Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Understanding the Gospels, Jesus and the Spread of Christianity Great Readers Questions Answered by Bart Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth Weren't Jews trying to make converts? Did Christians really do it mainly by telling stories about Jesus through word of mouth?
[00:00:20] And what did Jesus mean when he was talking about the Son of Man?
[00:00:24] Here are some of the excellent questions I've been asked by readers recently.
[00:00:29] My understanding is that Judaism was a proselytizing religion between about 150 BCE and 100 CE which spread Judaism all around the Mediterranean and parts of Eastern Europe.
[00:00:42] I got that understanding from the book Crossing Over Sea and Jewish Missionary activity in the Second Temple period by Michael F. Byrd, 2010 Michael Byrd is apparently a well known New Testament scholar in Australia.
[00:00:56] Are you familiar with him or with that book?
[00:00:59] What is your rationale for thinking that he is Incorrect response Yes, I know Michael, and no, there's no real evidence of Judaism as a proselytizing religion. This was the view that was popular about 50 years ago and still is among some evangelicals today.
[00:01:16] The passage in Matthew that is being referred to in the title of his book refers to Pharisees trying to make other Jews accept pharisaic views.
[00:01:24] Matthew 23:15 if you want to see a fully authoritative account by someone who really is an expert in ancient Judaism, I'd strongly suggest Martin Mission and Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire, Clarendon, 1994 Goodman's basic line that he establishes in detail based on a full knowledge of our ancient sources, is that the proselytizing mission of the Christian church was unparalleled in antiquity.
[00:01:52] Pagan cults did not engage in it, and contrary to one time widespread opinion, neither did Judaism.
[00:02:01] I was just listening to a talk you gave about the oral tradition that must have preceded the Gospels, and it all makes perfect sense to me. But I've seen some scholars push back on the game of telephone analogy that I feel like would almost certainly happen and very logically could contribute to us going from the historical Jesus to some of the later legendary accounts recorded in the Gospels and Apocrypha.
[00:02:23] So I wanted to get your opinion.
[00:02:25] In your opinion, is it apt to say a bit of the game of telephone was likely going on, stories passing from person to person, changing and being exaggerated as they imperfectly transmit from person to person and group to group orally up to Q and Gospels?
[00:02:44] If the telephone game is where one person tells a story to another who tells it to another, who tells it to another, and on and on until it gets say to the 15th person. And the story has changed significantly then? Yes, of course, that's exactly what was happening in early Christianity.
[00:03:02] The Christian faith was being spread by word of mouth from one person to another.
[00:03:06] Was there some other way? Logically, no.
[00:03:09] Empirically, based on our records, no.
[00:03:13] Most people couldn't read. And we have no evidence of authoritative gospels in circulation in the early decades when Christianity moved from being a group of a couple dozen people to being thousands, how did these people convert?
[00:03:26] Someone told them stories about Jesus.
[00:03:29] How did that person hear from someone else?
[00:03:32] How did that one hear from someone else? If a story started in, let's say, Jerusalem in 33 CE and was being told in, say, Ephesus in the year 68, how many intermediaries were there?
[00:03:46] Among other things, it would have been told a number of times, I'd suppose, in Aramaic and then translated into Greek, only to be told and retold until someone heard it 35 years later.
[00:03:58] And then it still would not have been written down for years.
[00:04:01] If it was written only in John, it would have been written down for the first time on record nearly 30 years after that.
[00:04:09] There really wasn't any other way for stories about Jesus to circulate, even if they were written down at some point in an earlier source that we don't have, since the vast majority of the population couldn't read, they would have heard it by word of mouth.
[00:04:24] The main problem with the telephone game analogy, it's an analogy, not a precise description, is not what some of those who want to discount it say. Hey, it wasn't that bad, but just the opposite. The situation was far more diverse and convoluted than a telephone game played one sunny afternoon at a birthday party among 10 kids, speaking from the same socioeconomic class, living in the same culture, in the same location, speaking the same language.
[00:04:51] Now we're talking about people in different lands, in different languages, telling stories for decades.
[00:04:57] That doesn't mean that every story was changed beyond recognition, but it does mean we can't really expect the stories to be the same over time. And some were changed significantly and others were, of course, made up. Even when they were written down, the stories got changed drastically. Read the trial before Pilate in Mark and John, or the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, or the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of Thomas.
[00:05:24] Recently, I had the great pleasure of listening to one of your YouTube lectures on the trial of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.
[00:05:31] As ever, your insights were most welcome. Yet I must confess that I remain a little unclear regarding your view of the Son of Man.
[00:05:39] Firstly, in your opinion, would you describe the Son of Man as a distinct heavenly being or originating from the divine realm and descending to the world as a judge?
[00:05:49] Secondly, when you say that the Son of Man is divine, may I ask precisely what you mean? Is the Son of Man a manifestation of Yahweh, or is he a lower, yet nonetheless very elevated divine entity existing as an agent of Yahweh?
[00:06:07] The Son of Man means a range of things in the Bible, but But when I talk about the Son of Man as a divine being sent from heaven in judgment on the earth, as in the teachings of the historical Jesus, I mean that he, the Son of Man, is a divine being, not God himself, but a messenger of God, sent to bring God's judgment, destruction for those opposed to God, and salvation for those he favors.
[00:06:33] This notion of the Son of Man originates with Daniel 7.
[00:06:37] See verses 13 and 14.
[00:06:39] He is divine because he is not a mortal who lives and dies, but he is not God himself, but a lesser supernatural being, for example, possibly a great angel of God who has divine authority in the sense that a human messenger of a king who is sent by the king on a mission has the authority of the king himself.
[00:07:00] Think Open up in the name of the king.
