Within Reason - #92 Bart Ehrman - The Dark Side of Christmas

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. Get Bart Ehrman's new course, The Dark Side of Christmas (affiliate link). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is a million subscribers to your, what, your YouTube? YouTube, that's right. That's amazing. Wow. Okay. Yeah, not many people who make a living out of talking about the Bible most of the time manage to get a million subscribers, unless, of course, they're Christian evangelists. Yeah, well, as you are.

So I keep getting told. Dr. Erman, Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Happy time off work, whatever it is that you like to say. Merry Christmas is fine by me. Yeah, well, we're going to be talking today about the very first people to ever put the Christ back in Christmas, and that was whoever, of course, forged the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. You've got a course coming out, or it's out now, I think, by the time this video comes out,

the dark side of Christmas. We did a Christmas episode last year talking about the birth narratives, their contradictions in the Gospels, you know, what it is that they're really doing. you've taken a little bit of a different approach this year in your biblical scholarship with the birth narratives. What is the dark side of Christmas? Well, you know, once somebody realizes that these Christmas stories are not descriptive events of what actually happened, but they're actually narratives, they're stories that, of course, there are some historical elements to it. There was a Jesus. He was born. His mother probably was

named Mary, and there are some historical things. But the stories themselves, that we get to Matthew and Luke, as we discussed last time, have a number of differences among them, some of which are contradictory, and they're almost certainly not historical accounts. And so if they're narratives, then it's important to look and to see what the narratives are and what the narratives are trying to say. And, you know, like everybody else on the planet, I've always kind of assumed that these are just purely happy stories about the coming of the Savior into the world. And it's only been within the last year or so, I started thinking more seriously about the downside of these stories. That there's actually, there's a dark side. It's not that I'm imposing a dark side into the

story, but that if we ignore the dark elements of the story, then we're actually not paying attention to what the authors are trying to say. And so I thought it'd be interesting to look at what that is, and not in order to discredit the stories, although I think for some people, you know, it would. But for other people, it just, it shows that there's actually more depth and profundity of these stories than would strike somebody who's used only to seeing a Christmas pageant at the church once a year. Yes. And this course was filmed as a sort of live seminar on the 7th of December. It's not been filmed yet, but by the time this goes out, it will have done. But anybody who wants to see that can still. There'll be a link down in the description.

and affiliate link, if you want to support the channel, to go and get that course. And you've got a bunch of other courses, like countless courses and all kinds of things biblical that have been incredibly useful to me in the content that I produced. So that will be linked down in the description. I suppose the first question I want to ask is, I don't think we've really touched on this last time, but what are the birth narratives in terms of genre? Like, somebody reading the Gospels will probably know that, broadly speaking, the gospels are supposed to be like biographies of Jesus. They're often portrayed as being

at least attempt at history, the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. When you read the birth narratives, the language seems sort of roughly the same, but do you think that that's what the authors were intending to do? You just said a moment ago that they probably weren't intending to give sort of an accurate depiction of what actually happened, but was that the author's intention you know you know the as you know I mean the problem with intention is we never know what somebody's intentions are somebody might guess what my intention is you know intentions are doing this interview but they you know actually I may have some other intention they've got no idea about it's all in my head and sometimes I don't even know what I'm

intending to do so so with these authors you know we really don't know what they're intending to do but my my guess is I mean it's just you have to guess my guess is they probably thought these things happened and so when I say that they're not historical. I'm not saying that they thought they weren't historical. I don't know what they thought. But, you know, I think we can show they're not historical. And so what are they, what are they trying to accomplish? If, in fact, they're trying to write a biography. I mean, I think you're right. I think the gospels are best understood as a kind of Christian form of a biography of Jesus. The thing that gets confusing is that we're used to a certain kind of thing

when we read a biography. I mean, if I read a biography of Winston Churchill or of Abraham Lincoln, you know, or of whoever, we have certain expectations because of how biographies are written in the modern world. And our modern expectations are driven by the fact that today people can do research on these things, and they have databases that they can go to, and they have all sorts of source material. And someone like Luke, for example, would not have had a library to go to or source material. And that's true of all the ancient biographers, the Greek and Roman biographers,

Swatonius and Plutarch and so forth. They wrote biographies. They wrote accounts of important people that are roughly like ours. They're the life, the life and what happened in a person's life. But there are lots of essential differences. One of the things that they often do in their biographies, ancient biographies, is they begin with some account of the person's birth. And not always, but often. And the point of the birth narratives usually is what the point, actually what the entire biography is, which is somewhat to give information, of course, but also to show what this person's character is like.

And so if somebody has a really rough beginning, it probably means this person's going to have a really rough life because it's foreshadowing what's going to happen. If you have somebody who's very famous, who is astounding, then they'll have some kind of spectacular birth. And so we have birth narratives of Alexander the Great, for example, or Plato, or, you know, pick your famous person. And these are often portrayed, even these birth narratives are often portrayed in supernatural terms to show that this person wasn't just a mere human like the rest of us, peons down here, that in fact they were something really special. And so I think the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are both trying to function that

way, trying to show that Jesus came into the world as something really different from the rest of us. Yeah, it's interesting to think just how limited the source material would have been for an ancient biographer of Jesus. what do we think about the dating of these birth narratives? Most people will probably know that Mark was the first gospel, John was the latest, and Matthew and Lucas somewhere in the middle. Do we have an idea of which was written first and whether or not they were aware of each other's writings?

Oh, well, there are differences of opinion on all these things. But you're right. I mean, almost everybody agrees Mark was first, and it does not have a birth narrative. John is the last one. It also does not have a birth narrative. Usually, Marx's dated around 70 or so, early 70s, and John is usually dated into the 90s or so. And it's long been thought that Matthew and Luke are sort of in between. And so like in the 80s, 80 or 85 of the common era, conservative evangelical scholars or conservative Catholic scholars might argue that they're, you know, 10 years after the birth of Jesus or something.

But most critical scholars don't think that. The big issue right now among scholars is whether Luke might be a later account. Luke also wrote the book of Acts, and some scholars are arguing that Acts could not have been written before the beginning of the second century. And so, if so, then Luke possibly would be later as well. The other big question is the one you mentioned. Did they know each other? I think everybody agrees, just about everybody agrees, that Matthew was not using the Gospel of Luke. One question is whether the Gospel of Luke was using the Gospel of Matthew. Luke is probably later. Did he have access to Matthew? And there's a small but loud minority of scholars who are saying yes. But the majority of us still think, no.

These are independent accounts. And when you compare just the birth narratives themselves, they have basically some things in common, right? But there's a birth in Bethlehem to somebody named Mary, who was a virgin. You know, their basic thing, but the stories themselves are completely different. And they have different points, and they're different things. And so I think they're probably independent of one another. Yes. Am I right in thinking that there are some scholars who even think that Luke is later than John?

Yeah. So the deal is that the book of acts that this person also wrote, some scholars have been arguing that the book of acts shows knowledge of the writings of Josephus. Josephus is writing in the 90s. His antiquities of the Jews appeared in the year 93. And if the author of Acts

did know that, then he had to be writing later. And so there's a move to push him back to like the year 120 or so. John is usually dated to the 90s. These are highly educated guesses.

So they're both guesses, but they're highly educated guesses. And so if Acts was written by the same person who wrote Luke, as it almost certainly was, and Acts was written in round 120, then possibly Luke, the gospel of Luke was possibly written later. But again, I'd say that's a minority view. Wow. What is it that gives us an indication that Luke, the author of Luke Acts, might have known the works of Josephus? Okay, that's a long other story, but it's a little bit complicated.

And I'll tell you, one of my criticisms of modern biblical scholarship, as it's been happening over the last 10 or 20 years, is that scholars have started, in my opinion, started lowering the burden of proof so that, you know, scant evidence is taken as hard evidence. And so in this particular case, it is not like we have for evidence, for example, that Matthew used Mark to show that. that Matthew used Mark, there is compelling evidence. Matthew has almost all the same stories as Mark and other ones, too. But then tells the same stories in the same sequence, and sometimes word for word the same. You can't get that unless somebody's copying somebody. And with Josephus and Ax, it's not like that at all. It's that there are some strange connections that you wouldn't expect.

I'll just give you one example. And Josephus talks about a couple of Jewish prophetic figures who tried to lead rebellions against Rome or were suspected of leading rebellions against Rome. And one of them is named Judas the Galilean and one is named Thudus. The Book of Acts mentions both of those. Judas of Galilee was like, you know, in the year 6, B.C.E. or something, and he's like, he goes way back there. And Thudis was like decades later. Okay. But Axe mentions them in the opposite order, mentions Thudis is coming first and then Judas of Galilee.

Josephus also talks about Thudus and Judas of Galilee. And he knows that Judas of Galilee was earlier, but he talks about him first, before he talks about Thudas. See? So this is kind of confusing. But the point is, is that they say, well, so, Acts must have gotten that from Josephus. And I don't know. I just seems to me. So a little less, a little less stringent than Matthew.

For me, it's way less stringent. Last question on dating, I promise. But, okay, so you flip open Matthew and you flip open Mark and they're sort of verbatim, same passages. How then do we know that Mark came afterwards, that Matthew came afterwards and that Mark wasn't like a redacted version of Matthew? Well, you know, in the early church, that was the opinion. San Augustine thought that Mark was kind of like a Reader's Digest version of Matthew. They got rid of the sayings and things. The arguments are kind of complicated and we maybe could do an episode on some time.

Yeah, in fact, we should do it. that, yeah. But it is, but the arguments are really quite compelling for Matthew not being, that Mark not copying Matthew, but Matthew copying Mark. And it has, it has to do with the agreements between Matthew, Mark, and Luke in tandem, the three of them in tandem, and it has to do with, with sequencing of the arguments. And it's, there are long arguments. We can't talk about that if you want to, but It's the kind of thing. They worked this out in the 19th century in Germany, where they really dug down deep, and then England picked up on it, then America.

And now there's almost, there's, there's, I don't personally know anybody who thinks Matthew was first because these arguments are just so compelling. If you want an argument, I can give it to you. We'll get back to Bart Ehrman in just a moment, but first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the bias that inevitably seeps into media reporting. One thing that we, as consumers of news, can do to navigate this media landscape is to compare headlines, objectively analyzing how different sources are reporting on the same story. At least we can now, thanks to today's sponsor, Ground News.

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use MyLink to get 50% off their unlimited access vantage plan just now for the holiday season. With that said, back to Bart Ehrman. No, right, I think let's best move on to talk about this, the dark side of Christmas. Most people know about the story of the nativity. And in fact, people acted out in schools and, yeah, the look of horror on my teacher's face when I said, I want to play one of the slaughtered innocent children that get killed in all of Bethlehem by Herod. The interesting question is why these horrible things are in the Gospels. Now, we can talk about what these are.

I mean, people will have heard of these things. Herod hears that there's a new king of the Jews who's been born. Herod is the king of the Jews. And so, out of insecurity, he decides to slaughter every child under the age of two in Bethlehem and the vicinity in order to prevent this king of the Jews from trying to overthrow him. that's a pretty horrible story. Now, if that actually happened, then of course the gospel writers would put it into the story. But if the gospel writers were kind of putting together semi-mythical events and basing their stories on things that they'd heard or maybe even making up stories to make a theological point, the question is on a theological level. Why would

these really horrible elements be included in the story of Jesus' birth? Yeah, well, I think that's by far the worst one. And it is horrible. And people, you know, when you read the stories or you see it enacted in church or whatever, I probably not most people participating those volunteer to be one of the slaughtered children. So you did. Okay. So, but, you know, when you read the story, what people, people just are enthralled by the, the fact that Jesus manages to escape and that God warns Joseph in a dream that this is going to happen and they have to get out of town and so they pack up and they travel to Egypt to escape Herod's wrath and so they think, oh, Jesus got away, great. But you don't think about all of these children who are slaughtered. People normally don't. And it's kind of like, you know, when you have one of these incidents, like there's an airline, airline crash, and, you know, 360 people die, and three escape, and you manage to survive. And, you know, soon afterwards, one of them's

interviewed on TV, and he says, oh, God was with me. I'm just so glad that God was protecting me. And what in the world are you talking about? There are 360 people who died here? You mean, God protected you? What? And so, like, and so we have that kind of reaction then. many of us do i do um but not with this story what about all those babies i mean why why did they why would they have to be killed and what's i think what makes it dark is that this is only matthew it's it's matthew's it's matthew's version and matthew says that it was in order to fulfill prophecy right because there's a prophecy in the book of jeremiah uh that rachel will weep for her children because they were no more. And so the slaughter of the innocence has the women

mourning, mourning, completely torn apart by the fact their children have been murdered. And it's to fulfill prophecy. Why is there a prophecy in the first place that this had to happen? I mean, in other words, you know, it looks like it's a nice thing. Oh, yeah, that does. That shows that Jesus is the Messiah, that's great. But why do you have to have a Messiah that comes into the world that leads to the slaughterer of innocent babies and ruining the lives of these families? Why don't do it some other way? So that's... Yeah, I mean, having an angel appear to Joseph and warn him that this is happening, so you better run. You might have thought that God could have sent the angel to maybe have a word with Herod instead, perhaps. Yeah, right, exactly. Well, that's right.

But it wouldn't have fulfilled prophecy then. Yeah, well, Matthew is pretty concerned with the fulfillment of prophecy. At one point in the birth narratives, even the fulfilling of a prophecy that doesn't seem to exist when he says that he shall be called a Nazarene. And I think we talked about that last time as well. But of course, the family flee to Egypt. And when they come back from Egypt, Matthew says that this is so that the prophecy is fulfilled in Hosea, that out of Egypt, I shall call my son. Now, in Hosea, it seems to be talking about Israel here. Out of Egypt, I shall call my son. And the son there is the nation of Israel being called out of Egypt, where they were once enslaved. Matthew seems to be, if these stories didn't happen, I mean, do you think it's plausible to suggest that Matthew simply invented these stories in order to fulfill prophecy? I mean, do we think that the slaughter of the innocence actually happened historically? Do we think that? that Jesus and his family did travel to Egypt, or do we think they're inventions either of

Matthew, the evangelist, or of somebody else that he'd been listening to? Well, I think they have to be inventions. I don't think that they can be historical. You know, we have an account of Herod and his atrocities, and the good things he did, for example, in the writings of Josephus, the Roman historian. And Josephus was well informed about the events in Herod's reign. And he has no trouble mentioning some of the awful things he did, but there's no word about this one. And this would be one of the worst things he'd ever done. And so there's no record, not just in Josephus, but anywhere of this happening. And this is the kind of thing that you'd certainly have a record of. So I don't think it happened. The idea that going

down to Egypt, you know, you just think about the logistics about this for a second. If Jesus was born in Bethlehem, I think a lot of historians think that actually that story, too, is made up because everybody knows he came from Nazareth, but in these two accounts, only in these two accounts, he comes from Bethlehem, the home of his ancestor, King David. But suppose he was born in Bethlehem, and suppose Joseph of Mary decided to take him down to Egypt? Well, okay. So from Bethlehem to Cairo, it's about 450 miles. And they, you know, they can't catch a train. And so how, you know, and so they go down and what do they, they walk down there? How do they, how do they do this? They're not rich. They don't have money. And where do they get their food? And how do they do this? And then come back for it. And then they take another 100 miles to go up to Nazareth afterwards. So you're talking about, you know, a thousand mile track. And it's found a, only in Matthew, and it's only given to show that he fulfilled prophecy. Well, Matthew, as you said, repeatedly throughout his gospel, but especially in the birth narrative, emphasizes Jesus fulfilled prophecy. And the whole point of these stories is to show him fulfilling prophecy, even when they're improbable or completely implausible. And so it's fulfilling a theological function rather than showing

what historically really happened. And that's not to mention, of course, the fact that in Luke's birth narrative, the family go to Jerusalem to present Jesus at the temple when the Gospel of Matthew has them going down to Egypt. Now, some people have tried to rectify that supposed contradiction by saying that they did both, which is often the case with biblical contradictions. Again, we talked about that in more detail in our last episode, But lots of reasons here to be thinking that, thank God Almighty, this is not a historical account of...

Yeah, right. Thank God it didn't happen. Yeah, good point. And, you know, it just... The reconciliations are problematic because Luke says they went right back to Nazar 40 days later. And Matthew says they went down to Egypt, which is, as I said, 450 miles. So, but the point of that contradiction is not just so you can say, oh, yeah, there's a contradiction. know, you can't trust these things. It's in order to show that these are stories and that as

narratives, they need to be interpreted as narratives. And you're somewhat missing the point if you're trying to reconcile everything, because the point is not what historically happened in this case. The point is, what is Matthew trying to show and what is Luke trying to show? And what are they trying to say about Jesus in these accounts? Now, we know why Jesus had to go to Nazareth to be a Nazarene, as the missing prophecy says. We know why he went to Jerusalem, because Jerusalem is the side of the temple. Why did he have to be born in Bethlehem? Well, that fulfills another prophecy.

And so in this case, Matthew quotes the prophet, prophet Micah, Micah chapter 5, verse 2, that there'll be a Savior who comes out of Bethlehem. Bethlehem was the birthplace of King David, and the Messiah was supposed to be a descendant of David. And to show then that Jesus is the son of David, Matthew wants him to be born in Bethlehem, where David was born, to fulfill the prophet Micah. And so once again, And it's kind of this interweaving of biblical prophecy to show who Jesus really is. Now, another question I have about the birth narratives broadly here is, is there any speculation about whether these were later interpolations into the Gospels? The reason I ask that is because I read the birth narrative of Matthew and I open the text and I see a genealogy of Jesus and then I see a birth narrative and then I see Jesus's ministry.

If I open the Gospel of Luke, I have a birth narrative with a bunch of other stories as well that aren't in Matthew, and we get like babies doing backlips and stomachs and stuff, and then we get the birth narrative, and then we get a baptism of Jesus, and then we get the genealogies of Jesus and the beginning of the ministry. And I don't know, it seems to me like maybe we started off with two Gospels that began with a genealogy and that somebody decided to sort of stick on this birth narrative to Luke at some point later. I'm not sure if the same thing might have happened with Matthew, but the other thing that sort of rings alarm bells here is that I might be wrong about this,

but it seems like the gospels outside of the birth narratives don't know anything about Jesus's birth of a virgin. Now, being born of a virgin would be a pretty good card to play when people are sort of doubting your authoritative. or when they're sort of asking you about Mary or anything like that. But nobody even tries to bring that up as a point towards Jesus's authority. So it seems like the disciples and the writers of the Gospels outside of the birth narratives don't know what happened there. It also seems like the placement's a little bit weird. Do you think these were part of the original manuscripts?

So it's a complicated question. I'm actually, I'm doing a webinar with members of my blog on this point in a couple of days. And because I think that there's very good evidence that Luke did not originally have that, have his birth narrative. There's not the same evidence with Matthew. I think Matthew probably did start that way. But Luke in particular, the points you're making are really some of the key points. Why would you have a genealogy of somebody after they're baptized as a 30-year-old?

Luke says he's 30. It's like not normally the place you'd put to genealogy. But there's a complication to it, too, that would not be widely known, that is that at the baptism, in Luke's gospel, you know, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus is baptized and he comes out of the water, and a voice comes from heaven. And in Mark's gospel, the voice says, you are my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. In Luke's gospel, a lot of the later manuscripts have that as well. You are my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. But some of our early manuscripts have something different, some of our earliest manuscripts. Some of our earliest manuscripts, the voice comes from heaven and says, You are my son, today I have begotten you.

A quotation, Psalm 2.7. And there are excellent reasons for thinking that that was originally what Luke wrote, and later scribes found it problematic. Today, I've begotten you when you're being baptized. But if that's the case, if that was what the voice said, which I think it is in Luke, then it makes sense that the genealogy comes right after it. Because the genealogy in Luke doesn't just go back to King David or just back to Abraham, the father of the Jews.

It goes back to Adam, the first human being. And from Adam, it goes to God. It starts with God. And so Jesus is descended from God, and then the voice says, Today I have begotten. He says, it's the Son of God imagery. So the genealogy makes sense in Luke, given that voice, but it doesn't make sense if you have a birth narrative.

Because in the birth narrative in Luke, the reason Jesus is the son of God is because the angel tells Mary that she's going to conceive, the Virgin will, the Holy Spirit, will impregnate her so that the one born of her will be called the son of God. And so the, yeah, so the virgin birth in Luke is to function that show Jesus really is the son of God, but it doesn't make sense then once you get to chapter three with the baptism and the genealogy. Yeah, and of course, you sort of, as people will realize reading the Gospels, you have all this info about Jesus's birth, precise details about who showed up and what happened,

and then radio silence right up until the baptism in his 30s. Well, and it's also, it's striking in Luke that Luke, as I mentioned, also wrote the book of Acts. Together, Luke and Acts make up one-fourth of the New Testament, just in bulk. And things about Jesus' life are mentioned in the book of Acts. Again, not his virgin birth. Even the apostles trying to preach that he's the son of God, say nothing about a virgin birth, in the book of acts. And so I think that what happened is that either Luke himself, either the author,

whatever his name was, whoever he was, either did a second edition with adding the birth narrative, which is totally possible, or somebody else added it on. The thing to note, though, one other point to note is that those two chapters, the birth narrative, are told in a very different writing style from the rest of the of Luke. Luke is actually a pretty good Greek author compared to most of the authors of the New Testament. Those two chapters are written in what scholars call a septuagintal style. It's in the language, the writing style is in imitation of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. That septuagintal style is all beginning with the birth narrative all

the way through chapter two, and then it ends at 3.1. And so it looks like, like it's maybe a different author using a different style. Wow. That's, I mean, that's pretty extraordinary. And the question that always comes to mind for me is that when we have instances in which the stories about Jesus were adapted after they were written down, what's to say that they weren't also adapted before they were written down as well? I mean, people say, when you say, well, how do you know you've got an accurate reporting of what

happened if nobody wrote it down for decades. And people say, well, there was a very strong oral tradition of people passing on stories and making sure every word was perfect. And it's like, okay, even the written manuscripts can adapt and change over time. There's a whole added extra ending to the entire Gospel of Mark. There's the story of the adulterous woman in John, which seems to be added in at a later date, perhaps even the last chapter of John, John 21, which for numerous reasons might also be thought to be an interpellation. If that can happen in the textual tradition, then of course it can also happen in the oral tradition too. Well, not only that, the people who say that really don't understand how oral cultures work. You know, I've spent a couple years doing

nothing but studying memory and oral traditions and oral cultures. Like, I didn't read anything about the New Testament or anything for about two years. This is about 10 years ago. I just reading memory books and what we know about oral cultures. And this line that in oral cultures, they never change anything. It's just completely bogus. It's not true. And we can show it's not true in the ancient world, and we know it's not true in oral cultures since then. And so one of my books actually deals with this. And so it's completely wrong, but the point you're making is a really good one, because you would think that in written cultures, especially people would keep things intact. No, they're changing them all over the place. Which book is it that that deals with

that? Well, it's my best book that nobody's read. It's because I actually, I should have given it a different title. It's called Jesus before the Gospels. But it's dealing with the oral traditions of Jesus. And what I did is I read all of these psychological studies of memory, how we remember things. I studied anthropologists who have studied modern oral cultures. I looked at the sociologists, talking about social memory. And I applied all of that to what we know. about the gospel traditions of Jesus before they were written down. And for me,

it was a really, really interesting book, a lot of fun. Well, now, the topic of the hour is the dark side of Christmas. We've talked about the slaughter of the innocence. What other kind of darkness is there lurking behind the nice Christmas lights? Well, you know, one thing, kind of a basic thing is just the Mary becoming pregnant

is, again, something that seems like a joyful event. I mean, Jesus is born of a virgin, and she's honored by God. And Luke, you know, in Luke, the angel comes to her in Luke. So only in Luke do you have the enunciation scene where she has a visitation from the angel Gabriel, who tells her that she's going to conceive. And she says, well, you know, I've never known a man. another, I've never had sex. And he said, well, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. The power of the most high will overshadow you so that the one born of you will be called holy, the son of God.

And she says, well, I'm the slave of God. Do with me what you will. When you start thinking about that for a second, it's troubling. So in ancient cultures broadly, but also in Israel, were married, that's when they got married. The men tended to be older because they had to be able to establish lives. And so the men might be in the early 30s, but the girls were 13 or 14 whenever they hit puberty. And so this is this 13 or 14-year-old girl who gets pregnant without being married. That can be very bad in many cultures today,

just in terms of reputation and social social. stigmas. And in the Gospels that's seen as problematic, Joseph is going to privately put her away and not have anything to do with her and divorce her. And here's this innocent girl who, you know, she has no saying the matter. You know, the angels doesn't say, is this okay with you? You know, and God's a you all right with this, Mary? It's that this is going to happen. And she says, well, I'm your slave. Well, yes. Masters could have sex with slaves as much as they wanted to and impregnate them if they want to. And so she's, this is what's going on then.

God is getting her pregnant without, you know. And the assumption is, well, of course, she's going to be happy about this. The text doesn't say anything about her being happy about it. Joseph isn't happy about it, but they submit to the will of God. You know, you just think about your 13-year-old daughter getting pregnant, and, you know, it can be heart-wrenching, really. Some say, I mean, this is a point of contention.

the pregnancy of Mary because some say that when she says you know look I'm a servant of the Lord there are two ways to read this there's a kind of well being your slave what shall I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire and there's a reading that's sort of like

this is an issuance of consent that this is her saying like I am your servant yes I will I will do what you want but in a kind of in a kind of happy way as if you say you know can you do you want to cook me some dinner And I'm like, hey, I'm, I'm your servant. I'll do whatever you want because I love you, you know.

And so it's unclear exactly how to read this. But even if we're talking about Mary sort of saying, okay, this is fine, giving her consent to this, I mean, firstly, she would have been quite young, right? I don't think we actually know how old she would have been, but some people say she would have been quite young. I'm not sure about that. Well, I think, I mean, as I was saying, normally 13 or 14 would be the age. and even if you think that she's saying yeah sure go ahead and do this i mean if your 13 year old

daughter said yeah i'm i consent to this i want to have a pregnancy i think you'd think maybe you need to be a little bit older before you can even you know meaningfully consent in that way um it's an interesting thing i mean when you talk about the dark side of christmas this isn't something that came to mind but i have heard this discussed a lot now that i think about it and not only this but someone i know uh recently pointed out i mean there's this christmas song Mary, did you know? I don't know exactly how it goes, but like, Mary, did you know, that, you know, your kid would go on to do all of these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was like, this is, this, I wasn't, I didn't think this was supposed to be like a happy Christmas song, because like, Mary had no idea that she was not only about to conceive a child at an incredibly young age and possibly, you know, ruin her reputation with people who didn't believe her, but also she'd then have to watch her son one day be brutally crucified. And this is sort of a preorday. and just sort of thrust upon Mary, even if she did consent to the idea of having a child who would be the son of God.

You'd have no idea of the suffering that she would have to go through watching him be crucified in front of her. Yeah. Well, you know, the way you first put this, I always considered this kind of a happy story and that she's consenting and that she's, you know, and it is striking that she doesn't say, you know, I'm your serving. She's, I'm your slave. And even if she does consent and even if it's like she's pleased about it, The social stigma in the ancient world for being pregnant out of wedlock was really quite severe, just as it is today. I mean, you know, adultery was punishable by death in ancient Israel.

I'm not saying that that always, I'm not saying every pregnant woman got stone to death, but it is in the Torah that she's supposed to be executed. and so even if she's willing, it had to lead, by any measure, it had to lead to real personal suffering and social rejection. And the thing about her, you know, then knowing that the son is going to die, that's actually indicated in the birth narratives themselves, in the Gospel of Luke, where the prophet who sees Jesus as a newborn, Simeon says that this child will grow up and it'll drive a sword through your heart, he says to Mary. Wow, man, from beginning to end, you know, she's always portrayed as being very pleased

and happy and joyful about it. But if you just put it in human terms, it does also have this dark side. And one of my points in this course that I'm doing is that the dark I'm not talking about the dark side in order to show what a horrible story it is. In some ways, I want to talk about it as having a deeper profundity than people realize. When you put this at the level of human emotion, what this really entails is not this kind of happy-go-lucky Christmas pageant. It is pain and suffering. When the Son of God comes into the world, it isn't for these birth narratives. One of the points these birth narratives, one of the points they're making is that the coming of the Son of God is not simply to relieve the suffering and bring salvation into the world.

Jesus is coming in the midst of suffering, and the suffering is right there before your eyes, even though people look the other way. And it's not only that, but the coming of the Son of God creates suffering. I mean, it does create huge suffering. These babies who get killed, these journeys that have to be taken. taken in poverty, this woman who's made pregnant. These are very, very powerful images that we neglect, I think, and that we overlook. And it's saying something, I think Matthew's trying to say something about God's relationship to suffering in the world, that he doesn't take it lightly. You know, he doesn't kind of just write it off. He's deeply, deeply entrenched it in some way.

Now, you said a second ago that the word here is not servant, but slave. Now, I've, looking at the NIV, the NIV has Luke's gospel put into the words of Mary, you know, I am your servant, or I am the Lord's servant. Do you think that that's a mistranslation? I mean, I don't know the Greek, but I know that a lot of the time words can kind of mean different things, depending on the context, but do we know that she really meant something more like a slave here? Yeah, we do. It's, this word is notoriously difficult for translators, not because they don't know what it means, but because there are reasons not to translate it to what it meant. The word is du la.

The Greek word, the mask in terms, what you look it up in a dictionary, Duloss. And it means a person who's owned by someone else and is required to do what they ask. And so there are separate words for servants, which would be somebody who, who serve somebody willingly, but they're not owned by the other person. The reason, especially in American translations, which the NIV is largely, for not using the word slave, is because translators are afraid that people will think of the term in light of the Antebellum South here, where the were and conjure image of African-American slavery and putting that wholesale onto that the ancient world because slavery was different in the ancient world but there is also a lot of

like too you were owned by somebody and you had to do what they told you to do and you could be punished and they were like very little to stop somebody from punishing you so the word is slave it's absolutely slave but many translators not just the NIV but the more recent updated edition of the NRSV, translated as servant. And in that case, by the way, the NRS committee voted for slave. But the National Council of Churches that published the NRSV decided to change it, even though they weren't the translators. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Because the NRSV is known for being, if I'm not mistaken, are more kind of to the text translation. It's supposed to give you a good idea of what the original Greek words meant, whereas the NIV probably takes a bit more liberty in trying to get the meaning across, right? Well, it's a complicated matter, this translation thing.

When I was actually the, I was a research assistant for the NRSV committee when it came out, the NRC came out in 1988. I was the research grunt for the committee. And their policy was to make it as, as literal as necessary, but they wanted it both be literal and idiomatic. And some translations are more idiomatic and somewhat more paraphrastic. Others are way more literal, like word for word wooden, like the New American Standard Bible.

And so both the NIV and the NRSV tried to kind of do a bit of both to make it very readable but accurate. but the NIV tends to the NIV committee was all committed evangelical scholars who in places implemented their evangelical biases I think I know

a number of those translators and the NRSV was a committee with a wide range of different kinds of people Jews. The NIV of course the nearly infallible version I wonder

we've done the the flight to Egypt as a result of the death of the killing of the newborns we talked about Mary how much more darkness is there for us to uncover in this in this story well you know that those are the main points of darkness they're also the main points of the story so I mean in in Matthew's Matthew's version, the birth of Jesus takes very quickly. Matthew begins with the genealogies you pointed out. And then it says, The birth of Jesus happened like this.

And boom, boy, it's like a few verses. Then you get the birth. But most of the story is the wise men, the Magi, who are following the star to Bethlehem so they can worship this child. And so they're following the star. And the entire, this whole thing with the wise men story is trying to explain.

why Herod slaughtered these babies, because he finds out from the wise men about the king of the Jews being born. And so the whole episode really is about the slaughter of the innocence and then the flight down to Egypt. In Luke's version, the whole, the account of the birth itself is all about this trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Joseph, so this is, I guess this is another part I hadn't talked about, but in Luke's version, the reason Jesus is born in Bethlehem is because there's a census that the entire world has to register for that was put out by Caesar Augustus. And so, you know, there was no worldwide census under Caesar Augustus, but in this narrative, there is a worldwide census, and everybody had to register for it. And Joseph is from the family

of David, so he has to register where David was born. And so he has to go to Nazareth. Well, this is a 100-mile journey. If he's up in Nazareth, he's got to go down to Bethlehem. His wife is not his wife, his betroth, is nine months pregnant. And so this is a bit of suffering. She's got to travel down nine months pregnant to Bethlehem to register for the senses. Why? So Jesus can be born there. They register for the census. Forty month and a half later, they go back. And, you know, and why? I mean, you know, and again, they're not, they're not catching a flight. They're, you know, presumably, they're walking there, nine months pregnant, so that he can be born there? Why is that necessary?

Why does Luke just have him live in Bethlehem and then later go to Nazareth, the way Matthew does? Well, it's because, you know, he knows that they came from Nazareth. He thinks Jesus has to be born in Bethlehem, and so he comes up with the story that has this dark side of this woman, having to fully pregnant, having to travel down there. Yeah, that's also pretty dark. I mean, I imagine even if they did get a plane or a train, when you're heavily pregnant, that's a pretty uncomfortable experience anyway. Yeah, no, it's not, you know, there's no place for them to stay.

And, you know, and so it's, it's, and they, that's the other thing is that they sort of end up having to give birth either in a, in a house in Matthew, I think, but Luke has it in the, in the famous stable, right? Well, he doesn't actually say a stable. What he says is that there was no room in the inn. And so we don't know where they were. In the older tradition, in the early church, it was a cave that Joseph found a cave. But the reason people say is stable is because there's a manger.

And so there must be animals there. So there's no mention of sheep or anything like you get in the Christmas pageants, but there's a manger there, a food trough. My students, my students, for some reason, have the idea that Mary gave birth in the manger. I guess she's lying down in this food trough and it doesn't say that, but they don't have a cradle available, so they put them in a manger. This is part of, so this is, again, this is part of Luke's story. Luke is trying to emphasize, unlike Matthew, Luke is trying to emphasize that Jesus came to the poor and he ministered to the poor during his life. And he's concerned about the poor and the outcast, and he's born a poor outcast.

And in Luke's gospel, it's not these wealthy, highly placed wise men from the east who worship him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In Luke's version, it's these lowly shepherds. So these illiterate farmhands who are out freezing with their flocks every night who come to worship him. And this is all, both stories are trying to emphasize something different about the coming of Jesus into the world. Matthew more that this is the king who has come, and Luke more like, this is the Savior of the poor and the oppressed. So Luke is sort of writing for the poor, or sort of trying to indicate that Jesus came for the poor. Matthew, as we've already said, is seemingly obsessed with the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. We know that the different authors of the

gospels, the different evangelists, as they're called, have different intentions when when writing their Gospels, is there a reason why the Gospels of Mark and the Gospels of John, especially with John being the most sort of theological and the latest of the Gospels, don't include anything about Jesus' birth? Yeah, well, you know, they don't. They don't say there's no birth narrative. There's no references, per se, to Jesus' birth in these Gospels. So we don't know.

We don't know whether Mark and John actually had heard a birth narrative before. We just can't tell. You would think that they would have. Surely we'd be talking about it. But Mark is writing before Matthew and Luke. Maybe in his community, they didn't have a story yet of the birth. John is writing later, but we tend to think of these authors like all knowing each other or something or all having access to each other's work.

But John might be just in a completely different community. He hasn't heard. But there are things about Mark and John that make us think that make me think that maybe they didn't think Jesus had been born of a virgin. I mean, in March, in some ways, is the more interesting because in Mark's gospel, early in Jesus' ministry, his mother and his brothers come to, they think, they come to take him out of the public view because Jesus is getting very popular, he's had the following. and we're told in Mark chapter 3, verse 20, that his family think that he's gone out of his mind. He's gone crazy, and he's gone crazy, and he rejects them. He turns them away. That's his mother and his brother.

Why would his mother think he's gone crazy? Didn't she know that he was a virgin when he was born and know who he was? Not in Mark. She doesn't know who he is. Like everyone else, she doesn't realize who he is. So I think Mark doesn't know anything about a virgin birth and has a different view of Jesus' family from Matthew and Luke. John is interesting as well because John certainly has Jesus come into the world, but not through a virgin. In John's account, Jesus is a pre-existent divine being who was with God in the beginning, who created the world and Christ himself created the world and then became a human being.

and so in order to bring salvation. And so in John's Gospel, we have an incarnation. Incarnation literally means coming in the flesh, where a divine being becomes a human being. And that's who Christ is. He is God's Word, who is with God in the beginning, who has now become a human being. That's only in John.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke say nothing like that and nothing about it. but what people have done for time immemorial is they've taken john's account of jesus coming into the world as an incarnation and matthew and luke's account of jesus being born of the virgin and combine the two into one thing that none of them says and so in the nicene creed it's jesus um becomes incarnate through the virgin mary where there's no birth narrative, and Matthew and Luke's virgin birth narrative, where there's no incarnation. When you read Matthew and Luke, Jesus does not pre-exist. The reason he's the son of God is because God impregnates Mary. That's why he's the son of God. So he didn't exist before that. In John, he did pre-exist, but he's not born of a virgin.

And so this is one of those things where since all four Gospels are put in the same book, between the same two covers, people read them in relationship to one another and end up creating a story in their heads that is not in any of the gospels. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, the the Gnostic Christian in me was holding his tongue and having to be sort of held back with chains when you talked about Luke's gospel saying, you know, today I have begotten you. I mean, this is so in keeping with a more Gnostic tradition. I guess there's also sort of the adoptionist view of Jesus' divinity, but it's so interesting how you can see, you can almost like watch the development of traditional Christian doctrine through the Gospels and the stories.

It starts with sort of like, as I say, like that in this particular case, we've got Luke where you have a sort of a birth story and the impregnation of Mary by a God, which is kind of in keeping with a lot of ancient, divine human stories, right? You write about this in how Jesus became God. You begin with a sort of analysis, so it's a wonderful book, begins with this analysis of the treatment of humans as divine or gods as human in the ancient world and in Judaism. And the idea that a god will come down and have sex with a mortal woman and give birth to a god or a sort of demi-god or something is a pretty common story. So it makes sense for that to be what you would put into a birth narrative. And you have Jesus potentially, today I have begotten you at the baptism, as if God is sort of putting divinity into him at some later point.

So you've got this like mortally born, not pre-existing person who gets infused with divinity at the baptism. Fast forward to John, and you've got, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was God. And the word is made flesh and dwelt among us. So the word is Jesus. And I'm looking at this and thinking, is there any other way to read this in that an early Christian community, the very earliest Christian communities, didn't see Jesus as God in the same way that a hundred years later they did? Well, yeah, you know, I think that's absolutely right, because you line them up chronologically, and that's how it goes. It becomes an increasingly more exalted view of Jesus. the monkey wrench to throw into that is that our earliest writer, our earliest writer, not

gospel writer, earliest Christian author is Paul, who also seems to think of Jesus as a pre-existent being in Philippians too. And so what I would say is that there absolutely was a progression of thought so that Christ becomes more and more exalted. And it goes on for centuries until you get the doctrine of the Trinity, which is about that's as high as you can get, really. And so there is a progression, but it's not a straight linear progression that everybody was thinking the same thing at the same time. In other words, later Christians had early adoptionist Christologies.

Some early Christians had more of an incarnation theology, although not as high as in the Gospel of John. And so it's an uneven development, but it does go in that direction. And that answers the other question you had earlier. why would somebody add these two chapters to Luke? Well, if you're living in a later Christian community and he sees this adoptionist Christology where today I have begotten you, then he thinks, well, okay, we need to kind of improve this a little bit

and he adds a virgin birth to it because it's more advanced understanding. Wow. One final question here about something we mentioned a second ago, which was Mark 321, when Jesus' family see him. think he's lost his mind which would be a weird thing for his family particularly his mother to think if she remembered giving birth to him and god telling her that he was going to be the son of god um the word for family there i'm seeing some footnotes that it can also mean associates yeah it's a it's a complicated greek um it it is not a word it's a phrase and um it is

is, how do I put this, it's a, it's a Greek phrase that literally means something like those around him. But when you read the passage in its context, there are two things that show that it means his family. One is that it can't mean his associates or they're with him because they were with him, they're with him throughout the whole thing. These are people who are coming to him to take him out of the public view who have not been with him when this incident is. happening. And so the phrase does, it does mean family in other contexts. But the other thing is that a few verses later, his mother and his brothers are mentioned as being these people who want to see him. And so, in 331. And so those things together have led most trans, I don't know what the NIV does, but sometimes people try and get around the problem. But it's almost

The NIV has family. The NIV has family. It just has a footnote. which says all his associates. And then finally, Jesus had brothers? I mean, what about the perpetual virginity of Mary? Well, you know, I started out teaching not in the South, where I teach now in North Carolina, but in the Northeast at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where a lot of my students were Roman Catholic.

And I would teach a New Testament class. They would never be upset about my talking about contradictions in the Bible or historical mistakes. things like that. But if I mention Jesus' brothers, they'd go ballistic. It's like, what? Because in the Catholic tradition, of course, Jesus can't have brothers because of the perpetual virginity of Mary. That's a later doctrine. It's not in the New Testament. What most Roman Catholics today say is that they are his cousins. The older view was that they were sons of Joseph from a previous marriage. So you get ways around having brothers and sisters in Mark as well.

But in fact, the word used as brother, Adolfo. It's not the word for cousin, an nepsioi. And so there's actually little doubt. These are his brothers and his sisters. But for theological reasons, some people get upset about that. As for theological reasons, people tend to do. Bart Ehrman, thanks so much for joining us. Merry Christmas.

It's always a thrill to have you on. I think this is something like your fourth time on my show now. You must be the most frequent guest. It's always a blast. It's an honor every time. So Merry Christmas to you too. Merry Christmas, one and all. Thanks for watching, everybody.