Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Christ, the date of Luke, and the literacy of Matthew.
[00:00:05] Questions and Responses Answered by Bart Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:12] Here are some of the really interesting questions I received recently and my responses Bart, you have said one Thessalonians is a heartfelt connection from Paul to some of his converts where he tells them how he thinks they are doing, urges them to keep going on, reminds them to avoid sinful natures, and encourages them to be patient now that some have fallen asleep because the end is near it's been a long time since I've read the book and I am struck with the passage quote, you suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus.
[00:00:50] The Jews who killed the Lord Jesus in the earliest Christian document we have.
[00:00:56] Dr. Ehrman, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:00:58] I didn't remember Paul saying something so matter of fact blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.
[00:01:05] Yep, it's a tricky passage. The important thing to notice is that Paul is talking about people in a region around Thessalonica and in Judea, not people according to their religion or ethnicity.
[00:01:19] Some Gentiles in Thessalonica have persecuted Christians just as Jews in Judea persecuted Christ.
[00:01:26] It is even more important to realize hard to do if you just read it in English that the Greek word translated Jew is also the word for Judean.
[00:01:35] Same word can be translated either way, depending on how it is used in a particular context.
[00:01:41] Given the regional reference here, it is much better to translate it Judeans that those in Judea killed Jesus just as those in Thessalonica, Thessalonians or are persecuting Christians.
[00:01:55] The next question is about my announcement of my next book on how we got the canon of the New Testament and why I'm bothering to write it.
[00:02:04] Barth, you have touched on this topic of the canon elsewhere. Jesus Interrupted Chapter 6 Lost Christianities, Pages 229246 and Lost Scriptures Pages 333 42.
[00:02:18] This is a rather tired out subject regarding the general audiences. Why not point them to the material you've already written?
[00:02:25] Regarding scholars, the books on the formation of the Christian canon have become a cottage industry. I have on my bookshelf probably half a dozen.
[00:02:34] Why not just point them to Metzger's earlier book on the subject and similar books?
[00:02:40] I know you always have a lot to say, so I'm excited to hear what you have to contribute in your new book.
[00:02:45] It will undoubtedly take its place among the vast bibliography on the topic.
[00:02:51] Yes, I've provided some relatively brief discussions of the key issues connected with the formation of the canon before, but I've never dug down deeply or in the ways I'll be dealing with here in my next book.
[00:03:02] On several occasions in the past, I've written an entire book length discussion of a matter I had discussed earlier in a chapter or just a few pages in a book.
[00:03:11] For example, I provide a brief discussion in Lost Christianities to the issue that I later devoted an entire book to in misquoting how scribes changed their texts.
[00:03:23] I'm very glad I wrote the latter book, because the few pages I devoted to it earlier were not at all sufficient for anyone wanting to know about the topic.
[00:03:31] In addition, I can't simply point people to other books about the canon, including Metzger's, because my book is not going to be like theirs. But dealing with the same information, which you're right, happens time and again in most books on the canon. Read three or four of them and it gets pretty hard to learn anything more from the next one or two.
[00:03:50] My book will be covering a good bit of material that I've never seen covered in a canon book before. I won't explain here in detail, but I'll say that roughly. My interest, unlike most, is largely focused on debates over one potentially canonical book or another.
[00:04:06] If you want to see the kind of thing I mean, check out my chapter on why 2 Peter got into the canon, but the Apocalypse of Peter did not.
[00:04:14] I don't believe anyone has done that before, and I'd like to dig into a lot of questions like that and others.
[00:04:22] What do you think of this thesis below by Christians? Thanks.
[00:04:26] The book of Acts ends with Paul being imprisoned.
[00:04:30] Luke came before Acts and so it must have been written at 62 AD.
[00:04:36] Luke is based on Mark, so Mark must have been written before 62 AD.
[00:04:42] I used to use the argument, but now I don't think it's at all compelling. It's a bit like saying Mark's Gospel must have been written before Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, because Mark never mentions his resurrection appearances Authors have very good reasons to end books when they do.
[00:05:00] In the case of Acts, one of the major points is that God is behind Paul's mission and and nothing can stop him. He can be chased out of town, he can be imprisoned, he can be beaten, he can be stoned to death, but nothing can stop him or his mission because he is empowered by the spirit.
[00:05:18] Ending with Paul being executed certainly would have suggested he could be stopped, and that would be contrary to one of the author's major themes. He had indicated in chapter one, verse eight that the gospel would go from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, and it ends with Paul preaching the gospel in Rome itself, whence all roads end, all roads lead to Rome.
[00:05:41] Mark itself is usually dated to just after the Jewish war that ended in 70.
[00:05:46] Luke clearly used Mark and so must have been written well after that.
[00:05:52] Are there arguments against the Jewish apostle Matthew the tax collector, being literate and capable of composing texts? A professional writer, St. Jerome writes in his preface for the Latin, I am now speaking of the New Testament. This was undoubtedly composed in Greek, with the exception of the work of Matthew the Apostle, who was the first to commit to writing the Gospel of Christ and who published his work in Judea in Hebrew. Characters Response Jerome is following the old legend that started, at least in our surviving sources, with Papias about 130 CE, that Matthew had written a gospel in Hebrew.
[00:06:32] There are very good reasons for thinking this is in fact legend, in part because the Matthew who is mentioned in the Gospels almost certainly could not have written.
[00:06:41] Those few Jews, apparently just over 3% at the time, who were taught how to read, were not trained to write except the scribes, and even they were copyists, not literary scholars.
[00:06:55] If it's right that Matthew was a tax collector, that would not have meant he was literate, certainly not in rural Galilee. Tax collectors had to be able to count money and harass people who wouldn't pay it, not engage in literary composition.
[00:07:10] Moreover, our Gospel of Matthew was certainly composed in Greek. For one thing, the unnamed author borrowed extensively from Mark word for word in Greek.
[00:07:21] He wasn't writing in Hebrew.
