recommendations for those of you in the audience who are interested in learning more.

Thank you very much to all. I hope you enjoyed the program. If so, remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. Also remember that you can use MJ's Quote Podcast to get a discount on all of Bart's courses at www.butterman. .com misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what will we talk about next time? We will have a very interesting corollary event to today's talk. One of the big problems that arose in the Q was that Jesus predicted that the end was coming in his own day, or in his own generation, and if so Jesus, a false prophet, the end did not come, did he predict that it was going to come?

If he predicted it and it didn't come, isn't it? make him a false prophet good question, that's what we're going to try and find out controversial things next time, thanks everyone and bye, this has been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart, um, we'll be back with a new episode a continuation. Tuesday, so be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on the barterman YouTube channel so you don't miss Bart Hermann and me. Megan Lewis, thanks for joining us.