Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Jesus Followers in History and Legend, by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth. I continue here describing my book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, Oxford University Press, 2005, with a final excerpt from the introduction. In my previous post, I discussed how historical accounts and literary fictions mix in the accounts we have of these three key followers of Jesus I pick up from there.
[00:00:28] Some scholars would argue that we ourselves are not so different from the storytellers of the ancient world that when we recount what happened in the past, we do so not merely to show what really happened, but because what happened is important to us today for our own lives. That is to say, at the end of the day, no one has a purely antiquarian interest, an interest in the past for its own sake. Instead, we are interested in the past because it can help us make sense of the present, of our own lives, our own beliefs, values, priorities, of our own world, and our experience of it. If this view is right, and I happen to think it is, then strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a disinterested study of the past. All of us who study it are in fact interested in it for how it can help us think about ourselves and our lives.
[00:01:18] In any event, this is certainly true of the ancient people who recounted the stories about Jesus early followers. They told these stories not merely in order to convey objective facts about past events, but also because these stories meant something to them, whether the stories were, strictly speaking, historically accurate or not.
[00:01:38] Among other things, this means that historians have a two pronged task. On the one hand, they try to determine, to the best of their ability, what actually happened in the past, what did Peter, Paul, and Mary really say do and experience.
[00:01:53] On the other hand, historians explore how the past came to be remembered by people who later talked about it and told stories about it, even when these stories were not historically accurate.
[00:02:05] Somewhat ironically, it is often easier to know how the past was remembered than to decide what actually happened. Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to separate the legend from the history, the fabricated accounts from the historical events, despite our best efforts.
[00:02:21] The most unfortunate aspect of history is that it is gone forever. Once something happens, it is over and done with. And while there may be traces of past people and events, these traces are always incomplete, partial, slanted, vague, and subject to a range of interpretations.
[00:02:40] Historians do their best to reconstruct past events based on surviving evidence. But history is not an empirical science that can establish high levels of probability based on assured results obtained by repeated experimentation.
[00:02:54] History is as much art as science.
[00:02:57] To a large extent, this is because our sources of information are so problematic with respect to the ancient source that says that Peter raised a smoked tuna fish to life. Can we trust it or not? How would we know? Another source indicates his shadow could heal the sick when he passed by them on a sunny day. Is that true? Yet another source indicates that he raised a roman senator from the dead by speaking a word in his ear. Did he really do so? Some of the stories of Peter's miracles are found in the writings of the New Testament. Others are found in books outside the New Testament. Does the historian accept what is found in scripture as being historically accurate and what is found outside of it as inaccurate? On what grounds? We have a number of writings that claim to be written by Peter, first and second Peter in the New Testament, the Gospel of Peter, and the apocalypse of Peter outside of it. Do we know whether he wrote any or all of these books, or should we take seriously what the New Testament book of acts says, that Peter was, in fact, illiterate and couldn't write at all.
[00:04:01] These are just a few of the problems we face when trying to know what Peter was really like and what really happened during his life. Analogous problems attach themselves to Paul and Mary. Doing history is not an easy matter.
[00:04:15] This is not to say that it is unimportant. On the contrary, speaking as a historian who does this for a living, knowing about the past matters. It matters whether the Khmer Rouge practiced genocide in Cambodia. It matters whether the experiment with communism in eastern Europe succeeded. It matters whether weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq. And it matters whether Jesus actually existed and whether his followers did the things that our sources indicate they did. And so we should do our best to know what happened in the past, whether in the recent past, with the destruction of New Orleans and the rather feeble efforts on the part of the government to deal with the crisis or the slightly more distant past, with our countries waffling over how to deal with the crises in Rwanda or Bosnia or with the far distant past, in examining the causes of the fall of the roman empire or the rise of the Greeks or the life of the historical Jesus.
[00:05:12] At the same time, as I have been suggesting, history is not the only thing that matters. And separating history from legend is not the only interesting and important exercise that scholars perform on our surviving materials. For history is not simply a matter of separating the historical kernel, that which really matters, from the legendary husk, that which can be discarded. In part, that's because, as I've indicated, the people who told and retold the stories of New Orleans of Rwanda, of Julius Caesar, of Jesus or of Peter, Paul and Mary did not themselves often distinguish between historical fact and legendary imagination.
[00:05:54] Historical memories, later embellishments, legendary expansions, pure fabrications were all told and retold because they related truths, beliefs, views, ideas that christians wanted to convey and to which they responded.
[00:06:11] We should see what these truths, beliefs, views and ideas were by examining the stories that survive. And so our study of Peter, Paul and Mary will consider both historical fact and legendary embellishment. We will ask what we can learn about these followers of Jesus as real historical figures, what we can know about who they were, what they did, what they believed, what they taught and how they lived. And we will ask about them as legendary figures who came to play such an important role in the imaginations of those who embraced the christian religion at its very foundations before it became the religion of the empire and eventually the most important social, cultural, political, economic, and religious institution in the history of western civilization.
