Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] My book on Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson.
[00:00:08] The only book I've written because I wanted to use the title is Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, the followers of Jesus in history and legend. It was a blast to write. One could argue that in one respect or another, these three were historically the most significant followers of Jesus. Whether they were in their own day or not is another question.
[00:00:31] In my view, they are the only followers of Jesus that we can say with relative certainty that they claimed to have seen him raised from the dead. A controversial view on all sides. And most intriguing, there are lots of extraordinary legends about them that survive and that, in fact, are still believed by many people today. For example, that Peter was crucified upside down, Paul was beheaded, and Mary was a prostitute. And these are just among the more tame accounts. It's also interesting to figure out what we can actually know about them historically. Hence my book, which devotes six chapters to each figure. Here is how I describe the book in the introduction. This will take two posts.
[00:01:20] Introduction even though this book is not about the folk singing trio of the 1960s, Peter, Paul and Mary, I'd like to begin by making reference to them and one of their best known songs. If I had a hammer I'd hammer in the morning I'd hammer in the evening all over this land I'd hammer out danger I'd hammer out a warning I'd hammer out love between my brother and my sister all over this land Peter, Paul and Mary burst onto the folk music scene in an apocalyptic moment in american history. In the early 1960s, the cold War was heating up. Nuclear proliferation was moving apace on both sides of the soviet US divide. Schoolchildren throughout the country were being taught drills about what to do if a nuclear bomb exploded over their cities. Get under your desks. And the american involvement in the war in Vietnam was just starting soon to become a real apocalypse now, to use the term later coined for the Francis Ford Coppola film. On the home front, the civil rights movement was at its height. Racial violence and desegregation were tearing apart communities, and it was not at all clear how the tensions would come to be resolved. It was a time of danger, a time of warning, of worse yet to come, and a time to turn from war, hatred and oppression to love all over the land. At the end of their popular song, after singing of a hammer, a bell, and a song, the trio unpacks their meaning. It's a hammer of justice it's a bell of freedom it's a song about love between my brother and my sister all over this land.
[00:03:09] In the context of the 1960s, when hard social issues of poverty, oppression, racism, sexism, not to mention the international clashes of power and dominance, confronted us all, the folk singers pled for a return to the humane justice, freedom and love.
[00:03:29] As it turns out, matters were not so different in the first christian century in the land of Israel. It, too, was a time of international political domination and imperialistic expansion, a time of class division, oppression, hatred, violence and war.
[00:03:49] Into that world there appeared the predecessors of our 1960s folk singers. They, too, were singers of a sort, only their message came not in a song, but in spoken word. These were prophets who had a word from above addressing the ills of their world. One of them, far and away the best known to us today, was Jesus of Nazareth. He also had a message of justice, freedom and love. Like other jews of his day, Jesus maintained that the evils of this world were caused by cosmic powers opposed to God and his people, who were wreaking havoc here on earth. These powers brought pain, misery and suffering. They were responsible for wars, epidemics, droughts, famines, violence, oppression and hatred. But their days were limited. Jesus believed that God was soon to reassert his power over this world and overthrow the forces of evil, to bring in a new kingdom on earth, a kingdom of God in which there would be no more injustice, violence, pain or suffering. God himself would rule supreme and people would live the lives of paradise.
[00:05:12] Jesus had numerous followers who adored him and committed themselves to his message. After his death, they took the message further afield, proclaiming that it was through Christ himself, now raised from the dead and exalted to heaven, that this future kingdom would be brought to earth. Three of these followers were named Peter, Paul, and Mary.
[00:05:37] These 3 may well have been the most important of Jesus followers. Simon Peter, his right hand man during his public ministry, the leader of the twelve disciples, the apostle Paul, the greatest missionary and theologian of the burgeoning christian church after Jesus death and Mary Magdalene, his closest woman follower and the one who first recognized that he had been raised from the dead, who was therefore arguably the first Christian.
[00:06:10] Peter, Paul, and Mary are significant not only because of who they actually were as historical figures of the first century, but also because of how they were remembered in later centuries as legends sprang up about them, legends that were often assumed to be gospel truth by those who heard and told them. During the first 300 years of Christianity, which will be the focus in this book, Peter was widely known as one who could do spectacular miracles, leading to massive conversions to the faith. He was said to have the power to heal the sicken, cast out demons, and raise the dead. Some of the stories about him will strike modern readers as more than a bit bizarre, as when he raises a smoked tuna fish from the dead in order to convince his onlookers of the power of God, or when he deprives a maleficent magician of his power of flight over the city of Rome, leading to a crash landing, demise and death.
[00:07:13] Paul as well, had legends told about him. He, too, was a great miracle worker whose handkerchiefs and aprons could be taken to the sick to restore them to health, and who baptized a talking lion that later refused to devour him when he was thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. Paul in particular came to be known as a great advocate of asceticism, preaching that eternal life would come to those who abstained from the joys of sex, even if married.
[00:07:43] Modern readers may find it surprising that this message resonated among many ancients, some of whom abandoned their marriage bed in exchange for a more blessed existence in the hereafter.
[00:07:57] Mary Magdalene herself came to be known for her sex life, or at least for her previous sex life. As stories began to circulate that she had been a prostitute whom Jesus reformed and who then shared an unusually intimate relationship with him before his death, later legend sent her to France as one of the first missionaries to western Europe.
[00:08:19] None of these stories about Peter, Paul, and Mary is historically accurate, but that does not mean they are unimportant. The people who retold these stories and those who heard them believed them to be accurate portrayals of the past. What is more, they told these stories because they expressed so well their own beliefs, concerns, values, priorities, and passions. If we are interested not only in the lives of the original followers of Jesus, but also in the lives of those who told stories about them in later times, there is no better place to turn than the stories circulating about Peter, Paul, and Maryland.
