Paul in particular cannot be stopped. At one point they stone him, gets up, goes to the next town. There’s nothing you can do because the spirit is behind this whole thing. That’s right. It’s like podcasting. Yeah. Unstoppable. Unstoppable. What really did happen on Easter Sunday? How did a first century Jew revolutionize the world’s moral vision? “When you accept Christ as a savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life.” “As children of God, let’s, let’s work to end injustice.” “The most important commandment is to love the Lord, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” And how much power does his message have today — for people inclined to treat the Bible skeptically? “The Christian share of the U.S. population has declined, while the religiously unaffiliated share has grown.” My guest this week has spent his entire career wrestling with the Christian Gospels, first as an evangelical believer — “Religion is based on faith, but I don’t think faith has to be blind.” And then, as a renowned and famously skeptical scholar of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman, welcome to Interesting Times. Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. And it’s the week of Easter. It’s Holy Week for Christians. This episode will appear on Holy Thursday. So just before Good Friday, just before Easter. And we’re appropriately going to talk about Jesus — as a historical figure, as a religious figure, how those two aspects fit together, which are questions that have been central to your own work, your scholarship, and your celebrity as an academic and popular writer. But I want to start with your latest book, which focuses on Jesus as a moral revolutionary, I guess you would say — someone who kind of helped bring a new mode of ethics into the world, and the title is “Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.” So let’s start with the subtitle. What was so transformative about Jesus’s moral message? A lot of my students assume that before Jesus came along, there wasn’t morality in the Greek and Roman worlds. My university is in the South, and so, Southern students, most of them raised Christian, who just assumed that morality came with Christianity — And that’s absolutely not right. So I am absolutely not arguing Jesus introduced the idea of love into the world. The idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we today — almost all of us, whether we’re Christian, whether we’re agnostic, atheist, whatever we are, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. So we might send a check, for example. Or we retire and we decide to volunteer the soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know, and we probably never will know, and we may not like when we get to know — if we did get to know them. So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. That in Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all. You were not — You were not supposed to be helping people who — just because they were in need, but that — Jesus based a large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one, who made this part of our conscience. And how much of the change is about strangers versus about, let’s say, enemies? Or is this an overlapping category? Because obviously one of the starkest things that Jesus says in terms of the kind of moral radicalism you’re describing, is: “Love thy enemy.” And one of the most famous parables that relates to this is the parable of the good Samaritan where, well, why don’t you — What is the parable of the good Samaritan actually? Why don’t you describe in your own words? The parable is that there’s a Jewish man who’s been going down — He’s going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and on the route, he gets attacked by a group of thugs who beat him up and steal what he has. And they leave him naked beside the road. And later, a priest from the temple is going on the same road, and sees him and walks on the other side and bypasses him. Doesn’t do anything. And then a Levite, who is one of the assistants in the temple, comes down, sees him, bypasses him. But then a Samaritan comes along. So the backdrop of the story is that the Samaritans were understood to be the enemies of the Jews. The Samaritan comes by and he sees this man, and he goes over and he helps him. So that happens. And then Jesus asks the person he’s talking to: Which one of these was the neighbor? Well, it was the Samaritan. So the idea is that if you’re going to be if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It’s, if somebody is in need that’s your neighbor. And that’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s love your fellow Israelite as yourself. And Jesus is now universalizing it. And so part of the thesis of my book is that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals, orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor. All of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically. So this is a work of I guess you could call it cultural and intellectual history. But I think it’s pretty obvious that you also want to make a point that’s relevant to our moral and political debates right now. Is that fair? It is. So what do you want, readers, Christian or otherwise, to take away from this argument that connects to let’s say, America in the age of the age of Donald Trump? Well, so I don’t get overtly political. I have very strong political views, many of which do not agree with yours. I am a studiously neutral interviewer. Professor but please. But please continue. I know you’re I’m just saying I tend to be on the liberal side of the trajectory, of so of the spectrum and so but it doesn’t really matter because in the book I’m not arguing for a particular political position or social agenda, position or not. What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you. The other you’re not supposed to bomb them back to Stone Age and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them. So again, we haven’t brought this up yet, but I mean, I’m not myself a Christian, so I’m not arguing this. We’re going to get to that. Yes I’m just saying I’m not making an apology for Christianity here, but I am saying this was Jesus teachings. This was his teaching. And even though I’m not a Christian, I subscribe to that idea. But what bothers me is that so many Christians in our world claim to be Christian, claim to be followers of Jesus, and don’t follow his most basic teaching about this. So I do want to talk about your own beliefs and your intellectual work and how those fit together, and I think they will lead us back in the end to the argument in the book. One, I’ll just put one kind of moral, philosophical question to you, I guess, on behalf maybe of at least some of the people you’re criticizing. One of the notable things about the 21st century world is that globalization and digital life have combined to create this sense of global immediacy at all times where you go on social media, you turn on the TV and events in incredibly distant lands are brought immediately to the fore. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan cares for the Jew with whom he is confronted. Like physically. The person is right there. He is physically the Samaritan’s neighbor. Even if politically, morally and so on, they are separate. Isn’t it a hard question how that generalizes to a world where in theory, you have some kind of relationship to eight billion people? Yes. No, Look, you can’t simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. I mean, if any government tried to Institute as their governmental policy the Sermon on the Mount they’d last about two days, period. I mean, so I’m not saying that it’s this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example. But the Bible is quite clear that just even in the Old Testament love your neighbor as yourself meant your fellow Israelite. Or it explicitly states, anybody who integrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite. So does that have any effect or not? I mean, if you’re not a Christian. No, I wouldn’t have any effect. If you are a Christian, you at least ought to think about it. All right, let’s talk. Let’s talk more about your own relationship to Christianity. And I feel like often when I read a book or an essay by someone who says, I’m not a Christian, but as a historian or as a cultural critic, I’m here to emphasize Christianity’s importance for the culture that we all live in. That person often is tiptoeing toward Christian belief that sometimes is an intellectual waystation, where first you say Christianity is important, and then you say, well, maybe it might be true. In your case, you’ve already taken a journey out of Christian belief. Tell me about that journey. Tell me about your own religious background before you became a professor of New Testament history Yeah, well, it continued on after that too. But yeah. So, look, I was born in a Christian household. And I grew up in Kansas and so fairly conservative area, and I was raised Episcopalian, was an active church person as a kid, altar boy. When I was 15, in high school, I had a born again experience, became a committed evangelical Christian. What was that? How did you have a born again experience? I started attending a youth group, campus life youth for Christ club, and the fellow who ran that was probably in his mid 20s. And he was a very gung ho evangelical Christian who believed that if you don’t commit your life personally to Christ as your Lord and Savior, you’re not really a you’re not really a Christian. So it didn’t matter that I went to the Episcopal Church every week and that I served as an altar boy, that I confessed my sins and I said the prayers and I sang the hymns to the contrary, that you could have been a white and Sepulcher, right. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly how he would have thought. That’s how he thought of it. And until I asked Jesus into my heart, as he put it, I wasn’t really a Christian. And I wanted to be a Christian. And so I did that. I committed my life personally to Christ as my Lord and Savior and became very gung ho about my religious faith. Did you. Sorry did you feel that as a personal transformation? Yes, very much so. It was a kind of an elevated spiritual experience where you felt kind of a burst of joy and a sense that something had changed now. And so when they call it a born again experience, many people actually have that sensation. Other people don’t. But I happen to this fellow had gone to Moody Bible Institute for his college, and he was very big on learning about the Bible. I knew nothing about the Bible as an Episcopalian. They’d read it and then preach on it. But he’s like, I didn’t know anything. And so I got really as Catholics, we always think that’s the safest approach. I know. Sorry, that’s a joke for Protestant and Catholic listeners. Go on. Sorry no. When I taught at Rutgers, most of my students were Catholic and it was a big, big sea change when I moved to the South. So anyway, I decided to be a committed Christian, go to Moody Bible Institute, and I really did become a Bible nerd there. I mean, that was day and night studying Bible and theology for three years. And Moody you would describe as fundamentalist in some way. Which, which effectively means. Well, there’s a lot of stuff associated with it, but fundamentally it means that the Bible is inerrant in a really strong understanding of the term. Any contradiction contradictions should be reconcilable. That’s right Yeah contradictions. Not just internal contradictions within itself or between books for, say, but with science, or six day creation. Adam and Eve, just like all the flood, it all historically happened and everything about the Gospels literally happened. And so, yeah, it was fundamentalist in that sense. And I bought into it, I just thought that it was and so when I left there, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham’s alma mater, which for me was a step towards liberalism Yeah, yeah. And I started moving away from the kind of strict fundamentalist thing I didn’t. I’m not going you don’t want to hear the whole story. But I decided I wanted to do a PhD studying Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. And the world expert on that was a guy named Bruce Metzger who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. So I applied there, and I went there, and I studied with him. I did both a master’s degree and a PhD there and became an expert in ancient Greek manuscripts. And over time, I moved away from this evangelical belief, especially this hardcore inerrantist thing. And by the time I was through, there, I was a fairly mainline Protestant, Christian who when I graduated, I was a pastor of a Baptist church for a year. Princeton Baptist church was an American Baptist church. And I preached on the radio every week. You were the second former American Baptist pastor that we have had on this show. Ryan Berg, the great religion data analyst. Anyway, just a striking fact. So you were a pastor. So as a mainline Protestant Christian, your relationship to the New Testament was basically to say the fundamentalists overstate how error and contradiction free these documents are. But there’s still good reason to think that Jesus is the Son of God, raised from the dead on the third day, and so on. Well, or had you drifted. Had you drifted a bit from that, too? I still would have affirmed that, but I. But as time went on, I started realizing that I didn’t really believe all of the kind of straight up doctrines. It turns out there are a lot of mainline Protestant ministers still today who wouldn’t who don’t think Jesus was literally born of a virgin, or even that he’s necessarily physically raised from the dead. And I kind of moved in. I moved in that direction. But until about 30 years ago, I was still a committed Christian. And then why did you ceasefire to be a committed Christian. It wasn’t related to my scholarship or my understanding of the Bible, or the understanding the historical development of Christianity. It wasn’t related to that. It was because of the problem of suffering. Why is there so much suffering in the world? When I taught at Rutgers for a few years. And when I was there, I was asked to teach a class called the problem of suffering in the biblical traditions. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible, in one way or another, is trying to wrestle with the problem of especially why the people of God suffer. And I had realized by this time that there’s not an answer in the Bible. There are lots of different answers, and some of these answers are in conflict with each other. And so I taught this class, and I thought afterwards I thought, man, I need to think more about this. I need and actually, when I got done with this class, I should write a book about that. I was like 30 or 32 years old or something. Wait, what are you talking? You’re 32. You got the answer to suffering. I mean, look, as a newspaper columnist, the rule is that there’s no obstacle to trying to solve the problem of evil in 800 words. So why should there be an obstacle to a 32-year-old writing on it? Yeah, but so this was a pivot point where you decided. Did you decide that God could not exist. Or did you decide that the Christian God was unlikely to exist? Like a God who has particular attributes related to goodness as we understand it? I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world. And I’m not a radical atheist who insists there is no God. But I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s, I don’t think there’s any kind of supernatural power that’s overseeing the world that is active in people’s lives, that actually answers prayer. I don’t believe a God like that exists, because such a God to exist would have to be bad, wicked? or? No, I don’t think that kind of God would have to be anything. And so it’s not that I have some kind of criterion for what that God must be, it’s that I think it’s unlikely that there’s a God who’s active in the world because in my view, if there was a God who was all powerful so I’m granting, if there was an all powerful God, if there was an all powerful God who was loving, then there wouldn’t be people who starve to death every minute, which is what happens. So I just came to I think it’s not true. I don’t believe there is some kind of divine power that is overseeing this world. I think that a more conservative Christian, listening to that narrative might say that you see a separation between how your view of the Bible and the New Testament changed and how your view of God changed. But the conservative Christian might say, well, it seems like there’s more of a progression here where you start out as a firm believer in a literal Resurrection, and then you become a believer in Jesus having been maybe spiritually present to the disciples, and then from there the possibility of an all powerful, all good God slips away. But there is a movement there where how you think about the New Testament does shape how you think about the likelihood that there’s a God who cares, right. It’s not completely separate. I think it’s separate because I believed I believed in God for a long time after I. So the views I teach, the kind of scholarship I do now, is exactly the scholarship I did when I was a Christian. So I can see how people would think that it’s kind of a domino effect. And when I was an evangelical, we talked about the slippery slope that leads to perdition. You give up one thing, man. It’s all over. And so I get that. But I have my closest friend, my two closest friends are Presbyterian ministers who are active in the church. And they basically think what I think about the Bible, right. No, I’m not saying it’s inevitable, the progression, but I’m just saying, if you held it as more of an. If you held it as an established fact that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and so on would necessarily have to give a little bit more credence to the possibility of a God who intervenes in the world. If I believe Jesus was raised from the dead necessarily, I would believe in God. Yes O.K well, that’s because there’s no other way. But if. But I’m just saying there is some progression there where your Presbyterian minister friends. Who would say, well, Jesus, I’m not putting words in their mouth, but Jesus didn’t Jesus, you had a power, had powerful moral teaching, was crucified and was present to the disciples in some way after the Resurrection. That’s a weaker claim on God’s behalf than the claim that Jesus was walking around and eating fish and so on. So once you’ve moved to the weaker claim, there is a general weakening. That’s all. That’s all I’m suggesting Yeah and but you would say you still I mean, just being here talking about the book you’ve just written. You’re still drawing moral value from the New Testament, even as an agnostic. Oh, yeah. Absolutely yeah. All right. I want to get a little bit deeper into the debate about the history of Jesus and the New Testament, the historicity, sorry, of the New Testament. And in doing some prep for this episode, I noticed that at one point, once you had a seven hour debate with a more conservative scholar of scripture, and I asked my producers if we could have seven hours for this, and they said, yes. So buckle, I don’t know what plans you’ve made for the rest of the day, Bart, but you’re here. No, we have slightly less time than that. So we’re going to try and do we’re going to try and skim the surface of what is an I think, just an incredibly fascinating debate. Regardless of where you come down or what conclusions you draw from it to start out. Imagine that the listener or viewer has very little contact with the debate, or even with Christianity itself. What is the historical raw material that the New Testament gives us in terms of understanding the life of Jesus and the early church? So we have four Gospels in the New Testament Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus life. Outside of those four accounts, there’s very little information about the historical Jesus, even within the New Testament. The New Testament has 27 books, and most of it doesn’t say very much at all about what his life was like between the time he was born and the time he died. Paul has more writings than anyone else and doesn’t say anything about his miracles or any confrontations. Or he doesn’t tell us about his life for a reason. I mean, for good reasons. But what that means is we basically have four accounts in the New Testament about his words and deeds. We have accounts from outside the New Testament. Lots of them. Other Gospels, for example. But generally they’re seen to be not historically reliable, even by people who wish they were. So basically, if we want to know about Jesus life, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And what is the. Just very quickly, what is the scholarly consensus on the relationship of the four Gospels that we have, or what is your own view or both. Well, my view is the common view. We have the first three. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have very many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence and often word for word, the same. And that has long been thought by scholars to indicate that somebody copying somebody. So almost everybody agrees that Mark was the first Gospel written. It’s our shortest Gospel, and it appears to have been used by both Matthew and Luke. So that Matthew and Luke have most of the stories in Mark, often the same sequence, same words, word for word. So Marcus, first Matthew and Luke used Mark and had material of their own that they added to it. Sometimes Matthew and Luke have similar material. Sometimes they have different material. Those three are then called the synoptic Gospels, which means you can see them together because you can put them in columns next to each other and actually read each version of the same story Yeah. And it’s interesting to see how they differ at that point. But John has very little of the material in Matthew, Mark, and Luke up to the time where Jesus is arrested. So the passion narrative, the account of his death, has similar stories in John. But John records mainly his own miracles, his own encounters of Jesus, his own teachings of Jesus that are different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And Jesus talks longer in John, right. That’s very much so when you get to John, entire chapters are Jesus talking. At one point, he starts talking in chapter 13. At his last meal and he talks through chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16. Then he launches into chapter 17. That’s all Jesus. Virtually all Jesus talking. That’s right. That is different. And then in addition, you’ve already mentioned Paul’s letters, but there’s a large number of letters, and there are the Acts of the Apostles, which seems to be written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. That’s right. And both of those, in different ways, are windows into the early church. And then it’s fair to say, since the 19th century, maybe the late 18th century, there’s just been endless attempts to drill down skeptically into the claims that these books make and how closely they are actually connected to the early church, have debates about who wrote the Gospels when they were written. You already mentioned lost Gospels, books that were supposedly suppressed. Debates about whether Jesus really claimed to be divine and on and on. I think it’s notable to me, as a reader of your work, that as a agnostic and skeptic of the historicity of the New Testament, you do think some kinds of skepticism go too far. So one of the books you’ve written is about people who think that Jesus didn’t exist that he’s a mythological figure. Why should we think that Jesus existed? Well, let me say let me say that I don’t. I mean, historians, by their very nature are skeptical because they’re dealing with sources that they have to evaluate. And so this isn’t just this isn’t a thing about Jesus, per. It’s about how history works that you’ve got to evaluate your sources. I’ve never gone into my scholarship trying to disprove things. It’s just you try to figure out what happened in the past. And there are people today call themselves mythicists who think that Jesus did not even exist. And I don’t object to that because it’s too skeptical. I object to it because it’s not historical. And so I’m just interested in knowing historically what happened, what really happened. And when it comes to the historical Jesus, the evidence is just so overwhelming. I mean, I don’t think you can really have a bona fide question about whether the man existed. The question is, what did he say and do. And that’s where you start getting into trouble. But the reason there are lots of reasons for thinking Jesus really existed. I mean, for one, just kind of one very basic thing. The apostle Paul, we mentioned he was writing letters in the 50s and the 60s. Jesus probably died around the year 30. Paul in his letters, talks about his meetings with James, the brother of Jesus. So if. So what I put it sarcastically is if Jesus, if Jesus didn’t exist, you would think his brother would know that. But Paul, Paul’s conferred with James So things like that. And so yeah. Jesus I think he certainly existed. That doesn’t tell you what he said and did though. But it’s fair to say it’s even by the standards of secular history. He’s an unusually well-attested figure in just in terms of how many people are writing about him Yeah and this is something I think that people kind of overlook because I mean, I often say, and it’s absolutely true that Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek and Roman source of the first century, except for outside of Jews and Christians not mentioned at all. And people say, oh, well, then he probably didn’t exist. Well, how many people are mentioned. I mean, the most Philo is like the most famous Jew from the period. I mean, how many people talk about him. No one. So the Roman, the Romans and Greeks generally thought they had better things to do, better things to do, and also but also right again, even extremely well attested figures. You’re dealing with sources that come later and are where you’re putting things together, if you’re talking about even like the life of Julius Caesar. Well, that’s it. I mean, you’ll have Roman emperors and things talked about, but who else has talked about, in a world like the Roman Empire had about 60 million people how many people, how many of those 60 million people in Jesus day do we actually have a record of very, very few. So the fact that you don’t have a record isn’t weird. It’s like it’s what you’d expect. So then another point, the idea that basically there were just tons of Gospels that have just as good a claim to be connected to Jesus as the ones in the New Testament that were then suppressed for political and theological reasons later. And this gets the full treatment in “The Da Vinci Code” and popular culture like that you’ve written. Obviously, there are lots of rival Gospels, why should we give at least a certain degree of priority to the ones that we have in the New Testament versus the others? Well, it’s not on a priori grounds. I mean, it’s not because they’re in the Bible. It’s that. So I actually did an addition to these other Gospels where I believe that I own it. So So I’m just so and I’m really interested in these things. But everybody who’s interested in the historical Jesus from a historical point of view, has to take every potential source seriously and examine it in detail and consider, does this provide historical information or not. On the kind of historical, on the grounds of the kind of historical criteria that historians use to figure out, what did you know. What did Abraham Lincoln really say Or do or what did Julius Caesar? You use the same criteria. And when you apply these criteria to these other Gospels, there’s almost none. There are virtually none of them that you can consider as historically reliable. Possibly the Gospel of Thomas, which says it has 114 sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945, about half of which are like you get in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The other half are not. Possibly some of those sayings in there could go back to Jesus. Apart from that, virtually none of these Gospels is going to give you historical information. So the New Testament, the books we have, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles, all of this maybe takes us as close to Jesus’s life as we’re likely to get pending some novel discovery in a cave or the ruins of Pompeii or something else. Pompeii the timing might be wrong, but you don’t think that’s close enough for them to be truly credible as historical narratives. Why Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and he really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think, oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did. So there are a lot of reasons for that. The first thing that I give me three reasons. They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event where they both can’t be right because they are contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish Homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living, they’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things. The authors living much later. And the contradiction of the third thing is these authors got their stories from somewhere. If we don’t know where the authors lived, we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we don’t. I’m just going to. Well, no. Go on, go on. We can get back to that because there’s some debate, but. Oh yeah, there’s debates about everything. Welcome to History. So these authors do not claim to be eyewitnesses. They do not narrate things in the first person. They describe Jesus and his disciples in the third person. As I said, they’re writing in a different language, living decades later. The question is where did they get their stories. The one thing we can say about Christianity in this period, from the time Jesus died to the time, say, the end of the Gospel of John that’s a 60 year period, is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Mediterranean. It started out as a small group in Jerusalem, and by the time the end of the first century, we know of Christian groups who are scattered throughout Judea, Galilee, Syria over to what we today think of as Turkey, Asia Minor, over to Greece, in Rome, possibly North Africa, possibly Spain. So in those 70 years, Christianity has spread. There’s no social media. There’s no newspapers there. Most people, the vast majority of people are illiterate, cannot read it, almost certainly spread by people telling stories about Jesus. So somebody tell somebody in Jerusalem tells a story to somebody else in Jerusalem. And then somebody from Antioch comes and he tells them the story. This goes on for 30, 40, 50 years before they are written down. So what happens to the stories. They change. And the evidence that they change is we have different accounts of the same story that are different. Where does the fact that the Gospels contain in stories of miracles, including, most notably, the Resurrection. Also plenty of secondary miracles, healings and so on. Where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism? Is it itself just an automatic reason for skepticism that you should discount historical narratives that claim that someone walked on water? I think saying historical skepticism is a tautology. History has to be skeptical. So it’s not that you’re doing historical skepticism. You’re doing history. But I mean, I agree 100%, but suppose you present to me two stories that follow the same trajectory you’ve described. They’re written down later. They pass through some kind of oral history. They’re written in a new language. They’re the same story, except one of them has a miracle in it. One of them doesn’t. Does the skeptical optical historian tautological again say the miracle is an extra reason to think that one of these stories has been garbled compared to the other. I think what the historian does is they look at the miracle story, and they judge whether it probably happened or not, because that’s what you do with history generally. And so what’s the probability of Jesus walking on the water. How do you establish that as a historically? That’s a very good question. How do you establish that historically? You cannot. Because all history, all historians can do it doesn’t matter who you’re studying in history. You can be studying Charlemagne, whoever you’re studying, studying Baal Shem Tov, who is the founder of Hasidic Judaism, who has eyewitness accounts of his miracles, fantastic miracles just within the last and we’re not talking about thousands of years now. And so historian looks at the accounts of Baal Shem Tov, doing things like sticking his finger up against a tree and making it come on fire to burn to warm themselves up or whatever. And you have all of these accounts and you ask, how do we account for the story. Well, how do you establish things happening in the past? I mean, what kind of criteria do you use as a historian to figure out whether something likely happened or not? And you have a set of criteria, but for example, do you have independent witnesses. Is it something that’s plausible? It’s something that ever happened, ever in the history of the universe before. So suppose you’ve got a story and you’re not sure. Did somebody make this up or did it actually happen? Like Jesus walking on the water. Did it actually happen or did somebody make it up now? Has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn’t happen? Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Has anybody ever actually walked on water? Yeah well, no, not in recorded history. In other words. So what is the likelihood? I’m not. So I’m not saying that it’s impossible. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Jesus walked on the water. I’m saying that if it did happen, there’s no way for us to establish it historically, because other explanations are always far more likely. But does that mean then, that you are essentially taking a kind of. A view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened just because you’ll always default to. By definition, miracles are things that don’t normally happen. If to take a different example, the Yale historian Carlos Eire wrote a book recently called “They Flew” It’s a book about accounts of levitating Saints in the 16th and 17th century. And air basically makes the case, and this is, of course, debatable all such things. But he makes the case that the level of historical attestation for these events is at the level or above the level that you would normally need to say. These things happen like independent witnesses, lots of different writers writing about it, people who have reasons to be skeptical saying it happened, all of these things. But then you’re still left with the fact that do people normally fly. No do people normally levitate. No so I’m just curious in, is there any level of historical attestation where you would say, O.K, this makes this miracle more likely to have happened. Or are we just defaulting to the idea that miracles are impossible. And so the historian can never assert that one possibly happened. I would say you have to consider every possible account and consider who the witnesses are, and evaluate whether it’s more probable that happened or that witnesses got it wrong, or somebody made it up at every point. So you don’t make a categorical decision. This could not have happened. Part of the problem with history is that history is actually not explaining just what happened. History is explaining what we can establish probably happened. And so the past is not history. The past is the past. Our only access to it is through historical inquiry. So let me give you a separate different example just to explain this for people who are quite following this. It is impossible for you to take your coffee, your black coffee and pour half and half into it and stir it and to stir it enough that the half and half comes out of it. I mean, it’s basically it’s the second law of thermodynamics. It can’t happen. And at least it never has happened. So suppose somebody from 1950 says that they saw somebody in 1920 do this, and suppose you got five people who say, yeah, 30 years ago, we saw this person stir the coffee, stir the milk in the coffee, and they stirred it right out of it. What’s the likelihood that those five people would be right? I would say the likelihood is virtually zero. Is it likely somebody could have made it up, that somebody could have seen something that they thought was that it was a magician, that it was somebody with sleight of hand. Do those things ever happen? Yeah, that happens all the time. Does anybody do this thing? No, it never happens. So which is more probable. Do you think that there’s a risk in New Testament historical scholarship of taking the fact that the Gospels include miracles, and using that as a reason to become overly skeptical of them. Yes, I think that is a risk. But I would say that it’s not that people who are critical of the new the vast majority of critical scholars of the New Testament are actually Christian believers. So I’m an odd duck. I mean, I’m an agnostic, I’m an atheist, and I’m a New Testament scholar, and that is weird. It’s not. So it’s not that everybody’s approaching this thing trying to destroy the miracles or anything like that. Most people doing this are actually churchgoing Christians. Let’s get. Let me just give you one example of how this problem might manifest itself. And you can tell me why. Why you think I’m wrong. So you mentioned earlier that know you yourself would probably date the Gospels to the later part of the first century. So the 80s, usually it’s thought the typical view is that Mark was written the first around 70 Yeah Matthew and Luke around 80. 85 John around 90, 95. And this makes a difference to the question of their credibility for the reasons that you’ve already laid out. The longer stories are circulating in oral tradition. The more errors confabulations all of these things creep into them. So the Gospels look, there’s still important historical sources, but they look less historically credible if you plant them in 85 versus 60. I wouldn’t say necessarily. I mean, somebody could write a book on Thomas Jefferson today and be more accurate than an account that was written a year after his death. And so it’s not necessarily that the length of time is the issue. The other thing about oral tradition, of course, is that stories change overnight. I mean, you’ve had things told about you the next day that just aren’t true. I mean, I know I have never, never I don’t. O.K, well, I’ll start tomorrow then I’ll say, well, no, I want to get at that question in a minute. But just on this question. Well, there are many reasons that scholars have for offering that later dating. But one of the reasons that shows up pretty consistently in the literature is the fact that at various moments in the Gospels, Jesus has discourses where he seems to predict something like the destruction of the Jewish temple, which happens in 70 AD at the hands of Roman armies. And just to take as the example, the Gospel of Luke. So the Gospel of Luke then connects to the book of Acts, the story of the Acts of the Apostles. They’re written seemingly by the same author. That’s right. Acts the Acts of the Apostles is it starts out with the early church. It ends up following the career of St. Paul. And it ends pretty abruptly in the early 60s with Paul a prisoner in Rome. And that’s just where the book ends. Yeah. Soon after that, a lot of incredibly crazy stuff happens. You have the martyrdom of Paul and Peter. You have Nero’s first persecution of the Christians. And then you have the Jewish War and the destruction of the temple. So it’s a very action packed decade. It has always seemed to me that the most straightforward reading of Acts, ending where it does, without any detail of the subsequent events, is just that the writer wasn’t aware of those subsequent events and was writing, was ending his story roughly where he was. It’s the early 60s. Paul is still alive. This is the end of the story because this is when he’s writing it. And that one of the key reasons that scholars reject that intuitive conclusion is that they don’t want to give Jesus credit for a prophecy. They don’t want to say, oh, wow, which is so Yeah go ahead, tell me, tell me, tell me why you think that’s a mistake in reading Yeah no, I understand that argument Yeah, I understand it. Wow I absolutely don’t think that’s why scholars came up with that, but. O.K O.K. O.K, good. So yeah, of course, that’s what I thought, for many years is that that’s the best way to explain it. There are reasons for thinking the Gospels were written later than that. And so then it’s a legitimate argument then. Well, then why does the book of Acts end while Paul is in prison in Rome in the 60s? So two things about that one. I agree that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem. So I don’t late date them because of that. Number 2 and Jesus predicted it because it was just in keeping with Old Testament prophecy. You’re saying you don’t think. Just to be clear, you don’t think Jesus literally knew the destruction was going to happen. You think he had supernatural knowledge. No, there were other. There are other Jews at the time who were predicting the destruction of Jerusalem. So thinking, it’s kind of people today, might say you might predict something that’s going to happen about the war in Iran, and they’ll come up with some prediction and somebody will be right. Somebody will be right. So you can read the handwriting on the wall kind of thing. There are good reasons for thinking why the author of Luke — Acts would have wanted to an Act before Paul was finally put on trial and executed. The whole point of the book of Acts is. So for those who don’t the book of Acts, as you said, begins after Jesus’ Resurrection. And then he ascends to heaven. And then the day of Pentecost happens and Christianity starts spreading throughout the world. So it covers about a 30 year period of the early spread of Christianity. One of the major theses of Acts, one of its themes, is that this is a movement that cannot be stopped. Paul in particular cannot be stopped. Paul goes into a town and he gets persecuted, and they beat him, and he just goes to the next town and starts another church and they try to stop him there. Can’t stop him. At one point they stoned him, gets up, goes to the next town. There’s nothing you can do because the spirit is behind this whole thing. That’s right. It’s like podcasting Yeah unstoppable. Unstoppable and very interesting. So the deal is that Paul’s execution had been narrated. He would have been stopped. Luke is trying to show that this is an unstoppable movement. And so he’s not going to narrate the execution. O.K I promised my producers we wouldn’t do the seven hour debate. So I’m resisting. I am resisting the urge to argue incredibly deeply. Just one. Two questions. First one, I’ve read your work, and so I know that you think it’s possible or likely that Jesus made these predictions Yeah isn’t aren’t there a lot of scholars who think that Jesus’s predictions are a reason to date the Gospels later. Isn’t that a. Not again. I agree, it’s not the only reason. But it is. It is a significant reason. Given it would be. The deal is with that is that it’s not quite that simple. It’s that some of these predictions, especially in Luke, seem to show a detailed knowledge of what’s going to happen when it happens. It’s just not that the temple is going to be destroyed, it’s that Roman troops are going to surround the city that the Gentiles are going to trample. It goes into detail that looks like it’s projecting backwards, something that they know about. But some of those details are also wrong. Like there’s claims about what season it happens in. Pray that it doesn’t happen in. Well, yeah. No, but the prediction that people say is wrong is when in Mark 13, Jesus says not one stone will be left upon another. And people today can go to the Western Wall. There are stones still there. But the problem is that Mark wasn’t from Jerusalem. When people talk about the destruction of Jerusalem, even today, they talk about is completely destroyed. And it wasn’t. So the fact that Mark has it wrong doesn’t mean that he was living before the event. O.K, so but so you’re saying that there are specific there are more specific reasons to think that the prophecies are written. So if you just first of all, it’s fine for you to say, O.K, Luke’s theme is that Paul can’t be stopped, so he doesn’t want to end with Paul being stopped. But if Luke is writing decades and decades later, everyone knows that Paul was stopped. Everyone knows that Paul was martyred. And it seems that a story and it seems that. But he’s telling a story to an audience that is aware of events. So if you’re telling a story about Martin Luther King. And you write the story and you end the story, somewhere just short short of his assassination. And it’s not a history just of Martin Luther King. It’s a history of the whole Civil Rights movement. And it leaves out like a whole back half of these events. That would be an odd narrative choice, given that everybody knows everyone involved in the Civil Rights movement, everyone involved in American history ever since knows that the signal thing about the end of Martin Luther King’s career was that he was assassinated. And by the way, there were riots. There was a whole transformation of American politics associated with it. It just seems like a big one. It’s a big challenge to write about that without letting that creep into your text. That’s right. Two why. If your theme is that Paul could not be stopped and you’re a Christian who believes in the Resurrection, why wouldn’t you end with Paul’s martyrdom and say other Christian martyrs, of which there are many, he continues to influence and shape the church to this day and Give further examples. Wouldn’t that be just a much more rhetorically natural style? Well, it may have been, but you can’t tell an author what he needs to write. And the Martin Luther King thing. It’s an interesting analogy, but I don’t think it quite works, because that’s really the point is the assassination for Paul. According to Luke. That’s not the point at all. For one thing, we don’t have a lot of records of people being martyred at the time. We actually don’t know a lot about Paul’s death. The earliest reference, we have to Paul experiencing martyrdom is around the year 95 by a book called First Clement. And so we don’t have records. We don’t know what this author even knew, actually. But if he’s writing later, by the time he’s writing, Nero’s persecution has happened. You have had substantial Christian martyrdoms of some kind. Martyrdom would be part of the story that Christians have to tell. Just seems odd to leave it out. Well, it’d seem odd if you. But there we have lots of historical writings from the ancient world, and they don’t end where you think they might where you would end them. And so it’s common to tell a lie, to tell a biography that has a section of a person’s life. So I understand it might seem weird, but I think it seems weirder if you just. If you already assume that Luke was writing before 70, then it would seem weird to you to think that somebody would think otherwise. I get that, but the question is, what is the actual evidence? It’s not where he stops. You can’t. That is evidence. It’s not the decisive evidence. Maybe, but it is evidence. So yeah. No that’s right. You look at every piece of evidence and you weigh you weigh the probabilities. All right, let’s move on from there. O.K, let’s go back to the very first point you made for reasons to treat the gospel skeptically, which is about contradictions between them Just give me a couple examples, just so listeners have them of places where the Gospels contradict themselves or contradict each other in ways that cast doubt on their historical reliability or validity. Not viability. Non-viability sorry. Well, yeah. So I’ve written kind of a long book on this. Jesus interrupted is his book where I deal with a lot of these. I mean, but there are all levels. I mean, it’s interesting because there at all levels, I’m just kind of on a basic level in Mark’s gospel, usually thought to be the first gospel. Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. And he says, when you go, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any money, but do take a staff. You got to take a staff because you’re going to be walking. So Matthew is exactly the same episode. Word for word, the same in places. And in Matthew he says to the disciples, O.K. So don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take a don’t take any extra money and don’t take a staff. It’s like, wait a second. So this is kind of like an obvious thing where it’s either he either said take a staff or don’t take a staff, but he probably didn’t say so. So things like that those are little things. But sometimes you get fairly big things. Like what day did Jesus die. In all the Gospels locate his death around the time of the Passover feast. Mark explicitly has Jesus himself eat the Passover feast with his disciples, and he takes the symbolic foods of the Passover feasts, the bread and the wine, and he instills new significance in them. Says, this is my body that’s broken. This is my blood. It’s given for many. And he. And so they’ve had a Passover meal. He’s arrested afterwards, and he is spends the night in jail. He’s crucified the next morning at o’clock in the morning. Mark specifically dates all of these things. John, our last gospel also gives specific dates for when things happen. Jesus does have a last meal, but it’s not said to be a Passover meal. He talks with his disciples for five chapters, as I said, and then afterwards he’s arrested, put on jail, and he’s put and he’s. Pilate condemns him to death, and he’s crucified after noon on the day they’re preparing the Passover meal a day earlier. Specifically dated in both cases. John 1914. So, yeah. So you have that kind. So those are detailed things that make you think somebody changing something for some reason of their own. And I think and that’s absolutely I think what’s happening, people are changing things for reasons of their own. But there are lots of other things that are simply I mean, they’re just very big issues involved with what did Jesus actually preach. Why did Jesus do miracles? Why big issues between the Gospels? But for most people me, when I was an evangelical, it took a little thing that I just couldn’t reconcile anymore to make me realize these are not inerrant. Inherent and once you realize that, it opens up the. It actually improves your interpretation of these Gospels. It makes it possible to understand each gospel for what they’re trying to say, rather than trying to make them all say the same thing Yeah, I guess so. To me, as someone I’m not a fundamentalist Christian, I’m a Catholic. And Catholics believe in some version of inerrancy of scripture. But being Catholic there’s 17 different theological schools about what that means to me, though it often seems like at least some of the kinds of things you’re describing. While they would undermine faith, if you feel obliged to believe that, the Gospels can never get a name wrong or a date wrong or anything like that, or else you have to throw them out. If you’re evaluating the likelihood that these are texts that actually come from eyewitnesses, come from eyewitnesses through mediation. Someone is writing down eyewitness accounts. Fine right. But come from eyewitnesses. They’re actually what you would expect. Like, this is so I. I’ve written, I guess, two memoir ish books. And one of them was about my undergraduate experience. God help me. And one of them. One of them. One of them was about having Lyme disease. And in both cases, just the nature of memoir writing means at phase one, you misremember certain things get certain things wrong, you’re a writer. So you telescope narratives, sometimes things are compressed and so on. All of that happens. And yet I still think of them as truthful testimonies about what happened to me that some future historian could reasonably rely upon. Then, in the case of the Lyme disease book, my wife wrote a book about the science of the maternal transformation, in which she discussed some of her own experiences as a mother and included details about being the wife of someone struggling with Lyme disease. And when I read her account, there were obviously there were things that she interpreted differently. So two people married, living in the same house, raising kids together, right Differences enter in from the beginning, but that happening in the Gospels seems like, in a certain way, evidence of their basic historical reliability, just in the sense that if I handed you as a historian, right, four documents written by different authors and they all agreed on every particular, right, they all hit the same point and their theology was clear. They all had exactly the same theology. Wouldn’t you be more skeptical of those documents than you would be of…? Yes right. Then my work here. My work here is done, I guess. Well, no, it’s not because I mean, that we had memoirs. We don’t have memoirs. These people don’t claim to be eyewitnesses. They don’t claim to. I mean, these are not eyewitness reports. I mean, if Peter had written a gospel, that’d be great. Unfortunately, Peter was illiterate. And so I mean, even in the New Testament, by the way, Peter is called illiterate. Acts chapter 4, verse 13. He was an agrammatos, couldn’t didn’t know his letters. So we don’t have anything from these apostles. What we have are stories in a different language, in different parts of the world, from people who weren’t there, who are telling us what they’ve heard. And so that’s not the same as you writing a memoir. So it’s not the same as me writing a memoir at the same time, though. And this is where I guess we just disagree. I think Mark is pretty clearly Peter talking to somebody like this. Why because it appears as Peter’s story. No it doesn’t. No it doesn’t. I mean, Peter, Peter is a dominant character in it relative to the other Gospels. Peter’s there’s all these little grace notes in Aramaic, where Peter had somebody remembering exactly of the word Jesus speaks. And so on. You don’t think that’s. And, if you raise thinking, Peter, this is Peter’s gospel, then it might sound like that. If you have no assumption about that at all, it would never occur to you that this is Peter’s version of the story. All right. I’m not going to. I just think that there’s no. Since the Gospels don’t claim to be by eyewitnesses, that to say that they’re eyewitness testimonies on what grounds? Why would you think that? You don’t think that. I mean, when you read other ancient histories, I mean, and when you read ancient historians like Thucydides, he tells you that he doesn’t know what these speeches were, what the speeches were like. How would he know he wasn’t there. He made them up. He told us he made them. That’s what historians do. He says they make it up. Who the person is. And you think, well, why would he likely have said in this case, well, then you come up with something. But in the case just in the synoptic Gospels, right across the different sources that Mark Matthew, I mean that Matthew and Luke are using, since we know they’re probably using Mark setting aside other debates there. Jesus doesn’t Jesus doesn’t come across as a character that Thucydides made up. He comes across as someone who’s being described by people who listen to him talk. You don’t think so. So we have the Sermon on the Mount. It’s found only in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It’s three chapters long. Matthew’s usually dated to around the year 80 to 85. He unless. Unless Luke was written earlier. In which case Matthew’s earlier. But sure. So I asked my students whether they heard the last inaugural address. Say some. I did this some months after the last inaugural address. They said, yes, I heard it. I said, O.K, write it down for me. How could they possibly write it down. How could somebody, 50 years after Jesus gave this address, know what he said? And if Jesus did give the Sermon on the Mount, why isn’t it in any of the other gospels? It’s like they just didn’t think that part was important. You see what I’m saying. These are stories about Jesus that have been circulating that different authors have put together in different ways. And the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke sound so similar is because Matthew and Luke used Mark. They have the same source. I will just say the claim about why people would remember the words of Jesus and why they’re different from listening to Donald Trump give an endless an endless inaugural address is that these stories were told to people who were explicitly his followers, who believed him to be potentially the Messiah, who were often living in community with one another, and who then experienced a radically transformative event that caused them to have stronger reasons from the beginning to share and circulate and remember these stories. And therefore, they’re more like maybe somebody writing a story about their own family 20 or 30 years later, or sharing stories about their own family than they are like me, sharing a story about what I remember the first inaugural address to be. So the fact that these were followers of Jesus is probably not the reason for thinking they’re more historically accurate, because the followers of Jesus have their own reasons for portraying Jesus in ways that they understand him. People tell stories all the time about people that are important to them, and the stories change. So the question is, what do we know about oral tradition. What do we know about how people passed on stories both today and in antiquity? And there’s actually a whole field of research on this, and it’s not favorable to the idea that people remembered things verbatim since for but they don’t. They don’t have to remember things verbatim to have general accuracy that’s different from someone making up a speech to your own example. If one community remembers that Jesus said, do take a staff and one community remembers that, he said, don’t take a staff. You still could have a pretty good sense that Jesus said some version of that dialogue. No, you don’t know that Jesus said it. You have to analyze it. What are the grounds for thinking. He said it just like, what are the grounds for thinking that George Washington said something or other. How do you go about establishing it? It isn’t just because it’s found in several sources, especially these sources used each other. If you’ve got three biographies of George Washington that all say he said the same thing. And these biographers all used each other, then that’s not you got one source. You don’t have three sources. One of the people you’ve debated in your many debates is a scholar and writer named Peter Williams, who wrote a book called, “Can We Trust the Gospels?” Have you seen my debate with him? Yes, so I encourage people who want to know about Yeah about his views about things and my views to watch that debate. I encourage that as well. And it gives you the extra two hours that this conversation is missing. But this will be my last question on this point. Williams makes the argument that if you look at details in the Gospels that are not about things, Jesus said, but are about place names, geography. How often does a given name appear. Versus what was actually common in the seconds or the 20s. In Palestine, they do remarkably well. It looks like the people who are describing, writing and talking about these things actually knew the geography of the Holy Land quite well, actually knew the nomenclature of people in this region quite well. And I watched your debate and you said basically something to the effect of just because somebody gets it that, New York City has five streets going this way, and that the typical name in the Bronx is Vinny. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be right about what happened on a particular day in a particular an actual event. Which is a fair point. At the same time, in the back and forth. We’ve just been having right, you’ve been emphasizing the idea that, Gospels are written decades later. They’re written in another language. They’re written maybe written down all over the Roman Empire. Not just in the Near East. And that because of this, when you’re talking about things Jesus said, there’s just too many cycles, too much distance and so on. Why didn’t those cycles and those distance make Williams’s argument obsolete? Like, why don’t people just get the names wrong After 60 years? Why don’t they start introducing massive errors of geography too? Why are all the errors that you imagined to be there about things Jesus said as opposed to where is Jericho in relationship to Jerusalem. Shouldn’t there be more errors of fact just through this cycle process you’re describing. Well, there are errors of fact that Peter doesn’t talk about in the Gospels. I mean, they’re just geographical errors. So there are those things. The fact that somebody tells a story about a certain place and gets the place names right doesn’t mean that the story is right. No, absolutely. But if you have, it’s irrelevant to the question about whether the story is about Jesus or things that happened. But it can’t be irrelevant in the sense that if the Gospels got place names badly wrong and introduced a lot of random weird names in place of what were actually the names that were normal in 25 AD, as a historian would say, well, that’s a reason to think it’s not true. That’s right. So the fact that they get things right has to be a reason for giving them some credit. It doesn’t work that way. Why not. O.K doesn’t work that way because of this. If you know the location of places, that doesn’t mean that you know what happened in those locations. You’re asking about what’s described. Jesus having said and done. Accurate if you say, well, it must be accurate because he knows where Jericho is in relationship to Jerusalem. I’m not saying that it must be accurate. I’m saying that you are saying that the process of oral tradition necessarily introduces a large set of errors in terms of memory, of statements. I’m not saying it necessarily does, but it does, but it doesn’t. But look, if there are errors all over the place about geography, that would call the stories into question. If there are not errors of geography. Then it’s neutral. Are the stories historical or not. No but it’s evidence. It’s not. It’s not neutral because it strongly implies that the people, the origins of these stories, that certain key elements of these stories were transmitted successfully across the process you’ve described. That’s all I’m saying. Yes like the place, the place where the geography of the near East, allowing for some errors, was transmitted fairly successfully across. It’s actually not all that great if you want to know the truth. But I mean, there are geographical errors. But look, if I tell a story about somebody murdered right in front of the Empire State Building, the fact I know where the Empire State Building is doesn’t mean the person was murdered there. All right, I will return, return us to our original theme and bring and bring us to a close. Luke ending when there was so much more to be said. There you go. So just as a historian then, we’ve walked around this a few times, but just directly, what do you make of the Resurrection stories? What do you think happened for Easter week? Yeah, I think the followers of Jesus definitely thought that before he died. I think they thought that he must be the Messiah or that he possibly was the Messiah. There are different views about what the Messiah would be at the time within Judaism. But whatever the view was, every view. The Messiah thought that he would be a powerful figure who would overthrow the enemies of God and set up a kingdom of some way. That was their expectation. Rather than that happening, though, Jesus was arrested and he was put on trial and was crucified, publicly humiliated and tortured to death. I think it’s absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterwards thought that he had been raised from the dead. My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterwards. I don’t know how many people had the visions. I don’t know whether there were groups where there were a few individuals. Eventually they convince the others and people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. They started proclaiming that they convinced people of it. And that’s the beginning of Christianity. Now, if you’re a Christian, that’s perfectly fine, because you can just say, well, yes, he did appear to people. If you’re not a Christian, it’s also perfectly fine. You can say they thought they had visions of Jesus. You don’t have to have an explanation. It could be a mistaken identity. It could be a dream. It could be. There are all sorts of people have visions. It’s probably not a mistaken identity. I mean, that seems that you just. You see Jesus’s cousin who looks like him and you think he’s alive again. A couple of years ago, I was giving a lecture in Michigan, and there was a guy in the third row who I thought was my dad. My dad had died 15 years before that. So it’s just like, oh my God. That just looks so, so but so but so then. Sorry so mistaken identity. You mean one person has this experience. It’s not that everybody thinks. Well, there’s a guy walking around. No, I don’t think Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time. I think it’s pretty clear, Paul. Paul believes he saw Jesus. We don’t know how he would have identified Jesus. He didn’t know Jesus during his lifetime, but he saw something he said was Jesus. I think Peter claimed to have a vision of Jesus. I think Mary Magdalene probably did. Do you think that because as a reader the scene where Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus seems kind of like it comes from an eyewitness account. No, no. O.K, of course I can’t. I can’t sell you on that at all. No well, how would you verify that? So why do you. So why do you think, Mary Magdalene had a vision of Jesus? If you don’t, as a historian, you look at independent sources, that claim something and it’s independently attested that Peter did and Mary did. And so I think that that’s completely plausible. There’s also you’re not but you’re never struck by these passages, just as a human being encountering another human being’s narrative and think to yourself that something like that happened. Well, I’m struck by the passages. They’re extremely powerful passages. But that doesn’t mean they happened. And so I think that one of the interesting things about the Resurrection, two things that people haven’t noticed. My first point is that the empty tomb in the New Testament never brings about faith. It always brings doubt Yeah and so it was never taken as the evidence. And I will say, if I encountered the empty tomb, it would not have turned me into. No, no, it’s a source of Yeah which is again, part of what is strikes me as quite realistic about the narratives that people don’t respond to the empty tomb by saying, now we will proclaim Christ risen Yeah, well, O.K. And fair enough. But that’s the other interesting thing, is that all the Resurrection narratives are filled with doubt. In the book of Acts, one of the strangest verses in the New Testament is Acts chapter 1, verse 3, where it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples, proving to them with many proofs that he was alive. And you think, how many proofs does he need. And yeah. And why does it take 40 days. But that is the interesting thing, is that in all of these accounts you have these doubt traditions. What are those doubt traditions about? Aren’t they about the fact that as you yourself said earlier, people do not normally rise from the dead? And so the normal human reaction is the doubting Thomas reaction to say, let me touch him. It would be. But if you’re sitting here in front of me, I’m not doubting you’re sitting here in front of me. Well, if your father, your late father, was sitting here in front of you, you would doubt that he was sitting there in front of you, that he wasn’t right. I thought he was right. So if he had spent 40 days with me, he wouldn’t have to be doing tricks to prove to me he was alive. And so my point is, I feel like if my father is still alive. I feel like if my father died an awful death crucifixion. And then he started appearing to me, it would take a long time before I was ready to believe that he was really there. You might think that but in fact, there are a lot of psychological studies of visions, especially of recently deceased loved ones. And virtually everybody who has it is sure it happened. But the claim, the claim that the early Christians make is precisely that this isn’t just a vision of a departed loved one. This is a world altering event that is going to inspire them to missionary work, and martyrdom, which most people who have a vision, a dream or whatever about their departed loved one don’t have. It just seems like your account of this as something that happens all the time. People somebody dies and people have visions and they decide that the vision was real. Just seems quite different from a situation where you have more radical claims and a lot of doubt about these radical claims all mixed together in a way that suddenly sets a new religion in motion. No, I can explain that. I mean, because we didn’t get to that part, but. So I know we’re almost at hour seven hours here. But let me just say that my point of saying that they thought Jesus was the Messiah before he died is the critical point, because when he got crucified, it showed he was not the Messiah. He was not the one who was going to destroy the enemies. But then they had these visions and they came to think he was alive again. So they thought, oh, we misunderstood. We thought he was going to destroy the Romans. God must have wanted him to die. The fact that God wanted him to die, shown in the fact that God raised him from the dead. He’s raised from the dead. His death is the way of salvation. Then Jesus must have had to die. God must have wanted him to die because he was the chosen one. How do we know he’s the chosen one. He got raised from the dead. Well, if God had his chosen one killed, why sacrifice for sins. That’s the beginning of Christianity. As soon as these people started realizing, oh my God, he’s raised from the dead, they thought that his death was a sacrifice that starts Christianity. So why is there the doubt? Tradition? Why is there all this material about the need for physical proof? And why isn’t why isn’t the collective. I’m saying, why isn’t the collective vision enough? Why do the Gospels lean so hard. One on this mystery? The tomb is empty. We can’t explain it Yeah. Two on describing these encounters with Jesus that are hard to figure out. You’re seeing him on the road to Emmaus. He’s eating fish. He’s here, he’s there. Like, why doesn’t the vision stuff clean things up. Especially again, given that in your account these are all being written later and smoothed out, because by the time when they’re being written later, we have records of Christians who think that Jesus wasn’t physically raised from the dead, but was spiritually raised from the dead. And Paul saying, no, no, no, it was a physical Resurrection. These accounts in Luke, and John, where Jesus is eating fish and touch my wounds and things. It’s meant to show that it actually was a physical Resurrection. So these authors are trying to show that this is not just some kind of spirit of Jesus going up to heaven or something. This is actually a physical Resurrection which fits into the Jewish apocalyptic view. But why are they including all of the doubt, including the doubt. Because it’s historical. There were apostles who doubted it. But you’re trying to sell an argument decades and decades after the fact. You want to prove that Jesus really was right. But why are the stories so strange? Why are they not straightforward? Jesus was raised, and then he taught us these things, and that’s it. Why do you’ve got all the empty tomb stories? You’ve got people not recognizing him and then recognizing him. You’ve he’s passing through walls. One moment he’s eating fish, the next right. Doesn’t that seem to reflect a fundamental initial strangeness in how people are experiencing it, rather than something that is constructed for propaganda purposes decades later. Propaganda wait, wait. You’re putting words in my lips. You’re saying. You’re saying that they had to emphasize. No, no. Physical reality to win an argument with the spiritual. The people who said it was spiritual. And I’m saying that it just seems like it’s all a weird mixture from the start. It is a weird mixture from the start. Look, if you see somebody that was publicly executed and then you see them alive, it’s going to be a weird experience. But my point about the proof, the eating the fish and things is that these people who are telling the stories about Jesus’ Resurrection to people who don’t believe and they’re saying, yes, you don’t believe. It doesn’t make sense. But I’m telling you, we saw him eat fish afterwards. So there was an empty tomb. These are proofs to convince those who are doubting. So you put doubt into the story to show that the doubts were resolved within the story. Let’s end by just going back. Going back to your book. And we started this conversation a long time ago, talking about the moral transformation that Jesus made and the idea that were supposed to love your enemies, love people who persecuted you, loved the stranger far away, who has nothing in common with you, all of these transformative ideas. You like those ideas. Yes, I do. Yes you do. If the Gospels ended with the crucifixion and Jesus’s death. You would have a story where someone came along and preached that it was important to love your enemies and important to care for the stranger and so on. And that person was crucified and died a horrible death. And that was the end of the story. And he talked about the meek inheriting the Earth and the last being first. And look where he ended up. Isn’t the power of the argument for Jesus’s ethics kind of inherently bound up in the idea that he won? Well, Christianity would not have become a thing if Jesus had died and there was no story of his Resurrection. It just would have been. He would have been another prophet who preached something and then got killed for it, and boom, that was it. So there wouldn’t be Christianity. But the power of the Christian message from the very beginning was the message that Paul has, which is that it seems a little bit ridiculous that God’s chosen one is crucified. And it seems a little bit ridiculous that the way to access ultimate divine power is by being a slave. And it’s. But it’s Jesus message. You have to serve others rather than dominate message. It’s so contrary to what’s in our DNA and what’s in every other culture. But because they thought it got raised from the dead, they thought it proved it. You have to be willing to die for others if you want to have life, if you want to have treasures in heaven, you have to sell everything you have now, completely contrary to what people would think. But it’s because of the Resurrection. Yes, absolutely. It’s the belief in the Resurrection that ends up making this the powerful message that transformed the West. And isn’t it also just to your own personal reasons for being an agnostic or a non-believer? Part of the power is also that it’s not a logical answer, but it’s at least a poetic answer to the problem of evil. The question of why God allows suffering is not resolved by God himself suffering, but it is at least addressed. It’s a powerful message that God. I mean, when I was still a liberal Christian, when I was a liberal Christian, I thought that the point of the gospel message was really that God had entered into the world and suffered with us. And that’s a very powerful message. I mean, it’s not one that I agree with anymore, but I can recognize it is a really powerful message, and that it’s so contrary to the way the world that has special poignancy to it. And here you are, so many years later, Sterling example of academic historical skepticism. And you’re writing a book trying to persuade people that Jesus’s message has something to it. Is it possible that you’re still in some sense a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. I sometimes call myself a Christian atheist. Because I don’t. I don’t believe in God. I absolutely don’t believe in God or any supernatural powers. But I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can. But although I’m not a very good follower of Jesus, I haven’t sold everything given to the poor, but I think that message is one that I want to embrace. O.K. Bart Ehrman, thank you for joining me. Thank you. And Happy Easter in advance. Happy Easter.
About The Author
