Within Reason - #35 Bart Ehrman - Did Jesus Even Claim to be God?

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Get Bart Ehrman's course, "Did Jesus Call Himself God?": https://www.bartehrman.com/godman View all of Bart Ehrman's courses: https://www.bartehrman.com/alex To support me on Patreon (thank you): http://www.patreon.com/cosmicskeptic To donate to my PayPal (thank you): http://www.paypal.me/cosmicskeptic Bart Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. (Wikipedia) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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spend this time talking about. I was a bit struck by the breadth of your work and a little bit paralyzed in terms of choosing a conversation topic. But I think that the majority of my listeners will know you in the context of your critical scholarship and some of your debates that you've had with Christians about the nature of the New Testament and the nature of Jesus. So I wanted to begin by asking, in your view, the figure of Jesus, the most important figure in Christianity, and if Christianity is true, the most important figure in history. What can we know about Jesus of Nazareth? Right, okay.

So, right, this is the soundbite, right? What can we know? So this has been arguably the major problem, one of the major problems of the study of Christianity, not just the New Testament, ever. I mean, one of the first people who tried to start studying the New Testament from a critical point of view. In other words, not simply accepting it as an inspired word of God that is infallible, but started examining it from a critical perspective was Hermann Samuel Ramirez.

His book got published in the 1770s, but it had to do with who was Jesus really. and he ended up arguing that Jesus was a political insurgent who wanted to overthrow the Roman Empire. But this view is, you know, reappeared over time. Reza Aslan has that view in his book, Zealot. Yes. But it started the idea that, in fact, you can't just use these Gospels as saying it as it is. You've got to examine the Gospels to see where they're accurate, where they're inaccurate, how do you know, how do you know what's historical? and so I would say that scholars have a huge range of opinions about this question I would say that

most scholars would agree at least most critical scholars would agree that Jesus at least you can say that Jesus was a Jewish preacher who came from Galilee who was a lower class who started an itinerate ministry of some kind where he was he believed that he had come to understand the truth of God and so he saw himself as some kind of prophet and he believed that God's kingdom was soon to arrive on earth and that people needed to repent in preparation for it and that many of the other Jewish leaders didn't really understand what God wanted but he did and so his proclamation of ethics about how to behave I think are historic many of them are historical, were intended to get people to turn their lives around so that they could be

prepared to enter into this kingdom. He eventually made a trip to Jerusalem the last week of his life and got in trouble with the authorities who had him arrested and then crucified under Pontch's pilot. So I think you can say that much, probably. What about the sort of content of the moral message and the claims that he made and the events that surround his life in the gospel narratives? can we say confidently as historical? It's very difficult because scholars have different assessments. My assessment is that a lot of the materials we have in the Gospels are, these materials are put onto his lips by later storytellers.

Many of them promote a later Christian agenda, which makes them a little bit suspicious. And so we have to develop criteria for knowing. What I would say about his ethical agenda is that by and large he accepted, he accepted the kinds of views that you find in the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, especially authors like Amos and Isaiah, that God was far more concerned with ethical behavior and how you treat one another than he is with sacrificial ritual and other kinds of cultic practices.

And so I think that basically, I think he probably did say that the two greatest commandments are you should love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. these are two quotations of scripture, and that he emphasized that over anything else. But it wasn't for reasons that people today have ethical messages. I mean, most of us today want to be ethical either because possibly we want to be a good person or we want society to work in the long haul.

Jesus wasn't really concerned about those things so much. He certainly wasn't concerned about society for the long haul because he didn't think there was going to be a long haul. He thought that God was going to intervene and destroy this current. order and bring in a new order, a new kingdom of God. And so he wasn't really concerned about how we get along that way. But he was concerned about how people could enter into this coming kingdom. And so the ethics are rooted in this apocalyptic message that the end is coming soon and

you need to get ready for it. That's something you've mentioned, I think, three times now is Jesus' view that the world is about to end. Of course, at least in what we would consider to be the short term, it didn't. what are you talking about when you say so confidently that one of the things we can really know about Jesus is that he believed in the coming apocalypse and how do modern Christians react to the fact that that didn't seem to occur? One thing scholars do is once they recognize that there are materials in the Gospels that don't actually go back to Jesus,

there are long, you know, we could have an hour-long discussion just about that one single topic, but there are clearly things that are not, don't go back to Jesus in the Gospels. There are contradictions in the Gospels. There are implausible statements. There's statements about things. I mean, there are lots of reasons for thinking this. Once you have that down as, once you recognize that, then you have to develop criteria for how you decide what actually did happen and what didn't happen. This is true not just of Jesus. It's true of every figure from the past. How do you go about establishing that somebody actually said and did what they're recorded saying and doing if you have sources that are written decades later by people

who didn't know the person and who have actually obviously changed things in places? So with that in mind, what you look for are materials that are found in multiple sources that are independent of each other. And one of the things that you find in all of our earliest sources about Jesus is that he's preaching about the coming kingdom of God. It's his first words that are recorded. In Mark chapter 1 verse 15, Jesus says, these are his earliest gospel. The first words, he says, the time has been fulfilled. The kingdom of God is near, repent, and believe the good news. So the time is fulfilled means that God has allotted a certain amount of time for this crazy world to run its course,

but that the time is up, the time fulfilled. So the kingdom of God is near means that God is going to wipe out what's now and bring in his kingdom, and so people need to repent and prepare for it. That basic message you get consistently in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in what we reconstructed the sources of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As time goes on, you get less and less of that perspective.

so that the Gospel of John doesn't have that perspective, the Gospel of Thomas preaches against that perspective. So the reality is that the earliest sources are consistently portraying Jesus as proclaiming this message. Some of you standing here won't taste death before they see the kingdom has come in power. This generation will not pass away before all these things take place.

So what do Christians do about that? Well, they reinterpret it. So he didn't really mean that. He meant something else. Maybe the church was going to come, or he meant that the Holy Spirit would come on the day of Pentecost, or he meant this, that, or the other thing, but he didn't mean what he's actually said to have said. And what's going on there in your view? Is that just people sort of coping with the idea that this didn't come to fruition? Or do you think there is a sort of legitimate interpretation of these verses that makes such that Jesus didn't actually think the world was literally about to end?

I wouldn't say it's an illegitimate interpretation because interpretation, it depends what you're trying to do with an interpretation. If you want to know what Jesus really meant, that's one kind of interpretation. But you could also say, well, you know, what does they mean for me today? That could be a different kind of interpretation that could be legitimate. But if you want to know what Jesus meant, you have to put him in his own historical context. And when you do that, then it's pretty clear he's predicting that there's a coming end of the age. And this problem about what to do with it has been around as long as there have been Christians.

because the earliest Christians expected it to come right away. The Apostle Paul thinks it's going to come right away. His followers thought it was all going to come right away. It didn't come right away. So what do you do? Well, what the early Christians did is they started changing what he said so that when you get to the Gospel of Thomas, he preaches against that message,

that there's an imminent coming kingdom. But again, what people do then is they try and spiritualize it so that he's not saying something wrong. He's just, you know, he's giving a spiritual message rather than a literal message, something like that. When you turn this into a critique of the Christian message and you say it seems here that we have Christ and his early followers predicting a near end of the world that didn't actually happen. As you say, people are able to interpret these verses differently. But do people that you put this criticism to at least accept that that is the most natural reading of these verses? It depends which person I'm talking to.

And so I have, where I teach, I teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is in the South, American South. And most of my students are highly religious, come from religious backgrounds, or at least they were raised religious. They're not necessarily now that they're at uni. But they, so they try, you know, they try to figure this out. And a lot of them just say, yeah, Jesus wasn't really saying that. But I have other people who are friends, who are academics, who are Christians, and who are New Testament scholars, but who are still committed Christians who are even ordained ministers. And they'll say, yeah, that's what Jesus said.

But, you know, Jesus was human. Some of them will say, look, if you believe in the incarnation, which is part of the Christian doctrine, it means he really became a human. And if he really became a human, then he had human foibles. and he had human limitations, and so he got things wrong. And so that's one way to do it. Another way to do is just say, look, he got the calendar wrong, but he got the idea right.

The idea is that we should be fighting against the forces of evil just as God is, and that eventually God's going to triumph. And so, you know, okay, you got the calendar wrong. So some people aren't as bothered about that as others. Now, of course, modern Christians think that Jesus made a slightly more radical claim, as well than just that the world was going to end or some certain moral teachings they seem to suggest

that he was also walking around claiming to be God it's one question to ask whether Jesus was God yes the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God yeah I find to be one of the most interesting in biblical scholarship and I wondered what your views are on the matter yeah so I think it's right to differentiate between those two because a lot of people don't

the question of whether Jesus was God is I agree, is completely independent of whether he ever said he was. It's also independent of whether he thought he was, but we have no access to his thoughts. We do have, we have access to some limited extent to his words. I am firmly convinced that Jesus never talked about himself as God. And one way to demonstrate that is to line up our sources of information about Jesus chronologically. And so I mentioned earlier that we have the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These are called the synoptic Gospels because they agree in so many places in which stories they tell, the sequence of the stories, even word for word, verbatim agreements, that everybody pretty much agrees

that there's some copying going on. Somebody's copying somebody. Scholars who've worked on this since the 19th century have said that Matthew and Luke both had Mark as one of their sources. So you had Mark as a source. Matthew and Luke copied Mark, but Matthew and Luke have a number of sayings of Jesus not found in Mark. And so most scholars today continue to think that Matthew and Luke had access to some other written source of information that they call Q. Q is a list of,

is a group of Jesus sayings that Matthew and Luke had access to. Matthew has some materials not found in Mark or Luke. So they say, well, that came from some other sources. And Luke has some material, not found in Mark and Luke, so that's other sources. Okay, so you've got Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but you also have Q and M, Matthew's special sources, and L, Luke's special sources.

If you look at all of that material, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Q, M, and L, okay? All of that together, Jesus never calls himself God. All of our earliest sources. Where Jesus starts calling himself God is the Gospel of John, our last source. And so to my thinking, you have these sources of information about Jesus. So I've just laid out six, six sources, six pieces of information versus one.

The six are all earlier than the one. It seems to me completely implausible that six authors would describe the sayings of Jesus, knowing that he called himself God, and neglect to mention that part. like that that bit just isn't important enough to bring up and so i think it's completely implausible people might be surprised to hear you make this make this claim that in all of the synoptic gospels we don't get jesus claiming to be god yeah is this not is this not the case in in any instance doesn't sort of jesus imply that he's god at certain point well it depends how you read these passages if you think what kind of passages are we talking about that people generally point to

in the synoptic gospels, in the earlier sources, that say, well, Jesus seems to be implying he's God. Because, of course, people will want to say that, okay, maybe Jesus wasn't walking around saying that he was God. Yeah. But maybe doing so wouldn't have been a particularly great strategy. Maybe in order to have enough time to have his message understood by his early followers and to sort of conduct his ministry

before eventually being killed, if he just immediately started claiming to be God, he'd just be killed straight away. And so what he needs to do is, is get the message across, get the important moral teachings, which are the most important part of his ministry, and then allow future generations after he died to realize the truth. Yeah, no, that would be a plausible way to argue.

I'm not convinced by it. It's what I used to argue when I was an evangelical Christian, and so I'm familiar with it. You'd have to say that the Gospel of John's wrong then, because in the Gospel of John, he does claim divinity early in the ministry and throughout the ministry. Second thing is, it'd be a mistake to say he was covering covering it up so that they wouldn't kill him any earlier because he's actually not crucified

for calling himself God. His divine claims have no relationship to any of the crucifixion narratives. And so it's not that that's going to get him in trouble. So, I mean, what is it? What is the... Oh, it's pretty clear. When you read the trial narratives, Pontius Pilate kills him from claiming to be the king of the Jews. And that's a political claim. And so that isn't concerned about Jewish theology, the term Messiah in most Jewish thinking at the time, and in certainly Roman understanding of Jewish thinking, is that the Messiah is the future anointed one, the king of Israel.

That's the literal meaning of the word Messiah, yes. It's the name Christos is the Greek word, Maschak, is the Hebrew word. It's referring to the king who gets anointed during his coronation ceremony to show that he's the favored one of God. Yeah, in the recent coronation of King Charles, it was chrism oil that was rubbed on his head and rest. None of us knew that was going to happen because it's been over 50 years since we've seen any of those. So you have this interesting word origin of Christ, Messiah, just means anointed one. And of course, this is a, I suppose Jews at the time would consider the anointed one to be something like an early king of Israel.

So they envision this Messiah figure, not as God. No, not as God. The Messiah was not God. But as a political leader, and this is perhaps where some people might stumble. And I remember when I first started considering the idea that Jesus maybe didn't even claim to be God, one of the things that I would think about is all of these times that he would refer to himself as the Messiah, the son of man, this kind of thing. And you forget that it's only today that we make these terms synonymous. But at the time the word Messiah, the term son of man, the term son of God, and the term God are not sort of...

They're not the same thing. You didn't see them next to each other in a source. But the problem is that I think historically since all these titles get attributed to Jesus, that he's Messiah, son of a man, son of God, Lord, God, all these things, that they all, then people just assume they all are different versions of the same thing. They are not different versions of the same thing. If you ask any Jew living in the first century, you know, you think that person's the Messiah. You mean he's God?

He said, what? What? You mean, no, I said he's the Messiah. And so it's like claiming, you know, You know, if you claim to be, you know, the prime minister, you're God. What? Yeah. And some of your prime ministers definitely have not been God, I can tell you.

Yeah. So what verses are we talking about when people want to say in the synoptic gospels? Yeah. Jesus here is claiming to be God. Because like we said a moment ago, some people suggest that he's not going to outright claim that he's God, but he's going to do things and say things which imply it and will later be seen as evidence of such. What kind of things are we talking about? Well, the one that people point to most frequently is a little bit difficult to unpack.

But it's the passage in Mark chapter 2 where Jesus is, he's in a house, it's crowded, people are all around, and there's this fellow who is paralyzed, and he's being carried on this cot, this pallet, and they can't get to him. Four guys are carrying it. He can't get through the crowd. So they take off the tiles of the roof and they lower him down into the house. And Jesus sees the man, sees their faith that they know he can heal him, and he looks at the man and says, your sins are forgiven.

and the Pharisees say, wait a second, only God can forgive sins. And Jesus says, look, which is easier to say that your sins are forgiven or take up your palate and walk? And obviously, the easier thing to say is your sins are forgiven because there's no way showing that it's worked. Whereas you take up your palate and walk and it doesn't do it, then you know it didn't work. right so so uh he said to show that this the son of man has authority in earth to forgive sins take up your pallet and walk the guy gets up and walks out and everybody's amazing whoa what so what that

how how that was interpreted when i was an evangelical and still is today by most probably most readers is only god can forgive sins jesus shows that he can do the more difficult thing healing the guy and since he can do the more difficult thing it means he can do the easier thing which means Jesus is claiming to be God, right? That's the typical explanation. Sure. And I think it's completely wrong. It's Jesus' enemies who say that only God can forgive sins.

That's an important point. Yes. Second point, Jesus does not say, in order to show I'm God, take up your pallet and walk. He says, in order to show that the son of man has authority to forgive sins. Well, who's given him the authority? Yeah. God has. And in fact, near the end of the gospel narratives, we have Jesus sending his disciples to spread his message, but also giving them the power to forgive sins.

Yep. And that's the thing. If you have authority, somebody's giving you the authority. And the other point that most people wouldn't have any way to know is that, as the great New Testament scholar, E.P. Sanders pointed out, in the temple when Jewish priests would perform a sacrifice when they would somebody would bring a you know a lamb or something there'd be a sacrifice once the sacrifice was performed the priest would pronounce that their sins had been forgiven they had that authority as priests

what Sanders argued is that what Jesus has claimed is not to be God he's claiming to have greater authority than the priests that this is an anti-priestly polemic it's got nothing to do with Jesus calling himself God that just as a priest can forgive sins, actually Jesus can. Yeah, I mean, I think when you say if he has authority, he has to be given that authority, I don't know if that's quite right in that you would want to say

that God has the authority to forgive sins, but it's not that he's given that. But to me, this verse describing Jesus sending out his disciples is really telling because he says, to his disciples, after the resurrection, as the father has sent me, so now I send you. and he gives them the authority to forgive sins. Now, I think to myself, if people make the claim that, well, Jesus was forgiving sins,

only God can forgive sins and therefore Jesus must be God. If Jesus gives the same authority to his disciples, that would make them gods too. But no, I mean, they're clearly not gods. But if he says that as the Father has sent me, so now I send you, we must think that surely the authority that Jesus has been given to forgive sins in this respect is given to him in the same way that he gives it to his disciples. That is not bestowing divinity upon them, but just the authority to forgive sins and nothing more.

I agree with that. And it's also important to note that Jesus doesn't say, I forgive your sins. Yes. He says, your sins are forgiven. And surely people don't think that when a priest pronounce forgiveness of sins that he's claiming to be God, if he says your sins are forgiven,

and so that's why I think it's been a bestowed authority, but I completely agree. It doesn't mean that everybody who pronounces forgiveness of sin, is thereby claiming to be God. By the way, I should mention that you have an entire course on this very question of did Jesus claim to be God, which is available on your website. The link you can go to is barturman.com forward slash godman.

And that will take you to this course that you've produced on this very question amongst a sort of wealth of other courses that you've produced. So if anybody's interested in going into more detail on this question, Barterman.com forward slash God. man i'll i'll put the link in the show notes or in the youtube description as well um of course the gospel of john things seem to change yes what do we have in john we have uh before abraham was i am now to me this is one of the most powerful uh indications of jesus claiming to yeah claiming to be god here do you think that when it comes to instances like that and and perhaps we should explain why it is

that saying before Abraham was I am would be such a powerful statement actually yeah let's do that first like people you'll often hear in this discussion Jesus said before Abraham was I am what's the significance of that well two things one is so he's referring to Abraham the father of the Jews

who lived 1800 years earlier and in this in the conversation he's having with his Jewish opponents they're saying you know how do you know about Abraham you're not not even 50 years old and he says well before Abraham was I am. So on one level, he's claiming to have existed before 1800 years or before,

1800 years ago. But the second thing is, he says, I am. Now, that phrase, I am, is a complicated phrase, as it turns out, ego ame, I am. Sometimes it just means, you know, if somebody says, you know,

oh, are you the leader of this group? Yeah, Ego Amy. I am. You know, it's a way of saying yes, sometimes. But in the gospel of John, it takes on special significance because Jesus repeatedly says, I am this, that, or the other thing. So I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world.

I am the resurrection and the life. These I am sayings are very important because every one of them is indicating that he's the one who brings salvation, that he is the power to bring salvation. But in this particular case, in John 858, when he says before Abraham was, I am, he doesn't say I am something else I just I am that's significant because in the old

testament in Exodus chapter 3 where Moses is being told by God to go to the go to the Israelites and tell them that you know they're going to be set free and go to Pharaoh and demand that you let it as people go he says well if they ask me you know what's your name what am I supposed to say and God replies I am tell them I am has sent you and so that comes to be taken as the name based the basis for the name of god i am and so if jesus says i am and he's referring to himself he seems to be claiming the name of god from the book of the old from the name of yahway in the old testament and so uh his jewish opponents take up stones to stone him to death yeah it may seem a little far-fetched to a to a modern reader that this is the claim embedded within that statement

but that phrase I am is hugely significant in the Old Testament and it does seem that in the narrative of John's Gospel this is what the this is what people interpret him as trying to claim. They do, yeah, absolutely. So the question is, firstly, do you think if this is an accurate account of what Jesus said that that's what he was doing? And secondly, do you think that it is an accurate account of something that Jesus said? Well, do the second. First, I don't think there's any way it's an accurate account.

I mean, if Jesus was going around claiming the name of God for himself, as in the Gospel of John, then, no, he wouldn't have survived. He would have been stoned to death. I mean, it wouldn't have been legal for them to stone them. They would have stoned it, probably. But the other thing is, if he had been doing that, why is all these other earlier sources just didn't think it was important enough to mention that bit? I mean, just beyond belief, I think, that these other early authors,

including not just these gospel authors, but Paul tells us a lot about Christ and certainly understands Christ in some sense to be a divine being. He never indicates that Jesus called himself God. If Paul knew he called himself God, you'd think he'd say it. Maybe he wouldn't. But I mean, so my point is that all the earlier materials say nothing about this. Our final gospel, sometime near the end of the first century, what is this? Like 65, 70 years after Jesus' death. finally he's saying these things well it seems unlikely that everybody earlier doesn't say anything about it

yeah so you're not just making a claim here that well we have this one statement in the gospel of John it's not really corroborated so we can't know if he said it you're making a claim that you positively think this wasn't said I don't think it was said and I think it's consistent with John's portrayal of Jesus otherwise right because John begins this gospel

within the beginning was the word the word was with God the word was God the gospel ends with Thomas declaring Jesus my Lord and my God and throughout the gospel Jesus this isn't the only divine claim he makes right he says you know I and the father are one and once again they pick up the stones to go after him or to his disciples they say

Lord show us the father and Jesus says well if you've seen me you've seen the father so there's like all of these things and you just don't get this in the earlier sources yeah I mean a statement like that if you've seen me then you've seen the father

I mean the sort of trinitarian doctrine is of course that the son is God and the father is God but it's not that the son is the father so to say something like if you've seen me the son

you've also seen the father I understand if he said something like if you've seen me then you've seen you've seen God this would seem to sort of confirm this trinitarian well I wouldn't call it Trinitarian because I don't think you have

trinities yet I shouldn't say Trinitarian yes but but I think it's clearly a divine claim yes it's not just that you know um like i mean if you told me that look you know look at me you're seeing god here i i wouldn't think this is like a normal claim of a human being yeah but but jesus what i'm saying is jesus isn't claiming he's not saying if you've seen me you've seen god but if you see me you've seen the father isn't this troubling to the doctrine of trinitarianism which wants to draw a distinction between the father and the son even if both are god yeah well it is

the whole trinitarian debate of course had a number of sides to it with different people arguing different things and people would take different verses in order to and so one of the we could talk about the trinitarian debate for a long time too but one of the big questions

early on was whether Christ really was the father so in the second century one of the most prominent forms of understanding the relationship of the father and the son is that Christ was the son

his father was the father but in fact they're the same thing just like I myself am a son and a father at the same time so to my father I'm a son and to my son I'm a father and to my brother I'm a brother so I could have like I've got three modes of existence

was just one of me and there were people who said that Christ was like that that God was like that there are three of them three relationships father son and spirit but they're just three modes of existence of the same being and that ended up being declared a heresy, you've got to have three separate beings. But the three separate

beings are all equally God. So in that reading of it, if you've seen me, you've seen the father because they're of the same substance. There's the later debates. You don't get that in the New Testament. Now, if Jesus didn't make these claims, if Jesus didn't say these words, then whoever sat down to write what we now call the gospel of John, what was going on? Was he just making something up? Was he just writing fiction purposefully? Was he trying to mislead people? I doubt it. I mean, we don't know what's in his head, obviously. I don't think so. And I don't think it's just John. I think everybody who, in the early church, who is telling stories about Jesus, which would have probably been just about everybody in the early church. I mean, Christians are, they're trying to convince other people to become followers of Jesus. First of all, I mean, you're trying to convince a family member or a neighbor or a business associate to become a follower Jesus, they never heard of Jesus. Why are they going to give up their religions to become a follower of Jesus? You've got to tell them stories about Jesus. So in order to convert people,

you've got to do that. And Christians are spreading throughout the entire empire. They're, you know, they're not converting millions of people or anything, or even thousands, many thousands. But they're, you know, one at a time, they're telling stories and they're converting people. But then once they're converted, they continue to hear stories in the communities about Jesus to help them understand who he was, what happened to him, why it happened to him, what he taught, how you're supposed to live based on his teaching. So people are telling stories the whole time. Stories change in the process of retelling. And there's no way to prevent that. They do. And so when people tell a story about Jesus that is not historically accurate,

it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying about it or that they're trying to deceive anybody. They're trying to explain something that's really significant to them. and things get exaggerated, things get changed, things get made up, and it's not a matter of willful intent or deception, it's just the way storytelling works. But of course, everything you said about these attributions in John's Gospel, surely the author would have thought of this too. I mean, to sit down and think, well, I have this idea of writing about Jesus' claiming to be God.

but it sort of hasn't existed until then. This isn't something that's been done. No, he doesn't know that. He hasn't read Matthew Mark, Luke, or MQ, and or L. He hasn't read these things. He's been in a Christian community for probably decades. And within that community, the way people are talking about Jesus is that he's a divine being.

And so this view develops over time within his community. So he thinks this is the commonsensical view. and so he's not i don't i don't think he's just he's coming up with this i think this is based on a long history within his own community um that uh where these views have developed and there's been a lot of interesting scholarship on that for about 50 years about what's happening within john's community leading to this exalted view of christ but um i so i think it's there in his community i don't think it's something he's inventing now another sort of interesting uh example of a gospel narrative which people might have good reason to think was invented by the author I think

are the birth narratives found in only two of the gospels with some discrepancies and seemingly written in in some cases with motivations in mind these are earlier and these are in gospels which at least in the well they as you said earlier they seem to be sort of a of each other's existence and copying each other, you know, aware of earlier Gospels, because the birth narratives occur in the synoptic Gospels. In this instance, are we not provided with an example of clear evidence of forgery? I mean, somebody sort of creating a story

which seems to sort of not exist anywhere else, putting it in their gospel narrative, in some cases seemingly in order to fulfill a, fulfill a prophecy or something like this. Like, is this an example of something that we can confidently say that the authors who are writing about it didn't actually think or have good reason to think that it happened? I don't think so.

I don't think that's right. I think that, in fact, I don't think Matthew and Luke. So it's in Matthew and Luke, and they both have a virgin verse story. And you're right, they have things in common. The things they have in common are the very broad things. Jesus has a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph, and that she gets pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Jesus gets born in Bethlehem

so that he's born of a virgin in Bethlehem. That's basically it. But all of the other details are different. That means, though, that if you've got a virgin birth story of him being born in Bethlehem and they both have it, most scholars think that Matthew and Luke did not know about each other's work.

Okay? that means that idea was floating around more broadly, that it's not made up by either one of them. See what I mean? Because since they both have it, neither one of them made it up. But the details are all vastly different. One of the things I do with my students at Chapel Hill is I have them,

they don't know what they're going to find, and I don't tell them what they're going to find. They know the Christmas story, because every year, they go to church and they hear the Christmas story where you get the wise men and you get the shepherds and get the produce, you get the herds slaughtering the innocence and things. So what I have them do is I have them read Matthew and just make a list, A, B, C, D, E.

This is the list of what happens in Matthew, this, this, this, this is it. Then I have them read Luke and make the same list for Luke, this, this, this is this. Then I have them compare the lists and to find out what's different and is there anything that cannot be reconciled. It blows their minds because, I mean, people can do this very easily, do it you realize whoa like matthew has all of these stories that no luke doesn't say anything about luke has all this stuff and not in matthew and in fact there are points where they they cannot be reconciled such as such as what are we talking about here uh well for example in luke's gospel

after jesus is born um this is i'll give you an irreconcilable one after after jesus is born um his parents uh have him circumcised on the eighth day and then after after 32 days the Mary has to make an offering in the temple to cleanse herself for her ritual and purity

for having given birth. She does that and so within about a month and then they go straight back to Nazareth where they came from. Okay? All right so basically a month and a half after Jesus' birth they returned to Nazareth which is about a hundred miles to the north up in Galilee.

They're in Jerusalem in the south, a hundred miles north to go back home to Nazareth. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus is born and Joseph is warned that Herod is now going to try and kill the child. And so Joseph takes the family and goes down to Egypt. And it takes a while to get to Egypt. They go down to Egypt and they stay there till Herod dies. And then they want to return And when they hear that Herod dies, word gets to them, then they come back. They can't resettle in Bethlehem like they want. They resettle in Nazareth.

So if all that's right, if Matthew is right that they went down to Herod to Egypt for months or years or however long, how can Luke be right that they immediately return to Nazareth? And what is the answer to that question from a sort of, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you have to make something up. I mean, what do people, I mean, presumably this is something that, you know, Christian scholars are aware of. What do they say?

Yeah. Right. So I guess to reconcile it, you'd have to say something like they, so one way to reconcile it would be to say that, so they returned to Nazareth and then they decided to come back to Bethlehem and they stayed in Bethlehem for a while. And then they found out about. Herod found out, and then they fled to Egypt. Then they returned to Nazareth. I mean, you'd have to come up with some complicated scenario.

But my point is that I don't think that Matthew and Luke were, this is my ultimate point. I don't think they were making up the story. I think both of them had heard stories. And a big problem with the Gospels is that they are written, the earliest Gospels probably Mark. probably at least 40 years after Jesus' death by somebody who wasn't there. And Matthew and Luke are 50, 60 years after Jesus' death. They weren't there.

They weren't Aramaic-speaking Jews in Israel. They spoke Greek. They lived in some other part of the world, and they've inherited stories. And so my sense is that most of the time they're just giving their version based on stories as they've heard in their own Christian communities.

Do you think there's any instance? in any of the gospel narratives where writers are purposefully inventing events or sayings to serve a theological purpose? Yeah, I think there are. I think there are some places where you can identify it. And I think there are a lot of places where they're just, you know, you just can't know. You know, if Matthew has a story that's only in Matthew, there's technically no way to know whether he just came up with that himself.

And there's a lot of that kind of thing where you can't know. there are places where it's pretty clear somebody's just coming up with something like I mean it's not clear if it's necessarily the author but somebody's clearly coming up with something I mean I mean the idea in Matthew here's an example in Matthew Matthew explains why Jesus was born in Bethlehem but he came from Nazareth and he says that the reason they moved to Nazareth was to fulfill the scriptures that says he shall be called a Nazarene. Yes.

But this is part of Matthew's whole thing where Matthew's always saying Jesus did this to fulfill what the prophet said. It's going to be born of Bethlehem, going to be born of a virgin, he's going to be called a Nazarene. Well, the other times when he says that, you can actually find the verse he's talking about

and you might be misinterpreting it, but at least you know what the verse is. There's no verse in the Bible that says he shall be called a Nazarene. And let's just restate that for our listeners. Matthew continually throughout the gospel is saying that and this occurred to fulfill the prophecy to fulfill the scripture and you look in the Old Testament and you find, oh, there's the scripture and he's sort of got this story

that fulfills the scripture. Here, the idea that Jesus comes from Nazareth is to fulfill the scripture that says that he shall be called in Nazarene. Yeah. And we look for that line. It's not there. And it doesn't exist. Yeah. What's going on there? Well, there are a lot of theories about it. And I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't look like probably Matthews just like lying about it probably there are lots of explanations the most popular explanation is that he's referring to a mess allegedly messianic prophecy in the book of Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 9 verse 1 we're told that um that the that that David will have a successor who will succeed him on the throne and they'll come from the notsar of David the root of David so it's like a

tree metaphor, like the tree has roots. And so the root will grow into a tree and one of the fruits of the tree will be this Messiah. So it comes from the root of David. And the word for root in Hebrew is Nazar. And it sounds like Nazare. And so it's, yeah, so it's, it may be that he has that in mind, for example. But if, if that is the case, yeah, we're essentially talking about like a, what, a mistranslation? Yeah, it's a mistranslation. It's a misunderstanding. It's Somebody made it up. I mean, Matthew may have made it up. Somebody made it up. So you say that this is like a popular explanation. And when I ask, like, how do we explain this? I mean, it's easy enough for an atheist or an agnostic or non-Christian to explain it.

But I mean, like, as a Christian scholar, surely that kind of explanation isn't available to you because it essentially says that the gospel, this important gospel author just made a translation blunder. Well, okay, so one thing I'd say is that not every Christian is a fundamentalist who think that every word has to be inspired by God. I mean, this idea that there can't be any mistakes in the Bible is a really fairly modern idea. Most Christians throughout history haven't really had that view of the Bible at all. So it's not like Christian versus a non-Christian explanation, because within Christianity there's an enormous range. Sure. And Christian scholars just would basically agree with me.

most of the things we're talking about here, if they're historical scholars. The scholars I studied with for both my master's and my PhD, I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, and this is where I got most of this stuff from. These people were ordained ministers, most of them, but they said, yeah, of course that's not. You know, they didn't have this fundamentalist view of the Bible.

So in this particular case, what a critical scholar would say, that when Matthew says, the scripture says, he shall be called a Nazarene, he's not trying to give a verbatim quotation, He's trying to say that this is somebody who would be a Nazarene and that he's misinterpreting Isaiah 9-1, Nazar, to refer to them.

That's what he's thinking. And you know, you got that wrong, but that's what he's doing. Can I ask you about mistranslations of Old Testament verses in general? Are there sort of other examples of what we might consider to be translation blunders in the New Testament? Oh boy, yeah, are there. Matthew's kind of famous for this. The one that's the most famous one is, again, in the birth narrative in Matthew.

Both Matthew and Luke, as I said, have Jesus born of a virgin. One of the interesting differences is why he had to be born of a virgin. In Luke's gospel, Luke says the reason he had to be born of a virgin, it's in the enunciation. The angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says, you're going to conceive a child. She says, what? I never had sex. I'm not going to have. I'm saying, no, no, the Holy Spirit's going to get you pregnant. And the angel says to Luke 135, the Holy Spirit shall come upon you.

The power of the Most High will overshadow you so that the one born of you shall be called holy, the son of God. So Mary gets pregnant by the Spirit so that Jesus is the divine son of God in Luke. That's not Matthew's view. Matthew doesn't say anything like that. Matthew says that she had

that she had to be a virgin to fulfill the scriptures because the scripture says that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. That's a quotation of Isaiah chapter 7 verse 14. In this case it's really there. Isaiah 714 is there and it says something like that.

It's a good start. But it's a good start that it's actually in the Old Testament this time. It's a good start. It's a good start. So it's there. The problem is that Matthew is quoting it in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And when you actually read the Hebrew, it does not say,

a virgin shall conceive and bear a son. And in fact, when you read it in the context of Isaiah, it's clear as day that it's not talking about that and it's not talking about a Messiah at all. Is that so? I mean, because the word used in the Hebrew Old Testament is the word Alma,

Yes. Which can mean virgin. Yes. It can also mean, what, young woman? Well, it doesn't mean, it means young woman, but it's young woman irrespective of whether she's had sex or not. Sure.

And the Greek translation in the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament. For our listeners, the New Testament's written in Greek. That's right. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, which means that the New Testament writers were reading a Greek translation

of the Old Testament when they wrote the New Testament. And the Greek version of the Old Testament uses the word is it Parthenos, which does mean virgin. Well, it also means young woman. So you said a moment ago that you think it's, I mean, I've heard before that there's a bit of a sort of translation problem here, but you said it's clear that this is not what's meant in this passage.

Oh, yeah. How do we know that? Well, nobody reads the passage. That's the thing. People read the verse. So the passage is really quite clear. So the deal is that Isaiah, so it's written by a fellow named Isaiah in Jerusalem in the 8th century B.C.E. And he's a prominent figure at the time in Jerusalem.

The king of Judah, Ahaz, is under threat. Two opposing armies have laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. looks like Jerusalem's going to be destroyed, and Ahaz is freaking out about this. He calls in the prophet Isaiah, and Isaiah says that God will give you a sign to show that it's not going to happen, that you're not going to be destroyed. The sign is that a young woman who has conceived will bear a son, and when the son is old enough to know the difference between good and evil, can eat curds in whey and know that. the difference between good and evil, these two kings will disperse.

They will be gone. They're not going to, and so he's saying, give it time, and they will go away of their own. You're not even going to have to fight the war. So there are two translational issues. One is he doesn't use the Hebrew word that means a woman who's never had sex, Bethula. He uses just a word for a young woman. And the Hebrew tense is the young woman has. has conceived, she's pregnant.

Before she gives birth, I mean, before the child she bears is very old, you won't have these political problems anymore. So it's a young woman has conceived. It's not a virgin will conceive. And it's not talking about a future Messiah. It's talking about some woman here who's pregnant, about what's going to happen to the city.

So it's not even a messianic prophecy. It's not a prophecy of a future Messiah. So where do you think the Virgin birth story comes from? Do we have New Testament authors making this up to fulfill what they think a prophecy says when it actually doesn't? Is it a sort of narrative that maybe already exists in an oral tradition that's put into writing and then subsequently people look at this passage in Isaiah and say, oh, well, maybe that's what it's referring to? I mean, what's going on here? Where does it come from?

So I don't think either Matthew or Luke could have made it up because both of them have it independently of each other. Yes. So it had to be floating around before them, I think. And there are debates about where it came from. There are, all of the options are really pretty interesting. One option is that somebody came up with it to say that it fulfills Isaiah 714. That, you know, they said, ah, yeah, yeah, that's why.

And so they came, they ring this, ah, so she had to be a virgin. Another option is that in the Greek or Roman world more broadly, within Greece and Rome, Roman thinking, there were numerous stories of supernatural births, where a great figure, either an emperor or a great warrior or a great philosopher or whatever, the birth wasn't normal, that a god had gotten a woman pregnant. And it may be that the Christians living in the Greek and Roman world

who come up with the story to show that Jesus had a special birth like that. So that's another explanation. A third explanation, which is also interesting, is that we have some evidence to suggest that many people suspected that Jesus had an unusual birth and that somehow he was born out of wedlock, that he didn't have a normal, he didn't, Mary wasn't married, didn't have a husband. and that the virgin birth story arose in order to explain, oh, yeah, it was a special birth.

In fact, this is what happened. God got her pregnant. It might be a combination of all those things, or two of them. So we don't know for sure. Those are three of the interesting ideas. Any more translation issues of this genre? Oh, well, no, there's all sorts, yeah. But usually, I would say in most cases,

the translation issues are related to the difficulty that you mentioned, that the biblical, the New Testament authors are writing in Greek themselves. And I don't think any of them knew Hebrew myself. This is debated among scholars. I don't think they could read Hebrew, any of them. And they're reading it from the Greek Old Testament, which was trying to translate the Hebrew into Greek. And any time you translate something, you can't,

there's no such things, a complete correspondence between what you're, and so the Greek translators of Isaiah were not probably trying to make this into a messianic prophecy but and so yeah so but

somebody else could take the translation and make it that way so throughout the New Testament you have this problem that the New Testament authors are quoting Old Testament passages and so yeah you said there are lots of examples of their suit. Yeah well their entire books

written on this. Are we talking about sort of small instances where like something seems to be mis-translated or have gone wrong? Are we talking about quite large, significant, theologically? There aren't huge, there aren't ones that are kind of on this magnitude because this is one that's dealing with the virgin birth. You know, and so, but, you know, there are other instances where it's not a mis, it's not a, there are some, a lot of instances. is that aren't necessarily mistranslations, but there's certainly unusual understandings of things. I mean, just to stick with Matthew's birth narrative, for example,

when I mentioned that Joseph takes Jesus and Mary down to Egypt, and the question, why does he take him down to Egypt? Why doesn't he just, like, why doesn't he, like, go to Nazareth? And Matthew says that the reason he goes to Egypt is to fulfill what was spoken of by the prophet, and he quotes, Josea, chapter 11, out of Egypt have I called my son now Josea

so this isn't a translational problem because he's actually quoting what Josea says but Josea is talking about the exodus from Egypt that God took the people of Israel out of Egypt and made him his son and so Israel is portrayed as the son of God and in scripture

and places and so out of Egypt have I called my son and Matthew says so it's a reference to the Messiah out of Egypt have I called my son now reference to Jesus Jesus, right? Jesus comes up. Now, in this particular case, it's an even more interesting situation in terms of the interpretation because it's, in this case, Matthew isn't saying something like this thing, not necessarily saying that this thing in Hosea isn't referring to

anything in Hosea's day, it's referring to the future. That is what he's saying about Isaiah 714 of the virgin birth. It's not about Isaiah's time, it's about the future. But in the case with Hosea, he seems to be saying that, yes, God called the people of Israel out of Egypt and saved them. And it's foreshadowing what's going to happen with the Messiah who's going to come out of Egypt to save people. And so it's more like the fulfillment of Scripture isn't that the Scripture has predicted something that's yet to happen. It's that something happens in Scripture and Christ fulfills it, fills it full of meaning. so fulfill in the sense of filling full of meaning and so it seems like

it just seems strange to me if that isn't the most natural reading of that Old Testament verse why somebody would just adopt it because these are people who firmly believe that Jesus

is the Messiah sent from God they don't think God came up with this idea like late in the game They thought this had been the plan all along, and they had to then find out where God gave hints about it. And so they searched the scriptures for indications that this happened. And probably the most obvious place where this happens is actually a set of verses

that many Christians today still use to show that Jesus was predicted by Scripture, which is Isaiah chapter 53, which isn't about his birth, but about his death. Isaiah 53 is about the suffering servant of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible. And it's a passage that was written when the nation of Israel had been taken into captivity into Babylon and were being punished for the sins that they committed, according to Isaiah. But that in this part of Isaiah, Isaiah is saying that the people are going to be set free from Babylon and able to return. And within that context, he has this passage in Isaiah 53 about, some figure who has suffered

for the sins of others. He calls him the suffering servant of the Lord. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him by his wounds we were healed. Christians read that and they said, it's referring to the Messiah.

This is talking about Jesus. He's the one who suffered for the sins. And it was never read that way by Jews, ever before this. Jews read it. Well, actually, Actually, Isaiah tells you who it's about. He calls it the suffering servant of the Lord,

and there are four sections of this part of Isaiah that talks about the suffering servant. And in a couple of places, he tells you who the servant is. In chapter 49, verse 3, Isaiah says, You are my servant, O Israel. Whoa, Israel is the servant that suffers. They've suffered for the sins of the people. But then Christians read this and say,

it was referring to the Messiah. So there again, it isn't a mistranslation per se, but it's explaining something in light of their faith in Jesus. And so, you know, I think a lot of atheists would say, yeah, well, they're just

making stuff up. But I think it's more complicated than that. I think that it's more that people are always reading texts in light of how they understand the world before they read the text. And you read a text in light of what you think and believe and presuppose. And so different people read texts

differently based on that. Christians are doing that, but non-Christians are doing that to everybody's doing that. And so, I mean, and it's true of any text. You know, it's true of poetry. You have different interpretations of poems, depending on how you read things. We spoke earlier about some sort of historicity surrounding Jesus. And I ask you what it is that we can know about Jesus. that question often comes up in the context of arguments in favor of Christianity in saying that a certain group of facts that we can know about Jesus seem to indicate that a man died and rose again I wondered while I had you here to get your views on this

I had an episode with William Lane Craig and he put forward a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth And I remember in that podcast, I sort of listening back had wished that I pushed back a little more. And a lot of people actually noticed and they said, you know, I'm surprised that you didn't really sort of give them a bit more grief for it. But I figured that perhaps rather than making a botched attempt at doing it myself, it would be better to ask you. I mean, his view on the matter, along with many others, is that we have a few facts about Jesus that we can pretty confidently say a true. Firstly, that, you know, a man called Jesus existed and was sort of going around

teaching and ethical code of sorts and gaining followers got into disrepute with the Roman authorities was killed by crucifixion and that afterwards groups of people claim to have seen him. Do you think that all of these facts are sort of well established?

Yes. So given that, how to explain? the you know the fact that all of these are true at the same time oh well I don't say in trouble at all think that I mean

we have other figures in history for for whom we have things like that with those four facts I mean Romulus the founder of Rome I don't know if he was a historical figure or not but people thought he was and he certainly ended up

somehow leaving the earth and people, their eyewitnesses saying that they saw them alive afterwards. I mean, do we have sort of, firstly, are the sources as reliable? Are they as well attested? Oh, now that's another question. See, that's not one of your four things.

Okay. Yeah. But I guess what I'm asking about is when we say that these facts are well established. Well, Livy, the historian Livy, so he's a Roman historian, and he reports that. Or Apollonius of Tiana, We have eyewitness testimony to his being raised from the dead.

What eyewitness testimony are we talking about? Who is it that claims? Followers of his. At the same time, they sort of all see him all in the same room. But see, now you're getting into the facts, see. Yes. So the question is what are facts? So if you're just talking about those four elements,

then we certainly have those four elements, so they're not difficult to explain. What William Lane Craig wants to do, though, is to take those four facts and start adding others to them as if they're the same value. What other facts are we talking about here? Well, he says that we know that there was an empty tomb. And you don't think that that's the case? I don't know.

And one of the things that I think Dr. Craig might say on that point is that if people were claiming to have seen him, if people were claiming that this man had risen from the dead, the tomb was there. It was something people could have gone to check. And it would have probably been one of the first things that they did upon hearing that this Jesus figure had risen from the dead. If there were no empty tomb, surely someone would have discovered this. This is not good evidence confirming the idea that there was, in fact, an empty tomb.

Well, it presupposes that he was buried in a tomb. This is one of the facts that William Lane Craig thinks we can say as well established that he was buried in a tomb. That's important to him. You don't think so. No, I don't. I mean, that's the thing. He takes these four things that, you know, Basically, everybody would agree on.

There's a man Jesus, he got killed. Later, people said they saw him alive. So that's fine. And those four are easily explained. Was there an empty tomb? There are very big problems with thinking there was a tomb at all. He's presupposing that the gospel story is right, that Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus,

the afternoon he was crucified, and put him in a family tomb, and on the third day, women came and found the tomb empty. Okay, so what is our ever? evidence of it. Well, the evidence, of course, is only in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They say that. And it was the tradition that Christians had had for a very long time. So it's certainly the Christian tradition. But there are lots of reasons for doubting that it's right. That he's never taken very seriously. I know he, I don't know if this was on your

thing or not, but somebody last week was interviewing me and replaying some things where he was trashing me for some debate we had 20 years ago where he said that, you know, the only reason I reject the resurrection is because I've got some kind of warmed over Humean understanding of things and I've never read Hume. You know, it's like, it's just such, it is just so wrong. It's just like, it is just, I mean, it's just factually wrong.

But apart from that, you know, he says that I'm not a historian. I don't know what he thinks, I do know what he thinks I am. He thinks that I'm a textual critic. whatever he thinks that is. And that's just completely wrong, too. It's just like he knows nothing about me, but he's making stuff up. So historians look at what you know about the situation

at the time period. And I'm not sure William and Craig has even read any much history about the time period. But one thing to look at is, for example, just as an example, what do Romans do with crucified victims? So we have records. of, we don't have lots of records.

I mean, one of the really interesting things that people don't realize, we have no literary description of a crucifixion from the ancient world. Like, nobody describes how they did it. Like, where they typically nailed, we know they were nailed sometimes because we have some nails.

That with DNA on, we've got that organic material on them. Were they tied? Were they cross beams? Were they stakes? I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. We don't really know. we do have a number of references

to what Romans did once the person died on their crosses and the accounts are consistent that what they did is they left them on their crosses as part of the humiliation that they would decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers and so we have off-the-cuff remarks

in a number of sources that that's just what they did and so there are debates about that we can have debates about whether that happened within Judaism or not people say yeah Jews didn't allow that it's absolutely right Jews didn't allow it but the Jews weren't killing it the Romans were killing it and so forth and so on so I don't know of any instance

where we have a verified account of anybody being buried on the afternoon of their crucifixion in a known tomb so how likely is it that they made an exception in the case of jesus i mean we think they would they would because you know he's the son of god and so he's exceptional but i mean pilot didn't know that jesus is the son of god he was just one of the guys he was crucifying that morning it's still quite an exceptional case i mean pilot seems quite distressed at the fact that jesus ends up going to according to whom to crucifixion well according to the gospel narrows of christian narratives but this is a this is a

a possibility. He crucified. It's possible. It's possible he's more upset about one of the other two guys. If it is true that you have an instance of pilot, really not thinking that this man ought to be crucified and asking the crowds. No, but I don't think that's historical. Why would we think that's historical?

I guess I'm not trying to make the case that it's, that we can know that this is the case. But this might be an explanation as to why we do have an instance of the Romans making an exception when it comes to sort of leading someone on the cross. because Jesus was exceptional, not just because he was the son of God, because of course, I don't believe that, and the Romans wouldn't have believed that, but that it was still an exceptional case. Why?

I guess in the case of Pilate, this might have been someone who he really didn't think deserved to be crucified. Why? Because this would be the case if the gospel narratives are correct. If what's written there is correct. That's right. I'm not claiming to be able to say that we know that they are, but if they were, this would offer an explanation of how we have an exception.

But the argument then is, if the gospel narratives are correct, then the gospel narratives are correct. And so that's not an argument. But it seems to me that that might be the case if the narratives were written so as to obviously give an explanation as to why Jesus was taken down from the cross. If it was clear that... Yes, the gospel writers are explaining why he would be allowed off. That's right.

It doesn't seem particularly plausible to me, though, that the idea of presenting Pilate as slightly disturbed by the idea of Jesus being crucified was a device that was used to explain why Jesus would have been taken down from the cross when Romans didn't usually do that. No, the reason for showing Pilots disturbance is something else. The reason that the, so when you look how Pilots portrayed in the Gospels, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and then you even add on later Gospels, like the Gospel Peter and later Gospels, When you do that, and you line them up chronologically,

Pilate gets more and more disturbed. And he starts, in Mark, he and kind of the Jewish counsel, kind of, they agree, okay, he needs to be crucified. In Matthew's Gospel, he washes his hands and says, I'm innocent of this man's blood, and the crowd cries out, does blood be upon us and our children? When you get to Luke a little bit later, pilot declares Jesus innocent three times.

And he sends him off to Herod, who declares him innocent. When you get to the gospel of John, he declares him innocent three times, and it says in John, the chief priest and scribes insisted to be crucified. And when you read it in the Greek, it says, Pilate then handed him over to them to be crucified, to the chief priest and scribes. When you get to the gospel of Peter, it's even more. Pilate gets increasingly innocent, proclaiming Jesus' innocence. Why is that?

Well, scholars have long known the answer to this one. If Pilate's not at fault, then who is? It's those damn Jews. They did it to him. So the reason for Pilots' exoneration is in order to heighten Jewish culpability. I don't think that's a historical motif. If you actually know anything about Pilot,

I mean, if you read the descriptions in Philo or Josephus, this was not somebody sat around agonizing. about crucifying the wrong guy. And to think that Jesus is the exception just means that we're so used to thinking of Jesus as the exception. But for Pilate, he's just one of these troublemakers. He's calling himself the king of the Jews.

Crucify him. But now, a moment ago, you said that, okay, William Lane Craig is wrong because he says that we can know there was an empty tomb and we can't. It seems to me a relatively minor detail in that you said, you know, we have these four facts,

including that Jesus was crucified, including that groups of people claim to have seen him after he died. I'm not sure groups of people claimed. Okay, because this is what I wanted to pick up on when you said that this can be easily explained. What is it that you think can be explained? The fact that we have records of groups claiming to see Jesus, the fact that groups did actually claim to see Jesus,

the fact that individuals claim to see Jesus, what are the things that you think, this isn't troubling for us to explain without having to invoke a resurrection? I don't think it's troubling to invoke the idea that there were individuals who claimed they saw Jesus alive afterwards. I don't think we have good attestation for it. I think Paul, the Apostle Paul, claims he saw Jesus alive a few years afterwards. And so I think, you know, I don't think he's lying about it.

I think you probably thought he saw Jesus. Paul, also being our earliest source of the New Testament, claims at one point that Jesus appeared to 500 people. That's right. that's right this seems to be some good evidence that we do have no I don't think so Paul knows there's a story

that 500 people saw him but I don't think that's evidence that 500 people saw him that that's a claim and so a claim isn't evidence evidence is when you try to substantiate the claim and so how do you go about establishing whether 500 people actually saw Jesus

well you look at what Paul says and then you see are there other sources to corroborate it Paul's writing before the Gospels. None of the Gospels mentions anything about this or the gospel sources. So Paul's our only source. And so is he right or not? Well, it seems like if 500 people saw him,

that this would be something that other people would mention, so I don't think we know. The thing about seeing things is that we have all the time. we have people who see things that aren't there. And a lot of evangelical Christians say, look, if you've got group visions, you can't have group hallucinations. That's right, yeah.

Yeah. So how do you explain Mother Mary showing up to hundreds of people at one time? Well, I think, I understand what you're saying, that we have examples of groups of people claiming that they've seen something that we don't actually believe they did. However, it seems in the case of the group

sightings of Jesus of the gospel narratives we're talking about a sort of a man like physically walking into a room interacting talking with these people it's not like seeing a vision of Mary we have modern accounts of Jesus showing up

today in all sorts of circles physically showing up I don't suppose that we have accounts of a man who died being seen by groups of people physically in the flesh, talking to them, interacting with them,

allowing them to sort of touch his hand, and appearing to people who spent significant periods of their life following them. And so it's not like they could have been mistaken about the identity. We certainly do have that of individuals in the ancient world. We have accounts of Romulus appearing to a senator and explaining what's happened to him. And so I think that, you know, and my view of this is that the kinds of evidence who look for

for Jesus needs to be the kind of evidence we allow for anyone else. And so it's striking to me that evangelical Christians focus on the Jesus materials, but they don't look at traditions that are comparable from the same period or sense. And so they say, well, you can't have group hallucinations, but they think that's exactly what you have when the Blessed Virgin Mary shows up. Or they say it's different because Jesus' disciples saw him. Well, okay, well, that's true of Apollonius of Tiana. Or that they'll say, well, but so many people have come to believe this.

That it's implausible that would happen if so many people believe. Well, there are about 2 billion people in the world who think that Muhammad was physically taken up in heaven. So do you use the same criteria or do you make exceptions in your case? But to have all of these things together in one example. I mean, you're quite right that you have a sort of an ancient account of an individual claiming to see somebody. And then you have a modern account of groups claiming to see a vision of something.

And then you have lots of people coming to believe something that they didn't see themselves. But put them together, groups of people, seeing a sort of physical sighting of a man who they used to know and followed around and lots of them coming to believe that's the case altogether. Seems to be a higher standard of evidence. None of those people in any of those groups attests to it. You see what I'm saying? We don't have groups of people saying they saw Jesus. We have individual writers saying...

We have a writer saying that groups of people saw him. And that isn't the same thing. You actually do have groups of people saying they saw Mary. And so that's stronger evidence. And it's not just that. I mean, it's just about anything. I mean, the Bailsham Tov, the best, this Jewish holy man who, we have accounts of his miracles that are written by the son of his personal secretary who got this information from two independent sources that all that were eyewitnesses to these miracles. There's not a Christian on the earth who thinks that these things happen,

But the attestation is better than to the miracles of Jesus. So what I'm saying is historians don't make exceptions on religious grounds. Historians look at evidence and evaluate it and try to establish what is most likely the most likely explanation for the evidence. And what is the most likely explanation in your view for these facts? What do you think happened? Is someone lying? Is someone mistaken? No, I don't think anybody's lying.

Through this whole thing, I just think, you know, I think a lot of atheists have this kind of binary, right? If it didn't happen, then somebody's lying about it. And that's just crazy. I mean, all of us have stories told about us that are not necessarily, sometimes people lying about us, but sometimes people just don't know any better. I mean, William and Craig thinks that I, like I was trained as a textual critic. He honestly thinks that. He's not lying about it. He just doesn't know.

I wasn't trained as a textual critic. So he doesn't know that. So people don't necessarily lie. I think what, in the case of the stories about Jesus, I think the most, my opinion is that the most plausible explanation is this. We have, you know, we know that Paul says that he saw him, and I don't think Paul's lying about it. I think Paul saw something.

He thought he saw Jesus three years afterwards. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that Peter was claiming that he saw Jesus. I mean, he's, he's, he's, Paul says he was the first to see Jesus, and in the gospel accounts, he's one of the early, he's there, Mary Magdalene, I would suppose Mary Magdalene probably had some kind of vision of Jesus. My, my sense is that these three people independently saw something they interpreted to be Jesus. They maybe, they maybe had a vision of some side, they mistook an identity, what they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had, they had a dream, I don't know, something happened to them, each of them.

And they told others, who told others, who told others, and the stories propagated. This kind of thing happens all the time. And so when you get both the synoptic gospels and the gospel of John, but I guess not in Mark, but you do get a sort of an anticipation of a group appearance in Mark at the end of Mark, but two of the Synoptic Gospels and in John, when we have a sort of written account of a group of people physically in a room seeing the figure of Jesus, is this just a story that sort of develops out of nowhere?

I mean, if this event didn't occur, but shows up in all of these gospels. No, it doesn't occur out of nowhere. It occurs because people are saying, I've seen Jesus. But if you think it's plausible that individuals might have seen Jesus. Yes.

And maybe there are some sort of ideas floating around that, you know, this person thought they saw Jesus, this person thought they saw Jesus. But the idea of a group of disciples sort of all getting together in a room, some of them saying that they've seen Jesus, and Jesus appearing to sort of vindicate his resurrection to them. Is this the sort of thing that can just sort of develop?

Is this sort of like a... How do rumors start anyway? I mean, how do rumors start that, you know, that, you know, a thousand people saw this thing? You know, 20 people saw this UFO. Where does that come from? It's not that somebody's lying about it, and it's usually not that 20 people saw it.

So it just happens, that kind of thing happens when you tell stories. But I want to insist that we don't have any of these group members saying that it happened. The other thing we haven't pointed out is you can't just take the Gospels that face value for this because when you compare their narratives of the resurrection, they're more contradictory than the stories of the birth narratives. We don't have a consistent, independent narrative. What we have are independent narratives that contradict each other. that are all written 40, 50, 60 years later

by people living in a different part of the world who didn't know any eyewitnesses who aren't even speaking the same language. I mean, so what do historians do with sources like that? They don't simply accept what they say because they happen to agree with their religious views. They evaluate them in light of what we know at the time, their consistency, even though if they see if they collaborated with each other.

These are the kinds of things that historians do. When you do that with these sources, I just don't think that, you know, you make a compelling case. What you end up saying is that there was one man in the history of the human race who was raised from the dead, and we know that because some people said so living decades later. I mean, you know, if I, I mean, you just think of it, what would analogies to that be? I mean, would you like, you know, if you take a cup of coffee and pour cream in it and you stir it up, it's always going to mix. I mean, the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics with entropy, requires it to be mixed up. You can never stir it long enough to unmix the cream, right?

I mean, you can't. You can't. It's a law of physics. It's never happened, never, never, never happen. If somebody says, they saw somebody do that 40 years ago and they say, you know, there are 100 other people who saw them do it, Would a physicist believe them? No, it can't happen. So the fact you've got somebody saying that 100 people saw it is not compelling evidence

when it comes to something that is a law of physics. They're also saying that people who, at the time that this purportedly happened, claimed that they saw what they saw. No, we don't know that. We don't know that the disciples themselves claim to have seen Jesus.

The only one we know is Peter. What do we know about Andrew's vision of Jesus? Well, I suppose not much, but it's... Nothing. It's also that Peter was willing to be put to the death for this belief. Ah, was he? Was he? Was he?

Like to reference. Why was Peter put to death? Again, I guess we don't have... We have no evidence. We don't know... We don't know that... Do we not know at all why Peter was put to death? This is another thing people say all the time.

I get this one a lot. Yeah. Where people say, look, these disciples have... had to believe in the resurrection because they went to their death for it. They died and for believing it. And you might die for the truth, but you're not going to die for a lie. I get that all the time. And then I asked him, how do you know how Andrew died? How do you know how Bartholomew died? How do you know how Peter died? Was he crucified upside down? How do you know that? When you ask them that, they have no idea. And the reality is we have no record of the deaths that within, I mean,

you get later legends. By the end of the second century, early third century, you start getting legendary accounts of the deaths of some of the apostles. So we have legendary accounts of John, who by the way did not die for believing it. He died as an old man, according to the legend. You have Peter and Paul and Thomas and Andrew. You've got four accounts of people who were killed for their faith. These are legendary accounts that even evangelicals will read them and say, It didn't happen that way. I mean, for example, when Paul gets killed in the act of Paul, end of the second, early third century,

the executioner lops his head off, cuts his head off. And out of his neck sprouts milk. So that's our account. So, okay, so when people say that all the disciples have died for their faith, well, what's the evidence of that? yeah okay interesting just to to wrap up i wanted to ask to revisit where we were before we started talking about the resurrection and in fact to take it back to the beginning if if jesus didn't walk around claiming to be

god the historical jesus i mean like the things that we think he actually did say who did jesus claim to be in your view what did he claim to be doing yeah i think jesus absolutely saw himself as a prophet of the coming kingdom. He thought the kingdom of God was soon to arrive and people needed to prepare for it. And so I think he modeled himself on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible who were warning people that danger was imminent and they needed to protect themselves from the danger by returning to God. But I think there was more to it than that. I think that Jesus probably did see himself as the king of this coming kingdom. I think that he thought that God was going to make him the king.

I don't think that's what he proclaimed publicly. We have no record of him saying that in public in our early sources. But it is the charge that was brought against him at his trial. I think it is pretty clear that Pilate killed him for claiming to be the king of the Jews. And he wasn't claiming to be the current king because there wasn't a kingdom. and so I think he probably was so I think what happened is that Jesus was telling his insiders

that the kingdom's going to come and I think he told them that he was going to be the king one reason for thinking that is because there's a saying of Jesus that I think we can establish is probably authentic what scholars do is they go through every saying of Jesus they get through every line they get through every word to try and figure out

did this happen or not do you say this or not there's this one saying that almost certainly Jesus said I think which is he's talking to the 12 disciples you get this in Matthew and Luke and he says to them in I think in the Matthew version he says to them that you 12 speak to the 12 disciples when the kingdom comes you 12 will be seated on 12 thrones ruling the 12 tribes of Israel 12 12 12 I think Jesus must have said this because Judas is one of the 12 he's talking to

And a later Christian, if you're trying to ask what would a Christian make up, a Christian is not going to make up a later saying where Jesus is saying that Judas is going to be one of the 12 rulers. So I think the saying probably goes back to Jesus. If that saying goes back to Jesus, as I think it must, that means that his 12 disciples are going to be ruling the 12 tribes. Well, who's going to be ruling them, the 12? I mean, he's the one who chose them,

and it's his teachings that are going to bring people into the kingdom. I think Jesus thought he'd be the king. and that he told the 12 and so Pilate found out divine in any sense do you think Jesus wasn't claiming any form of divinity

I don't think so no I don't think a Jew I don't think a first century Jew living in the 20s in Israel would have had any way of imagine that he was God well as I say more detail on this is available in your course

did Jesus claim to be God available at Bart Erman, that's B-A-R-T-E-H-R-M-A-N dot com, forward-slash Godman. I'm also told that you can access all of the courses that you have available by going to the link Bart-Ehrman.com forward slash Alex. This has been created as a way to direct people to all of the various courses across the sort of wealth of different theological and historical topics. If listeners are interested, links will be in the description as well. And of course, this is available, this material in writing.

the did Jesus claim to be God stuff probably most evident in we had it here has been in the background the whole time hidden away we have how Jesus became God this is probably the book that I would point people to if they want to talk about

the did Jesus claim to be God question how Jesus became God will also be linked down in the description below along with you can see a few other few works that we've managed to look into the background quite conveniently a bit of product place before you there. But it's been a fantastic and wide-ranging discussion.

Yeah, exciting. Yeah, this is good. No, important things. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Well, Dr. Bart Ehrman, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Thank you.