Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Interesting questions on the teachings of the NT Answered by Bart Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:08] I continue to get very good questions about all sorts of things we deal with on the blog. Here are a few that have come in recently.
[00:00:17] In a recent episode of your Misquoting Jesus podcast, I understood you to say that despite many errors and contradictions in the Bible, no doctrine is affected because it can always be found elsewhere in the text.
[00:00:29] I always believed that this was not in fact the case regarding the Trinity. If 1 John 5:7:8 does not truly belong in Scripture, as I have heard claimed, I thought that there is no other place where Father, Son, and Spirit are said to be one.
[00:00:45] Please, can you put me right on this?
[00:00:49] Ah, I wasn't referring to errors and contradictions in the Bible, but to textual changes made by scribes.
[00:00:56] No one change of any scribe has a decisive effect on any major Christian doctrine. That's because doctrines are never based simply on one verse or another, but on an entire sweep of biblical passages and theological reasoning.
[00:01:10] To that end, scribes did indeed add the explicit statement of the doctrine of the Trinity in 1 John 5:7:8. It wasn't in 1 John as originally written, but the doctrine was not based on that verse.
[00:01:23] It was based on a much wider database that included a range of passages such as a God's claim in Isaiah that He alone is God and there is no other b passages that treat God the Father as different from the Christ, c passages that clearly indicate that Christ is nonetheless God, and d passages that indicate the Spirit is also God but is not the Father or Christ.
[00:01:50] One way to affirm that all these passages are right is the doctrine of the Trinity One God, but three persons.
[00:01:58] 1 John 5:7 8 definitely supported that view, which is why it was added by scribes, but it is not the primary basis for it.
[00:02:09] Do we know why it was so important for Christians to make Jesus be God?
[00:02:14] I understand how he became God, but I never really understood why.
[00:02:19] Why was it so important, especially in light of so many texts saying explicitly that Jesus was not God for Christians to make and believe him to be God?
[00:02:29] Response Ah, good question.
[00:02:32] I don't think that followers of Jesus first felt a desire to make Jesus God and then figured out a way to make it happen.
[00:02:39] Instead, I think that some of the disciples, for whatever reason, believed that they saw Jesus alive after he had been crucified, realized this meant God must have raised him from the dead, concluded he had actually been taken up into the heavenly realm since he was alive, but clearly wasn't around anymore and quote unquote knew, as did almost everyone else in the world, that that would have made him a divine being, since that's what ascending to the realm of God or the gods meant.
[00:03:08] In short, it was the belief in the resurrection that led to the very quick probably conclusion that he had been made a divine being.
[00:03:17] And once his followers believed that a variety of opinions occurred over time.
[00:03:22] Maybe he was divine not just at the end, but during his entire ministry.
[00:03:26] So God adopted or made him his Son at his baptism or at his birth. So he was born of a virgin or before he came into the world. He was a pre existent divine being who became incarnate. Or he had always existed and was fully equal with God forever.
[00:03:45] Hi Bart, do you think that Paul was certainly on the right track with his teaching?
[00:03:50] Even though Paul never met Jesus and had very little interaction with the disciples, he pretty much got Jesus apocalyptic message right?
[00:03:58] How do you account for this?
[00:04:02] If you are asking whether I think Paul was right in the sense that his views about God Christ salvation were true, then no. I'm an atheist and so I necessarily don't think so. But it sounds like instead you were asking if Paul was right about Jesus message, I.e. that their views were essentially the same or very similar.
[00:04:23] If so, then I'd say partly yes and mainly no.
[00:04:27] Paul was like Jesus in that he was an apocalypticist expecting an imminent end day of judgment. But he doesn't attribute that view to Jesus and appears to have had it before becoming a follower of Jesus himself.
[00:04:40] Still, to that extent they align.
[00:04:43] But his entire theology of salvation, that the entire point of Jesus life was his death as an atoning sacrifice and his then resurrection that demonstrated he really did die for others, is very different from Jesus's views at their core.
[00:04:58] In some ways they are quite contrary to what Jesus preached.
[00:05:02] Jesus preached that people needed to repent of their sins and turn back to God so that he would forgive them.
[00:05:08] Paul did not think God would forgive people when they repent. They needed an atoning sacrifice and Jesus himself provided it.
[00:05:19] I feel compelled to ask how one can claim a religion if one does not think it is important to commit to the literal truth of a specific doctrine or historical event.
[00:05:28] I always thought the barest essentials of being a Christian meant believing I would not go to heaven if Jesus had not come into the world and been killed.
[00:05:37] What am I missing?
[00:05:41] It's a little hard for many of us to get our minds around the idea that something can be true if it's not literally true.
[00:05:47] But we often think fiction, for example, conveys truth in the sense that a story can reveal something true about human relations or ethics or the nature of the universe.
[00:05:57] As a biblical example, the creation story of Genesis 1, among other things, shows that God is sovereign over all things that could be true whether the world was created in six days or not.
[00:06:09] So, too, with stories about Jesus.
[00:06:12] For many believers, they convey truths even if they didn't literally happen.
[00:06:17] For many Christians, the essential element of the Christian message is not about a personal afterlife, but about this life.
[00:06:25] Jesus models how we should live in order to find peace and meaning in this world.
[00:06:30] It's interesting how remarkably difficult it is to get 20 Christians to agree on what is the essential point of the religion.
