Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Christ's Legalism, His Divine and Human Nature Stories of His Father Joseph and Other Questions Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch Here are some of the intriguing questions I have recently received from readers on Jesus view of the Law, the intriguing Apocryphal Gospel about His Father Joseph, Christ's Divine and Human Nature, and other things do you think Jesus taught complete pacifism in response to violence and a less legalistic form of Judaism?
[00:00:38] I think he was a committed pacifist, yes, and he certainly thought that the laws of Torah were to be observed. They were what God commands. But as with other Jewish teachers, he knew that sometimes a situation would arise in which someone would be forced to violate one law or the other because they espoused different principles of behavior that were at odds. For example, if you were supposed not to work on the Sabbath but someone needed help that might entail work, then you could break one law to keep the other. In those cases, Jesus thought that the greater laws, that is of love thy neighbor and caring for those in need, were to take precedence over the others.
[00:01:23] I just finished reading History of Joseph the Carpenter in your book the Other gospels.
[00:01:29] On pages 94 and 95, Jesus replies to his apostles concerning Joseph's death compared with Enoch and Elijah, who I gather were taken to heaven directly without dying, but he says the Antichrist will kill them, etc. I am baffled by this. Can you elucidate the meaning for me? The relevant passages are 31 and 32.
[00:01:53] Ah, it's a great passage in a very interesting writing that few people even know about.
[00:01:59] In the story Joseph, Jesus father has died at the age of 111. They bury him. Jesus disciples don't understand why he had to die. Surely he was as righteous as Elijah and Elisha, both of whom were taken out of the world without dying. Why didn't God simply take Joseph as well?
[00:02:19] Jesus responds to their queries by pointing out that every human has has to die because of the sin of Adam. So Joseph had to die.
[00:02:28] But what about Elijah and Elisha? They too, Jesus says, will eventually have to die. And in fact, whenever the two of them think about it, they know it's got to happen eventually and they wish it had happened already.
[00:02:42] So Joseph in fact is better off than they. He's gotten it over with.
[00:02:47] Question on your podcast you have been talking about Paul's understanding of salvation that he lays out in Romans.
[00:02:56] I have used your discussion as a reason to re read the epistle. Yes, indeed, Paul describes sin not as a verb, but as a noun, and a cosmic noun at that. This brings up a question.
[00:03:08] The scholarly consensus is that Paul wrote in the 50s, Mark around 70, Matthew and Luke sometime later, and John near the turn of the century. Yet Paul's cosmic ideas seem more in line with the Gospel of John than than the Synoptic Gospels. Are we sure we have the timing right? Are there scholars who place Paul's letters later, closer in time to the Johannine author community?
[00:03:34] Are there extra biblical or agnostic writings that shed light on this apparent connection between the ideas of the Pauline author and the Johannine author?
[00:03:44] Response the real difficulty is that throughout the history of Christianity, including in the very earliest periods, theological views do not develop in a linear fashion. It is not that at one time every believer has one view and then everyone adopts another and then another.
[00:04:02] Instead, different believers have different views at the same time and different views at different times. That means that a more developed view is not necessarily later than a less developed one. And someone may well hold an old and generally seen to be outdated view, while someone else may hold a more avant garde view well before its time.
[00:04:25] It still happens today all over the place where some people have views of Christ that were considered outmoded centuries ago, for example that Christ was fully God but not actually human.
[00:04:37] As a result, dating the gospels and Paul etc. May involve taking account of their views, but their views cannot be decisive for the dates.
[00:04:49] How can Jesus the human know of his divine side at the same time? If he was fully human and fully divine at the same time, as 5th century theologians argued, was he fully human or not? I know that The Councils of Constantinople 2 or 3 defined Jesus as having two wills, one divine and one human.
[00:05:11] Again, how could Jesus human will operate consciously while being aware that his divine will was present at the same time?
[00:05:21] I'm afraid I don't know how that could work. But it was only a problem. At the point at which church fathers came to maintain that Christ was 100% divine and 100% human. That conclusion doesn't work logically, following Western forms of logic or mathematically. But these theologians, many of whom were excessively intelligent, highly educated and trained in philosophy, weren't thinking in traditional philosophical or mathematical terms, but carrying through the logic of their theological assumptions.
[00:05:54] There were problems with saying he wasn't fully human and other problems saying he wasn't fully divine. If they hadn't gone this direction, it would probably be less of a problem. If Christ was part human and part divine, then in theory his human part could realize he also had a divine part and vice versa. But that's not the doctrine that developed. As you intimate, we can't really pose the problem to the biblical writers since none of them had the later view that Christ was 100% of both.
[00:06:27] Do you have an opinion about when the nomina sacra were introduced? My impression has always been that it's pretty much taken for granted that the nomina sacramento were not used by Paul. Would you agree?
[00:06:41] Do you know of any scholar who has suggested that Paul himself used the nomina sacra? Someone suggested that to me the other day, and I find it implausible as it seems more natural to assume that a system of abbreviations would have emerged during the copying and collating process and not by someone about to write a letter to a congregation.
[00:07:04] For those who don't know, nomina sacra means sacred names and is used as a technical term for a set of words about 15 or so that were connected with God, Christ, etc. Which probably because they were used so frequently and possibly in imitation of the Jewish use of the tetragrammaton, the four letters that represented the name of God in the Hebrew Bible were abbreviated in most New Testament manuscripts, normally by giving the first and last letter of a word with a line over the top.
[00:07:38] So if one was doing it in English, Christ would be abbreviated CT with a line over the top, God as GD with a line over the top, etc. In answer to the 1. The nomina sacra are found in manuscripts already in the second half of the second century, so sometime before that.
[00:07:58] Some scholars have argued they were introduced already in the first century, but that's speculative and I really doubt it. I'm thinking mid second century, probably when the books that later were collected into the New Testament were starting to be considered scripture. 2. I don't think Paul would have used them, no. 3. I don't know of scholars who would argue Paul used them.
