Welcome and Guest Introductions

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It's February 26, 2026, and we have Back on Mormon Stories one of the coolest guests we've ever had on Mormon Stories. Today we have Back on Mormon stories the Dr. Bart Ehrman, professor of I don't know the Bible. And Bart has a brand new book that's coming out in March called Love Thy Stranger, how the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. And you could get this book on Amazon. You can pre order it. We're going to be talking about this book possibly throughout, but definitely at the end.

John Dehlin [00:00:44] For those who don't know, I wanted to reintroduce Bart to our audience because we did interview Bart several years ago on Mormon Stories podcast. But Bart Ehrman is a distinguished professor of religious studies, or we can say was or probably still is a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I say was because He, I think December 31, 2025, was his last day. We can have him talk about that. Bart Ehrman is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and the Triumph of Christianity. His books have been translated into 27 languages with more than 2 million copies sold.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] Bart Ehrman, congratulations on your retirement from UNC Chapel Hill. Welcome back to Mormon Stories. And you also have a YouTube channel and a podcast, is that right?

Bart Ehrman [00:01:42] Yeah, I do. It's named after that book, Misquoting Jesus. And so it's a weekly podcast and plus other things on my YouTube channel. Yep, yep. So. Right. Can't compete with Mormon Stories, but, you know, we do our best.

John Dehlin [00:01:55] Well, I think. I think you're doing just fine. In fact, you're doing so well that I thought the shtick for today's episode would be Bible scholar meets Mormons. In other words, obviously I'm Mormon, but I've got two avid listeners and or co hosts who are big Bart Ehrman fans. So, Colby, why don't you tell Bart who you are and why you wanted to be on this episode or why I chose you or asked you to be on this episode.

Guest 2 [00:02:20] Yeah, absolutely. So, Bart, I am a practicing attorney that lives in Boise, Idaho. John has me on as a guest from time to time or guest host from time to time to talk about Mormonism's truth claims. I'm interested because I absolutely love your podcast. I listen to it basically every single week and have loved your work and your books, and I really, really loved Your last lecture, I thought it was really touching. I have also taught law as an adjunct professor for the last seven years. And I think your passion as a professor really comes through in that last lecture. So thank you for everything you've done.

Bart Ehrman [00:02:57] Well, thank you. Thank. Thanks. I really appreciate it, Colby.

John Dehlin [00:03:00] Yeah. And we'll make sure Brooklyn puts in the show notes a link to Bart's last lecture. It's a lecture he gave as he retired from UNC Chapel Hill. But I don't know, Bart, is it fair to say it gives an overview of many of the key points of your research and your, I don't know, messages over the past several decades?

Bart Ehrman [00:03:21] Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, I try, you know, look, It's a lecture 50 minutes. But I did try to emphasize what I thought was kind of at the core of what biblical scholarship is really all about. And so I think I called it, like the most significant discovery in the history of biblical scholarship. That's a bit grandiose, but I didn't make it, so I'm just talking about it.

John Dehlin [00:03:42] Well, it's a must watch, and there's already 176,000 views, which is far too little, but it's also very impressive. Really quickly Coy, tell Bart who you are and why you wanted to be on this episode.

Guest [00:03:53] Yeah, I'm a practicing physician and a big fan of yours and going through a faith deconstruction reconstruction probably eight years ago. You were one of the first people. I jumped into most of your debates on YouTube and then reading as many books as I can find, really instrumental in forming a better understanding of, you know, Bible history, New Testament, and my view of who Jesus was. And yeah, I've been. I've been a big fan ever since and loved your last. Your last lecture there as well.

Bart Ehrman [00:04:29] Well, thanks, thanks. Go. I appreciate it.

Bart Ehrman's Journey from Evangelical to Agnostic

John Dehlin [00:04:32] All right, Bart. Well, even though we're going to be covering some new, some of the same ground we covered when you were on Mormon stories several years ago, there's a whole new generation of viewers and listeners who I want to introduce to you and to get him to buy your book. And to do that, I want to go back and have you begin by telling us a bit about your origin story, the fact that you were an evangelical Christian before you weren't, and tell us a bit about your faith transition, what got you into Bible scholarship, and then we'll go from there, if that's okay. And also any preambles or throat clearing you want to begin with, take it away. Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman [00:05:11] Thanks. Yeah, well, no, I've had a very interesting journey, at least from where I sit. I was raised in a Christian household. We were, I was raised Episcopalian. We were, we were a fairly religious family, but we weren't, you know, conservative, evangelical or anything like that. When I was 15 in high school, I had a born again experience through a, in a group group that was in the high school, a Christian group. And I, uh, committed my life to Christ as my Lord and Savior. And I became a very committed evangelical.

Bart Ehrman [00:05:44] After high school, I went to Moody Bible Institute, which is a fundamentalist Bible college. And I was very gung ho into learning about the Bible and about how to evangelize people and how to be a faithful Christian. And my entire understanding of the Bible and of Christianity came out of that fundamentalist background.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:07] I. When I graduated from Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which is an evangelical liberal arts school, where I started actually broadening my horizons a bit. I was taking classes in cultural history and in philosophy and in, you know, art history and geography, you know, geology. And so I started broadening my view of the world.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:27] After that, I took Greek at college at Wheaton, and I wanted to become a scholar of the Greek New Testament. And I was especially interested in studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament to understand where they were different from each other and how we could figure out what the authors originally wrote.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:44] The world expert on that was a man named Bruce Metzger, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. And I went there for my master's degree to study with him, and then I stayed on for a PhD there. So I was there for seven years.

Bart Ehrman [00:06:59] While I was there, I started changing my views about the Bible and about understanding what it was all about. The Princeton was not an evangelical school. It was a Presbyterian school training Presbyterian ministers. I was not Presbyterian, but the person wanted to study with taught there. So that's how I went there. And I started realizing in the course of my studies, as I learned Greek more thoroughly and started reading the New Testament in Greek more carefully, and as I learned Hebrew and started learning reading the, the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew eventually then I learned French and German to read scholarship from Europe on the Bible.

Bart Ehrman [00:07:38] And I threw myself into it quite seriously. And I started realizing there are problems with the Bible there. If you just automate with yourself, as I told myself, I said, if I'm being honest with myself, this is a contradiction. This is a flat out contradiction. And once I started realizing that, that there were occasional contradictions, it made me start realizing that the Bible wasn't What I thought it was, it wasn't an inerrant revelation from God. It was a very human book.

Bart Ehrman [00:08:07] That was the beginning of my biblical scholarship. And as I progressed through my master's and then my PhD program, I realized increasingly that the Bible isn't a single book. It's actually 66 books that have combined into one book. So that's actually what my last lecture is about, is about how once you realize the Bible is different books by different authors, written at different times in different places to different audiences, with different perspectives and views and theologies, it changes how you look at the Bible and it actually makes it far more interesting and important and it explodes the interpretation because you're no longer making one book say exactly what some other book says.

Bart Ehrman [00:08:49] You're actually, you're realizing, oh, they are different. So I remained a Christian for a long time, for years after that, but of a more liberal bent ended up again in the Episcopal Church. When I came to Chapel Hill to teach, I was a liberal Christian and I didn't work. I taught like adult Sunday school at the local Episcopal Church. And it was only some years later that I struggling with the problem of why there's suffering in the world, why there's so much pain and misery in a world in which God is to be sovereign, a world where God is said to answer prayer and yet prayers don't get answered and people suffer horribly, that I started questioning my faith altogether.

Bart Ehrman [00:09:38] It's probably 30 years ago when I finally realized, you know, I just don't believe there's a God in this world. At least a Jewish Christian God who's in control, created the world. World is going to redeem the world. I don't, I don't believe it anymore. And so for the last 30 years, I've been, I've been a. An atheist with respect to, like, what do I believe? I do not believe there's a superior being in the universe. I'm also consider myself an agnostic, though, because if somebody were to ask me, do you know if there's a superior being in the universe? I say, no, how would I know?

Bart Ehrman [00:10:09] There's no way to know. So I don't know it. So I'm agnostic. I don't know, but I don't believe it. So I'm an atheist.

John Dehlin [00:10:16] Beautiful. Bart, really quickly, we'll probably be talking about many of the concepts that were influential to causing you to lose your faith. But from a personal perspective, can you share with us kind of two or three of the biggest silver bullets that you personally that personally kind of penetrated your, your Christian faith consciousness and kind of really, really did you in what were two or three of the biggest examples or topics or passages, you know, or concepts that really hit you personally, if that makes sense.

Bart Ehrman [00:10:57] Well, I'll give you, I'll give you one of sort of each. I mean, for me the big transitions were from being a very conservative evangelical to being more liberal Christian. And for that it was actually, it's, it was just, it was because of my education, Princeton Seminary. But the event that made a huge difference was early on, and I talk about it in one of my books, Misquoting Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [00:11:23] I had taken a class on the Gospel of Mark. This might have been my second semester there at Princeton. It was right away at Princeton Seminary. And it was a study of the Gospel of Mark. The entire semester on the Gospel of Mark, studying it in Greek.

Bart Ehrman [00:11:37] Before the semester, I memorized all the Greek words in the Gospel of Mark so I could just read it without having to lick things up to dictionaries. And I, you know, and so I threw myself into this course and at the end of the semester, the, the term paper was supposed to be on any topic we chose on the Gospel of Mark.

Bart Ehrman [00:11:53] And I had long been intrigued by a passage in Gospel Mark even when I was an evangelical. In Mark Chapter two, where Jesus is. Jesus and his disciples are on a Sabbath. They're by a grain field and the disciples are hungry and they go into the grain field and they start pulling things off and eating them. So it must be corn or something like that. They start eating some corn or we don't know what. But the Pharisees see them doing this and they accuse Jesus and they say, what? What? Why are you letting your disciples do that? It's the Sabbath. They can't be harvesting on the Sabbath.

Bart Ehrman [00:12:26] And Jesus, as he always does in the Gospels gets the better of them by telling a story and then delivering a powerful one liner. The story says, look, don't you remember in the Hebrew in the Old Testament, don't you remember in the Bible when David and his followers were, were hungry on a Sabbath? And no, they didn't know they were hungry. And they went into the tabernacle and they ate the show bread that was on the altar that only the priests were supposed to eat.

Bart Ehrman [00:12:55] So you know, their need was superior to the law. The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath. And so, and so he gives this story and he says, and he says, remember when that happened in the Bible, when Abi Apollo was the high priest and then he gives the story.

Bart Ehrman [00:13:14] The thing is that I knew it as an evangelical that Abiathar was not the high priest when this happened. His father Ahimelech was. If you just look it up in the, in the book of 1st Samuel, Ahimelech is the high priest. So then why does Jesus say Abiathar is the high priest? Isn't that a contradiction? So I decided to take that on in my term paper, 30 page term paper, digging deep into the Greek grammar and explaining that, based on a sophisticated analysis of the Greek grammar, that even though Jesus said Abiathar is the high priest, what he really meant was that Ahimelech was the high priest.

Bart Ehrman [00:13:48] So that was my, that was my term paper. 30 pages trying to prove that. And so the professor of that class was a very devout. He wasn't, I don't know if he'd call himself evangelical, but he was a devout believer in the inspiration of the Bible. No, no mistakes in it kind of guy. And so, but, but I mean, no mistakes in the sense that, I mean, there aren't like huge errors, but he was, he wasn't a complete conservative evangelical. And, and so I wrote this paper, had this analysis, and at the end of the paper, the only thing he said was, maybe Mark just made a mistake.

Bart Ehrman [00:14:21] And he was a pious person I looked up to. I thought, oh, really? Huh? Maybe it is possible Mark made a mistake. Wait a second, that makes better sense than my 30 page, you know, detailed analysis. I was just making stuff up to get away from. So that, that alerted me to the fact there actually could be a mistake. And once I realized there could be a mistake, I started seeing more mistakes and more and more and contradictions that led. So that was one, that was one, one moment in my life.

John Dehlin [00:14:49] Thanks for sharing that. When, when you did start losing your faith, just because so much of our audience, not just LDS or Mormon, but we have a lot of former evangelicals, former Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, over half our audience has never been Mormon. But, but what I think many of us have in common is just the difficulty and the pain and the trauma of losing faith. Especially a high demand religion can be really, really painful and difficult. Was it difficult for you to experience that faith transition? And if so, how was it most challenging for you?

Bart Ehrman [00:15:32] Yeah, it was very difficult because, you know, as I said, after that event, I was a liberal Christian for a number of years. I came to think that because of all the suffering in the world, I just couldn't believe there was A God who was active in the world anymore.

Bart Ehrman [00:15:45] And it wasn't because of a personal experience of mine. It's because it's just seeing the incredible suffering all around us. It was very, very difficult for me emotionally. I found it emotionally wrenching. For years. I was. I was afraid that maybe there is an afterlife, and if I'm wrong, I'm in trouble now.

Bart Ehrman [00:16:07] I was. I lost. I lost friends. I had a rift in the family about it because my, my, my parents, for example, remain committed Christians. And it was just, it was very disruptive my entire life up to that point. My thinking life, my thinking about big issues in life were all centered on the. The truth of the Christian faith. And now I was saying that I didn't think it was true anymore. And so I found it very emotionally disrupting and disturbing, and it took a long while for me to get over it. I did get over it. I'm completely over it now. But it, you know, when it's something that's that near and dear to you, it is very difficult to leave it.

John Dehlin [00:16:50] Yeah, beautiful. Well, let's go ahead really quickly and jump in. Just start really broadly, if that's okay. Colby, you had a question around the value of religion, just broadly speaking. Do you want to, do you want to go and ask that a Bart.

The Social Value and Dark Side of Religion

Guest 2 [00:17:09] Yeah, sure. I would love to. So, you know, Professor Ehrman, as you look back at the role that religion has played in kind of stabilizing society, I think a lot of people can share their perspective on how foundational religious belief has shaped the West. It sounds like that's the topic of your new book. I guess my question would be kind of two part, like, what role has religion played in serving as kind of that stabilizing foundation for societies? And do you think secular frameworks will ever get to the place where they can replicate that function that historically, historically has been played by religious belief?

Bart Ehrman [00:17:48] Yeah, no, it's a really good question. And it's, you know, it's the one that everybody who has faith issues struggles with. You know, if I leave the faith, I mean, apart from society at whole, as a whole. But where do I find my moral compass? For example, how do I, how do I know how to behave now? Because I don't have a God telling me how to behave and, and do it, do you lose, do you lose the moral compass then? And, and what, what. And your basic thinking about, like, life and meaning and what's the purpose and is there any purpose? And all of those things are centered in your religion.

Bart Ehrman [00:18:19] And so you Know in my book, what I do in this book, Love Thy Stranger, is I try to argue that a very, very important element of what we think about as what it means to be a moral person, what it means to do the right thing and to be the right kind of person comes to us directly from the teachings of Jesus and not from how we are formed in our, you know, by our ancient DNA and not by the world into which Jesus was born.

Bart Ehrman [00:18:47] There were Greek and Roman philosophers who, moral philosophers who were very intent on explaining how ethics should work and how people should behave. And they have, they were, some of them were brilliant and they had really fantastic insights. But Jesus had a different approach to things. And in, in one key respect Jesus. My theme of my book is that Jesus thought that what really mattered wasn't if somebody was close to you. You don't just help people who are close to you. You don't love your neighbor in the sense of just your family and your friends and your close community. You love anybody in need, anybody who's in need, even if they're an enemy, you help them.

Bart Ehrman [00:19:26] And that because Jesus taught that, his followers taught it. And when his followers took over the Roman Empire, that became the understanding of morality within the Roman Empire, which the Roman world, and has been handed down to us today.

Bart Ehrman [00:19:40] So the question is, if we leave the Christian faith, where are we, you know, do we lose our sense of morality? Does society have anything to tie it together anymore or not? My views about this are that it's not that Christians are more moral than other people in my experience.

Bart Ehrman [00:20:02] It's not that non Christians are necessarily non moral. The kinds of things that glue us together are. Much of it is in our DNA that glues us together as communities. And most people throughout the Western world now do have a common moral sense, even if they don't believe in, in the Christian message anymore, or even they were never connected with Christianity because Christianity was so central to the development of Western society and culture.

Bart Ehrman [00:20:32] The kind of Christian mentality is in people who are complete atheists, even if they don't recognize it. So I'm not, I'm sure I'm answering your question very well, but I, I do think that, that, that the kinds of things we get out of Christianity could in theory happen outside of Christianity. I think the big problem is that people who leave the faith usually don't have communities to go to where they can share their values and share their concerns. And you know, it's one of the brilliant things about some organized religions is the idea of fellowship with like minded people that you don't, you know, don't normally socialize with.

Guest 2 [00:21:08] Yeah, that's very follow up. I did. And I think the, the thing that's very interesting to me about your comments, Dr. Ehrman, is, you know, you talked about how recognizing the suffering that we see all throughout the world was so foundational to you, kind of losing the, the last vestiges of your belief in Christianity.

Guest 2 [00:21:30] I kind of experienced that in reverse in the sense that I, during my time as an attorney, earlier in my career I worked as a criminal prosecutor and when I was working on a very difficult child abuse case that resulted in the death of this child due to abuse and neglect, I just saw things in this case file that just completely changed me. And so I didn't actually leave Mormonism for several more years, but at that point I basically shifted to only being able to believe in like a deistic God model because, because of that issue. And I think one of the things that's interesting to me about what you just said is how oftentimes, obviously not always people who really, really believe, kind of the core of this Christian message which you're talking about, this expansive view that Jesus had, can sometimes be used then to lead people out of that faith.

Guest 2 [00:22:24] Right. It's seeing this expansive view that then that Jesus taught that can then cause people to look and see this suffering all around us in a completely different way.

Bart Ehrman [00:22:35] Yeah, no, it's a great, that's a really great point. And you know, when people, there are a lot of people who had experiences similar to yours where they've just seen horrible suffering and you know, they just realize, you know, of course people try to explain it and they, they have explanations and the explanations are satisfying to some people, but other people look at and say, no, there's no good explanation for this if there's a God in the world. And so I, I very much appreciate that.

John Dehlin [00:23:04] Let me ask you really quick, Bart, what are the. When somebody feels burned and rejected by their religion or by their faith oftentimes, or they've been traumatized or hurt by it, they end up feeling like, you know, their religion is evil, their church is evil, religion itself is evil. And that humankind might have been better off if there was never religion to begin with, but certainly today would be better off if there was no religion. This is a weighty question and I'm sure it's not a uni dimensional answer, but I would love to get your high level take on, on that, on those questions.

Bart Ehrman [00:23:45] Well, you're absolutely right. And it's, you know, I don't, I don't have a lot of contact with Mormons in that situation. I have some, but I've had a lot of contact with evangelical Protestants in that situation. And most of us who left the faith understand the knee jerk reaction when you just, you just cringe when somebody holds to things that you used to hold yourself and you just think they're so wrong, so obviously wrong and can't understand why they don't know it's wrong. And there's a kind of a vehemence about it that often comes about and people sometimes do just say, look, religion is horrible and off.

Bart Ehrman [00:24:22] And it often is because of their personal experiences when they've been very hurt by things within the religious tradition. So I, I get that. And a lot of people like that, really like a lot of my books because they think that it's kind of, kind of fueling the fire that they've got burning within them. I've always been a little bit surprised by that because I'm not, I'm actually not opposed to Christianity myself or any in any of its forms. I mean Mormonism or Catholicism or Orthodoxy or you know, fundamental fundamentalism, I'm not fond of, I'm not fond of fundamentalism, any kind of fundamental. I'm just Christian, Islamic, Jewish, whatever, that's the problem for me, but not religion per se.

Bart Ehrman [00:25:00] So the thing about this book that I've just written is that it's the only book that I think I've written that people will look at and say he's really saying something really quite good about Christianity. And I am.

Bart Ehrman [00:25:14] It's not that I'm a Christian, because I'm not. But I think people go too far in painting a dark picture of, of religion in general and Christianity in particular, because that's my, my main field of interest because they just, they can point out all the wicked things that have happened and do happen in the name of religion. And it's not hard to drop a list in my book. At the end of the book I point out I'm not just painting this in a bright light because I recognize how anti Judaism early on in Christianity led to horrible events, pogroms and slaughters of villages in the Middle Ages and eventually led to the Holocaust.

Bart Ehrman [00:25:53] Absolutely happened. Crusades, Islamophobia, Inquisitions, where you torture people to death because they don't have the right beliefs and, and justifying slavery in the south, in the American south, oppressing women, I mean, it's just like, oh my God, there's so much that is negative. But my book is, my book tries to say, yes, that is, that is absolutely right. And there, there's no way to minimize that, in my view.

Bart Ehrman [00:26:18] There is also good that happens and we would be. I think it, I think it's foolish to say that it's all bad when in fact you can show there's a lot of good and in ways that just I didn't even expect going into this book. But as I did the research, I, I came to realize things that are, I think, are historical facts. I mean, such as Christians in the Western world are the ones who invented public hospitals and they invented orphanages, they, they invented homes for the elderly, they invented governmental assistance to the poor because they're poor. They invented private charities for disaster. These are all Christian inventions in the West.

Bart Ehrman [00:26:58] And so people don't believe me when I say that, but I'm telling you it's true. It's historically, it's, it can be shown. And so that's a positive side. So I, you know, I have not been as badly burned by religion as other people have been. And so I sympathize with those who do and I try to empathize with those who do. But I think it's also important to look that there is a good side as well.

John Dehlin [00:27:22] I love it. Bart. One of the big problems that I think people get into is having, let's just say in the modern era, having unrealistic expectations about what scriptures are and aren't, what they are trying to do and, and what they aren't trying to do and even what they are claiming to be trying to do versus what we try and use them to do in modern times. And oftentimes when, you know, when I talk about like, well, the science says the flood couldn't have happened or science says the age of the earth is, you know, billions of years.

How Modern Scholarship Reads the Bible

John Dehlin [00:27:59] Some of my believing Christian friends will say the Bible, you know, before the modern era, the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament, they weren't created to be science manuals. They weren't even created to tell us how things happened.

John Dehlin [00:28:17] And people were much more comfortable with stories and fables and myths and they weren't as concerned about literality. Give us that background and tell us whether there's validity to people having a different expectation of scripture sort of in a pre modern timeframe.

Bart Ehrman [00:28:37] It's a very complicated question because, I mean, it is true that Genesis 1 was not meant to be a science manual. It's also the case that the author of it appears to have thought that it really happened that way. And it's certainly the case that that was the view of Jews and Christians throughout the centuries. They thought it happened that way.

Bart Ehrman [00:29:01] When we say it wasn't a science manual, that's true, but it's because science itself didn't exist in the way we know of it. I mean, the way we know what we think of as science today is a product of the Enlightenment. And you can make a very strong case that Isaac Newton, who, by the way, was a very devout Christian, although he was considered a heretic by some, but he was a believing Christian.

Bart Ehrman [00:29:22] The way science got started is when Isaac Newton had the bright idea that a scientific experiment, the. The result of an experiment did not have to make sense philosophically or religiously or in terms of common sense. That the scientific experiment, the result is what the result is. And once you admit that, you start getting modern science that did not exist before the days of Isaac Newton. And so to say that it's not a, you know, that's not a science manual is. Is true, but it's because they didn't have science. But it's also true that they did think it really happened that way. And I think some people want to kind of soften the impact of science.

Bart Ehrman [00:30:02] I mean, you know, obviously the 19th century was huge for the development of Western religion, both because, well, biblical scholars started realizing the problems in the Bible that I, that I've talked about a lot, you know, contradictions and implausibilities and things. They start realizing, you know, different authors had different views. In the 19th century especially, that became a big deal in Europe.

Bart Ehrman [00:30:25] But it was at the same time that the sciences developed. And, you know, Darwin, you know, Darwin. Darwin's trained to be a minister. If he hadn't got on the beacon, he, he may, well, the beetle, he may have. Well have just become a country parson.

Bart Ehrman [00:30:42] But once you get Darwin writing the Origin of the Species and you. And you get geologists realizing the Earth cannot not be 6,000 years old, it is. They, you know, they thought it's much older than that. They didn't, they didn't realize that it was, you know, whatever 4.5 billion, which is the current thinking, but they thought it was much older. Once you have that combination of the sciences and this kind of scholarship on the Bible combining, whoa. It led to big problems for, for religion. And I think it's a mistake to say, well, back then, you know, they didn't really believe these things. They knew it was all myth.

Bart Ehrman [00:31:16] No, they, they knew his stories. And they appreciated the stories and they weren't really interested in the science because science didn't exist, but they did think that's how it happened. So.

John Dehlin [00:31:27] Got it, Got it. That makes sense. Okay, so. So really quickly, if somebody. I, I loved what you talked about in your last lecture about just the first two chapters of Genesis, really illustrating the point that we just fundamentally misunderstand how the Bible. What the Bible is and how it was put together. And that oftentimes there's multiple stories of the same event. I think. Can you just review with our viewers and listeners as a teaser what most of them probably haven't even thought of about the creation story itself appearing twice within two chapters?

Contradictions in Genesis and the Old Testament

Bart Ehrman [00:32:08] I know it's a sort of thing, Biblical scholarship's like this, where there's something a biblical scholar will tell you and you look at and you say, yeah, well, that's obvious. Why didn't I see that? You know, it's like, I read the Bible for 50 years. I never saw that before. And it's like right there in front of your eyes. But until somebody points it out to you, you don't realize it. And so what, you know, with, with the creation account in Genesis, you get two accounts in Genesis, chapters one and two. And it's a very simple exercise. I give it to my students when I, when I'm teaching the Hebrew Bible.

Bart Ehrman [00:32:37] I say, okay, here's your assignment. And I don't tell them in advance what to expect. Go through the creation account in Genesis chapter one and list everything that happens in the sequence. Okay, so first God says, let there be light, so that there is light. Then he made a firmament. Then he separated the, you know, made the land, the hard land, the land. And then he made the plants, they make sand. And you know, and it does it all in six days. And then on the seventh day, rest. I say, okay, so make a list of what, what happens in the creation story. Then go to chapter two, verse four and make a list of what happens in the.

Bart Ehrman [00:33:09] In that story when what is created when. And then compare your lists. What's similar between the lists and what is different and are there irreconcilable differences? So I just give them the assignment. I don't tell them what the answer is going to be. They do it and they come back and say, oh, my God, I had no idea. Yeah, you had no idea because nobody reads it that way. But, you know, which is. Is. Is. Are human beings a. The last thing Jesus that, that God creates on day six? Or is Adam, the first thing God creates are humans created before the plants and the animals as in Genesis 2, or after the plants and the animals, as in Genesis 1?

Bart Ehrman [00:33:52] And so, you know, is woman created at the same time or a different time? And so you get. You get all of these differences, and then they start noticing their other problems. Like just in the Genesis 1 story, the sun, moon, and stars are created on day four.

Bart Ehrman [00:34:09] That's after the plants have been around. You have plants created and then the sun. Well, what happened to photosynthesis here? I mean, how do you have plants without a sun? And not only that, but the sun, moon, and stars are created on day four. What's created on day one? Light. Where's the light coming from? There's no sun, moon, or stars. You just go through these things. You say, oh, my God. And so that's why. That's why it is right to say these are stories.

Bart Ehrman [00:34:36] You know, they are. You can call them myths. I call them myths. They are myths. They're stories about how God made. Made the world in a way that didn't really happen. Which isn't the same things that, you know, people didn't knew it didn't have, they thought it did have, but yet you can't take them as literal descriptions because in the sense that if you want to know what really happened.

John Dehlin [00:34:57] Right. And so just really quickly, I don't know how we want to refer to it, if the Old Testament's an okay way to refer to it. But why in the world tell us how the Old Testament, just at a high level, was assembled? And why in the world would Genesis have two accounts of the same event within two chapters as an example of how we should think about what the Old Testament is versus what the Old Testament isn't? Does that make sense?

Bart Ehrman [00:35:26] It does, yes. Because when. So when scholars recognize things like that, you know, look, there are hundreds of things like that in the Bible where it doesn't stack up. It's especially interesting when it happens within the same book. One chapter and then the next chapter it happens. Wow.

Bart Ehrman [00:35:43] It often is more like this book says this and that book says that, and you just cannot reconcile these two. That happens a lot. The Genesis 1 and 2 thing. Scholars in the 19th century recognized that not only do they have different orders of creation, different stories about how the creation worked, these Two accounts, Genesis 1 and 2, use a different name for God, and they have a different writing style.

Bart Ehrman [00:36:11] And they started going through things and started realizing these are really different from each other in lots of different ways. In Genesis 1, you have God, who's the kind of this transcendent power who's, you know, let there be light. Boom, there's light. But when you get to Genesis 2 and then Genesis chapter 3, God is anthropomorphized, you know, in chapter 3 goes along pretty well with chapter 2. Chapter 3 is the garden of Eden, where God is walking through the garden in the cool of the evening, wondering where Adam went.

Bart Ehrman [00:36:42] You know, it's like a. It seems to be very different. So what scholars ended up realizing and then demonstrating is that the book of Genesis, along with Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers in Deuteronomy, is comprised of different sources that somebody at some point had a story that you have now in Genesis 1 and a different story by a different author, written at a different time, with a different view that's now in chapter two. And put, put them together. So you have the two of them together.

Bart Ehrman [00:37:12] When you put the two of them together, people don't notice generally that they're very different. If you had them separated, they'd say, yeah, yeah, they ain't the same. So scholars realized that the, the Pentateuch, the, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, were made up of sources. The traditional views that there are four sources behind it and that you can separate out the different stories from this source or that source. So, so you have that.

Bart Ehrman [00:37:38] But then you also have an even bigger problem that once you get past, you know, once you get past sources within a book, one book doesn't agree with another book, and one author has a different view of another author. And that becomes especially intense when you get to the New Testament and you start realizing, wait a second, Paul doesn't seem to have the same views of salvation that Jesus had.

John Dehlin [00:38:00] What?

Bart Ehrman [00:38:03] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:38:05] And it goes deeper. I think people want to believe that some committee got together hundreds of years before Jesus or even thousands of years before Jesus and these Jewish rabbis or whatever, and they're like, okay, which scrolls are we going to incorporate into this book? And let's make a bound book help us understand why, you know, how or why the Old Testament shouldn't be thought of in the modern context. A book is sort of a technology, right? It's something that doesn't appear until much later, right?

Bart Ehrman [00:38:46] Well, it appears, but not like we think of. So the problem with thinking of, say, the Old Testament, in the English Old Testament, there are 39 books. And when you, you can buy an entire Bible with the New Testament as well, you can buy just an Old Testament that has the, the 39 books, these 39 books are between two covers. And so you naturally think it's one book, it's a book.

Bart Ehrman [00:39:09] And you know it has, you might have 39 parts to it, but it's one book. But that, if it's one book, that changes how you think about it. Because when you, when you pick up a book, I've got all these books behind me, you pick up a book, you know, chapter one is not going to be like radically different from chapter five in sense of like contradicting it and different perspective. Like it's the same book.

Bart Ehrman [00:39:29] But the, the, the Old Testament is not a single book by a single author. It's more like an anthology that it was collected together much later. These books were all written individually so that like the, the book of Amos had no connection with the book of Daniel to begin with. Whoever wrote Amos wrote Amos and that was circulating as a book. Whoever wrote Daniel centuries later wrote Daniel that was circulating as a book. Later people compiled them together into a book.

Bart Ehrman [00:40:02] But the fact it's now compiled doesn't mean it was written that way. They were all written as individual books. And so the payoff of that is if you really want to understand each book, you have to understand what it is saying and not assume it's saying the same thing as some other books. You know, so if you, you know, if you, if you simply assume that, that you know the, the book of Deuteronomy is saying exactly the same thing as say, you know, the book of Isaiah, you're going to get it wrong.

John Dehlin [00:40:33] And in the New Testament, you helped me understand that Matthew didn't probably didn't write Matthew, Mark probably didn't write Mark. Luke didn't write Luke, John didn't write John. Do we have the same problem in the Old Testament? And does it even go deeper in the sense that can we even know if someone like Adam or Abraham or Moses, Noah or even David existed, let alone did they write the books that, you know, their names are attributed to?

Bart Ehrman [00:41:05] Big problem. One issue in the Old Testament is that a lot of the books are written anonymously. So it's going to be different when we get to the New Testament. But Genesis does not claim to be written by Moses or Exodus, Numbers or Deuteronomy. That's a later ascription to Moses. And the books themselves presuppose Moses did not write them. So, so scholars, so there's that. So you have anonymous books. You know, Joshua judges, these books are anonymous. You, you start, you get people assigning names to them, them you Know, oh yeah, Moses wrote that in order to lend greater authority to them. There are other books that claim to be written by, by named authors.

Bart Ehrman [00:41:48] I mentioned Amos or Isaiah, for example. These are people who tell you what their name, what their name is and they, they write a book. And in most cases in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, most scholars think, yeah, probably there was this Amos who wrote that.

Bart Ehrman [00:42:06] But the problem is that most of the historical, in fact all of the historical books are anonymous. So if you want to know about David, you know, you don't have anything David wrote. People say he wrote the Psalms. And in fact the Psalms themselves have little headings in kippets at the beginning that say, you know, the Psalm of David, those were added later. The Psalms were anonymous. And some these psalms that claim to be written by David could not have been written by David, included by the Psalm 23. People never think about this. But when at the end of Psalm 23, and the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want where at the end he says that he wants to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Bart Ehrman [00:42:43] The house of the Lord is the temple. It didn't exist until David died. His son Solomon built it. 23rd Psalm could not have been written by David because it's talking about dwelling in the temple. And so scholars recognize things like that. And it is a big problem because we don't know who wrote most of these books and it creates problems for knowing their historicity.

Bart Ehrman [00:43:09] My view, the common view among critical scholars is no, there was not an Adam. I don't think there was an Abraham. I think that's a widely held view as well. There might have been a Moses like figure, but he certainly wasn't doing many of the things described in the books of Exodus and following.

Bart Ehrman [00:43:28] There was a David, but I don't think we know very much about him. So these books, they're telling stories that had been being told for not just year after year or decade after decade, for centuries before people wrote them down. And most of them are stories, meaningful stories, important stories, really great stories and stories that you can think by, but not necessarily historically accurate.

John Dehlin [00:43:54] You may know, Barth, that the Book of Mormon, a huge section of the Book of Mormon stems from a literal journey that people from the Tower of Babel made from the old World, I guess, to the new. These people are called the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon. Please, please tell us, Bart Ehrman, that at least we can rely that the Tower of Babel did in fact happen as stated in the Old Testament.

Bart Ehrman [00:44:21] Oh God, I wish I could.

John Dehlin [00:44:24] Martin, don't take the Tower of Babel away from us Mormons, please.

Bart Ehrman [00:44:28] Sorry, man. So, like Genesis 11. So that it's in Genesis 11. The first 11 chapters of Genesis by Schol critical scholars is called the primeval history, which means the. It's the events that happen before kind of real history starts kicking in for, you know, in biblical scholarship, real history kicks in starting in Genesis 12 with the calling of Abraham.

Bart Ehrman [00:44:51] And that's assuming Abraham really existed, which I doubt too, but. So the Tower of Babel is one of the. It's the last tale of the primeval history. These people want to build a tower because they want to get up to heaven.

Bart Ehrman [00:45:05] It's not. It doesn't actually say why they want to get there, but one of the constant themes Throughout Genesis chapter 1 through 11 is that the problem with the human race is that they're trying to be like God. They're trying to. You know, and. And so the problem in the Garden of Eden is that Adam and Eve eat from the knowledge, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because then they can be like God. And God doesn't want people to be like him. They're. They're mortals. And so they build. So after the flood, these people around the world decide to come together. They all speak the same language.

Bart Ehrman [00:45:37] They build this tower. This is a replica of what's happening in Babylon where they build these ziggurats or whatever they're called, these. These large tower things. And so the story is built on that, that idea, making a myth out of that. But then God decides that he has to stop them from getting up to him, because, you know, that'd be more. They'd be more like God then. And so he confuses their languages. And that's why it's called babble, because they're babbling now because they can't communicate, so they can't build the tower. Yeah, no, that did not happen. It's a. It's a Myth in Genesis 11 to explain why it is, you have different peoples and different languages around the world.

John Dehlin [00:46:14] And because so much of modern Christianity is rooted in the Old Testament, specifically sort of anti LGBT kind of teachings, but we also have kind of this warlike Jehovah God that's even willing to engage potentially in genocide in the Old Testament. How do you help those who want to believe in the Bible and even in Christianity in an ethical way? How do you help them make sense of a genocidal, homophobic, brutal Old Testament God?

Bart Ehrman [00:46:52] Well, it really helps if you accept the claims of biblical scholars that the Bible is not a single book and that different books have different perspectives. And what that means is if you have perspectives that don't agree with each other, then you have to choose which ones you're going to accept.

Bart Ehrman [00:47:11] Everybody does that, by the way. Even the most hardcore fundamentalist Christian chooses which verses to go with. They, they'll say they don't. But today, for example, if you, you know, there's only a couple verses in the Hebrew Bible that talk explicitly about same sex sexual relations, I, I hesitate to call that homosexuality because the concept of sexuality is a modern concept that you don't have before Freud. I mean, you certainly have this, the idea that men sometimes want to have sex with men and women with women, and not only want to, but do, I mean, so that, and the Old Testament does condemn men having sex with men in a couple places.

Bart Ehrman [00:47:57] It equally condemns wearing a, a sweater that's made out of two different kinds of fabric. And it equally condemned, if, if you have somebody from outside of Israel who immigrates into Israel, if somebody joins your country, you're to treat them like other people who were born into your country.

Bart Ehrman [00:48:20] It is very clear about this, about immigration policy. And so, you know, if you pick the verse that, that condemns same sex relations, but you don't mind wearing certain sweaters and you don't care about immigrants, but you want to get rid of them, you know, quite apart from like what, you know, what I think about those views personally, socially and morally. But if you think you're following the Bible, you're not.

Bart Ehrman [00:48:46] And so you've got to choose, and everybody does choose. So instead of the God who sponsors genocide, I, I support the God who says, love your enemy and take care of those who are in need and care for the poor and the homeless.

Bart Ehrman [00:49:01] So, you know, so I guess people choose different parts, but, but once you realize the Bible is different like that, it frees you up to recognize that some parts of it are problematic in the modern world.

John Dehlin [00:49:14] COLBY.

Historicity of Biblical and Mormon Scripture

Guest 2 [00:49:15] So on that question of historicity, Professor Ehrman, I think thinking about the biblical texts as being a collection, really a library, I think I completely agree with everything you just said, and I think for me it kind of prompts this question.

Guest 2 [00:49:30] And you may be familiar with this, maybe you're not, but, you know, the Book of Mormon, which is, you know, purportedly an ancient record that Joseph Smith translated from, that dates back to about 600 B.C. to 400 A.D. so kind of runs parallel to both the old and New Testaments in the Americas. One of the claims in the Book of Mormon is that there was this collection of brass plates. I've often compared this to like a proto Old Testament. So it kind of is built on this idea that there was a collection of the first five books of the Old Testament all the way up until Jeremiah.

Guest 2 [00:50:08] Can you maybe just speak to how the comments you just had about viewing these as, you know, different books that probably weren't ever collected in that form, at least in that day and age. Do I have that right? From a historical perspective?

John Dehlin [00:50:23] And just it's around 600 BC and it definitely has the writings of Isaiah in it. And allegedly this, this, this Jerusalem family takes these brass plates that it contains Isaiah and brings them to the United States around 600 BC or to, to the Americas. So yeah, they're always envisioned as like plates with like little H. Loops are loops and the plates are kind of like a book and the loops are the bindings for the book. So tell us the probability that those. Please, Bart Ehrman, Please tell us that brass plates like that existed around 600 BC in Jerusalem containing what had been written so far in what we now know as the Old Testament.

Bart Ehrman [00:51:12] Once more, I wish I could. So the, the big problems from a point of view of just straight up biblical scholarship is that parts of the Pentateuch and possibly all of the Pentateuch was post exilic. Post exilic refers to the fact that

Guest 2 [00:51:34] the,

Bart Ehrman [00:51:37] the Babylon destroyed the, the nation of Jud of Judah and Jerusalem in the, in the sixth century. And books, the books that were, and parts of the Pentateuch were written after that. Parts of Isaiah were definitely written after that. It's pretty easy to demonstrate that parts of Isaiah were written during the Babylonian exile and parts of it were written after the people would come back into Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile.

Bart Ehrman [00:52:12] There are scholars who think that parts of the Pentateuch probably go into the 5th century or so. And Isaiah, the, the final part of Isaiah certainly is after the, there's been, you know, back in the land after the exile.

Bart Ehrman [00:52:29] That would be in the, in the 530s or so. So I guess technically, if they think like 6th century, I suppose, but, but that nobody, there's, I don't think there's anybody among the critical scholars, people who, most of these critical scholars of the Hebrew Bible are either Jewish or Christian, but they aren't necessarily. But, but all the critical scholars agree that this book, these books were not formulated into like a canon at that time. It was much later. Much later.

John Dehlin [00:53:02] Okay. And this idea of deutero Isaiah or third or fourth Isaiah, Isaiah. I just want to confirm that what we now have in the King James version of the Bible as Isaiah, can you confirm that it was written by multiple authors over multiple years or even decades or centuries, and that the latter parts of Isaiah would have been written after 600 B.C. such that important parts of Isaiah could not have traveled with Lehi and his family to the Americas, at least in totality? Can you confirm that or do we have that wrong?

Bart Ehrman [00:53:45] Okay. No. So. Okay. So again, since the 19th century, when especially German scholars were digging into this, it became quite clear as they read the text closely that Isaiah has three different sections to it, chapters one through 39.

Bart Ehrman [00:54:01] Most of those chapters do go back to the eighth century. Prophet Isaiah, who was. Who lived in Jerusalem, and with some chapters added later. But. But those chapters would be from the 8th century. So the 7 hundreds in those chapters, Isaiah is. Is anticipating that the Assyrians are going to invade the north, the land of Israel, and destroy the northern part of Israel. That happened in 722. It actually did happen. And so Isaiah's written before that, or at least he's claims to be writing before that, starting with chapter 40 up through chapter 55. 40. 55 is starting in chapter 40. There's a different author who's celebr, who's celebrating the fact that now the southern nation, Judah, is in Babylonian exile, but he's celebrating the fact they're going to be released and return to their homeland in Judah.

Bart Ehrman [00:55:03] That means that it's happening after the Babylonian destruction of Judah in the year 586 and somewhat before the year 539, when they were allowed to return. So it's later in the sixth century. Those chapters of Isaiah, the final chapters of Isaiah 56, 66, were written after the people had come back from the land from Babylonian exile.

Bart Ehrman [00:55:26] You just read these texts and it's clear that's what's going on. The problem is they're in one book. So you assume the book is all by the same author at the same time, but it's not. And so there's no way that the bulk of this book could have been written by the year 600.

John Dehlin [00:55:42] Okay, that's super helpful. All right, well, let's move to the New Testament, if that's okay. And let's begin with maybe what I think some of my friends would say is the most important question. What is the scholarly consensus, and what is your opinion about whether Jesus, number one, someone named Jesus, existed that we could at least loosely tie to the teachings in the New Testament. But maybe even the character that is depicted in the New Testament is based on someone who actually lived. Did a human named Jesus exist who did anything like what we think he did as Christians?

Did Jesus Really Exist?

Bart Ehrman [00:56:26] Yeah, well, it depends what you think he did. He certainly existed. So you know, there is a, there's a loud voice that is on, mainly on the Internet, but mythicists group of people who insist there never was a Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [00:56:42] You won't find critical, critical scholars among the group, but they are a loud group. The evidence for the existence of Jesus is completely overwhelming. And so there was a man, Jesus from Nazareth, who was a Jewish preacher who like other Jews at the time, thought that the end of the world was coming soon, that God is his answer to suffering. I mean he realized there's a lot of suffering in the world, but he thought that God was allowing it to happen. For a time the powers of evil were allowed to do their worst and they were. But God was soon going to intervene and destroy them and bring in a bring back paradise to earth the way he had originally designed it.

Bart Ehrman [00:57:26] There's going to be paradise again. Jesus thought that was going to happen within his generation. That much seems really, I mean look, it is, it is about as certain as you can get about ancient history that Jesus existed.

Bart Ehrman [00:57:40] It's really pretty certain that something that he was a Jewish preacher in the first century who was crucified by Pontius Pilate, that's virtually certain what he actually said and did. That's where the problem comes because we have four gospels. The Gospels are not written by contemporaries. They were written decades later by people living in different parts of the world who didn't speak Jesus language Aramaic.

Bart Ehrman [00:58:07] They are basing their stories, their accounts on stories that have been in circulation for years. And they disagree with each other sometimes flat out contradictions, sometimes differences in perspective. So it is difficult to reconstruct what Jesus actually said and did. But it's, it's clear he did exist. And the debates are about the details.

John Dehlin [00:58:32] Okay? And you know, Jesus, obviously Jesus wasn't the way his name would have been pronounced at the time. But that name was a common name, right? So probably lots of people had that name.

Bart Ehrman [00:58:45] Yeah, his name. So his language was Aramaic. It's related to Hebrew in Hebrew. So our name Joshua comes from the Hebrew word. The Aramaic word would have been Yeshua. And in Greek when you say Yeshua, you say Jesus. And when you say Jesus in English you say Jesus. People say why did you just call him? Yeshua, well, I don't know. Why did you call, why do you call John John? Why do you call James James? When you're talking in English, you use English names. That's why.

John Dehlin [00:59:17] Got it. Okay, tell us, tell us about just this mind blowing idea that that many Christians have never heard of, let alone would want to grapple with. How do we know that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John may not have written Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Take us back to how we figured that out, how we know that and why that really matters in terms of understanding the New Testament better?

Authorship and Manuscripts of the New Testament

Bart Ehrman [00:59:49] Again, it's a complicated question. I have an entire course on this, an online course I do that explains all this. So it would take a while. But here's the basic information. Go. The gospel writers, Matthew, we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gospel writers are anonymous. They don't tell us their names. The Gospels have titles the Gospel according to Matthew, but whoever wrote Matthew's gospel didn't call it that. I mean, so in Greek, actually the oldest, the old manuscripts say According to Matthew, that's the title. Well, you know, when I write a book the title is not called According to Bart.

Bart Ehrman [01:00:26] I give it a title. And so whoever's calling it according to Matthew is differentiating it from the one that's called According to Mark or According to Luke, Etc. These are later attributions. The authors don't name themselves, they don't talk in the first person in their gospels. They don't indicate that they were companions of Jesus. In the Gospels they're writing in a different language from Jesus and they're clearly living later they appear all to be living after writing after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. The reason, reason there are reasons for thinking that the first time we have these names definitely attached to these books.

Bart Ehrman [01:01:07] Matthew wrote this one, Mark, this one, John, Luke, these ones first time that happens is in the writings of Irenaeus, a church father who was writing in the around there 185. So about 100 years after these books were in circulation is the first time they're called these things.

Bart Ehrman [01:01:26] So they were circulating anonymously. Earlier authors sometimes quote them but they don't, they don't mention Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So there are reasons for thinking these were not written by Aramaic speaking peasants living in, in Israel at the time of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [01:01:44] They're not written in Aramaic. These authors don't appear to know Aramaic. And, and so it looks there are good reasons for thinking they were written decades later in Greek by people who didn't know Jesus. So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were assigned to these books by later readers because they wanted you to know that these came from authorities.

Bart Ehrman [01:02:07] The reason they wanted you to know they came from authorities was because there were other gospels floating around that actually did claim to be written by apostles. We have a Gospel of Peter and a Gospel of Thomas and a Gospel of Philip and a Gospel of Bartholomew. And, you know, you have a bunch of other gospels that are actually claiming to be written by apostles. And when the people who were sort of in the more what became the orthodox view of things wanted to celebrate their gospels, they named them after authorities so that the, you know, so, so that they'd have authority. And so that's how they got the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Bart Ehrman [01:02:46] Two of them allegedly disciples. Matthew the tax collector. John the belove disciple. Two of them are friends of apostles. Mark a companion of Peter, Luke the companion of Paul.

Guest [01:03:01] Coy.

John Dehlin [01:03:01] You had a question about the manuscripts themselves, I believe.

Guest [01:03:06] Yeah, so.

John Dehlin [01:03:08] Or any other question you had.

Guest [01:03:10] Yeah. How does having access to these old manuscripts. You've often talked about how we have copies of the copies of the copies of these manuscripts, and at one point you mentioned there were 30,000 counted discrepancies. And then later, maybe even hundreds of thousands of discrepancies, more discrepancies than actual words in the New Testament.

Guest [01:03:34] So how does having access to those manuscripts help us to understand these, you know, who wrote what and how accurate we can make understand what was said? You've addressed this a little bit already. And then more specifically, the Sermon on the Mount being a sermon, a lot of people debate whether this was a sermon given at one time or if this was given over multiple different teachings and then sort of compiled. The Book of Mormon actually has its own mention of a Sermon on the Mount given when Jesus visited the people in America after he died.

Guest [01:04:16] After he died, and then, you know, went to visit them. So I guess how likely is it that Jesus would give a Sermon on the Mount in one sermon in the old world and then give a similar sermon in the new world after his death?

John Dehlin [01:04:35] Bart, please don't take the Book of Mormon Sermon on the Mount away from us. Bart, please.

Bart Ehrman [01:04:41] Well, if you think it's likely Jesus came to America after his death, then why not? I mean, you know, I think the problem is Jesus coming to America for, for those of us who are not in the Mormon tradition.

Bart Ehrman [01:04:54] And so. Okay, so your, your, your question has a number of aspects to it. As with virtually every discipline, every academic discipline, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about anthropology or sociology or history or. Or philosophy or chemistry.

Bart Ehrman [01:05:10] You've got specialization. That happens. And many times outsiders. The specialization seems kind of like, you know, why don't you just kind of get your act together and just do one thing? But within biblical studies, there are specializations. And your question actually deals with different specializations. So the question of the manuscripts is different from whether Jesus gave a sermon on the mount. Both of them are different from. From what? About what you can say specifically about how accurate any particular gospel is. And so these are different questions that require different methodological approaches.

Bart Ehrman [01:05:45] The manuscripts. The only way you know what an ancient writing said is if you've got manuscript evidence for it. All ancient writings were copied by hand. We don't have original writings of any books of the New Testament. So that whoever wrote Matthew sat down over, you know, days, weeks, and wrote out a gospel.

Bart Ehrman [01:06:11] We don't have that thing that he wrote, you know, the actual thing he produced. He wrote it. People read it, somebody wanted to copy, they copied it. Some other person from some other church visiting said, oh, look at that. You've got a thing about. You got a Gospel of Jesus life. We'd like that. And they copied that. Then somebody copied that copy and somebody copied. Copy that copy. And you don't. We don't have any of those copies. What we have are copies from hundreds of years later. Our first complete copy of the Gospel of Matthew dates from about the year 370, so about 300 years of people copying it and then copying the copies and copying the copies of the copies.

Bart Ehrman [01:06:52] And the problem, and that's true of all the books of the New Testament, all the books of the New Testament are in the same situation where we don't have a complete copy for 300 years or so. And I should say that that's not just dealing. That's just not a biblical thing. That's true of every book from the ancient world.

Bart Ehrman [01:07:12] It's just. It's just the way it was in the ancient world. And so that's how it is. The problem is we have so many copies of Matthew and the other books of the New Testament, we can compare them with each other, and there are differences among them. As you pointed out, there are hundreds of thousands of differences among the manuscripts where a verse will be worded one way in one manuscript, it'll be worded a different way in another manuscript.

Bart Ehrman [01:07:36] Most of these differences are completely insignificant. They don't matter for anything. The majority. The. If you had to count the most common difference, it's misspelled words, you know, who cares? And so a lot of differences don't matter. Most of the differences don't matter. Some differences do matter.

Bart Ehrman [01:07:55] Some differences matter a whole lot. And some of those differences that matter a whole lot, we can't even decide what the original said. But scholars compare these various manuscripts to one another and they figure out based on these comparisons and a number of factors, what probably was what the author originally wrote.

Bart Ehrman [01:08:19] Again, this isn't just a New Testament thing. It happens for the Old Testament, it happens for Homer, it happens for Virgil, it happens for Shakespeare, it happens for Wordsworth, it happens for every author where you have to figure out the original because you have copies that differ from each other.

Bart Ehrman [01:08:36] So there's that once you know what you pretty sure is probably the original say of Matthew, okay, you know what the original is, that doesn't tell you whether the original was right or not. You just know what Matthew, Matthew wrote. Or you, you have a pretty good idea that you think you know what Matthew wrote. Whether what he wrote is right or not is a different matter.

Bart Ehrman [01:08:58] The illustration I often give of this is in the modern world when, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, we don't have much doubt about what he wrote. There are millions of copies of it. So you know what he wrote. Does that mean that what he wrote is right? No, it just means you know what he wrote.

Bart Ehrman [01:09:17] And so I say that because I don't know if this is true in Mormon circles, but in conservative Christian, evangelical Protestant circles, there's a. You hear this claim often that since we have so many manuscripts of the New Testament, more than any other book from the ancient world, we know that what the New Testament is true.

Bart Ehrman [01:09:37] It doesn't mean that at all. It just means, you know what they wrote. But what they wrote is true or not. It's a different question. So, so, so that's the manuscripts. Whether Jesus delivered on the Sermon on the Mount, that's another problem that has to be solved on the bases. And I think most scholars think, no, I mean, just with the Sermon on the Mount, it's three chapters long.

Bart Ehrman [01:09:58] Jesus talks for three chapters with lots of one liners and parables. And Matthew's writing his account 55 years later. So what I do with my students, I ask them, did you hear the last inaugural address year ago? Yeah, I heard it. Okay, write it down.

John Dehlin [01:10:15] What?

Bart Ehrman [01:10:16] They have no idea? Of course not. If Jesus gave a sermon like who wrote it? Nobody wrote it down. And 50 years later, somebody living in a different part of the world, writing in A different language actually could do it word for word. What. So it's a different question, though, from the manuscripts.

John Dehlin [01:10:33] And Bart, have I heard you say previously and. Or today in this interview that many of the books of the New Testament, of the Gospels, many of the four gospels, were written generations after the person whose name is on the particular gospel actually would have lived. In other words, they were passed down through oral tradition for at least one, two or three generations before they were actually written down. Do I have that right?

Bart Ehrman [01:11:02] Yeah, I mean, it depends how you date everything. But scholars typically date the Gospel of Mark to around the year 70, maybe just after the year 70, because it looks like he knows about the, about Jerusalem being destroyed in the year 70.

Bart Ehrman [01:11:16] Luke and Matthew are about 10 or 15 years after that, in the mid-80s, and John is usually thought to be 95 or so. And so just with John as a key example, the Gospel of John reports many of the sayings of Jesus, but it looks like this had to be written around the year 95.

Bart Ehrman [01:11:33] John, there's Jesus disciple. John was an adult when Jesus called him to be his disciple in the late 20s. There's no way he's raised around in the, in the, in the mid-90s. He's not alive then. So that's. So these stories were, are written by these authors. And if, if they're our early, they're our earliest surviving gospels. There may have been earlier gospels. If so, we don't have them. The way people knew about Jesus was not by written gospels. Most people couldn't read anyway. People are telling stories about Jesus. That's how Christianity is spreading, by people telling stories. If somebody in Ephesus in the year 80 has heard about Jesus, he's heard stories about Jesus that have been circulating throughout the Roman world, from Israel to Ephesus, far away in a different language, translated from Aramaic.

Bart Ehrman [01:12:26] And so these books are all based on oral traditions, stories people have told and retold and retold. Not only do the manuscripts get changed by scribes, but before that, we all know what happens to oral stories when they're told from one person to the next man. They can change a lot. But those are the stories the Gospel writers had heard.

Contradictions Within the Gospels

John Dehlin [01:12:45] And then can you just tell us for those who are just like, you're already blowing their mind, kind of like your mind was originally blown, that the New Testament contradicts itself, that the sequencing, understanding the sequence of when each of the Gospels was written helps us understand it better, but also explains some of these contradictions or errors or problems. Maybe Pick three to five of some really big ones in some of the big categories to help us understand the flaws or inconsistencies or errors or even the chronology of the New Testament.

Bart Ehrman [01:13:25] Well, one example I typically start with with my students is explaining that in Mark and John, our first Gospel is probably Mark, John's probably our last. Both of them explicitly tell you the day Jesus died and the hour of day.

Bart Ehrman [01:13:40] Mark indicates that Jesus disciples are told to make a Passover meal for Jesus and them. And they do that. And so they eat the meal. That even they eat the Passover meal. It's important to remember that in Jewish reckoning, the day begins when it gets dark.

Bart Ehrman [01:14:02] Still works that way. That's why Shabbat dinner, Sabbath dinners held on Friday night, even though Sabbath's on Saturday, because the day begins when it gets dark on Friday. Okay, so they prepare a meal for Jesus. It's a, it's on a Friday.

Bart Ehrman [01:14:17] They prepare the meal in Mark, and that night they may eat it. In other words, it's on the Passover day and they eat the Passover meal. Jesus gets arrested afterwards, spends the night in jail. Next morning he's found guilty. He is crucified at 9 o' clock in the morning on the Passover day. The day after they eat the Passover meal.

Bart Ehrman [01:14:35] Mark explicitly dates it in several verses. Chapter 14, verse 12, 15, 35, etc. The gospel of John also has Jesus having a last meal with his disciples, but it's not called a Passover meal. He's arrested afterwards and spends the night in jail and he's put on trial and he's crucified after noon. And John tells you that it's the day before the Passover, chapter 19, verse 14. It's the day when they'd be preparing the Passover meal that Jesus has killed.

Bart Ehrman [01:15:08] Well, he either got killed after the Passover meal was celebrated or on the day they were preparing to celebrate it that night. Can't be both. And he's either killed at nine in the morning or afternoon and wasn't put on the cross and can't be both. Well, so what's going on there? Well, John's changed the story.

Bart Ehrman [01:15:25] He's changed the story because the Passover meal is commemorating the Passover lamb that was killed by, you know, in the days of Moses to celebrate the Exodus, celebrated every year eating a Passover meal. Okay, well, John thinks that Jesus is the Passover lamb. John's the gospel, the only gospel that calls Jesus the Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world.

Bart Ehrman [01:15:51] So John has changed his story when Jesus dies so that he dies when they're killing the lambs in the temple in preparation for the Passover, so that Jesus really is the Passover lamb. So he's changed a historical fact to make a theological point. You can do that kind of thing. You can find those kinds of differences throughout the Gospels. Sometimes it's even more obvious. I'll just give you one example of that. It may not seem like a big deal, but it's a flat out contradiction. In Mark's gospel, the first gospel, Jesus sends out his disciples to go spread the news of the kingdom of God.

Bart Ehrman [01:16:29] And he tells them, go heal people, cast out demons, preach the kingdom of God. Don't take a backpack with you, don't take extra sandals, don't take any extra money, but take a staff. You, a walking staff. But take a staff.

Bart Ehrman [01:16:44] So they go and they do it. Matthew has exactly the same story. And Jesus says, don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any money, and don't take a staff. Wait, and Mark, he says, do take a staff, and Matthew says, don't take. Which is it? Ah, well, it's just, you know, it's a contradiction. Matthew changed it. Matthew changed it because he wanted to show even more that they weren't reliant on anything but God.

Guest 2 [01:17:12] God.

Bart Ehrman [01:17:13] And so they didn't even take a staff with them. So you get that kind of little, little thing, you get that kind of bigger thing in John and you have, you know, so you have, you have tensions and contradictions. We could talk all, all day about them. My book, Jesus Interrupted is a book where I really go into a lot of those just to show people how different these are, sometimes flat out contradictions and sometimes very, very different understandings of Jesus.

John Dehlin [01:17:39] I remember studying in Mormon seminary as a high school student, realizing that Judas is killed in two totally different ways or dies in two totally different ways, and that even the sign over Jesus's head, not only could they not get that right, just the, what, eight words on the sign over his head when he was crucified, but like every one of the four gospels says something different in terms of what the sign said above Jesus's head. Am I remembering that right? Because I remember struggling with this in high school.

Bart Ehrman [01:18:15] Well, look, you know, you need to remember they didn't have eyeglasses back then. And the four evangelists, man, they just, they're doing the best. They wrote what they saw for the listeners. A really great exercise. I mentioned that thing About Genesis. And the example you used is a perfect one for people. People want to see problems in the New Testament, the stories of Judas is death because you get two accounts of it, as you said. You get In Matthew, chapter 27, you have an account. And in Acts, chapter 1, you have an account. And I have my students just list what happens and then try and figure out.

Bart Ehrman [01:18:48] So if people do that, you'll find out that, you know, people think of Jesus going out and hanging himself. That's what you get. In Matthew, you. In the book of Acts, Judas does not hang himself. He falls headlong onto the ground and his intestines spill out over the earth.

Bart Ehrman [01:19:06] In Matthew, the priests buy the field that he's going to hang himself on with the money that Jesus. That Judas has returned the 30 pieces of silver. In Acts, Judas bought the. Bought the field himself. And Matthew is called the field of blood because it was purchased with blood money, the money of a betrayal that led to Jesus death. Blood money. In Acts, it's called that. It's called the field of blood because Judas bled all over it.

Bart Ehrman [01:19:38] So you can, you know, people try to reconcile these two. You cannot reconcile these two, in my opinion. And so it's another. Yeah, it's another great example.

John Dehlin [01:19:47] And would you say. And some would say, well, those are trivial examples. They all, you know, he died. It doesn't matter how Judas died, he died. Or if the words on the sign above Jesus's head on the cross say different things. They basically all say, here is the king of the Jews or the supposed king of the Jews. Are there important doctrinal or theological differences? And maybe more importantly, does Jesus's role or power or divinity change? And some would argue, like the fish story, the fish gets bigger with each subsequent account. Does any of that happen where actually the nature of Jesus changes over time?

Bart Ehrman [01:20:35] Well, the answer, both questions is yes. In my case, as with many other cases, what made me understand that there could be big differences? I. I could easily reconcile big differences. When I was a conservative evangelical, for me, it was a little detail that did it. This thing about. Was Abiathar the high priest or not? It's like, it's like a chink in the armor. So once you get a lot of chinks in your armor, you start realizing there's something going on here. There are big differences of theology and big differences of the understanding of Jesus among the Gospels.

Bart Ehrman [01:21:13] Let me give you an example of each. Almost nearly every Christian that I've ever known says that Jesus died for your sins. This is the Teaching of Matthew and Mark and John and Paul and virtually all the authors of the New Testament that Jesus death brought an atonement for sins. However you understand what an atonement is. Jesus death puts you right with God, God somehow.

Bart Ehrman [01:21:43] And in most of these authors it's because it's a sacrifice for sins. It's a substitution for your death. Christ died in your place for you. The Gospel of Luke does not have that idea. Luke's Gospel is usually under almost always. It's almost always understood to have been. Have copied Mark for part of his stories, for some of his stories.

Bart Ehrman [01:22:06] Every place in Mark's Gospel that Mark indicates Jesus death was an atonement for sins, that he sacrificed his life for others. Luke gets rid of that. He doesn't copy those parts. In fact, he just takes them out of verses that he has otherwise.

Bart Ehrman [01:22:24] And in the Book of Acts, written by the same author, Luke whoever, whatever his name was, the same author wrote both the Gospel and Acts. That's not much debate among anybody even, I mean, even conservatives. Yeah, it's clear that's true. In the book of Acts, the apostles are trying to convert people to become followers of Jesus and they give sermons, chapter 2, chapter 13, etc. And when they give these sermons, they never talk about Jesus death being for your sins.

Bart Ehrman [01:22:56] They say Jesus was unjustly killed, he was a righteous man and you are responsible for killing him and you better repent or you're going to be judged. Luke's view is that if you turn to God because you realize how sinful you are and you repent of your sins, he will forgive you.

Bart Ehrman [01:23:18] His view is not that you need somebody else to be a sacrifice for your sins. That's a pretty big difference. Does Luke have a doctrine of the atonement? Does he think that Jesus had to die for the sins of the world? No.

Bart Ehrman [01:23:33] The others do. Why did Jesus die? That's big. That's big. The second question you have about Jesus identity, that of course it relates to that. But here's another big deal. People naturally think that Jesus called himself and considered himself to be a divine being, that Jesus was God and he called himself God.

Bart Ehrman [01:23:55] And that's pretty much true for the Gospel of John. He never talks about himself as a divine being. In Matthew, Mark and Luke. What? Yeah, all of the. In John, John. In John, Jesus says things like I and the Father are one.

Bart Ehrman [01:24:17] John 10:10 or before Abraham was. I am. So he existed before Abraham and he uses the name of God. I am. In the story, the Jews know exactly what he's saying they take up stones to stone him to death both times because they know that he's claiming to be God. In chapter 14, verse 9, he's talking to his disciples and he says, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

Bart Ehrman [01:24:45] Wow, okay. These are really quite exalted claims and they're not found in any of the other gospels. Jesus does not talk about himself in Matthew, Mark and Luke, except the main thing he says in Matthew, Mark and Luke is that he has to go to Jerusalem to get crucified, but he does not talk about himself as God at all.

Bart Ehrman [01:25:08] And so, you know, if you're kind of doing a little thought experiment and you're thinking about Matthew, Mark and Luke, why wouldn't they have him tell, like, say that he's God if they knew that he said that he was God? I mean, if. If you're writing a gospel about Jesus and you know that he called himself God, like, why wouldn't you include that part? It seems like that'd be a pretty important lesson to learn, is that Jesus thought he was God. You just leave it out because it's not. Yeah, that's not very important.

Bart Ehrman [01:25:34] Leave out that little bit. No, they had not heard this. John is our last gospel. By the time John's written, people have increased their understanding of Jesus. It's elevated to become a more elevated understanding of Jesus. Now, Jesus was not just a human messiah who fulfilled God's will by dying for the sins of the world. He's God. Whoa. But that's only John.

John Dehlin [01:26:01] Colby, you got a follow up?

Guest 2 [01:26:02] I do. I have a question about John or a development in John, Dr. Ehrman, that I learned from you. So one of the. One of the stories when I was a believing Christian, as a Mormon, that was so foundational to Jesus Christ's character, like who I thought Jesus was, was the story in John, chapter eight of the woman taken in adultery. And I was surprised to learn, and hopefully you can recap or correct me where I don't understand this exactly right. But I was surprised to learn that our earliest manuscripts do not have the story of the woman taken in adultery. Can you maybe speak to whether I have that right? And when we do see that story basically be added to later manuscripts of the Gospel of John.

Disputed Passages and the Resurrection

Bart Ehrman [01:26:45] Yeah, I'm happy to address that. It relates to Coy's question earlier about the manuscripts because there I was talking about the differences among the manuscripts and boy, this is a big one. So the story of the woman taken in adultery, I suppose listeners all know this I mean, this woman's been caught in the act of adultery. She's dragged before Jesus by Jewish leaders who say that the law of Moses says we're supposed to stone her to death. What do you say? So they're setting this trap for him because if he says, yeah, stone her to death, then he's violating his, his own teachings of love and mercy.

Bart Ehrman [01:27:19] But if he says, no, don't stone her, then he's breaking the law of Moses. So what's he supposed to do? And so. But Jesus has a way of getting out of these things. And he stoops down, he starts riding on the ground. We don't know what he's riding. He's actually riding something. He's not just doodling, he's riding something. Something. Lots of theories what he was supposed to be writing. And he stands up and he says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.

Bart Ehrman [01:27:42] And stoops down, starts writing again. And one by one, the Jewish authorities realize they too are sinful. And so they, they walk away until she alone is left. Then Jesus says, I don't forgive you either. Go and sin no more. So it's a beautiful story. It's a great story. It's probably the best known story in the Gospel. I say that because it's in every Hollywood movie about Jesus, no matter what.

Bart Ehrman [01:28:04] So the deal is, though, that was certainly not in the original New Testament, in the original Gospel of John or anywhere else in the Gospels. This is not much of a debated point among scholars. I actually knew this when I was a conservative evangelical at Moody Bible Institute.

Bart Ehrman [01:28:23] I realized, wow, that one wasn't in there. And the, the. There are lots of reasons for knowing that. It does occur in 1 5th century manuscript, Codex BZ, but it's not in any of the other Greek manuscripts. So it's in one manuscript that's known to be a really kind of wild manuscript and in some Latin manuscripts later.

Bart Ehrman [01:28:46] So it's not in our earliest and best manuscripts. It's not. You don't have it in manuscripts. And you don't. We don't until much later, until many, many years later, centuries later. And we have Greek authors, Christian authors, who write commentaries on the Gospel of John starting, starting in the third century, we have Christian commentaries who comment on every passage. John. And this passage is not mentioned until the 12th century in a Greek commentary. They didn't know about it. And so it's something that was actually added in the Middle Ages. Some people think that maybe it was like A, a marginal note. Like a scribe came along at some point and thought, you know, this passage in John chapter seven and eight, it's about how you have to judge righteously and, and how Jesus is a righteous judge.

Bart Ehrman [01:29:34] And you know, I heard the story and he writes the story in the margin, right? And then the next scribe comes along and sees the story in the margin, says, oh, you know, the guy who met this, made this manuscript 20 years ago. He left this story out. So he puts it in this, puts it in, the next guy copies it in there. And it goes like that, that.

Bart Ehrman [01:29:51] So it was not originally in the New Testament. That is not a much debated point. And you know, but you are right, I mean, it is a beautiful story that does illustrate one aspect of how people think about Jesus. And I, you know, I'm all for the story, but it wasn't originally in the Bible.

John Dehlin [01:30:13] Bart, help us understand the evidence. Like, for a lot of people, the most important thing in the whole Bible is the resurrection of Jesus. So you've already established that the New Testament is based on someone who actually lived a Jesus of Nazareth a couple thousand years ago. How is the evidence for an actual resurrection of Jesus?

Bart Ehrman [01:30:38] This is a particular problem that's related to the problem of all the miracles in the Bible, specifically with the resurrection. Here's another exercise I have my students do. Do this one. I. Of all the exercises, I suggest you do Genesis, Judas, now this, this is the one I recommend the most. Go through each gospel and list what happens and compare your lists.

Bart Ehrman [01:31:04] See what's similar among the four, see what's different among the four, and see if there are any differences that cannot be reconciled. So I have two comments about the resurrection. One is that the accounts are hopelessly contradictory, and second, that even if they were consistent, there's not. It doesn't make historical sense to talk about proof for the resurrection. So let me deal with the first thing first and we can follow the other one if you're interested. The first one is when you make your list.

Bart Ehrman [01:31:38] So Jesus. In all the gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday afternoon, and on a Sunday morning his tomb is discovered to be empty. So ask yourself how. How many women go to the tomb? What are their names? What do they see there? Who do they see there? Do they see. So is there one woman? Is it Mary Magdalene? Is it several women? If several women, what are their names? When they get there? Has the stone been rolled away already or not? Depends which gospel you read.

Guest 2 [01:32:12] Street.

Bart Ehrman [01:32:12] How many women are they? What are they called? Do they see? Do they see one. Do they see a man there? Do they see two men there? Do they see two angels there? Do they see what do they see there? What are they told there? Are they told something that Jesus had told them in Galilee, or are they told that the disciples are supposed to go to Galilee?

Bart Ehrman [01:32:35] If they're told to tell the disciples to go to Galilee, do they tell the disciples or do they tell nobody? Depends which gospel you read. If they tell the disciples, do the disciples go to Galilee? Depends which gospel you read. Luke is quite clear.

Bart Ehrman [01:32:49] He's explicit that Jesus is raised from the dead on Sunday. He meets with several of his disciples. Then he meets with all of the disciples on that day. And at the end of the end of the chapter, on the same day, he ascends into heaven.

John Dehlin [01:33:06] Heaven.

Bart Ehrman [01:33:07] His instructions to them. He meets them in Jerusalem. He sees them in Jerusalem. They're all in Jerusalem. Explicitly in Jerusalem. And he tells them, don't leave Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And that's in Luke's second volume, chapter two of Acts. The Holy Spirit comes upon them on the day of Pentecost, 50 days later. They've been in Jerusalem the entire time? Month and a half. More than. Yeah, a month and a half. When it. And they stay in Jerusalem. Matthew's Gospel.

Bart Ehrman [01:33:34] They go up to Jerusalem, they go up to Galilee. They leave Jerusalem right away, they go up to Galilee. They meet Jesus in Galilee, and that's where Jesus instructs them and leaves. Did they go to Galilee or not? Depends which gospel you read. Did the women tell anybody or not? Depends which gospel you read. So hopelessly contradictory. Which calls into question their validity, the value as historical sources. They're all telling stories and try to emphasize things differently. If it's okay with you, I'll tell you the. The other bigger problem.

John Dehlin [01:34:05] Sure. Please.

Bart Ehrman [01:34:07] With. With. When you talk about was Jesus raised from the dead? My view is that that is a. That's a issue of faith, not a issue of history. If something like that did happen historically, because of the. The nature of how historians go about doing their business of reconstructing the past, there's no way to show that something like that happened. So that sounds kind of confusing, but let me explain. Historians cannot show everything that happened in the past.

Bart Ehrman [01:34:43] 99.9999% of the past cannot be recovered. We just have no evidence for it. No evidence for it. When historians try to figure out what happened in the past, they have to figure out what's the most likely thing to have happened. You know, you got somebody Saying this, somebody's saying that, somebody's saying the other thing. We've got this physical evidence and that physical evidence. It's like doing a court case. You got all this evidence and the jury has to decide, and there's probabilities, and you have to weigh the probabilities.

Bart Ehrman [01:35:11] What is the probability of a divine intervention into the natural order? If historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, historians have to work within the realm of what's possible, given what we know about the world.

Bart Ehrman [01:35:31] It is highly. Look, it'd be highly unlikely that somebody was raised from the dead, right? I mean, everybody would agree it's highly unlikely. There have been. Since Homo Sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago, Christians think that there's been one person, person that that's happened to. There's been about 115 billion people alive. So what are the chance, if you're just looking at chances? Well, the chances. One out of 115 billion. Okay, so what kind of evidence would you look for? The evidence we have.

Bart Ehrman [01:36:00] Our first piece of evidence comes about 25 years later in the writings of Paul, who says he saw Jesus. Which is more likely? That the laws of nature were broken or that Paul mistook what he saw? How often are the laws of nature broken? Well, they're called laws because they're never broken. They've never been recorded as breaking, like in. Under scientific spirit. Never.

Bart Ehrman [01:36:24] What are the chances somebody miss, saw something, misunderstood what he saw, had some kind of dream, had a vision? What's the chances that. Well, that happens all the time. Well, which is more likely then? Well, yeah, but all the disciples saw him. Did they?

Bart Ehrman [01:36:40] What's our record of that? Do we have any of them saying that? No, the only person who says it is Paul. We have later gospels that talk about it, the disciples seeing Jesus, Gospels written decades later by people who weren't there, who didn't know, the apostles who have heard these things by oral traditions? And so we have records of people claiming to see Jesus and records of people claiming to see the tomb empty.

Bart Ehrman [01:37:03] Well, do stories ever get started? Does gossip ever start? Do rumors ever start? Do stories get changed in the retelling? Do what if you're a historian who just wants to know the facts? If you're a Christian and you think it happened, you say, I believe it happened. I believe it happened. The historian cannot show it happened because any other explanation is more likely as long as it doesn't break the laws of nature.

Bart Ehrman [01:37:27] So. So that's the dilemma. If you're talking about did it probably happen. If you mean historically. Well, no, of course not. If you think, did it happen, then. Well, if you believe it happened, then you believe it happened. But it's not based on historical proof. There is no historical proof. That would. That would be satisfying.

John Dehlin [01:37:47] Love it. Cole, you've got a question about the documents that didn't make it into the New Testament, the apocryphal manuscripts. Is that right?

Apocryphal Books and the Historical Jesus

Guest [01:37:57] So how would our understanding of Jesus and his character be different if some of these apocryphal books would have made it in the final cut?

Bart Ehrman [01:38:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:08] And tell us first what an apocryphal book is for those who don't know.

Bart Ehrman [01:38:13] So there are, you know, there are books. We have 27 books in the New Testament that are either claimed to claim to be written by apostles like Paul or are said to have been written by Apostle Paul like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Bart Ehrman [01:38:26] And so there are lots of books that were written by Christians, some of them claiming to be written by apostles, that were not included in the New Testament. We have Gospel Peter, Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Philip, gospel of Mary, etc. Etc. These were not included. And Coy's question is, if they were included, how would that have changed our view of Jesus?

Bart Ehrman [01:38:50] And it's a great question. It's a question a lot of people are asking these days. It's a question much on my mind because it's what my next book is on that I'm starting to work on. And it's the questions I'm doing. It's a question I'm doing on my.

Bart Ehrman [01:39:04] In I'm. This morning I was thinking about it because I'm holding a conference on this question in September. I have this, just a little plug. I have this saying called Paths in Biblical Studies that produces online courses and does online conferences. I'm going to do a big conference just on this question about the books that didn't make it in in September. So if, if people are interested in this stuff, just look me up on the web and you'll see my website with the courses and conferences and stuff. But I'm getting the best scholars in the world on this question to talk about it. And coy, it completely depends on which of these Gospels would have been included, because these Gospels.

Bart Ehrman [01:39:41] So, you know, I'm saying that each of the Gospels in New Testament are different from each other. You know, Matthew's different from Luke, and John's different from Mark, et cetera. They're all different, but they're more like each other than any of Them is like any of these other gospels that did not make it in.

Bart Ehrman [01:39:56] So I'll say that. And if the Gospel of Thomas was let in, that would create a very different view from what you get in Mark. But if it wasn't Lea, but the Gospel of Philip was let in, it have a very different view. The Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene, if that was let in. And so it would just depend. A lot of these gospels are called Gnostic Gospels. Gnosticism was a form of Christianity that was popular in the second century into the third century that understood that the death of Jesus is not what brings salvation. What brings salvation is understanding his secret teachings.

Bart Ehrman [01:40:35] And these gospels sometimes lay out his secret teachings about where, where the, how the world came into being and how we got here and how we can get out of here, how we can be saved. And so depending which of these Gospels gets in, it changes our views of things. But some of these Gospels have radically different views. Others of them, other gospels that did not make it in have views that are very similar, similar to what we get in the New Testament, but. But different in key ways that church fathers didn't appreciate. And so our canon of 27 books, this is what my next book is on, is how we got these 27 books.

Bart Ehrman [01:41:11] Who decided, when they decided, on what grounds did they decide? So there are lots of books kind of like that out there already, but I'm going to be focusing especially on what kind of arguments were they having about like, why did Revelation get in? You know, shouldn't they have left that one out? Or like, yeah, man, I don't know. I'm not sure about Mark. It just seems like a condensed version of Matthew. Why'd that get in? So I'm going to be dealing with the arguments about it in this book. Coy, I hope that answered your question.

John Dehlin [01:41:40] Coy, go ahead and ask your next question about Barth's intentions. I think that's a really important thing to get out on the table.

Guest [01:41:47] Yeah. So many of the critics that are trying to understand where you're coming from and I've shared a lot of your work with friends and family. Often I hear that they think that your intention would be to tear down belief or to tear down faith in Jesus. And my observation in observing many of your debates and reading your books is that you're more interested in the truth of what was written, the truth of what. You even mentioned in your last lecture that 2 billion people believe the Bible to be Scripture. And it does matter how we interpret that. So I wonder if you can speak to what your intentions are and what your desires are in your work in answering these critics that think you're just out there. An antichrist or anti.

Guest 2 [01:42:40] Belief.

Bart Ehrman [01:42:42] Right. Well, thank you, Coy. I'm glad you asked the question. I, I have heard, I've had people, I've debated, I won't name any names who have claimed that my in. I begin my classes at Chapel Hill by saying that my goal is to deconvert people.

Bart Ehrman [01:43:02] And that's just a flat out lie. And the interesting thing is there was a conservative evangelical apologist who, who said that, that he had talked with somebody who flat out said that he was in my class. And that's what I said. I told him it's absolutely not true. And he said, well, I have an eyewitness. I said, yeah, that'll show you something about eyewitnesses because I can tell you you can interview any of my students that you know in my classes this semester, any semester. I explicitly state I am not interested in deconverting anybody.

Bart Ehrman [01:43:33] I'm not interested in deconverting them from what they believe. I'm not interested in them converting them to what I believe, believe or what I think. I'm interested in getting them to think. And so that is, that is absolutely my goal. And I have that goal with my atheist students.

Bart Ehrman [01:43:53] I don't, I don't try to confirm what they think or not. I want them to think as well. And so I want everybody to think. And so I think the one problem with, with religion generally is that people, people believe what they were raised to believe.

Bart Ehrman [01:44:08] You're born into a family and your family, often parents will have beliefs and you're, you're taken to a religious institution, you raised up and that's just seems common sense to you. And you never even like think about it much.

Bart Ehrman [01:44:22] But you know, when it comes to the Bible, which is as you said, I mean, There are over 2 billion Christians in the world and the Bible is the foundation of it. There are a lot of people who never read the Bible who believe in it. There are a lot of people who read the Bible and don't read it very carefully. There are very few people who know what experts who spent their entire lives studying this book say about it.

Bart Ehrman [01:44:45] Most of the things that I teach in my classes, most of the things that I write about, most things I talk about when I give public lectures, most of those things are things that I either learned or had the basis for. When I was attending a Christian theological seminary that was training pastors in the Presbyterian Church.

Bart Ehrman [01:45:06] And so, you know, the idea that there are contradictions, the idea that John is the only one that reports Jesus claiming to be divine. The idea that the accounts of Judas are at odds with each other. The idea that you have to read each book for its own meaning. The idea that you can't simply assume that every book's saying the same thing. Like all of these things are things that are taught at high level divinity schools and seminaries that are training ministers, Christian ministers. These are views that are held by Christians, Christian scholars of the Bible. Almost all New Testament scholars are Christians.

Bart Ehrman [01:45:39] Not all of them. There are some Jews, some very fine Jewish scholars in the New Testament. There are a few atheists and agnostics. Most are Christians and most hold. It's not. They hold every view that I hold. I mean scholars disagree on everything thing. If scholars didn't disagree on everything, you just need one scholar to write all the books, that'd be fine. But. So I disagree with scholars on lots of things, but I am not out to destroy anybody's faith.

Bart Ehrman [01:46:06] If they look at the things that I talk about and they agree with me and it challenges their faith and they need to decide what to do. I absolutely don't encourage people. I tell my student every now and then I'll have a student ask me if I'm trying to destroy their faith. You'd be crazy if you take a semester course and leave your faith. I mean, you know, you're 20 years old here, you've been thinking this for 20 years and now the basis of a few, like a couple months, you're going to leave it. What if you, you should think about it for a while, please.

Bart Ehrman [01:46:34] And so no, I, I absolutely have no intention. I do have the intention of attacking fundamentalism because I think it's dangerous and I think it does more harm when people are so self assured that they are absolutely right that the Bible is iner.

Bart Ehrman [01:46:53] Therefore they can condemn people who are not like them because they're getting their cues from the Bible about how they should be. I'm very much against any form of fundamentalism, but I'm not against reasoned faith. So I'm not trying to destroy people's faith. If they have faith, I want them. I think it's better.

Bart Ehrman [01:47:12] My typical view is that I think if you decide to leave the faith, you should do it for reasons. If you decide to stay in the faith, you should do it for reasons. And that it's, it's better to have reasons, which means you have to think about it and it's better to think about it because it's better to be an intelligent believer than an ignorant believer. And if you don't, if you don't seek knowledge, then you're embracing ignorance. And I don't think that's a good thing.

John Dehlin [01:47:41] Love it. Bart, let's turn a little bit to Mormonism for a second. When Joseph Smith. What is your impression of, of, let's just say the validity of Mormon scripture, of Joseph Smith as a prophet. Have you studied much about Mormonism and, or the Book of Mormon and, or Doctrine and Covenants, book of Abraham, etc. And do you have any thoughts or feelings around its validity, how it corresponds, complements, contradicts, Christianity? Any initial thoughts before we poison the well with any questions?

Reflections on Mormonism and LDS Theology

Bart Ehrman [01:48:17] Questions? Well, I, you know, I am not an expert in Mormonism and so I'm reluctant really to talk about it, just like I, I'm reluctant to talk about Islam, you know, or Hinduism or Buddhism. These are things I know some things about, but they're, they're not areas of expertise. So I have zero expertise on, on Mormonism. The only time I read the Book of Mormon carefully was when I was an Evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute. And I read it carefully in order to isolate all the contradictions and historical implausibilities. And I marked it up so the next time Mormon missionaries to my door, we'd have an interesting conversation.

Bart Ehrman [01:48:53] So that was it. And, and so, you know, I've never, I've never subscribed to Mormon beliefs as an outsider to Mormonism. They seem peculiar to me. I had this conversation this morning over coffee with somebody not about Mormonism, but my line to him was that everything that you're not raised on, every religious tradition you're not raised on, seems weird to you view.

Bart Ehrman [01:49:21] You know, people who are Baptists think that their views are common sense, but I mean, if you're not a Baptist, they seem weird. And I, I wasn't raised in Mormon circles. I didn't know Mormons. I didn't know Mormons well until I was teaching at UNC. I started having a number of students from BYU come into our PhD program to do PhDs with me. And so I had a string of, of Mormon students over years, years. And I learned a good bit about Mormonism from them. It's very, very helpful. And they could, of course they could do scholarship, but they remained most, most of them remained Mormon and some of them still teach, they teach at byu, you know, so, so look, it's second, third hand knowledge.

Bart Ehrman [01:50:05] I Have. So if you've got detailed questions that are about, like the Book of Mormon, I'll have to break out my copy. I marked up when I was a fundamentalist.

John Dehlin [01:50:15] I think one question is Joseph Smith basically was part of a restorationist movement where he felt like there had been an apostasy, that Jesus set up his one true church on the earth with authority and a structure and 12 apostles and ordinances.

John Dehlin [01:50:35] And then the Catholic Church and subsequent churches corrupted and it bastardized the teachings. And so Joseph Smith was called to restore God's one true church on the earth. And so he needed to restore things as they were from the beginning.

John Dehlin [01:50:54] And so from that we have temple worship, we have celestial marriage, we even have polygamy. We have not just baptism by immersion, but baptism for the dead as well. And you know, on and on and on core Mormon theology, including a living prophet today who leads and guides the church and gets revelation from God.

John Dehlin [01:51:21] So it does that seem, you know, consistent with what you, with what your understanding of the Old and New Testament were pointing towards or hoping for.

Bart Ehrman [01:51:34] So I'll say two things about that. Again, I'm not attacking Mormonism. I have great respect, respect for Mormonism as I, I have respect for all major religious traditions. And so I'm not, you know, I have no interest in attacking Mormonism or proving it wrong any more than I, you know, have an interest in proving that the Methodists are wrong, you know, which I think they are, but whatever.

Bart Ehrman [01:51:55] So. But I have two things to say about it. One is that that it was not Joseph Smith's idea that that the church started out one way and got corrupted and now he's going to return to it. This is a common theme throughout the history of Christianity. I don't know how well informed he was about the history of Christian denominationalism, but it absolutely is, you know, throughout the Middle Ages there are these get back to the origins movements. The Reformation is nothing but that. Martin Luther is trying to get behind the Catholic Church to what, what the Apostle Paul and the other authors of the New Testament really said.

Bart Ehrman [01:52:33] And, and once Protestantism started, you had numerous splinter groups that did the same thing for years. I was a member of the Plymouth Brethren community that was a back to the New Testament movement because all the other denominations had messed it up. And so that basic motif you find constantly throughout the history of Christian denominations. If you want to consider Mormonism the denomination, but close enough, I know like Plymouth Brethren, we did not want anybody to call us a denomination. We weren't a denomination. We were true Christians.

Bart Ehrman [01:53:07] Those other things are denominations. So the other thing I'll say is that those traditional Mormon beliefs and practices that you mentioned were not original to early Christianity. We have good evidence for what the early Christians believed and what they practiced.

Bart Ehrman [01:53:25] The only Mormon practice that you've mentioned just now that that can be traced back to the early church may be the baptism for the dead. As you all know quite well. It's based on a verse in First Corinthians, chapter 15. Unfortunately, we don't know what Paul meant when he. When he tells the Corinthians that if there's no resurrection, why do you baptize for the dead? Had.

Bart Ehrman [01:53:52] We don't know what it signified, how it was practiced, what, what they were thinking. And so I don't. There's no way to know whether the Mormon view is the correct view. There are about 2,000 interpretations of that verse among biblical scholars. So the other things.

Bart Ehrman [01:54:10] No, including like polygamy. I mean, just. You sort of go down the list of things. No, these are not. These cannot be found in records of the early church period.

John Dehlin [01:54:24] Coy has a question about Jesus that's tied to Mormonism.

Guest [01:54:31] Yeah. So you mentioned how people have some issues with Jesus perhaps having a brother or family because Mary was a perpetual virgin. In LDS theology, there's sort of an unwritten or unspoken belief that maybe Jesus was married, maybe even to Mary Magdalene, I guess. And according to some of the. I think you would say, most reliable authors like Dan Brown.

John Dehlin [01:55:02] Just.

Guest [01:55:03] Just kidding. They kind of allude to that as well. I wonder if you could comment on any. Just historical, you know, validation to that, or is that just sort of myth?

Bart Ehrman [01:55:17] Yeah, So I actually have written about this in two of my books. I wrote a book on Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. There. There were. There are 683 books written about the Da Vinci Code. I was one of them. But I was the biblical historian who's trying to isolate what his historical mistakes were. And so my entire thing is like, what he gets wrong, like just historically wrong. And it takes a of bunch book to explain it. But one of the things that I dealt with was Mary Magdalene. But I also have a book called Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene where I have six chapters on Mary Magdalene.

Bart Ehrman [01:55:49] And so I'll give you the short story. Mary. People do not realize this. People think of Mary Magdalene as extremely important in the ministry of Jesus, probably Jesus. Some people think of her as Jesus closest disciple. Many people think of her as his closest female disciple.

Bart Ehrman [01:56:08] If you read Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John up to the time of Jesus crucifixion. So from his birth to his Crucifixion, in all four books there's only one reference to Mary Magdalene. Luke chapter 8, verse 3. Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Susanna and a large group of other women support Jesus and his disciples financially.

Bart Ehrman [01:56:34] That's it. His entire ministry. That's the one reference. She and other women in Mark's gospel and in the Gospels, she and other women see Jesus get crucified and she's one of the women who finds the tomb empty. In the Gospel of John she's the first she sees the tomb empty and she has an encounter with Jesus. In only in John she has a one on one with Jesus where she realizes he was raised from the dead.

Bart Ehrman [01:57:08] She goes back and tells the disciples and Peter and John come and verify the tombs empty. Now I don't know, it's very hard to say anything at all historical about Mary Magdalene. I think there probably was a person like that probably was a follower of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [01:57:26] If it's true that she was one of the first or the first to realize that Jesus was raised from the dead, that would be hugely significant because you could make the case that Mary Magdalene was the founder of Christianity.

Bart Ehrman [01:57:43] Whoa. Because if Christianity is the belief in Jesus, death and resurrection and she's the first to recognize it and she's the one who, who told the disciples she would be the first, she would have been the found, she'd be the foundation Christian. So that's huge.

Bart Ehrman [01:57:58] Now saying that she. Even if you think that much, some people do, some don't. Even if you think that much, that's not the same thing as her being married to him and like having sex with him and having babies with him as people want to argue, including Dan Brown.

Bart Ehrman [01:58:16] So, so the, the idea that they were married is completely made up. There's, there's no indication of that in our early sources. We start later, we start getting references to Mary Magdalene and Jesus that are sometimes used to suggest they had a closer relationship, possibly an intimate relationship, especially in a book called the Gospel of Philip, which is a later Gnostic text from the end of the second century or later. And it is not historical. And even what it says is misunderstand understood if you think they have a miss of an intimate relationship. So that whole thing is simply a modern fabrication.

Bart Ehrman [01:58:56] Not modern as in Dan Brown, but it's been, it's been around for a while. I don't know of other, I don't know of other Christian communities that subscribe to it outside of LDS communities.

John Dehlin [01:59:11] Bart, you've been super generous with your time. One of the main things we want to make sure to do is to sell this book. The book is Love Thy Stranger. It's coming out in March 2026. You can pre order it on Amazon.

Jesus's Teachings on Love and the Stranger

John Dehlin [01:59:26] Bart, we've got this tricky thing in in on Mormon stories where we, we try not to be political or partisan from the standpoint of not wanting to turn off our viewers and listeners by making them feel like we're choosing sides. However, I think we all care about Christianity, we care about the state of our country. And you've got a lot to say in this book about Christian nationalism and the way Christianity is being co opted politically and maybe even steered in ways that aren't consistent with what Jesus was trying to do, specifically as it relates to immigrants, foreigners, et cetera. So we want to give you a chance to kind of of explore for us the main theses in your book Love Thy Stranger and even give us some teasers or even some answers on why Christian nationalism may be taking us away from the teachings of Jesus and not towards them or in harmony with them.

Bart Ehrman [02:00:33] Thank you, I appreciate that. You know, I also try to stay neutral in my public appearances on political issues and social media, social agendas for the most part. I have a, I have a daily blog, you know, I've done it for 14 years, where I post, you know, five to six times a week. And I never get into politics. I talk about the New Testament, Jesus, Bible, ancient Jewish religion, ancient Roman religion, all that stuff. And people ask me comments, they have come and I don't allow politics on it.

Bart Ehrman [02:01:04] I, I do a podcast, my Misquoting Jesus podcast. I don't do politics on it. And so, so in this book I don't directly do politics. In other words, I don't state my political views about things. I do try to approach this question from a historical point of view. What is it that Jesus taught and that can be put in relationship to what people say he taught and how Christians act today?

Bart Ehrman [02:01:31] And so, and so it's not, I am not saying that this action is wrong or that action is wrong or that, that. I am saying it's not what Jesus said and that's different. And so I try to, I try to remain neutral, but in that sense and political like I don't support one political party or publicly, you know, for the most part, I don't make comments about the Congress or the president or that kind of thing. So with that said, my thesis in this book As I was intimating earlier is that Jesus brought a new kind of alteration truism into the world.

Bart Ehrman [02:02:08] Jesus inherited from the Israelite tradition from the Hebrew Bible. You should love your neighbor as yourself. And he very much advocated that. But he, when he advocated that, he, he had his own interpretation of it, as did other Jewish teachers. I mean, every Jewish teacher would say, yes, that's a core teaching of the Bible. You got to love your neighbors, yourself, yourself. But within the book of Leviticus, love your neighbor as yourself is quite clear. If you just read that verse, it's talking about people within your own nation, those who are among you, the, the nation of Israel, you're to love your fellow Israelite as yourself.

Bart Ehrman [02:02:47] That was the teaching. So even if the Israelites a stranger to you, so not just your family and friends or the people who are in your synagogue or whatever, I mean, it's like any Israelite is to be treated well. Well, and when it says love your neighbor, it does not mean to have a feeling towards them. It's not an emotion in this sense. This sense, love means helping somebody who's in need. If there's a fellow Israelite who's hungry, you, you provide them food, or they need clothing, you provide them with clothing. They're homeless, you provide them shelter. You help people who are in need. If they're a fellow Israelite, you do that even if you don't know, know them.

Bart Ehrman [02:03:26] And in the Torah, it also says that if somebody moves into Israel, somebody immigrates into Israel, you treat them just like an Israelite. They, they are to be loved just as a fellow Israelite, treated just the same as an Israelite. If they immigrate in.

Bart Ehrman [02:03:44] That obviously has implications for people who want to say that we, we are followers of the Bible, Bible, and we accept what the Bible teaches. And we think immigrants should not be allowed in here. And if they are allowed in here, they, they should be imprisoned or kicked out or. So I'm not. Again, I, I am not taking a position on American immigration policy per se. I'm saying that if you say you're a Christian and you believe in the Bible, that that's contrary to what the Bible says.

Guest [02:04:18] Says.

Bart Ehrman [02:04:20] And so you have to decide, do you prefer a particular immigration policy or do you prefer following what the Bible says? And if you say, well, what it says there is not relevant anymore to our situation. You know, look, we live in a complicated age, and immigration today is not like immigration in Israel in the 6th century BCE.

Bart Ehrman [02:04:41] If you want to say that, I'll Say, I completely agree with you. You, I agree. Ours is a much more complicated situation. And I don't think you can pluck a verse out of the Bible in order to make it apply to our complicated situation.

Bart Ehrman [02:04:57] And I think that applies not just to immigration, but to gay rights, to your views of women, to whether women can exercise roles of authority, for example. It applies, I mean, it applies across the. The board to all the things. If you say it doesn't apply to immigration, it doesn't apply to other things too. So in what sense are you saying that you implement the teachings of the Bible?

Bart Ehrman [02:05:20] What Jesus taught was. Jesus taught something even more radical, though, than you should love your fellow Israelite, even if you don't know them. His view was that love your stranger, meant love anyone who's in need, whether they're Jewish or not.

Bart Ehrman [02:05:37] Jesus taught that those in need were to be treated well, and you're to treat those in need as well as you treat yourself. So if you, if you have a house, if people's homeless, you need to provide a shelter. If you have clothes, you should provide clothing. If there, if you have enough to eat, you should provide food. You should help others, even if you don't know them. And you will never know them, and you might not like them. If you do know them. If you did know them, that doesn't matter. Matter. If they're in need, you help them. The thesis of my book is that that was Jesus radical teaching is a radicalization of what could be found more broadly in Judaism.

Bart Ehrman [02:06:13] It was not found at all in the Greek and Roman worlds. And when Christianity took over the Roman world, that became the ethic, that became the moral sense that we need to help those in need. That's why we have inherited that idea. So that if you hear about a disaster, you want to give to disaster relief word. That idea that you should help somebody you don't even know. No come from. It didn't come from the Greek philosophers or the Roman philosophers or the Jewish. It came from Jesus.

Bart Ehrman [02:06:40] And whether you're a Christian or not, you've inherited it because you've lived centuries later after this has been the dominant thing. And so my view, my personal view is that's a good doctrine, that's a good thing, and we should implement that. Whatever you do, think politically, whatever you do politically, my view is that ought to be part of it. That ought to be directing our political policies and our social agendas, in my view.

John Dehlin [02:07:06] Beautiful. All right. So one of the books that everyone needs to buy is Love Thy Stranger Buy it, pre order it now on Amazon really quickly. Bart, I want to sell other of your books too, so maybe just. We'll take a second tell our viewers and listeners what Misquoting Jesus is about. I know you have so many. We're not going to be able to do this with all your books, but we'll do it with just a few.

Bart Ehrman's Books and Charitable Work

Bart Ehrman [02:07:29] You Misquoting is my best selling book. I mean, it's been the most popular book. And it's about how scribes change the texts when they were copying them. Since we don't have the originals, but we only have copies and the copies all have differences among them, how do we know what the authors actually said? You know, it's kind of hard to accept what John says if you don't know what his words were, you know, and you can't interpret what Mark means if you don't know what Mark said. And so that's what that book's about. It's about how scribes change the text and how we can figure out what originally they did say.

John Dehlin [02:08:00] How about Jesus Interrupted?

Bart Ehrman [02:08:02] Jesus Interrupted does a lot more of what we're saying been talking about here, where it deals with all of the major, most of the major problems that scholars deal with when it comes to the Bible, especially the New Testament. How do we know that Paul wrote these letters that are attributed to him? Some scholars think he didn't write six of his 13 letters. How do we know who wrote the Gospels? Also looks at contradictions between one book and another book.

Bart Ehrman [02:08:28] It looks at other forgeries where, I mean, where people were actually forging, forging books. It looks at, it does look at the problem that we don't have the original manuscripts. It looked. So it looks at various kinds of problems that scholars have identified, including like, who invented the idea of the Trinity, Where'd that come from? And who came up with the idea of having a canon of Scripture, having 20, 27 books of the New Testament, and when did that happen? So, like, who invented Christianity? Because it didn't just like show up one day. And so it's that kind of thing.

John Dehlin [02:09:01] I love it. There's so many I could list. There's how Jesus became God. There's forged. There's heaven and hell, God's problem, the triumph of Christianity. Coy, is there a, is there a book or two of Barts that really meant a lot to you? And I'm going to ask you the same question. Coyote, Toby.

Guest [02:09:18] I think the triumph of Christianity was one of the big ones. From Jesus to Constantine, History of The Bible, the making of the New Testament. And then, of course, the fun one was the truth and fiction of the Da Vinci Code.

John Dehlin [02:09:35] And how did those, if you wanted to just kind of bear testimony of Bart Ehrman and how he's helped you. This is a very Mormon ritual. Bart. Coy, why don't you bear your testimony of Bart Ehrman and then we'll have Colby give his closing testimony as well.

Guest [02:09:51] I actually was speaking to a close friend yesterday for his testimony of Bart Ehrman.

John Dehlin [02:09:57] You've been a Mormon bishop, is that right, Coy?

Guest [02:10:00] I have not. No. I. Oh, okay. Okay.

John Dehlin [02:10:02] I was going to invoke authority.

Guest [02:10:04] Close, but another story. I just am appreciative of the work that you've done and how it formed my. My journey through Christianity. You know, understanding more of reality, of the historicity of the New Testament. So I guess my. Yeah, mine is appreciation. And you've been one of my heroes in my faith journey, trying to understand who Jesus really was, what really happened. And I'm a truth seeker. So, yeah, my testimony is appreciation for all this work that you've done. And I get to stand on the foundation that you built for my understanding.

Bart Ehrman [02:10:43] Well, thank you, Coy. I really appreciate that.

John Dehlin [02:10:47] Colby's now yours.

Guest 2 [02:10:49] Oh, thank you so much. My favorite book of yours was definitely Jesus Interrupted, but I actually would pitch your. You have helped sponsor or maybe you can speak to your relationship with it. But the New Insights in the New Testament conference, I attended that virtually, obviously with my wife. Wife last year. And I really, really appreciated the different scholars that you brought together to talk about their insights into the New Testament. And I, I thought it was just very interesting. I also have purchased several of your courses through your website that I've really, really appreciated. So I know you did one about the, the books of the Old Testament, the first couple of books of the Old Testament, and I really appreciated that one also.

Bart Ehrman [02:11:33] Well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So the, you know, so if people want to find out about those courses or this conference, we, we have actually have a conference on the Hebrew Bible coming up in, in a few weeks with top scholars in the world talking about major aspects of the book of Genesis and with Q and A. So there are going to be eight scholars who each give a 50 minute lecture followed by live Q and A. It's all remote and people can see how they can, you know, reserve a speaker spot for it. Just go my website, it's bart erman.com and you'll, you'll see, just click on courses and you'll see all that.

Bart Ehrman [02:12:06] So, so thank you. Yeah. And, and that new insights into the New Testament thing, we've done that one for three years now and we have about 2500 people come to it. And it's, it's great because I have all these scholars come in who are really, really. And you know, they, they're top level scholars. Most, some of them are Christians, some are ex Christians, some are Jews, some are ex Jews, some are, there's a whole range of people. So. Yeah, so that's the one we're going to be doing the Apocrypha on in the fall.

John Dehlin [02:12:35] Have you heard of Dan McClelland, Bart Ehrman?

Bart Ehrman [02:12:37] I know Dan McClellan. He's going to be giving the keynote address at this Hebrew Bible conference I'm doing in a couple weeks.

John Dehlin [02:12:44] And how proud should Mormons be of Dan McClellan?

Bart Ehrman [02:12:47] Well, I hope they are proud because he made a big splash with this book. He's a really bright guy who is able to explain complicated things in simple terms. He's a Hebrew Bible guy and, but he's, he's widely knowledgeable. And so I don't know, I actually don't know his standing within the LDS community anymore. But, but he's, I think, you know, so I haven't talked to him about that. But it's, but he's, he's really good. He's one of these people who, who can, who can communicate to non scholars. It's great.

John Dehlin [02:13:19] All right, last question. Bart, you do quite a bit of charitable work, isn't that right? I think a lot of the money that people pay to your website goes to a charity. You want to talk about that as a vital thing?

Bart Ehrman [02:13:32] Yeah. My main charity is my blog and so it's just called the Bart Arman blog. I mentioned it earlier. I started it in 2012. So I've been going almost 14 years now. Now the idea, there's two ideas behind it. One is to communicate biblical scholarship to a wider audience at a level they can understand.

Bart Ehrman [02:13:53] And so I do, I do a lot on New Testament historical Jesus, Paul. I do a lot on the Hebrew Bible and on ancient Judaism and Roman religion and Greek religion, all sorts of things. But, you know, I post five or six times a week and so and people can, people who belong to the blog can make comments and they can ask questions. I get probably, I don't know, 10 questions a day or so. I've answered every question I've ever gotten on the blog in 14 years.

Bart Ehrman [02:14:24] So, yeah, it's a lot. But the Reason I do it is for the second reason for doing this blog. There's a small membership fee. I mean small like as in like I think at the bottom the, the lowest tier is 29.95 a year. So you know, it's like, what is that? Like, you know, two bucks a month to get all of that.

Bart Ehrman [02:14:43] And, but then there are higher tiers where you can make comments or I do webinars at higher tiers or I do like, I do things for people and, but the people pay a membership fee. I don't take any overhead out of the over, out of the fee to, to pay for the blog. I've got volunteers who do work for us and a paid employee.

Bart Ehrman [02:15:04] I don't get a dime. I never gotten a dime. We take all of the money, money with no overhead taken out and give it to charities dealing with, mainly with hunger and homelessness and disaster relief. The last, over the last three years, just the last three years, we've raised one and a half million dollars and every penny of that has gone to disaster relief and homelessness and hunger issues.

Bart Ehrman [02:15:30] I pay for the blog. The plug does cost because I have a full time employee, a CEO and we have expenses. I mean, so I have a separate fundraising thing that I do for that so that it doesn't. Not a penny comes out of membership fees. So I encourage people to look at it because if you're interested in the stuff I've been talking about here, this is, this is like every day you get different and you have, and the archives go back 14 years. You can get the whole access to the whole thing. So it, and, and it's for a good cause to help, help, help people in need.

John Dehlin [02:16:00] You better be careful, Bart, or someone may accuse you of being a Christian.

Bart Ehrman [02:16:04] I know they have. Yeah, well, I, I consider myself an atheist Christian. They're Christian atheists, I guess.

John Dehlin [02:16:09] I love it. You're a Christian atheist.

Bart Ehrman [02:16:11] I try to follow the teachings of Jesus, but yeah, I obviously don't do very well. I mean, look at the, I mean I've got a lot of stuff here. I haven't sold all this, but, but I think the idea that Jesus, I really do think his core idea is to be concerned about those in need, need. And I, even though I don't believe in God, I really agree with that teaching.

John Dehlin [02:16:30] I love it. All right, well, the book is Love thy Stranger by Dr. Bart Ehrman, among many, many, many other books. You can buy it on Amazon pre order it now it comes out. Did you say March 16th or March 26th. What's the date?

Bart Ehrman [02:16:45] It's. It's March 24th. And my. Sorry, my publisher in particular would like you to pre order it.

John Dehlin [02:16:52] Please pre order it. We'll include a link. And Bart, you've been super generous with us today. Thank you so much for all you do. Thanks for coming on Mormon Stories, Colby and Coy, it was really fun to have you both here. You made this conversation better. And Bart, I'll just give you the last word to make your closing statement and to plug or say anything else you want to say as we, as we wrap up.

Closing Thoughts and Farewell

Bart Ehrman [02:17:20] Well, I, No, I just, I'd like to thank you for having me on because, you know, my, you know, my, my goal in life as a scholar originally was to be a very technical scholar of Greek manuscripts with no interest in communicating to wider audiences. And I completely changed that about 30 years ago. And my, really, my mission life now is to communicate what scholars think to non scholars. And so I really appreciate, you know, we've had two and a half hours to do that here and is this, that's pretty rare. And I will also say that I do a lot of these podcasts. Nothing quite at this depth for length, but I have people comment to me more about Mormon stories than probably any of the others.

Guest 2 [02:18:02] Whoa.

Bart Ehrman [02:18:03] Congratulations, John. All you're doing here because you're doing great things and I really appreciate it.

John Dehlin [02:18:09] Well, thanks, Bart. Would you be surprised to know that a two and a half hour episode is considered short by more Mormon story standards?

Guest 2 [02:18:16] No.

Bart Ehrman [02:18:16] Is it really?

John Dehlin [02:18:17] Oh, yeah. We do six, seven, eight, nine hour episodes sometimes, but I'm not, I'm not necessarily proud of that, but. Am I lying, Colby? Am I lying, Coy? Am I lying?

Bart Ehrman [02:18:27] No, Bart.

Guest 2 [02:18:28] My wife and I's original episode with John and Mormon stories is over 5 hours, so.

Bart Ehrman [02:18:32] Good God. Wow. Okay. Well, I, Yeah, I'm trying to think when I've done a two and a half hour episode for anybody before. I. Boy, I'm having memory lapses now, but man, I don't think so.

John Dehlin [02:18:47] Thanks for helping to sustain our brand. Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman [02:18:50] It was so nice to meet so much doctor. No, no, it was so nice to meet you. Well, it's nice meeting you guys too. So thank you.

John Dehlin [02:18:56] Yeah. And if we can ever help you and your cause and return this favor, other than helping you sell a lot of books, I hope you'll reach out, Bart, because we, we love what you do. And I'm guessing you might even be more prolific in retirement than you were as a, as faculty. Is that possible.

Bart Ehrman [02:19:13] Well, it's possible because I won't have any committee meetings or grading or conferences or lectures.

John Dehlin [02:19:18] Yeah, lectures.

Bart Ehrman [02:19:19] I was like, oh, my God. Yeah. So we're hoping it'll be good. We'll see. It's looking good so far.

John Dehlin [02:19:25] Stay healthy, and thanks for your gift to the world and to Mormonism. We just, we honor and appreciate you. And also, everyone, check out Bart's last lecture. It's called the Last Lecture, Bart Ehrman's Retirement Lecture from Uncle. It'll give you a great introduction to him, and then he can dive from there. All right, Dr. Bart Ehrman, thanks for joining us on Mormon Stories.

Bart Ehrman [02:19:49] Okay, thank you.

John Dehlin [02:19:50] Take care. Stay in touch. If people want to reach out to you, just go to your website, bart ehrman.com.

Bart Ehrman [02:19:55] yes, barturman.com is the best way.

Guest 2 [02:19:58] Yep.

Bart Ehrman [02:19:58] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:19:58] Okay. Thanks, Colby. Thanks, Coy. It's great to have you. Thank you, and thanks to everyone for joining us today on Mormon Stories. We couldn't do this without our donors. Please, please subscribe. We are only like 800 subscribers away on YouTube from hitting our 300,000 subscriber mark. You can also subscribe on Spotify and Facebook and Instagram. Wherever you get the podcast, please do that. We exist from our donors, so thanks. If you donate. If you don't donate and you want to support content like this, go to MormonStories.org donate, become a monthly donor. And we will, we will continue providing this type of content.

John Dehlin [02:20:38] We love your feedback@mormonstoriesmail.com and we love your comments on YouTube and on Spotify. And again, your likes and your shares are super helpful as well. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. Buy this new book, love Thy Stranger. Buy all of Bart Ehrman's books for yourself and for your friends and family. Take care, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. And remember, Jesus said to welcome and love strangers. So love thy neighbor. Love thy stranger as thyself. Take care, everybody.

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