Making Sense with Sam Harris - #313 — Apocalypse

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Bart D. Ehrman about the prophecies contained in the book of Revelation. They discuss his latest book, "Armageddon," and widespread Christian beliefs about the coming end of the world. 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, just a brief housekeeping here. I just received an update from a former podcast guest. Meg Smaker was my guest for episode 300, where we discussed her cancellation. guest for episode 300, where we discussed her cancellation. She's a documentarian who made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab. It's now The Unredacted. And if you recall, her film was

accepted to the Sundance Film Festival and others, and then she was promptly canceled for having the temerity to make a film on this topic while being of the wrong racial and religious identity. And anyone who heard that episode understands that she was absolutely the wrong target of this kind of activist hysteria, having lived for years in Yemen and having produced an entirely compassionate and balanced film. Anyway, the response to that podcast was overwhelmingly positive, and she had a GoFundMe campaign to help her release the film, which I think only had a few thousand dollars in it before we recorded our interview. And after you guys heard from Meg, very quickly she raised over three quarters of a million dollars. So

needless to say, that was a tremendous help to her. And she's now releasing the film herself, and their upcoming theater dates for the month of April in New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Austin, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and perhaps other cities are being added here. Anyway, the information can all be found at jihadrehab.com. Today I'm speaking with Bart Ehrman. Bart is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, and a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of six New York Times bestsellers,

and has written and edited more than 30 books, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, Heaven and Hell, and most, Armageddon, which is the focus of today's conversation. The topic today is really the end of the world as viewed through the book of Revelation, and more importantly, what Christians, especially in the United States, believe about prophecy and the consequences of that belief. It's always great to talk to Bart. I don't tend to focus on religion much these days, and it's always amazing to be reminded of what people specifically believe on this front. It really is quite extraordinary and unfortunately still all too consequential. And now I bring you Bart Ehrman.

I am here with Bart Ehrman. Bart, thanks for joining me again. Ah, thanks for having me. So you have written a new book titled Armageddon, which, I mean, I guess all the products of biblical prophecy are attention-getting, but the concept of Armageddon sits close to the heart of, I would imagine, all evangelical Christians. I want to track through your book because it's a discussion of Revelation, the book of Revelation, which I've read before. I can't say I committed much of its sequence to memory, but I want you to tell us what is in there, and we'll talk about its implications for Christian belief, particularly in the U.S., and also the future of our world. But before we do,

you've been on the podcast before, and we spoke about many issues related to what we're going to touch on today, but can you remind people of your background? Because it's pretty relevant to understanding how you come at these topics. Yeah, well, it is. So when I was in—I was raised in kind of a nominally Christian household, but we weren't nominal. We went to church. But when I was 15, I had a born-again experience and became a very committed evangelical. And after high school, instead of doing something

kind of normal, like go to university, I went to Moody Bible Institute, which was a bastion of fundamentalism. And the relevance to this is that I believed that every word in the Bible was inspired by God, and the book of Revelation we took as a prediction of what was soon going to happen in our lifetimes. And so that's how I started out, as a firm believer in the Bible. I ended up going to Wheaton to finish my degree and did a degree in English, and then I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary. And when I was there, I was still studying the Bible. It was a seminary, it's a Presbyterian seminary, but it tended to be more liberal in its orientation. And the professors there, by and large, didn't think that the Bible was infallible or inerrant.

They thought that there are mistakes in the Bible and contradictions, and it took me a long time to get my head around that, because I just didn't believe it at first. But then eventually, as I started reading the New Testament more in the original Greek, and I started reading the Old Testament in Hebrew, I started realizing there really are problems here. And so I gave up my view of the inerrancy of the Bible. And so I gave up my view of the inerrancy of the Bible. I remained a liberal Christian for a long time, but in the midst of giving up the idea of inerrancy, I gave up the idea that the book of Revelation is not a literal description of the future, but a kind of a book of hope that those who are being oppressed for being righteous now

will be rewarded later. Not that it's a literal description of what will happen, but it's an apocalyptic sense that at the end, God's going to make right everything that's wrong. And so it's supposed to be a book of hope. And so that's what I held for a long time until about five years ago. I really started studying Revelation and I thought, you know, both of those views, they're both wrong. It's absolutely not talking about our future the way almost everybody thinks it is, but it's also not really a book of hope.

It's a violent, wrathful book about getting revenge. And so I've completely changed my view about it. Yeah, if memory serves, Jesus comes back and he's not in a good mood and he's really not one for turning the other cheek. No. He's introduced as the lamb that was slain. So he's introduced as the lamb that was slain, and that makes you think, starting off, that, well, so this will be a book about how Jesus suffered violence from others, and it'll be a book supporting that approach to nonviolence. But it doesn't take long before you realize that this lamb who was slain is coming back for vengeance. He's out for blood, and that's what he gets.

So let's define a few terms before we get into the book itself, because I realize I think I'm using one of these common terms inaccurately. The term apocalypse, which I gather is just a synonym for revelation, has come to mean, in I think common parlance, it's more or less synonymous with a calamity and a point of no return. It's like the apocalypse is the end of the world. And this is just a confusion based on the fact that that's what is being described in Revelation. Yeah, more or less. You're right. I mean, the word apocalypse, it's a Greek word, apocalypsis, and it means something like an unveiling or a revealing. The Latin equivalent is revelation, revelatio. And so in Latin, it'd be revelation, and in Greek, it'd be apocalypse. And I think what happened was that this term apocalypse came to be

applied to an entire literary genre from the ancient world, which people don't write in this genre anymore. But in these apocalypses, Jewish and Christian apocalypses, they often talked about the crises that were coming and about how in the end it would be okay, but for now it's just going to be hell on earth. And so the apocalypse came to refer to this period of hell on earth before it was resolved. And it's because that's what these apocalyptas discuss, and so that's how the term then shifted to mean the end. Right, but do you think that's an appropriate usage now, or is that a corruption of the term that we should avoid? Because, for instance, I don't know. No, no, I think it's fine. I think the term has morphed into that. Okay.

You know, just like a lot of terms mean a variety of things in different contexts, this term, usually when we say the apocalypse is coming, you know, that's what we mean. Right, right. when we say the apocalypse is coming, you know, that's what we mean. Right, right. Then I will not issue any retractions over phrases like a misinformation apocalypse that I was worrying about with social media. What about the term Armageddon? Armageddon is a term made up by the author of Revelation. It is based on a couple of Hebrew words. It's referring to the valley outside of Megiddo. Megiddo, so Armageddon, Megiddo. Megiddo is a town in Israel that you can still visit.

Anybody who visits Israel could see it. And it's a place outside of this town, this city, there was a place where a lot of major battles happened in the Old Testament. And Armageddon in the book of Revelation is the place where the final battle will take place, where the armies of the enemies of God are gathered together, and Christ comes from heaven with the heavenly armies to do battle. And it's no battle. Christ wipes them all out,

quite simply. So it's the site of the final battle, and so that too has come to mean something like the ultimate end of the world. Well, let's talk about Revelation and what we know about it as a book and the history of its inclusion or not in the canon. What do we know about John of Patmos who supposedly authored it? Well, I think the person that we call John of Patmos really did author it. One of the things about these apocalypses, this ancient genre, is that usually they're written pseudonymously. Normally, the person claims to be some famous person from the past. And so we have an apocalypse of Abraham, the father of the Jews, or an apocalypse of Enoch, this man who never died. Or we even have an apocalypse of

Adam, as in Adam and Eve, who wrote an apocalypse. And the reason they pick these ancient spiritual figures is because these books contain revelations of the secrets, the divine secrets, that are going to make sense of the chaos that's happening down here on Earth. And who better to be given a revelation than one of these people? So the apocalypse of John is somewhat unusual because the person tells us his name, his name's John, but he doesn't tell us which John he is. John was a common name in Judaism at the time, and this person appears to be someone known to his audience. He does not claim to be the disciple John, John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus' disciples. The book ended up being included in the New Testament because people ended up thinking

that it was that John, but already in early Christianity, some of the scholars realized, yeah, it's not the same person who wrote the Gospel of John, for example. So all we know about this John of Patmos is what we find in the book, which is that he appears to be writing from the island of Patmos, which is off the west coast of what's now Turkey. And he says he's there for the Word of God, and that's usually taken to mean that he's been exiled, he's being persecuted, has been exiled for his Christian activities, but he doesn't actually say that. And so it's not completely clear why he's on Patmos, but it has something to do with his Christian ministry. And one thing that struck me in your book was the claim that the Greek

in the book isn't very good, right? And this put me in mind of something Nietzsche wrote. I forget where this aphorism occurs, but he said it was clever of God to learn Greek when he wanted to become an author and not to learn it better. And I always took that as just Nietzsche being snide, but you say that the Greek text actually is kind of substandard Greek. Yeah. So Nietzsche, as you know, started out teaching classics. And so he was actually, he was very, very good at Greek. And the Greek of the entire New Testament was often lambasted in the ancient world by ancient literary elite as being really kind of second rate.

And most of the New Testament is second rate by high literary standards, but the book of Revelation is far beyond that. It's bad. The last time I taught, I've got an adjunct appointment in the classics department here at UNC, and a few years ago, I was teaching an advanced undergraduate class on the New Testament Greek, and one of the assignments I gave them is I had them read chapter one of Revelation and to list all of the grammatical mistakes. Not just bad Greek, you know, not just like not very good, but actually bad, mistaken Greek. This author just doesn't write well. And the theory that most people have for that is that his native language was maybe Aramaic or some kind of Semitic language, and that Greek is

his second language, and so he's not as good at it. That's what I used to teach too. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized it's not that he's showing that he normally could speak a Semitic language. It's that he just doesn't write very well. And that's not weird. Most people don't write very well. So you shouldn't expect that just because somebody can write Greek, it means they're going to be able to write well. And I think he's just somebody who's not a good writer. Well, so what have fundamentalists done with this inconvenient detail that this text that is supposedly inerrant and directly inspired by the creator of the universe shows in the language of its original composition less than perfect mastery of the language? mastery of the language. It's really quite interesting. There are biblical scholars, not just fundamentalists, but others too, who have explanations for this. One explanation that gets floated around is that this author actually could write very good Greek, and they point to

some passages where the Greek's pretty good. And so they say, well, if he could write Greek well, then it must mean that he's choosing not to. And so one theory is that this author, because he's giving such a countercultural message, that he's writing it in street lingo, that he's trying to sound kind of countercultural. It's an interesting idea. I actually considered it for a while, but it just isn't true. We know nothing about Greek street lingo to begin with, so there's no way to establish that this is what it would look like. But apart from that, even some of my not-best students can sometimes construct good sentences. It doesn't mean they always can. And so I don't think there's much of an explanation, but they usually just say

something like, you know, God's giving him the absolute right idea, so the words are right, even if the grammar's wrong. Okay. You can imagine how that lands with an atheist over here. Yeah, well, I'm an atheist too. It doesn't land well with me either. Okay, so let's talk about how the world ends according to this text. I don't know in what sort of detail you want to track through it, but just give us the story of Jesus's return as described in Revelation. Yeah, so the book describes itself as a book about the wrath of God and the Lamb, the Lamb being Jesus. The way it works is really not that complicated. I mean, the reality is most people avoid the book of Revelation,

except for the people who want to see what's going to be happening next year sometime, the people who are fundamentalists who are interpreting it in order to show what's going to happen in our near future. Most other people just avoid it because it just seems so weird and bizarre. And my experience is that most students or most others are afraid of it because it's so weird. But in fact, it's not hard to follow if you're just given the roadmap. Remind me, when was it included in the Bible? Well, that's hard to say because the Bible was never, there was never a vote or anything about which books would be in. It was widely debated for the first several centuries,

and it wasn't until the fourth century that the majority of church leaders started agreeing that it was canonical scripture. So it was floating around, and it was highly controversial, not for reasons that we would think of today. Today, the reasons we find it controversial is because of all the blood and violence, but that wasn't so much the problem. The way it works here is that John is given a vision of the heavenly realm. This is typical in ancient apocalypses. The prophet is taken up into heaven to see how the realities up there make sense of what's happening down here. In chapter 4, John goes up, and he goes into the throne room of God, and God is holding—God's on the throne, he sees God on the throne, holding a scroll that has seven seals on it. So it's this writing that's been sealed with seven seals.

And the scroll is taken by the Lamb, the Christ image, and Christ starts breaking the seals. And every time he breaks one of the seals, a catastrophe hits the earth, usually a very nasty catastrophe. When he breaks the seventh seal, then there's an introduction to seven angels who each has a trumpet, and they blow their trumpets. And with the blowing of each trumpet, more disasters happen. And when the seventh angel blows the seventh trumpet, we're introduced to seven angels who have bowls on their shoulders of God's wrath, and they pour God's wrath out on the earth. So by this time, you've had a threefold series of seven disasters each, and after that, even God's had enough, and he arranges for the Battle of Armageddon,

where his chief enemy, called the Beast, which is the Antichrist figure, marshals his armies. Christ comes forth from heaven with his armies, slaughters the beast and the armies of earth, and then that introduces a thousand-year rule of Christ here on earth, just with the martyrs of Jesus, following which there's a final judgment. Everybody who's ever lived is raised from the dead and faces judgment. Those who are on God's side are rewarded. Those who are opposed to God are thrown into a lake of burning sulfur, and they don't live there forever. They're not being tormented forever. They're destroyed there. That's how he kills everybody on earth, which is 99% of the population that's ever lived. And then the saints are given a new heaven and a new earth.

A Jerusalem descends from heaven, a new Jerusalem that is 1,500 miles cube, and it's solid gold with gates of pearl, and they live there happily ever after. Well, it's all so reasonable, it's hard to know where to start to doubt it. So let's define a few more terms that will be familiar to people, many of whom who have not even opened this part of the Bible because they've just been received into the common conception of American Christianity in particular. Where does the rapture come into this picture? Ah, yes. This is what I start with in my book, because when I was a fundamentalist Christian, I believed that the rapture was going to be coming soon. The rapture is the doctrine that is found in conservative evangelical and

fundamentalist circles that says that Jesus is coming back from heaven to take his followers out of the world before all these disasters hit. And so the idea is that surely, you know, the true followers of Jesus aren't going to have to experience this. And so Jesus takes them out. The word rapture comes from a Latin word, which means to be snatched up. And so the idea is that Jesus returns, snaps up all the Christians up to heaven, and then all hell breaks out on earth. And this period of chaos and suffering that the good Christians will be able to avoid by being raptured is called the tribulation? In evangelical fundamentalist circles, yes. It's called the tribulation, and in those circles, it's to last for seven years.

And so it's a seven-year tribulation. When I was a student in the 1970s, we thought the rapture was coming soon, and there was all this talk about how we didn't want to be left behind, because that would be a very bad thing. 1972, very bad, low-budget movie. But it was about the rapture having happened, and the people who were left behind are controlled by the Antichrist, including the liberal Christians who didn't believe in the rapture. And so this scared the daylights out of all of us. And so that ended up developing in the 1990s with this series, the Left Behind series, that was written by Tim LaHaye and Philip Jenkins, that by the time Timothy LaHaye died in whatever it was a few years ago, there had been 80 million copies of this thing sold. And there's been very interesting research on it showing that most people who read it simply assumed it's what the Bible says.

on it showing that most people who read it simply assumed it's what the Bible says. And so, which returns me to your question, where is all of this in the book of Revelation? And the startling answer is, it's not in Revelation at all. There is nothing about the rapture in the book of Revelation. The rapture had never been conceptualized until the 1830s. So throughout the entire history of Christianity until the 1830s, nobody had ever thought of the rapture. But it came into existence then and took over evangelical Christianity first in England and then here in America. So on what basis did that doctrine appear? It's a little bit complicated, but there's a man named John Henry Darby who founded this

small group of, it's kind of like a denomination, a small denomination called the Plymouth Brethren. And it was in the 1830s, about 1830, he started this group. And they were very hardcore Bible believers, and he thought that when you read the Bible carefully, you can see that the Bible is set up to show that God deals with the human race differently at different periods of time. And so when he deals with Adam and Eve, he just tells them, don't eat the fruit off of this tree, and that's it. They do eat the fruit, and so that

messes everything up. And so later he sends a flood, because there's sin all through the world, he needs to destroy the world. And then he tells Noah that he needs to institute government. And so he tells Noah, if anybody kills someone else, it's the death penalty. And so that goes along, the idea of conscience and government go on for a while until Abraham comes, and then he gives Abraham a promise that there's going to be, that his descendants will be the people of God. And so at every point, things are changing depending on what God does at the moment. He gives Moses the law, finally, and then people are under the law until Jesus comes, and Jesus saves them from the law.

And so there are these periods of time that God deals with people differently depending on the moment. And so there are seven of these periods, and they're called dispensations. And so there are seven of these periods, and they're called dispensations. And at the end of the sixth dispensation, at the end of the Christian period, God sends Jesus to take everyone out. There's this hell on earth, and then there's the millennium, a thousand-year rule of Christ. And so what Darby wanted to argue is that God is certainly not going to have his righteous people suffer through this tribulation before the millennium, so he takes them out of the

world. So he came up with this thing. He called it the secret rapture because he said, the Bible says no one knows when it will happen, so it's a secret when it will happen, so it's the secret rapture. And then that ended up becoming a popular view over a long period of time. And there's this distinction between premillennialism and postmillennialism, which offer a very different picture of the end times. How is there debate about which is true here?

Isn't there just a clear description as to the sequence in here? I mean, you might want to define what the difference is. Yeah. Well, weirdly, you know, part of my book is trying to show how all of these things actually are closely connected with social and political realities in the modern world. And one of the very strange things is that this kind of thinking actually started with the French Revolution. When the French Revolution hit, theologians in England were very, very upset and thought,

this is surely an indication that the end is almost here. This started the modern idea that the Bible is predicting the imminent end. For most of history, not just the book of Revelation, but the entire Bible was not interpreted as a prediction of our future. But with the craziness of the French Revolution, the chaos and the slaughter, theologians started saying, look, this is what was predicted. That view came over to America, and especially in America, there was a much more positive outlook on the future. Technology was developing, sciences were developing, the Enlightenment was hitting America, and there were theologians like Jonathan Edwards, who's most famous for his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, but he was actually a real intellectual. He was trained in philosophy and in science, and he went to Yale when he was something like, I don't know, 13. He was a really smart guy. And he developed the idea that the way we are improving here on Earth, and especially in America, we are moving toward

the kingdom of God. We are going to be implementing the kingdom of God, that this was God's plan all along, that America would introduce the world into a period of peace and prosperity, and that that would be the millennium that the Bible is talking about. It's not a literal thousand-year reign of Christ. It's the glories we're going to be bringing in by our advances. In that understanding of things, Jesus was going to come back, but he would come back after the millennium in order to bring eternal life here on earth, so that it wouldn't just be people would live and die in this great

kingdom, but that it would be an eternal kingdom. And so Jesus would come after the millennium, and that was post-millennialism. That kind of optimism swept through a lot of Christianity through the 19th century, and it took a very serious hit with World War I, where it turned out that the advances in technology led to things like machine guns, and the realities of war became apparent, and it started looking like we're not really improving things by our advances. Then, of course, there was a depression, and then there was a Second World War, and atomic bombs drop, and people basically gave up on post-millennialism then. They said that we are not

heading toward the kingdom. And a spirit of pessimism came in. The pessimism had started back with Darby back in the 1830s, but now just about everybody bought into it, that in fact this world's getting worse and worse, not better and better, and it's going to continue getting worse until real craziness hits. And so the idea then was that Jesus is coming back not after we develop a millennium, but before the millennium, because we're not going to develop it. What's going to happen is Jesus will take his followers out of the world, and then after this chaos happens for seven years, he will then return and start the millennium. And then the final judgment is after that. And so the idea is that Jesus returns before the millennium, not afterwards. So that's premillennial.

Yeah, it's interesting because they have enormously different ethical and political consequences, these views. So if you're a premillennialist, fundamentalist, and you're eager for Jesus to come back and set the world straight, you look at the chaos of human events, and no matter how bad things get, there's always this silver lining. The worse things are, the better they are on some level because it's not until the wheels completely come off that Jesus returns. Whereas if you're a postmillennialist, you know that he's not going to come back until

we actually manage to build something like a paradise here on earth and maintain it for a thousand years. So it's a very different expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and it's a very different political and ethical project in the meantime. Are there any post-millennialists left? Yeah, well, the fundamentalists are all pre-millennialists, but there are, you know, Christianity is a very diverse phenomenon throughout the world, and especially in America. And most liberal Christians don't subscribe to this, like mainline Christians, just the mainline Protestant denominations, Methodists and Presbyterian, Episcopalian, et cetera, et cetera.

They don't subscribe to these things. And they tend to have a much stronger social agenda as a result, because they think we need to improve our lot here. And they tend not to even think or talk about millennial issues. They think the book of Revelation is a symbolic book. It's filled with metaphor. It's not meant to be taken as a description of things that are actually going to happen. Those who do think that it's actually going to happen tend to be premillennialist, and some of them, some of the fundamentalist leaders, are quite anxious for things to get worse and worse, and seem to be rather pleased when there are major catastrophes in the world, or major wars in the world, because this is a sign that we're near the end. So,

hallelujah, it's almost here. How has this impacted the founding of the State of Israel and the Christian support for Israel? I mean, there's this discussion of what you call Christian Zionism in the book, and the fact that Israel can count on American evangelicals as their really strongest base of support, American evangelicals as their really strongest base of support, the logic of it is fairly perverse given the expectations of pre-millennialists. Perhaps you can describe what's happening there. Yeah, this is one of the interesting things that I deal with in the book because it's something that people probably wouldn't expect, that American foreign policy has long been driven by these expectations. including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.

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