Making Sense with Sam Harris - #125 — What Is Christianity?

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Sam Harris speaks to Bart Ehrman about his experience of being a born-again Christian, his academic training in New Testament scholarship, his loss of faith, the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity, the status of miracles, the composition of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, the nature of heaven and hell, the book of Revelation, the End Times, self-contradictions in the Bible, the concept of a messiah, whether Jesus actually existed, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the conversion of Constantine, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Bart Ehrman. Bart is the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. He's a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,

and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He's been featured in Time and The New Yorker and The Washington Post and many other places. He's been on The Daily Show. He's been in many documentaries. And his most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity, and this details the history of how Christianity spread through the world. Bart, as you'll hear, is a former believer. He's now, I think he calls himself an agnostic at this point, though that didn't come up. But we had a great conversation. This was really the full tour of what Christianity is as a belief system and how it got that way. I wanted to come at it as though from Mars and consider the whole doctrine as though I had never heard of it before. We did that and it was fascinating. We talked about his background

as a born-again Christian and then his loss of faith once he became a true scholar of the New Testament. I asked him what the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity is. We talked about the status of miracles. We spent some time talking about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus and the nature of heaven and hell. We talk about the end times and biblical prophecy and about who Jesus likely was and who he thought he was. We focus on Paul as the most important apostle and then discuss how it was that he likely converted so many people to the faith. Anyway, I thought it was a very interesting conversation. Sometimes it's good to examine something that you're familiar with

as though you've never seen it before, and that's what we do here. I now bring you Bart Ehrman. I am here with Bart Ehrman. I am here with Bart Ehrman. Bart, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So you have a fascinating new book, The Triumph of Christianity, How Forbidden Religion Swept the World, which we will definitely talk about, I want to talk about, but it comes on the back of many books you've written about Christianity. And you have a very interesting story with respect to your own faith and scholarship. So I just want to start there, which is not really the subject of your current book. For those listeners who don't know you, take us back to some of the crucial moments

in your development as a thinker on this topic. What is your background religiously, and where did you wander on the landscape of faith and doubt? Yeah, I know I'm a bit of an odd duck in the field of New Testament and early Christian studies, because I'm a scholar of the New Testament. My PhD is in New Testament, but I'm actually not a Christian myself, and there aren't very many non-Christian scholars of the New Testament out there. I was raised Christian, though. I was raised in the—when I was a kid, I was in the Episcopal Church and grew up fairly religious. When I was in high school, I had a born-again experience, and I committed my life

to Christ. And that's how I got really interested in the Bibles, because I was religiously committed. Tell me more about that. What is a born-again experience? We're going to talk about Saul and the road to Damascus that made him Paul, but what was your experience? So I was a church-going Episcopalian, and I started in high school attending a youth group that was not connected with the church, but was a very religious youth group. It was called Campus Life Youth for Christ. And the leader of this group was a 20-something guy who was very charismatic in his personality, who insisted that the only way to be a real Christian was to ask Jesus into your heart and to commit your life to him as your Lord and Savior. And so I decided I had to become a Christian. It wasn't clear to me what I was before that,

because I went to church every week. But this was a sort of a personal commitment that somebody would make. And so being born again meant making this commitment. And then you were given a new life. Your old life was over, and now you began your life as a Christian. But was it merely a matter of deciding to do this? Did it entail some experience that seemed confirmatory of the belief structure? I mean, was there some evidence that came crashing down subjectively that seemed to verify the truth of the doctrine? Yeah, so the way it worked and still works in these circles, is that it involves saying a prayer and making a personal profession of God, of faith in Christ. And the confirmation is in a kind of feeling of elation,

where you have this kind of psychological moment of heightened emotion. And that is sort of the beginning confirmation that something's actually happened, you're a you're a different person now. And so as a 15 year old, having only been born 15 years earlier, I was born again. epistemology is hard to ignore because what sort of group induction experience as a teenager wouldn't produce a feeling of elation? I mean, you could imagine so many other things being swapped in for Christianity there. Did you worry about this at the time, or was it just, was the truth of the beliefs that you were taking on just kind of baked into you based on your background? Yeah, no, I didn't worry about it a bit for many years. I was convinced that I knew the truth and that if somebody wanted to have eternal life, they had to also know this truth.

And there was one truth, and it was rooted very much in an understanding of the Bible, that the Bible was the revelation from God, and one had to commit oneself to the truth of the Bible in order both to know God and to have eternal life. And anyone who didn't accept this message was destined to the fires of hell forever. So you would have called yourself an evangelical at that point? Does anyone call themselves a fundamentalist, or is that a word of opprobrium spoken by secularists who don't agree with them? Well, not just secularists. Fundamentalism tends to be the term used for the guy who's to the far right of you. And so even in Christian circles, you have a lot of Christians who talk about fundamentalists,

and what they mean by that often is somebody who's sort of rabidly conservative. But I'll say, I mean, when I went off to college, I went to a fundamentalist Bible college, and we were somewhat proud of the term fundamentalist because for us, it meant that we subscribe to the very fundamentals of the faith. And there were other Christians who were more liberal in their orientation who didn't accept even the very fundamentals. And so we considered ourselves to be fundamentalists in what we thought was a positive sense that we held to the essential elements of the Christian faith. Yeah. I mean, wasn't it originally a coinage of Moody Bible College?

No, I'm not sure where it originally started, but I think it actually started later than Moody started. Moody started in the late 19th century, and the term fundamentalist became a big deal in the 1920s when there was a split in several denominations over issues such as, you know, was there a literal virgin birth? Or is the Bible inerrant in all of its wording or not? With conservatives saying, yes, it's inerrant. And yes, there was a literal virgin birth. And other Christians saying, no, not so much. And so it divided into fundamentalists and liberals. Okay, so take me forward from there. So you're 15, you're now a fundamentalist

Christian. You believe presumably a whole raft of doctrines, and now you're becoming at some point more of a formal student of the faith. What did your academic background begin to look like? So in high school, I was very active on the high school debate team, and I was very involved in debate. And when I was graduating from high school, I had to decide whether I'd go on to Kansas University to be on the debate team or to go off to a Christian school and further my understanding of the Bible. And I ended up following the latter path. This 20-something fellow who was the head of this youth group had gone to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and told me that if I was going to be a serious Christian, I too would go to Moody Bible Institute. And so I did. I went to Moody Bible Institute, which was a three-year

degree program that focused on Bible and theology. And there, my classes, my initial post-high school education was taking classes. One semester, I'd have a class on the Gospel of John and another on the book of Hebrews and another on how to evangelize the pagans. And it was all Christian kind of stuff. And so I did that for three years. That always comes in handy. So did you start with the study of the relevant ancient languages at that point? No. When I was at Moody, I wanted to take all the Bible and theology classes I could. And even though I knew the importance of learning Greek for the New Testament, I didn't want to waste time doing that because

I just wanted to master the Bible as well as I could. And so I took all my classes on the English text. But you know, my first semester at Moody, I took a class on the Gospel of John, so the entire semester on this one book of the New Testament. And during this class, the guy who was teaching this class seemed really smart to me, he was really organized, and I thought, you know, this guy's getting paid to do that. I want to do that. And so already as a 17-year-old, I decided I wanted to become a New Testament scholar. So then you went to graduate school still full of faith? When did your study begin to erode your conviction in the truth of the doctrine? Right. So Moody was a three-year institution. And to get the bachelor's degree, you had to

transfer somewhere else to get credits. And so I transferred to, after Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham's alma mater. And for me, that was a step towards liberalism because they were not quite as fundamentalist as I was used to. And at Wheaton, I took a, for my foreign language requirement, I took Greek, ancient Greek. And it turned out I was pretty good at it. And so then I decided I wanted to do my graduate work dealing with the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, studying the New Testament in the original Greek language. And the world expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament was a man named Bruce Metzger,

who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so when I graduated from Wheaton with a degree in English, Seminary. And so when I graduated from Wheaton with a degree in English, I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to further my education in Greek manuscripts. And then did that take you through your PhD? So I did a master's degree there, a three-year master's degree, and then I applied and got into the PhD program. And so it was another four years getting my Ph.D. And in the process, my first year of my master's program, I took Hebrew so I could read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. And I learned German so I could read what scholars in Germany had said and French so I could read what scholars in France had said. And so I started getting involved in serious scholarship as opposed to simply memorizing the Bible or, you know, learning about the Bible.

I learned, I was actually studying it in the original language. And that was largely what led me away from fundamentalist Christianity. Well, so before we talk about the epiphanies you had that led you to doubt, or the various stages of doubt, take me back to before that moment. And at that time, if we had met you at your most educated with respect to the Bible, but also full of faith, at that point, what would the young Bart Ehrman have said is the most convincing argument in favor of Christianity? I would have said that historians can prove that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that there's no explanation for the evidence other than an actual resurrection, which means that

God must have raised Jesus and that that proved the historical reliability of the Christian claims. And what would you have said the evidence was, given that there's no doubt that most historians would balk at any challenge to prove the resurrection. So how would a historian go about doing that? So again, so this is back in my very conservative Christian days. I would have said that there are two basic historical facts that virtually everybody agrees on, and people need to explain these two facts. The two facts are that three days after Jesus was put in a tomb, the tomb was empty, and that some of his followers said they saw him alive again afterward, and that any explanation for those two facts has to explain both of them

satisfactorily. And then what I would do is I would go through various explanations for why there would be an empty tomb and why people would say they saw him alive afterward, including groups of people. And I would say that none of the naturalist explanations simply work for those phenomena. Well, so as a skeptic here, some explanations just come rushing in for me, as you might imagine. And so I'm just wondering why, and I guess I'm not speaking about you personally here, but just as a matter of culture, the culture of people like you who are very well versed in the Bible, who believe the central doctrines of Christianity, and anchor their belief to this claim. I mean, so here's the first thing that, as an atheist debater on this topic, would come to mind to say. I mean, obviously there's Hume's famous line about there being, you know, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it's, I think his word is endeavors, to establish. So again, translating that into

modern English, the testimony about the miracle, it would have to be an even greater miracle for that testimony to be false. And that bar is almost never cleared. I mean, like you can think of an uncountable number of modern situations where you have Western devotees of Indian gurus who believe that their teacher has performed a miracle. And the culture of confirmation bias and self-deception is just palpable when you talk to these people. I mean, you're surrounded by people who, even in a modern context where they have all of the resources of scientific skepticism at their disposal, and when they haven't been indoctrinated into these beliefs since birth, you can still find Ivy League educated people who are convinced of the veracity of various miracles really on the basis of hearsay. or logical test. And certainly, they're not meeting Hume's criterion here that the testimony of these people, the people who are delivering the hearsay, is somehow so rock solid that it would be

an even greater miracle that you'd have to admit if you were to suspect that it's false. How is it that you account for what seems, at least from the outside, to be such a disinclination to put these claims to some obvious skeptical tests? Right. I mean, I completely agree with your view on this now. And I have debates with people today, public debates with people who want to argue that resurrection really happened. And it's incredible to me that they continue to think that you can prove this. But as you know from your debates, people who are inside a particular tradition evaluate probability differently from people who are outside that tradition. And so the Christians,

who are outside that tradition. And so the Christians, people who, like me, were fundamentalists, what we would argue at the time was a couple things. One is that the disciples absolutely thought they saw Jesus raised from the dead. They talked with him. They ate with him. They spent time with him after his crucifixion. And the reason we know that they really did is because they all were willing to be martyred for this belief that he'd been raised, and that for us was evidence that it happened. But not only that, but we're not just talking about individual things where you could say that somebody had a dream or a hallucination. We have authors claiming that 500 people saw him at the same time. So it couldn't be a hallucination, we have authors claiming that 500 people saw him at the same time. So it couldn't be a hallucination because, I mean, you can't have a group hallucination with 500

people. So these are the kind of arguments we have. And these arguments made real sense to people who already believed in the resurrection because it just seemed plausible. And to outsiders, of course, it just seems kind of crazy. But to insiders, you know, for everything with the past, you're trying to evaluate what probably happened, and there's no reason it probably didn't happen. And so, well, okay, it seems like it probably did happen. Yeah, well, so the other issue here, which comes ready ready to hand is the time at which these various Gospels were composed. Perhaps you can remind me of the history here. None of these documents that are ostensibly reporting these eyewitness accounts of miracles were actually contemporaneous

with the miracles or with the ministry of Jesus. What is the earliest account we have of anything that Jesus is reported to have said or done? Right. So, yeah, so the basic dating is that Jesus died around the year 30 of the Common Era. Our earliest gospel is probably the Gospel of Mark, which was written around the year 70 of the Common Era, so it's 40 years later. This is a kind of contemporary view of critical scholars. Matthew and Luke would have been later than that, maybe 80 to 85 of the Common Era, John maybe 90 or 95. So we're talking 65 years later for the Gospel of John. And so when I was a fundamentalist Christian, though, I didn't accept those dates.

I thought that Matthew and John were written by people who were actually disciples of Jesus, and Mark and Luke were written by people who knew eyewitnesses. And moreover, I would point out at the time that even prior to the Gospels, the Apostle Paul was writing, and Paul wasn't one of Jesus' disciples, but Paul claims that he himself saw Jesus alive soon after his at one time. And so, you know, today, critical scholars would say, look, we don't have these accounts until decades later, which I think is right. But when I was a fundamentalist, I would try to kind of argue back closer to the time of Jesus that we actually have people who said they knew eyewitnesses. And is that standard among fundamentalists, however well-educated in the text, that they would not agree with the modern academic dating? That's right. So the deal with the modern academic dating is the Gospel of Mark seems to know that

the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans. That happened in the year 70, and so probably it's written sometime after the fact, but fundamentalist Christians would say, no, it's predicting it's going to happen. And so, you know, it could have happened, it happened well before, this gospel is well before that. And if you don't agree with that, it's because you have an anti-supernaturalist bias. Oh, interesting. So they get a kind of an added benefit there. They not only get the contemporaneous record, they get the truth of prophecy. That's right.

Interesting. It's good to focus on why all of this is important. There's a lot riding on this, because the resurrection of Jesus is really the core miracle that... I guess I should just ask you, what do you think, is there a standard conception of the minimal set of beliefs that makes a person a Christian? I understand that the fundamentalists would draw the line differently than others, but I'm just reminded of the line from, I think it's 1 Corinthians, from Paul, where he says, if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, which is to say completely ineffectual, in error. So there is no Christianity. On Paul's account, there is no Christianity unless the miracle of the resurrection is true. At least that's how I read that line. Is that the center

of the doctrine for most Christians or certainly anyone whose Christianity wouldn't have evaporated to a point where it really has no supernatural characteristic? Yeah, so the reality on the ground is that there is a bottom line for what one has to believe in order to be a Christian. And every Christian draws that bottom line in different places. And every Christian thinks that they're the only ones who have the right line. So yes, there are lots of Christians who would say, if you don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus, then you really aren't a Christian, whatever else you might say. And they would quote that line from Paul from 1 Corinthians 15 that you were quoting just now. I know lots and lots of Christians who don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus. They think that his body stayed in the grave, rotted in the grave, and that the resurrection

is more of a spiritual event or it's a metaphorical event, but they still consider themselves Christian. I mean, there are lots of very highly educated Christians who are sophisticated. The more evangelical Christians would say, well, you're not really a Christian. And the other Christians would say, well, actually, you know, you're not the one who's been given the right to define what a Christian is. And so there are these very large debates within Christianity itself about where the bottom line is. Yeah, and I must say, I have met very sophisticated people, very well-educated people, very successful people who are believing Christians. And when pressed on this point, I have been astonished to discover that they actually believe the literal story of resurrection. I mean, these are not people who I would have thought were Bible thumpers or fundamentalists of any sort. This is like the

last trench that has to be defended in the war against doubt. No, there certainly are a lot of people like that who are otherwise, I mean, who believe in evolution or believe in, I mean, they believe, you know, they believe in science. I mean, you know, they think the universe is 13.8 billion years old and whatever, but they would draw the line at a literal resurrection. And there are a lot of other people, not as many, but there are sophisticated Christian thinkers who say, no, that it's not a literal resurrection, and that, in fact, the earliest Christians didn't believe in a literal resurrection,

that that was a later imposition on the faith. Let's talk about a few other doctrinal claims that may or may not be central. So, what is the place of heaven and hell, would you say, in Christianity generally and your version when you were a believer in particular? Yeah, so this is something I'm very interested in because it's what my next book is on. It's where the issue of heaven and hell came from. Because the standard Christian belief is that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven or hell, goes for eternal reward or eternal punishment. And that teaching's not in the Old Testament, and it's not what the historical Jesus thought.

And so where'd it come from? And so that's what my next book is. And so that's what my next book is. When I was a fundamentalist Christian, I was a fervent believer in a literal heaven and a literal hell. And I believed that hell was a place of eternal torment, that it would never end with no possibility of escape. And it was the destination of the vast majority of the human race. Fancy that. And it was the destination of the vast majority of the human race. So, you know, the kind of arrogance, you know, involved with that kind of claim, you know, that I'm going to be rewarded forever. But my next door neighbor, well, poor sap, he's going to hell forever. That's the arrogance of it.

I don't think it actually struck me at the time. And were you actually psychologically affected by it? I mean, presumably you knew people who you recognized to be good people, who you had nice connections with, but who you were sure were going to spend eternity in fire. Was that belief deep enough so as to cause you any feeling of psychological pain or compassion? How did you feel interacting with people who you knew were destined to be tortured for eternity? Yeah, no, it absolutely did have an effect. And where it was practically manifest was in my desire to convert people

because I believed that goodness had nothing to do with it. It didn't matter whether you were a good person or a rotten person. If you didn't believe in Christ for your salvation, you were destined for hell. And so this is what drove my attempt to try and convert people, just as in early Christianity, it was this belief that drove the evangelism of the early church. So it's always been this kind of motivation for Christians that, you know, if you really love somebody and you know they're going to hell, you need to sort of crack the whip and make them convert. There certainly are scriptural justifications for that belief. Now we're up against the limits of my Bible scholarship, but I seem to remember many passages

where it's suggested either directly in the words of Jesus himself or at least by one of the Gospel writers that there is no path to the Father but through the Son, right? That's right. That's the emphatic teaching of the Gospel of John, and that everybody who doesn't believe in Christ is going to be condemned. But in the Gospels, it's not clear that this is eternal torment in a particular place. The idea of eternal torment comes more clearly in the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, clearly in the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, where those who are opposed to God are thrown into a lake of fire, and they burn in this lake of fire forever. I seem to remember that Jesus is presiding over that lake of fire.

Well, so, yeah, it's very—it's actually—part of the intrigue of the book of Revelation is how intricate the scenario is, which is, I think, one of the reasons people have been so drawn to it over the years, because it isn't just kind of a straightforward statement. It's actually this graphic narrative portrayal and trying to piece it all together, because you've got Christ, and you've got God, and you've got the angels, and you've got the Antichrist and the prophet of the Antichrist, and so you have this entire scenario going on. But yeah, Christ and his followers are given an eternal reward in the new Jerusalem, and all those opposed to Christ are sent to the lake of fire. So if one were going to read the Bible, both Old and New Testament, straight through and form on the assumption that everything there is true and inerrant and that it's sort of on the reader to resolve any apparent contradictions. What rational understanding and expectation of the afterlife would one form. And so this is now a picture of the end times and one's personal end after death

and I guess after the resurrection. And this is now sort of uncontaminated by the rest of the literature that has grown up on this. So let's leave Dante and Milton and everything else that has come since aside. What do heaven and hell look like and what does the end of the world look like? Yeah, so it really depends on what the assumptions of the reader are. If you're a reader who knows nothing about Milton or Dante or anyone, is just coming

to — but is intelligent but tries to reconcile everything, what that person would argue probably is in a view of progressive revelation, where the ideas that are most true develop over time, and some of the earlier authors don't recognize the truth, the full truth. They only have partial revelation. truths, the full truth. They only have partial revelation. And in that understanding of things, the idea in the Sheol of the Old Testament where everybody goes to this kind of nether world and they stay in this nether world forever, that gets modified over time until you get into the Gospels where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished, but it looks like they're punished by annihilation. That develops yet further when you get to the book of Revelation, when you find out that, in fact, people are not annihilated, they're tortured forever. And so the idea then

would be that it's all consistent, but only in the sense that there was a progressive revelation, and this reader of the Bible, this hypothetical reader of the Bible then, basically agrees with the final book that there's eternal torment or eternal reward. Islam has a similar concept of abrogation, where later verses abrogate earlier verses, and as luck would have it, the more violent verses tend to abrogate the more peaceful ones to the benefit of all humanity. So that is viewed in the Christian tradition, that progressive revelation, not as any sort of data point against this notion of inerrancy. You can still be inerrant even while various gospel writers or their predecessors are laboring under incomplete knowledge of God's plan? Yeah, it's because of the view of inerrancy that this view developed,

because you have to reconcile these things. And so what a critical scholar would look at and say, well, you know, this is just inconsistent. One author has one view and another has another view, and they can't be lined up to it. then the way to get around that is by saying, yeah, it's progressive revelation. So then what would heaven look like to someone who has gone through this whole progression and come out with some kind of final expectation? What is the picture of the afterlife if you go to the good place? So this is the interesting point, is that if you're just sticking with the Bible, you don't have the idea that you die and your soul goes to heaven forever. It's that at the end of time, bodies are going to be raised from the dead,

and that there'll be a final judgment on the earth, and God will destroy the forces of evil, and he will send everybody who is opposed to him into eternal punishment, but he will raise from the dead all of his righteous, and they'll live here on earth forever in a utopian kingdom. And so the earth will be returned to the state that it was in during the days of Adam and Eve, and it'll be a perfect paradise forever. So it is a terrestrial paradise that presumably now functions by a slightly tweaked laws of physics so that it can last forever here, but it's not somewhere else, and it's not in some ethereal condition. That's right. And in this view, the tweaking actually happened with Adam and Eve,

that originally this world was created as a paradise, and because of their sin, it got corrupted. And so God is going to reverse the sin that was brought into the world by Adam and Eve and bring it back to its original state, which is supposed to be a place of eternal bliss. I must say I'm rarely in conversations with Christians about these sorts of things, but this is certainly not a scientific poll, but I am certainly walking around with the feeling that most Christians are believing in a very different heaven. I think when someone dies close to them who they think is still in the faith and destined for heaven, they're not picturing that person moldering in the ground for thousands of years or however long it takes for Jesus to come back and usher in the end of the world. They're picturing that person's soul more or less moving directly from the hospital bed or wherever they were when they died into some ethereal condition, which is the afterlife,

and it is eternal, and it's in the company of God or Jesus or some circumstance that's just a matter of pure satisfaction and well-being. Two questions. Am I wrong about that? Isn't that what many, if not most, Christians believe? And if so, what are the scriptural antecedents for that belief? You're right, that is the belief, and that's one of the reasons I'm writing this next book, about where these Christian ideas of the afterlife came from, because most of the Bible doesn't teach them. You can get to that view from a few passages, sort of random and isolated passages, passages, sort of random and isolated passages, which don't actually say quite that about this ethereal afterlife for souls. But you do get a couple passages in the writings of Paul where he

seems to think that, yes, there is going to be this resurrection of bodies at the end of time. But in the meantime, when people die, they've got this immediate presence with Christ in heaven. when people die, they've got this immediate presence with Christ in heaven. And I think that that idea that you have this immediate presence with Christ at your death gets transformed into this idea of an ethereal existence. The thing is that most Christians who have this idea of this kind of existence of your soul but not your body have conflicted views, because they also think that when they get to heaven, they'll be able to see their grandmother and talk with her. Well, I mean, if she doesn't have a body, what are you going to see exactly?

And how are you going to recognize her? And, you know, so they have to come up with kind of weird explanations for how, in fact, it's your soul, but the soul has the physical appearance of your body. And even though you don't actually have eyes anymore, you can still see, and you can still hear, and so forth. And how old is your grandmother? Is she restored to her the prime age of 30, or is she still granny in that condition? Well, that's right. And if you've had an infant child who's died, is the child still an infant? Or, you know, do they, what are they in heaven?

And so you actually, you have Christians who seriously debate these issues and actually write books trying to explain what it's really going to be like. I recall St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with some of this stuff. You have Christians debating all sorts of issues relating this all the way back into the second Christian century. I mean, you have Christians asking, you know, if the body's raised from the

dead at the end of time, and so all of the parts of your body are brought together, what happens if you were eaten by a cannibal so that part of your body became part of the cannibal's body? So when the parts are raised from the dead, who gets the parts? You or a cannibal. So that part of your body became part of the cannibal's body. So when the parts are raised from the dead, who gets the parts? You or the cannibal. And so you have people debating this kind of thing all the way back. It's tempting to picture a very different history where the doctrine of Christianity was fatally confounded by one cannibal. Yes, right, right. So then what is the picture of hell that one can rationally form

on the basis of Scripture? So most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament there isn't a hell, a place of torment. There's this place called Sheol, which is a shadowy existence where everybody goes, good or wicked, believers or non-believers, and it's just, you kind of, you exist there and not much happens forever. When you get to the teachings of Jesus, Jesus thought that there'd be a resurrection of the dead at the end of time, and he appears to have thought that those who were opposed to God were not going to be tormented forever, they were going to be annihilated. Unlike the righteous, the righteous will be given an eternal reward, but God will punish the wicked by destroying them.

And the Apostle Paul never says anything about hell as a place of eternal torment. It's not really until you get to the book of Revelation that you start getting this eternal torment idea of, you know, of having this lake of fire. Is it Revelation that also gives us the notion of the rapture? Or is that prefigured somewhere else? Is that an Old Testament prophecy that then Revelation connects the dots on? Well, this is an interesting point that even most Christians don't know. The book of Revelation does describe what's going to happen at the end of time, but it does not have a doctrine of the rapture. There's no rapture in the book of Revelation. The idea of a rapture actually comes from the Apostle Paul. In the book

of 1 Thessalonians, Paul is talking about what's going to happen at the end when there'll be a resurrection of the dead, and he says that Jesus is coming back from heaven, and those who have died in Christ are raised from the dead, and those who are living at the time will be taken up with them into the sky, and they'll meet Jesus there up in the air. So it actually comes from Paul's letters rather than from the book of Revelation. Right. So now, did you believe in the rapture when you were at this point, at the peak of your faith? I not only believed in it, I knew it was going to happen before the late 1980s, literally. Wow. So then had you lost your faith by the time the late 80s came around, or was that one of the reasons why you lost it? Well, I'd certainly lost my faith

in the rapture by that time. My loss of faith was kind of a long-term process, and the rapture was one of the first things to go. So what was the first doubt that was truly insuperable? Did it move in discernible increments where you crossed some kind of bright line and couldn't get yourself back to feeling the faith you had felt the day before? Yeah, there were a number of lines, but the sort of first moment was when I realized that the Bible was not inerrant. My first year at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was taking a course on the Gospel of Mark, which was based on an interpretation of the Greek text. And so I knew Greek by this time,

and we had to translate the entire Gospel of Mark, and we did an interpretation of every verse. It was very deep and detailed. And I had to write a term paper, and I wrote a paper on a passage in Mark where Jesus is talking about a story in the Old Testament that happens, and he says that this account happened when Abiathar was the high priest. This is in Mark chapter 2. When you read the Old Testament account, actually, the account that he's summarizing didn't take place when Abiathar was the high priest. It happened when his father Ahimelech was the high priest. So I write this 30-page paper arguing that even though Jesus said that Abiathar was the high priest, it didn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest. He knew that Ahimelech was the

high priest. So I write this long paper, and the professor reads the paper. He likes the paper. It gives me an A because I had this complicated grammatical argument. But at the end of it, he said, maybe Mark just made a mistake. I thought, huh, that'd be easier than 30 pages of dancing around the problem and coming up with this fancy grammatical thing. You know, in fact, yeah, maybe Mark just made a mistake. And once I recognized that there could be a mistake, it opened up the floodgates. And I started finding mistakes without wanting to, and then I started wanting to, and then I started finding them all over the place. There are mistakes with respect to facts we know outside the text of the Bible, but

there are contradictions within the Bible that are, any way you squint your eyes, they are contradictions. I remember there was an old book, I think it's probably 150 years old, I remember I have somewhere in the house, which I referenced in my first book, The End of Faith. I think the title is Self-Contradictions in the Bible. And some of these are just, you know, it's just that the coin came up heads or the coin came up tails. You can't believe both. I think one was John the Baptist was in prison at the time of the crucifixion, or John the Baptist was somewhere else at the time of the crucifixion.

How did you deal with those? Well, the intellectual task of fundamentalists involves reconciling differences. And if you work hard enough at it, you can reconcile just about anything. And so, you know, this was like solving a puzzle. You assume that there are no errors. And if that's your assumption, well, then there are no errors. And the task is to find out why this is not a contradiction. And so today, I mean, when I talk with fundamentalist Christians and try and point out, you know, the Gospel of John says Jesus died the day before the Passover, and the Gospel of Mark says he died the day after the Passover, and they both can't be right. Well, they have a way of reconciling it. So that's what you do. So what is the hardest thing to reconcile?

If you were going to point out one thing that you think stood the best chance of toppling the whole house of cards, what is that thing? Well, the example I just gave is the one that I use if I want to convince—you know, if I've got one example. if I want to convince, you know, if I've got one example, I walk them through what happens in John's Gospel, because John explicitly dates the day of Jesus' death as the day before. He explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on. And the Gospel of Mark also explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on, and they just flat out contradict each other. And so when you take somebody actually through the text and show this to them, then that does it. What I do with my students is I do a number of things with them to get them to see how there are different views in the Bible, but one thing I do is I have them compare either the

accounts of Jesus' birth in Matthew and Luke or the accounts of his resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I simply say, look, list everything that happens in this gospel, then list everything that happens in that gospel, and compare your two lists and see if there's anything that is impossible to reconcile. And in both cases, there are things you simply cannot reconcile because they just contradict each other. Actually, I think we should go back to the time at which these texts were written, you know, based on modern scholarship for a moment. Because if you accept that there was a significant delay in the composition of even the earliest Gospels. So if Mark was 40 years after the death of Jesus, and that's the earliest text, just map that on to our present conversation. It's as though you and I were now talking about,

without the aid of any media, without the aid of any real written materials or anything. It's as though you and I are in a world now where we could talk about some historical figure who had a great influence a generation and a half ago. We're talking about JFK or Martin Luther King Jr. or somebody who we never met. We may not have met anyone who met that person. This person has, there's a kind of a residue of their life's work in the world based on almost entirely verbal accounts. Because again, we don't have the internet. We don't have widespread literacy and contemporaneous records. We just have rumors of rumors. And now you and I are going to put pen to paper or papyrus and write an account of exactly what happened in the last years and

weeks and days of this person's life. That's the picture, at least eye form, of what this would look like. And the idea that that kind of effort, absent some direct line to an omniscient being who's just simply telling you what happened, that seems like an all-too-human enterprise that, if nothing else, will introduce a fair amount of error and creative license and whimsy into the process. Thank you. you