Did Jesus actually rise from the dead? Heal the sick? Turn water into wine?
How close do the Gospel stories take us to what really happened at the beginning of Christianity?
This is one of the world’s great religious debates and one of its most intense historical detective stories, and my guest this week has spent his career as a leading participant, joining the skeptical side as a New Testament scholar after growing up as a believing Christian.
His latest book is called “Love Thy Stranger.” It describes how Jesus’ teaching reshaped the moral conscience of the West — and it proves its own point, you might say, since the author is an agnostic who is urging people to listen more carefully to Jesus.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Bart Ehrman, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Bart Ehrman: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So it’s the week of Easter. It’s Holy Week for Christians. And we’re appropriately going to talk about Jesus — as a historical figure, as a religious figure, and how those two aspects fit together, which are questions that have been central to your own work, your scholarship and your celebrity, as an academic and popular writer.
But I want to start with your latest book, which focuses on Jesus as a moral revolutionary, I guess you would say — someone who helped bring a new mode of ethics into the world. And the title is “Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.”
So let’s start with the subtitle. What was so transformative about Jesus’ moral message?
Ehrman: A lot of my students assume that before Jesus came along, there wasn’t morality in the Greek and Roman worlds. My university is in the South, and so Southern students, most of them raised Christian, who just assumed that morality came with Christianity — that’s absolutely not right.
I am absolutely not arguing that Jesus introduced the idea of love or the idea of altruism into the world. What I am arguing is that we, today, almost all of us — whether we’re Christian, agnostic, atheists, whatever we are in the West — when there’s a disaster that happens, we feel like we ought to do something about it. There’s a hurricane, there’s wildfires, there’s an earthquake, and we feel like we ought to do something. We might send a check, for example, or we retire and we decide to volunteer in a soup kitchen. We’re helping people we don’t know and probably never will know, and who we may not like if we did get to know them.
So why do we help them? My argument in the book is that sense, that we should help people in need, even if we don’t know them, ultimately derives from the teachings of Jesus. In Greek and Roman moral philosophy at the time, this was not an issue at all — you were not supposed to be helping people just because they were in need. Jesus based it in large part on his Jewish background, but with some transformations of what he himself knew growing up. He is the one who made this part of our conscience.
Douthat: How much of the change is about strangers versus about, let’s say, enemies? Or is this an overlapping category? Because obviously, one of the starkest things that Jesus says, in terms of the moral radicalism you’re describing, is: “Love thy enemy.” And one of the most famous parables that relates to this is the parable of the good Samaritan.
What is the parable of the good Samaritan? Why don’t you describe it in your own words?
Ehrman: [Chuckles.] Well, it is a good illustration of the issue because the parable is that there’s a Jewish man who’s been going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the route, he gets attacked by a group of thugs who beat him up, steal what he has and leave him naked beside the road.
Later, a priest from the temple is going on the same road, sees him, and walks on the other side and bypasses him. He doesn’t do anything.
And then a Levite, who is one of the assistants in the temple, comes down, sees him, bypasses him on the other side.
But then a Samaritan comes along. The backdrop of the story is that the Samaritans were understood to be the enemies of the Jews. The Samaritan comes by and he sees this man, and he goes over and he helps him.
So that happens. And then Jesus asks the person he’s talking to: Which one of these was the neighbor? Well, it was the Samaritan.
The idea is that if you’re going to love your neighbor, it doesn’t just mean somebody who’s within your own religion or your own ethnicity or your own nation. It means, if somebody’s in need, that’s your neighbor. That’s what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
So Jesus is getting the idea of love your neighbor and even love your stranger as yourself from his Jewish heritage. But within Israel, it’s “Love your fellow Israelite as yourself.” And Jesus is now universalizing it.
Part of the thesis of my book is that that mentality is what led to huge institutional changes in the West, including the invention of public hospitals — orphanages, old people’s homes, private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, governmental assistance to those who are poor — all of those are Christian innovations you can establish historically.
Douthat: So this is a work of, I guess you could call it, cultural and intellectual history. But I think it’s pretty obvious that you also want to make a point that’s relevant to our moral and political debates right now. Is that fair?
Ehrman: It is.
Douthat: So what do you want readers, Christian or otherwise, to take away from this argument that connects to, let’s say, America in the age of Donald Trump?
Ehrman: So I don’t get overtly political. I have very strong political views, many of which do not agree with yours. [Laughs.]
Douthat: I’m a studiously neutral interviewer, professor, but please continue.
Ehrman: I know. I’m just saying, I tend to be on the liberal side of the spectrum. But it doesn’t really matter, because in the book, I’m not arguing for a particular political position or social agenda position.
What I am saying is that if people claim to be followers of Jesus, they ought to follow his teachings. And his teachings are quite clear that you should care for people who are not like you — the other. You’re not supposed to bomb them back to the Stone Age, and you’re not supposed to make them suffer because you don’t like them or you don’t want them among you. You’re supposed to take care of them.
We haven’t brought this up yet, but I’m not myself a Christian, so I’m not arguing this ——
Douthat: We’re going to get to that.
Ehrman: I’m just saying, I’m not making an apology for Christianity here, but I am saying this was Jesus’ teaching, and even though I’m not a Christian, I subscribe to that idea. But what bothers me is that so many Christians in our world claim to be Christian, claim to be followers of Jesus, and don’t follow his most basic teaching about this.
Douthat: So I do want to talk about your own beliefs and your intellectual work and how those fit together, and I think they will lead us back in the end to the argument in the book.
I’ll just put one kind of moral philosophical question to you, I guess, on behalf of at least some of the people you’re criticizing. One of the notable things about the 21st-century world is that globalization and digital life have combined to create this sense of global immediacy at all times. You go on social media, you turn on the TV, and events in incredibly distant lands are brought immediately to the fore.
In the parable of the good Samaritan, the Samaritan cares for the Jew with whom he is confronted physically. The person is right there. He’s physically the Samaritan’s neighbor, even if politically and morally, they’re separate.
Isn’t it a hard question how that generalizes to a world where, in theory, you have some kind of relationship to eight billion people?
Ehrman: Yes. You can’t simply take the teachings of the New Testament and transplant them into the 21st century. If any government tried to institute, as their governmental policy, the Sermon on the Mount, they’d last about two days, period.
I’m not saying that it’s this kind of simplistic equivalent. What I am saying is that if people in power claim to be Christian, they ought to take very seriously what that means. I’m not saying that it’s going to necessarily affect immigration policy, for example. But the Bible is quite clear, even in the New Testament, that “Love your neighbor as yourself” meant your fellow Israelite, or it explicitly states that anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite.
So, does that have any effect or not? If you’re not a Christian, it wouldn’t have any effect. If you are a Christian, you ought to at least think about it.
Douthat: All right, let’s talk more about your own relationship to Christianity. I feel like often when I read a book or an essay by someone who says, I’m not a Christian, but as a historian or as a cultural critic, I’m here to emphasize Christianity’s importance for the culture that we all live in, that person is often tiptoeing toward Christian belief. That’s sometimes a sort of intellectual way station where first you say, “Christianity is important,” and then you say, “Ah, well. Maybe it might be true.”
In your case, you’ve already taken a journey out of Christian belief. Tell me about that journey. Tell me about your own religious background before you became a professor of New Testament history.
Ehrman: Well, it continued on after that, too. [Chuckles.] So, yeah, I was born in a Christian household and I grew up in Kansas, a fairly conservative area. I was raised Episcopalian. Was an active church person as a kid — an altar boy.
When I was 15, in high school, I had a born-again experience. Became a committed evangelical Christian.
Douthat: What was that like? How did you have a born-again experience?
Ehrman: I started attending a youth group, Campus Life Youth for Christ club.
The fellow who ran that was probably in his mid-20s, and he was a very gung-ho evangelical Christian who believed that if you don’t commit your life personally to Christ as your lord and savior, you’re not really a Christian. So it didn’t matter that I went to the Episcopal Church every week, that I served as an altar boy, that I confessed my sins and I said the prayers and I sang the hymns ——
Douthat: To the contrary, you could have been a whited sepulcher.
Ehrman: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly how he thought of it. And until I asked Jesus into my heart, as he put it, I wasn’t really a Christian. And, you know, I wanted to be a Christian. [Chuckles.]
So I did that. I committed my life personally unto Christ as my lord and savior and became very gung-ho about my religious faith.
Douthat: Did you feel that as a personal transformation?
Ehrman: Yes, very much so. It was kind of an elevated spiritual experience, where you felt a burst of joy and a sense that something had changed now. When they call it a born-again experience, many people actually have that sensation. Other people don’t, but I happened to.
This fellow had gone to Moody Bible Institute for college, and he was very big on learning about the Bible. I knew nothing about the Bible as an Episcopalian.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: They’d read it and then preach on it, but I didn’t know anything.
Douthat: As Catholics, we always think that’s the safest approach.
Ehrman: [Laughs.] I know.
Douthat: Sorry, that’s a joke for Protestant and Catholic listeners. Go on.
Ehrman: When I taught at Rutgers, most of my students were Catholic. It was a big sea change when I moved to the South. Yeah.
So, anyway, I decided to be a committed Christian, go to Moody Bible Institute, and I really did become a Bible nerd there. That was day and night studying Bible and theology for three years.
Douthat: And Moody, you would describe as fundamentalist in some way.
Ehrman: That’s right.
Douthat: There’s a lot of stuff associated with it, but fundamentally, it means that the Bible is inerrant, in a really strong understanding of the term. Any contradictions should be reconcilable.
Ehrman: That’s right. And not just contradictions — internal contradictions — within itself or between books, but with science.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: Six-day creation, Adam and Eve, the flood — it all historically happened. Everything about the Gospels literally happened. So yeah, it was fundamentalist in that sense. And I bought into it.
When I left there, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham’s alma mater, which for me was a step toward liberalism. [Laughs.]
Douthat: Yeah.
Ehrman: And I started moving away from the strict fundamentalist thing.
You don’t want to hear the whole story, but I decided I wanted to do a Ph.D. studying Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. And the world expert on that was a guy named Bruce Metzger, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. So I applied there and I went there and I studied with him. I did both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. there, and became an expert in ancient Greek manuscripts.
Over time, I moved away from this evangelical belief, especially this hard-core inerrantist thing. And by the time I was through there, I was a fairly mainline Protestant Christian. When I graduated, I was a pastor of a Baptist church for a year — Princeton Baptist Church, an American Baptist church — and preached on the radio every week. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: You are the second former American Baptist pastor that we have had on this show — the other is Ryan Burge, the great religion data analyst. Anyway, just a striking fact.
So you were a pastor, and as a mainline Protestant Christian, your relationship to the New Testament was basically to say: The fundamentalists overstate how error- and contradiction-free these documents are, but there’s still good reason to think that Jesus is the son of God, raised from the dead on the third day, and so on.
Ehrman: Well ——
Douthat: Or had you drifted a bit from that, too?
Ehrman: I still would have affirmed that. But as time went on, I started realizing that I didn’t really believe all of the straight-up doctrines. It turns out there are a lot of mainline Protestant ministers until today who don’t think Jesus was literally born of a virgin or even that he is necessarily physically raised from the dead. And I moved in that direction, but until about 30 years ago, I was still a committed Christian.
Douthat: And then why did you cease to be a committed Christian?
Ehrman: It wasn’t related to my scholarship or my understanding of the Bible or the understanding of the historical development of Christianity. It wasn’t related to that. It was because of the problem of suffering — why is there so much suffering in the world?
I taught at Rutgers for a few years, and when I was there, I was asked to teach a class called The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Tradition. And when I got asked to teach the class, I thought it would be a great idea because I had long thought that every author of the Bible in one way or another is trying to wrestle with the problem of, especially, why the people of God suffer.
And I had realized by this time that there’s not an answer in the Bible — there are lots of different answers. And some of these answers are in conflict with each other.
So I taught this class. And I thought afterward: Man, I need to think more about this. I should write a book about that!
I was like 32 years old or something. And I was like: Wait a second, what the hell are you talking about? You’re 32. You’ve got the answer to suffering? [Laughs.]
Douthat: Look, as a newspaper columnist, the rule is that there’s no obstacle to trying to solve the problem of evil in 800 words. So why should there be an obstacle to a 32-year-old writing on it?
Ehrman: [Laughs.] Yeah.
Douthat: So this was a pivot point. Did you decide that God could not exist? Or did you decide that the Christian God — a God who has particular attributes related to goodness as we understand it — was unlikely to exist?
Ehrman: I came to think that the idea that any monotheistic religion has a problem with the existence of God, given the state of suffering in the world.
And I’m not a radical atheist who insists there is no God, but I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s any kind of supernatural power that’s overseeing the world, that is active in people’s lives, that actually answers prayer. I don’t believe a God like that exists.
Douthat: Because such a God, to exist, would have to be bad?
Ehrman: No.
Douthat: Or wicked?
Ehrman: No, I don’t think that that kind of God would have to be anything. It’s not that I have some kind of criteria for what that God must be; it’s that I think it’s unlikely that there’s a God who’s active in the world. Because, in my view, if there was a God who was all powerful — so I’m granting, if there was an all-powerful God — who was loving, then there wouldn’t be people who starve to death every minute, which is what happens.
I just came to think it’s not true. I don’t believe there is some kind of divine power that is overseeing this world.
Douthat: I think that a more conservative Christian listening to that narrative might say that you see a separation between how your view of the Bible and the New Testament changed, and how your view of God changed.
But the conservative Christian might say: Well, it seems like there’s more of a progression here.
Ehrman: That’s right.
Douthat: Where you start out as a firm believer in a literal resurrection, and then you become a believer in Jesus having been maybe spiritually present to the disciples. And then from there, the possibility of an all-powerful, all-good God sort of slips away.
But there is a movement there, where how you think about the New Testament does shape how you think about the likelihood that there’s a God who cares, right? It’s not completely separate.
Ehrman: I think it’s separate. I believed in God for a long time after. The kind of scholarship I do now is exactly the scholarship I did when I was a Christian, so I can see how people would think that it’s a kind of domino effect. When I was an evangelical, we talked about the slippery slope that leads to perdition. [Laughs.] You give up one thing, man, and then it’s all over. So I get that.
But my two closest friends are Presbyterian ministers who are active in the church, and they basically think what I think about the Bible.
Douthat: Right. I’m not saying it’s inevitable, the progression.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: I’m just saying, if you held it as an established fact that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, you would necessarily have to give a little bit more credence to the possibility of a God who intervenes in the world. Right?
Ehrman: Yes. If I believe Jesus was raised from the dead, necessarily, I would believe in God. Yes. [Laughs.]
Douthat: Yes. OK. Well, that’s ——
Ehrman: Because there’s no other way for Jesus ——
Douthat: But I’m just saying, there is some progression there where your Presbyterian minister friends would say: Well, Jesus had powerful moral teaching, was crucified, and was present to the disciples in some way after the resurrection.
That’s a weaker claim on God’s behalf than the claim that Jesus was walking around and eating fish and so on.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: So once you’ve moved to the weaker claim, there is a general weakening. That’s all I’m suggesting.
But you would say, talking about the book you’ve just written, you’re still drawing moral value from the New Testament, even as an agnostic.
Ehrman: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Douthat: All right. I want to get a little bit deeper into the historical debate about the history of Jesus and about the New Testament. In doing some prep for this episode, I noticed that you once had a seven-hour debate with a more conservative scholar of Scripture. And I asked my producers if we could have seven hours for this, and they said yes.
[Ehrman laughs.]
So buckle up. I don’t know what plans you’ve made for the rest of the day, Bart, but you are here.
No, we have slightly less time than that. So we’re going to try and skim the surface of what I think is just an incredibly fascinating debate, regardless of where you come down or what conclusions you draw from it.
To start out, imagine that the listener or viewer has very little contact with the debate, or even with Christianity itself. What is the historical raw material that the New Testament gives us in terms of understanding the life of Jesus in the early church?
Ehrman: So we have four Gospels in the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They are the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus’ life. Outside of those four accounts, there’s very little information about the historical Jesus, even within the New Testament.
The New Testament has 27 books, and most of it doesn’t say very much at all about what his life was like between the time he’s born and the time he died. Paul has more writings than anyone else, and doesn’t say anything about his miracles or any confrontations. He doesn’t tell us about his life — for good reasons.
What that means is we basically have four accounts in the New Testament about his words and deeds. We have accounts from outside the New Testament, lots of them — other Gospels, for example — but generally, they seem to be not historically reliable, even by people who wish they were.
So basically, if we want to know about Jesus’ life, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Douthat: And what is the scholarly consensus on the relationship of the four Gospels that we have? Or what is your own view? Or both?
Ehrman: Well, my view is the common view. The first three — Matthew, Mark and Luke — have very many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence, and often word for word the same. That has long been thought by scholars to indicate that somebody’s copying somebody.
So almost everybody agrees that Mark was the first Gospel written. It’s our shortest Gospel, and it appears to have been used by both Matthew and Luke, so that Matthew and Luke have most of the stories in Mark, often the same sequence, same words, word for word.
So Mark is first; Matthew and Luke used Mark and had material of their own that they added to it. Sometimes Matthew and Luke have similar material; sometimes they have different material.
Those three are then called the synoptic Gospels, which means you can see them together — you can put them in columns next to each other and actually read each version.
Douthat: Of the same story. Right.
Ehrman: Yeah. And it’s interesting to see how they differ at that point.
But John has very little of the material in Matthew, Mark and Luke, up to the time where Jesus is arrested. So the Passion narrative — the account of his death — has similar stories in John, but John records mainly his own miracles, his own encounters of Jesus, his own teachings of Jesus, which are different from Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Douthat: And Jesus talks longer in John, right?
Ehrman: Very much so. When you get to John, entire chapters are Jesus talking. At one point, he starts talking in Chapter 13 at his last meal, and he talks through Chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and then he launches into prayer in Chapter 17. That’s virtually all Jesus talking. So that’s right. That is different.
Douthat: Yeah. In addition, you’ve already mentioned Paul’s letters, but there’s a large number of letters and there are the Acts of the Apostles, which seems to be written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke.
Ehrman: That’s right.
Douthat: And both of those in different ways are windows into the early church.
And then it’s fair to say, since the 19th century, maybe the late 18th century, there’s been endless attempts to drill down skeptically into the claims that these books make and how closely they are actually connected to the early church, of debates about who wrote the Gospels and when they were written. You already mentioned lost Gospels, books that were supposedly suppressed, debates about whether Jesus really claimed to be divine — and on and on.
It’s notable to me as a reader of your work that as an agnostic and skeptic of the full historicity of the New Testament, you do think some skepticism goes too far. One of the books you’ve written is about people who think that Jesus didn’t exist, that he’s a mythological figure. Why should we think that Jesus existed?
Ehrman: Well, historians by their very nature are skeptical because they’re dealing with sources that they have to evaluate. This isn’t a thing about Jesus, per se — it’s about how history works, that you’ve got to evaluate your sources.
I’ve never gone into my scholarship trying to disprove things. It’s just that you try to figure out what happened in the past. And there are people today who call themselves mythicists, who think that Jesus did not even exist. And I don’t object to that because it’s too skeptical; I object to it because it’s not historical. I’m just interested in knowing historically what happened — what really happened.
And when it comes to the historical Jesus, the evidence is just so overwhelming. I don’t think you can really have a bona fide question about whether the man existed. The question is: What did he say and do? And that’s where you start getting into trouble.
There are lots of reasons for thinking Jesus really existed. For one very basic thing, the apostle Paul, who we mentioned, was writing letters in the 50s and the 60s. Jesus probably died around the year 30. Paul, in his letters, talks about his meetings with James, the brother of Jesus.
When I put it sarcastically: If Jesus didn’t exist, you would think his brother would know that. [Laughs.] But Paul’s conferred with James!
So it’s things like that.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: So, yeah. Jesus — I think he certainly existed. That doesn’t tell you what he said and did, though.
Douthat: But it’s fair to say, even by the standards of secular history, he’s an unusually well-attested figure, just in terms of how many people are writing about him.
Ehrman: Yeah, and this is something I think that people have overlooked. I often say — and it’s absolutely true — that Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek and Roman source of the first century. Outside of Jews and Christians, he’s not mentioned at all. And people say: Oh, well, then he probably didn’t exist.
Well, how many people are mentioned? Philo is the most famous Jew from the period. How many people talk about him? No one. [Laughs.]
Douthat: The Romans and Greeks generally thought they had better things to do. But also, again, even for extremely well-attested figures, you’re dealing with sources that come later and are where you’re putting things together, even if you’re talking about the life of Julius Caesar, right?
Ehrman: Well, that’s it. You’ll have Roman emperors and things talked about, but who else is talked about? The Roman Empire had about 60 million people. How many of those 60 million people in Jesus’ day do we actually have a record of? Very, very few.
So the fact you don’t have a record isn’t weird. It’s what you’d expect.
Douthat: So then, another point, the idea that basically, there were tons of Gospels that have just as good a claim to be connected to Jesus as the ones in the New Testament, but were later suppressed for political and theological reasons — this gets sort of the full treatment in “The Da Vinci Code” and popular culture.
Obviously, there are lots of rival Gospels.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: Why should we give at least a certain degree of priority to the ones that we have in the New Testament, versus the others?
Ehrman: Well, it’s not on a priori grounds. It’s not because they’re in the Bible.
I actually did an edition of these other Gospels.
Douthat: I believe that I own it.
Ehrman: Yeah, and I’m really interested in these things. But everybody who is interested in historical Jesus from a historical point of view has to take every potential source seriously and examine it in detail and consider: Does this provide historical information or not? On the grounds of the kind of historical criteria that historians used to figure out: What did Abraham Lincoln really say? Or Julius Caesar? You use the same criteria.
And when you apply these criteria to these other Gospels, there are virtually none of them that you can consider as historically reliable. Possibly the Gospel of Thomas — it has 114 sayings of Jesus, discovered in 1945, about half of which are like what you get in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the other half are not. Possibly some of those sayings in there could go back to Jesus. Apart from that, virtually none of these Gospels is going to give you historical information.
Douthat: So the New Testament — the books we have, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles — all of this maybe takes us as close to Jesus’ life as we’re likely to get, pending some novel discovery in a cave or in the ruins of Pompeii or something else. Pompeii — the timing might be wrong.
But you don’t think that’s close enough for them to be truly credible as historical narratives. Why?
Ehrman: Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.
There are a lot of reasons for that.
Douthat: Give me three reasons.
Ehrman: They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event, where they both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things: The authors living much later, and the contradiction.
The third thing is: These authors got their stories from somewhere. We don’t know where the authors lived and we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But we don’t ——
Douthat: I’m just going to — go on, go on. Sorry.
Ehrman: We can get back to that, because that’s obviously a debate point.
Douthat: Yeah. There’s some debate, but ——
Ehrman: Oh yeah, there’s debates about everything. Welcome to history. So these authors do not claim to be eyewitnesses. They do not narrate things in the first person. They describe Jesus and his disciples in the third person there. As I said, they’re writing in a different language and living decades later. The question is: Where did they get their stories?
The one thing we can say about Christianity in this period, from the time Jesus died to the time, say, at the end of the Gospel of John — that’s a 60-year period — is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Mediterranean. It started out as a small group in Jerusalem, and by the end of the first century, we know of Christian groups who were scattered throughout Judea, Galilee, Syria, over to what we today think of as Turkey, Asia Minor, over to Greece, in Rome, possibly North Africa, possibly Spain.
So in those 70 years, Christianity has spread. There’s no social media, no newspapers. The vast majority of people are illiterate, cannot read. It almost certainly spread by people telling stories about Jesus. So somebody in Jerusalem tells a story to somebody else in Jerusalem, and then somebody from Antioch comes and he tells them the story. This goes on for 30, 40, 50 years before they are written down.
So what happens to the stories? They change. And the evidence that they change is we have different accounts of the same story that are different.
Douthat: Where does the fact that the Gospels contain stories of miracles — including, most notably, the Resurrection, also plenty of secondary miracles, healings and so on — where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism? Is it itself just an automatic reason for skepticism that you should discount historical narratives that claim that someone walked on water?
Ehrman: I think saying “historical skepticism” is a tautology. History is skeptical. It’s not that you’re doing historical skepticism — you’re doing history.
Douthat: I agree 100 percent, but suppose you present to me two stories that follow the same trajectory you’ve described: They’re written down later. They pass through some kind of oral history. They’re written in a new language. They’re the same story, except one of them has a miracle in it and one of them doesn’t.
Does the skeptical historian — tautological again — say the miracle is an extra reason to think that one of these stories has been garbled, compared to the other?
Ehrman: I think what the historian does is they look at the miracle story and they judge whether it probably happened or not, because that’s what you do with history generally.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: And so what’s the probability of Jesus walking on the water? How do you establish that as a historically ——
Douthat: That’s a very good question. How do you establish that historically?
Ehrman: You cannot.
Douthat: OK.
Ehrman: It doesn’t matter who you’re studying in history. You can be studying Charlemagne or studying Baal Shem Tov, who is the founder of Hasidic Judaism, who has alleged eyewitness accounts of his miracles — fantastic miracles — and we’re not talking about thousands of years now. So a historian looks at the accounts of Baal Shem Tov doing things like sticking his finger up against a tree and making it come on fire to warm themselves up or whatever. And you have all of these accounts, and you ask: How do we account for this story?
Well, how do you establish things happening in the past? What kind of criteria do you use as a historian to figure out whether something likely happened or not? And you have a set of criteria. For example, do you have independent witnesses? Is it something that’s plausible? Is it something that has ever happened, ever, in the history of the universe before?
Suppose you’ve got a story and you’re not sure if somebody made it up or if it actually happened. Like Jesus walking on the water — did it actually happen or did somebody make it up? Now, has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn’t happen? Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Has anybody ever actually walked on water? Well, no, not in recorded history. In other words: What is the likelihood?
So I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Jesus walked on the water. I’m saying that if it did happen, there’s no way for us to establish it historically because other explanations are always far more likely.
Douthat: But does that mean then that you are essentially taking a kind of a view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened, just because you’ll always default to, by definition, miracles are things that don’t normally happen?
To take a different example, the Yale historian Carlos Eire wrote a book recently, called “They Flew.” It’s a book about accounts of levitating saints in the 16th and 17th century. And Eire basically makes the case — and this is, of course, debatable, like all such things — that the level of historical attestation for these events is at the level or above the level that you would normally need to say these things happen. Independent witnesses, lots of different writers writing about it, that people have reasons to be skeptical saying it happened — all of these things. But then you’re still left with the fact that: Do people normally fly? No. Do people normally levitate? No.
I’m just curious. Is there any level of historical attestation where you would say: OK, this makes this miracle more likely to have happened? Or are we just defaulting to the idea that miracles are impossible, and so the historian can never assert that one possibly happened?
Ehrman: I would say you have to consider every possible account and consider who the witnesses are and evaluate whether it’s more probable that that happened or that witnesses got it wrong or somebody made it up at every point. So you don’t make a categorical decision that this could not have happened.
Part of the problem with history is that history’s actually not explaining just what happened — history is explaining what we can establish probably happened. So the past is not history. The past is the past. Our only access to it is through historical inquiry.
Let me give you a different example, just to kind of explain this for people who are not quite following this. It is impossible for you to take your coffee — your black coffee — and to pour half-and-half into it and stir it, enough that the half-and-half comes out of it. I mean, it’s basically the second law of thermodynamics; it can’t happen. At least, it never has happened.
So, suppose somebody from 1950 says that they saw somebody in 1920 do this. And suppose you’ve got five people who say: Yeah, 30 years ago we saw this person stir the coffee, stir the milk in the coffee, and they stirred it right out of it.
What’s the likelihood that those five people would be right? I’d say the likelihood is virtually zero. Is it likely somebody could have made it up, that somebody could have seen something that they thought was that, that it was a magician, that it was somebody’s sleight of hand? Do those things ever happen?
Yeah, that happens all the time.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: Does anybody do this thing? No, it never happens. So, which is more probable?
Douthat: Do you think that there’s a risk in New Testament historical scholarship of taking the fact that the Gospels include miracles and using that as a reason to become overly skeptical of them?
Ehrman: Yes, I think that is a risk. But the vast majority of critical scholars of the New Testament are actually Christian believers. So I’m an odd duck. I’m an agnostic, I’m an atheist, and I’m a New Testament scholar, and that is weird.
So it’s not that everybody’s approaching this thing, trying to destroy the miracles or anything like that. Most people doing this are actually churchgoing Christians.
Douthat: Let me just give you one example of how this problem might manifest itself, and you can tell me why you think I’m wrong.
You mentioned earlier that you yourself would probably date the Gospels to the later part of the first century, so the 80s.
Ehrman: Usually the typical view is that Mark was written in the first, around 70.
Douthat: Yeah.
Ehrman: Matthew and Luke, around 80, 85. John, around 90, 95.
Douthat: Right. And this makes a difference to the question of their credibility for the reasons that you’ve already laid out: The longer stories are circulating in oral tradition, the more errors, confabulation — all of these things — creep into them.
So the Gospels are still important historical sources, but they look less historically credible if you plant them in 85 versus 60. Right?
Ehrman: Well, I wouldn’t say necessarily. Somebody could write a book on Thomas Jefferson today and be more accurate than an account that was written a year after his death. So it’s not necessarily that the length of time is the issue.
The other thing about oral tradition, of course, is that stories change overnight. I’m sure you’ve had things told about you the next day that just aren’t true, right? I know I have. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: Never.
Ehrman: OK, well, I’ll start tomorrow then. I’ll say something.
Douthat: I want to get at that question in a minute, but just on this question, there are many reasons that scholars have for offering that kind of later dating. But one of the reasons that shows up pretty consistently in the literature is the fact that, at various moments in the Gospels, Jesus has discourses where he seems to predict something like the destruction of the Jewish temple, which happens in 70 A.D. at the hands of Roman armies.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: And just to take as an example, the Gospel of Luke. So the Gospel of Luke connects to the Book of Acts, the story of the Acts of the Apostles. They’re written seemingly by the same author.
The Acts of the Apostles starts out with the early church. It ends up following the career of St. Paul. And it ends pretty abruptly in the early 60s, with Paul a prisoner in Rome. That’s just sort of where the book ends.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: Soon after that, a lot of incredibly crazy stuff happens. You have the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, you have Nero’s first persecution of the Christians, and then you have the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple. So it’s a very action-packed decade.
It has always seemed to me that the most straightforward reading of Acts ending where it does, without any detail of those subsequent events, is just that the writer wasn’t aware of those subsequent events and was ending his story roughly where he was — it’s the early 60s, Paul is still alive, and this is the end of the story because this is when he is writing it.
And that one of the key reasons that scholars reject that sort of intuitive conclusion is that they don’t want to give Jesus credit for a prophecy. They don’t want to say ——
Ehrman: Oh, wow. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: Go ahead. Tell me why you think that’s a mistake in reading.
Ehrman: Yeah, I understand that argument. Yeah, I understand it. Wow. I absolutely don’t think that’s why scholars came up with that, but OK. Of course, that’s what I thought for many years. That’s the best way to explain it.
There are reasons for thinking the Gospels were written later than that. So, then it’s a legitimate argument. Well, then, why does the Book of Acts end while Paul’s in prison in Rome in the sixties?
Two things about that. One, I agree that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, so I don’t late date them because of that.
Douthat: Jesus predicted it because it was just in keeping with Old Testament prophecy. Just to be clear, you don’t think Jesus literally knew the destruction was going to happen.
Ehrman: I don’t think he had supernatural knowledge, no. There were other Jews at the time who were predicting the destruction of Jerusalem. It’s kind of like people today might predict something that’s going to happen about the war in Iran; they’ll come up with some prediction ——
Douthat: And somebody will be right.
Ehrman: Somebody will be right. So, you can read the handwriting on the wall kind of thing.
There are good reasons for thinking why the author of Luke—Acts would have wanted an Act before Paul was finally put on trial and executed. The whole point of the Book of Acts — for those who don’t know, the book of Acts begins after Jesus’ resurrection. He ascends to heaven, then the day of Pentecost happens and Christianity starts spreading throughout the world.
It covers about a 30-year period of the early spread of Christianity.
One of the major theses of Acts, one of its themes, is that this is a movement that cannot be stopped. Paul, in particular, cannot be stopped. Paul goes into a town and he gets persecuted and they beat him, and he just goes to the next town and starts another church. They try to stop him there; they can’t stop him.
At one point, they stone him. He gets up, goes to the next town. There’s nothing you can do because the spirit is behind this whole thing.
Douthat: That’s right. It’s like podcasting. Unstoppable.
Ehrman: Unstoppable, and very interesting.
So, the deal is that if Paul’s execution had been narrated, he would have been stopped. Luke is trying to show that this is an unstoppable movement, so he is not going to narrate the execution.
Douthat: OK. I promised my producers we wouldn’t do the seven-hour debate, so I am resisting the urge to argue incredibly deeply.
Just two questions. First one: I’ve read your work, and so I know that you think it’s possible or likely that Jesus made these predictions.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: Aren’t there a lot of scholars who think that Jesus’ predictions are a reason to date the Gospels later? Again, I agree it’s not the only reason, but it is a significant reason given.
Ehrman: The deal with that is that it’s not quite that simple. It’s that some of these predictions, especially in Luke, seem to show a detailed knowledge of what’s going to happen when it happens. It’s not just that the temple’s going to be destroyed; it’s that Roman troops are going to surround the city, that the Gentiles are going to trample … it goes into detail that looks like it’s projecting backward something that they know about.
Douthat: But some of those details are also wrong, right? There were claims about what season it happens in, pray that it doesn’t happen in …
Ehrman: Well, no. The prediction that the people say is wrong is when, in Mark 13, Jesus says, “Not one stone will be left upon another.”
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: And people today can go to the Western Wall and there are stones still stood there. But the problem is that Mark wasn’t from Jerusalem. When people talk about the destruction of Jerusalem, even today, they talk about it being completely destroyed — and it wasn’t.
So, the fact that Mark has it wrong doesn’t mean that he was living before the event.
Douthat: OK. So you’re saying that there are more specific reasons to think that the prophecies are written.
First of all, it’s fine for you to say Luke’s theme is that Paul can’t be stopped, so he doesn’t want to end with Paul being stopped. But if Luke is writing decades and decades later, everyone knows that Paul was stopped. Everyone knows that Paul was martyred. Right?
Ehrman: But he’s telling a story.
Douthat: But he’s telling a story to an audience that is aware of events. If you’re telling a story about Martin Luther King, and you write the story and you end the story somewhere just short of his assassination, it’s not a history just of Martin Luther King. It’s a history of the whole civil rights movement, and it leaves out like a whole back half of these events. That would be an odd narrative choice, given that everybody — everyone involved in the civil rights movement, everyone involved in American history ever since — knows that the signal thing about the end of Martin Luther King’s career was that he was assassinated.
And by the way, there were riots; there’s a whole transformation of American politics associated with it. It just seems like one: It’s a big challenge to write about that without letting that creep into your text.
Ehrman: That’s right.
Douthat: Two: If your theme is that Paul could not be stopped and you’re a Christian who believes in the resurrection, why wouldn’t you end with Paul’s martyrdom and say, like other Christian martyrs, of which there are many, he continues to influence and shape the church to this day and give further examples?
Wouldn’t that be just a much more rhetorically natural style?
Ehrman: Well, it may have been, but you can’t tell an author what he needs to write.
The Martin Luther King thing is an interesting analogy, but I don’t think it quite works because that’s really kind of the point — the assassination.
For Paul, according to Luke, that’s not the point at all. For one thing, we don’t have a lot of records of people being martyred at the time. We actually don’t know a lot about Paul’s death. The earliest reference we have to Paul experiencing martyrdom is around the year 95 by a book called First Clement.
So, we don’t have records. We don’t know what this author even knew, actually.
Douthat: But if he’s writing later, by the time he’s writing, Nero’s persecution has happened. You have had substantial Christian martyrdoms of some kind. Martyrdom would be part of the story that Christians have to tell. It just seems odd to leave it out.
Ehrman: Well, it seems off. But we have lots of historical writings from the ancient world, and they don’t end where you would end them. It’s common to tell a life, to tell a biography that has a section of a person’s life.
I understand it might seem weird, but I think it seems weirder if you already assume that Luke was writing before 70 — then it would seem weird to you to think that somebody would think otherwise. I get that.
But the question is: What is the actual evidence? It’s not where he stops.
Douthat: That is evidence. It’s not decisive evidence, maybe, but it is evidence.
Ehrman: Yes. Right. That’s right. You look at every piece of evidence and you weigh the probabilities.
Douthat: All right. Let’s move on from there.
Ehrman: OK.
Douthat: Let’s go back to the very first point you made for reasons to treat the Gospel skeptically, which is about contradictions between them.
Ehrman: Mm-hmm.
Douthat: Give me a couple of examples, just so listeners have them, of places where the Gospels contradict themselves or contradict each other in ways that cast doubt on their historical validity.
Ehrman: Yeah. I’ve written a long book on this; “Jesus Interrupted” is the book where I deal with a lot of these. There are all levels. It’s interesting because they’re at all levels.
On a basic level, Mark’s Gospel is usually thought to be the first Gospel. Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. He says, when you go, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any money, but do take a staff.
OK, you have to take a staff because you’re going to be walking.
Matthew’s is exactly the same episode, word for word in some places. But in Matthew, he says to the disciples, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any extra money — and don’t take a staff.
Wait a second. This is an obvious thing where he either said take a staff or don’t take a staff, but he probably didn’t say both.
Those are little things. But sometimes you get fairly big things, like: What day did Jesus die?
All the Gospels locate his death around the time of the Passover feast. Mark explicitly has Jesus himself eat the Passover feast with his disciples, and he takes the symbolic foods of the Passover feast — the bread and the wine — and he instills new significance in them. He says, “This is my body that’s broken; this is my blood. It’s given for many.”
So, they’ve had a Passover meal. He’s arrested afterward and he spends the night in jail. He’s crucified the next morning at nine o’clock in the morning. Mark specifically dates all of these things.
John, our last Gospel, also gives specific dates for when things happen. Jesus does have a last meal, but it’s not said to be a Passover meal. He talks with his disciples for five chapters, as I said, and then afterward he’s arrested, put in jail, Pilate condemns him to death and he’s crucified in the afternoon on the day they’re preparing the Passover meal — a day earlier.
Specifically dated in both cases. John in 19:14.
So, those are detailed things that make you think somebody is changing something for some reason of their own. And that’s absolutely, I think, what’s happening.
People are changing things for reasons of their own, but there are lots of other things that are simply very big issues, like what did Jesus actually preach? Why did Jesus do miracles? Big issues between the Gospels.
But for most people, like me when I was evangelical, it took a little thing that I just couldn’t reconcile anymore to make me realize these are not inherent.
And once you realize that, it opens up, it actually improves your interpretation of these Gospels. It makes it possible to understand each Gospel for what they’re trying to say, rather than trying to make them all say the same thing.
Ross Douthat: Yeah. I’m not a fundamentalist Christian, I’m a Catholic and Catholics believe in some version of inherency of Scripture, but being Catholic, there’s like 17 different theological schools about what that means.
To me, though, it often seems like at least some of the things you’re describing, while they would undermine faith if you feel obliged to believe that the Gospels can never get a name wrong or a date wrong or else you have to throw them out, if you’re evaluating the likelihood that these are texts that actually come from eyewitnesses — through mediation, someone is writing down eyewitness accounts, but come from eyewitnesses — they’re actually what you would expect.
I’ve written two memoirish books. One of them was about my undergraduate experience, God help me. And one of them was about having Lyme disease. In both cases, the nature of memoir writing means at phase one, you misremember certain things, you get certain things wrong. You’re a writer, so you sort of telescope narrative — sometimes things are compressed, and so on. All of that happens, and yet I still think of them as truthful testimonies about what happened to me that some future historian could reasonably rely upon.
Then, in the case of the Lyme disease book, my wife wrote a book about the science of the maternal transformation, in which she discussed some of her own experiences as a mother and included details about being the wife of someone struggling with Lyme disease.
When I read her account, obviously, there were things that she interpreted differently. So, two people — married, living in the same house, raising kids together — differences enter in from the beginning.
But that happening in the Gospel seems like, in a certain way, evidence of their basic historical reliability. Just in the sense that if I handed you, as a historian, four documents written by different authors and they all agreed on every particular, they all hit the same point and it was clear they all had exactly the same theology. Wouldn’t you be more skeptical of those documents?
Ehrman: Yes. Right.
Douthat: OK. Then my work here is done, I guess.
Ehrman: No, no, it’s not. I would that we had memoirs. We don’t have memoirs. These people don’t claim to be eyewitnesses. They don’t claim to be — these are not eyewitness reports.
If Peter had written a Gospel, that’d be great. Unfortunately, Peter was illiterate — even in the New Testament, by the way, Peter is called illiterate in Acts 4:13. He was agrammatos — didn’t know his letters.
So, we don’t have anything from these apostles. What we have are stories in a different language, in different parts of the world, from people who weren’t there, who are telling us what they’ve heard.
So that’s not the same as you writing a memoir.
Douthat: It’s not the same as me writing a memoir. At the same time, though, and this is where I guess we just disagree — I think Mark is pretty clearly Peter talking to somebody.
Ehrman: Really?
Douthat: Yes.
Ehrman: Why?
Douthat: Because it appears as Peter’s story, right?
Ehrman: No, it doesn’t.
Douthat: No, it doesn’t? Peter is a dominant character in it, relative to the other Gospels. There’s all these little grace notes in Aramaic where it’s somebody remembering exactly the word Jesus speaks and so on. You don’t think ——
Ehrman: No. If you’re raised thinking this is Peter’s Gospel, then it might sound like that.
If you have no assumption about that at all, it would never occur to you that this is Peter’s version of the story. No. No.
I just think that since the Gospels don’t claim to be by eyewitnesses, to say that they’re eyewitness testimonies — on what grounds? Why would you think that?
When you read other ancient books, histories, when you read ancient historians like Thucydides, he tells you that he doesn’t know what the speeches were like. How would he know? He wasn’t there? He made them up. He tells us he made them up. That’s what historians do, he says: They make it up.
You know who the care person is and you think, well, what would he likely have said in this case? Well, then you come up with something.
Douthat: Right, but in the case just of the synoptic Gospels, across the different sources that Matthew and Luke are using — since we know they’re probably using Mark, setting aside other debates there — Jesus doesn’t come across as a character that Thucydides made up. He comes across as someone who’s being described by people who listen to him talk. You don’t think so?
Ehrman: So, we have the Sermon on the Mount. It’s found only in Matthew, Chapters 5, 6 and 7. It’s three chapters long. Matthew’s usually dated to around the year 80 to 85.
Douthat: Unless Luke was written earlier, in which case Matthew’s earlier. But sure. Yeah.
Ehrman: So, I asked my students whether they heard the last Inaugural Address. I did this some month after the last Inaugural Address. They said, “Yes, I heard it.” I said, “OK, write it down for me.” How could they possibly write it down?
How could somebody, 50 years after Jesus gave this address, know what he said? And if Jesus did give the Sermon on the Mount, why isn’t it in any of the other Gospels? They just didn’t think that part was important? You see what I’m saying?
These are stories about Jesus that have been circulating, that different authors have put together in different ways. The reason Matthew, Mark and Luke sound so similar is because Matthew and Luke used Mark. They have the same source.
Douthat: I will just say the claim about why people would remember the words of Jesus and why they’re different from listening to Donald Trump give an endless Inaugural Address is that these stories were told to people who were explicitly his followers, who believed him to be potentially the Messiah, who were often living in community with one another, and who then experienced a radically transformative event that caused them to have stronger reasons from the beginning to share and circulate and remember these stories.
Therefore, they’re more like maybe somebody writing a story about their own family 20 or 30 years later, or sharing stories about their own family, than they are like me sharing a story about what I remember the first Inaugural Address to be.
Ehrman: The fact that these were followers of Jesus is probably not the reason for thinking they’re more historically accurate, because the followers of Jesus have their own reasons for portraying Jesus in ways that they understand him.
People tell stories all the time about people that are important to them, and the stories change.
So, the question is: What do we know about oral tradition? What do we know about how people passed on stories, both today and in antiquity? There’s actually a whole field of research on this, and it’s not favorable to the idea that people remembered things verbatim ——
Douthat: They don’t have to remember things verbatim to have general accuracy. That’s different from someone making up a speech.
To your own example, if one community remembers that Jesus said “Do take a staff” and one community remembers that he said “Don’t take a staff” — you still could have a pretty good sense that Jesus said some version of that dialogue.
Ehrman: No, you don’t know that Jesus said it. You have to analyze it. What are the grounds for thinking he said it? Just like what are the grounds for thinking that George Washington said something or other? How do you go about establishing it?
It isn’t just because it’s found in several sources, especially if these sources used each other. If you’ve got three biographies of George Washington that all say he said the same thing, and these biographers all used each other, then you’ve got one source; you don’t have three sources.
Douthat: One of the people you’ve debated in your many debates is a scholar and writer named Peter Williams.
Ehrman: Yeah.
Douthat: Who wrote a book called “Can We Trust the Gospels?”
Ehrman: Have you seen my debate with him?
Douthat: Yes. Yes.
Ehrman: I encourage people who want to know about his views about things and my views to watch that debate.
Douthat: I encourage that as well. And it gives you the extra two hours that this conversation is missing. But this will be my last question on this point.
Williams makes the argument that if you look at details in the Gospels that are not about things Jesus said, but are about place names, geography — how often does a given name appear versus what was actually common in the 30s or the 20s in Palestine — they do remarkably well.
It looks like the people who are describing, writing and talking about these things actually knew the geography of the Holy Land quite well, and knew the nomenclature of people in this region quite well.
I watched your debate and you said basically something to the effect of just because somebody gets it right, that New York City has five streets going this way and that the typical name in the Bronx is Vinny, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be right about what happened on a particular day at an actual event — which is a fair point.
At the same time, in the back and forth we’ve just been having, you’ve been emphasizing the idea that Gospels are written decades later. They’re written in another language. They’re maybe written down all over the Roman Empire, not just in the Near East — and that because of this, when you’re talking about things Jesus said, there’s just too many cycles, too much distance and so on.
Why didn’t those cycles in those distances make Williams’s argument obsolete? Why don’t people just get the names wrong after 60 years? Why don’t they start introducing massive errors of geography, too?
Why are all the errors that you imagine to be there about things Jesus said, as opposed to where Jericho is in relation to Jerusalem? Shouldn’t there be more errors of fact just through this cycle process you’re describing?
Ehrman: Well, there are errors of fact that Peter doesn’t talk about in the Gospels. They’re just geographical errors. So, there are those things. The fact that somebody tells a story about a certain place and gets the place names right doesn’t mean that the story’s right.
Douthat: No, absolutely.
Ehrman: It’s irrelevant to the question about whether the stories about Jesus are things that happened.
Douthat: But it can’t be irrelevant in the sense that if the Gospel’s got place names badly wrong and introduced a lot of random, weird names in place of what were actually the names that were normal in 25 A.D., you as a historian would say, “Well, that’s a reason to think it’s not true.”
Ehrman: That’s right.
Douthat: So, the fact that they get things right has to be a reason for giving them some credit.
Ehrman: It doesn’t work that way.
Douthat: Why not?
Ehrman: OK. Doesn’t work that way because of this: If you know the location of places, that doesn’t mean that you know what happened in those locations.
You are asking about what Jesus has said and done is accurate. If you say, “Well, it must be accurate because he knows where Jericho is in relation to Jerusalem” ——
Douthat: I’m not saying that it must be accurate. I’m saying that you are saying that the process of oral tradition necessarily introduces a large set of errors in terms of memory of statements.
Ehrman: I’m not saying it necessarily does. It does, but it doesn’t. Look, if there were errors all over the place about geography, that would call the stories into question. If there are not errors of geography, then it’s neutral. Are the stories historical or not?
Douthat: No, but it’s evidence; it’s not neutral.
Ehrman: It’s not evidence.
Douthat: Because it strongly implies that the people, the origins of these stories, that certain key elements of these stories were transmitted successfully across the process you’ve described. That’s all I’m saying.
The place where the geography of the Near East, allowing for some errors, was transmitted fairly successfully across ——
Ehrman: It’s actually not all that great, if you want to know the truth. There are geographical errors.
But if I tell a story about somebody murdered right in front of the Empire State Building, the fact I know where the Empire State Building is doesn’t mean the person was murdered there.
Douthat: All right, I will return us to our original theme and bring us to a close — like Luke ending when there was so much more to be said.
Ehrman: [Laughs.] There you go.
Douthat: As a historian, we’ve walked around this a few times, but just directly: What do you make of the resurrection stories? What do you think happened?
Ehrman: I think the followers of Jesus definitely thought, before he died, that he must be the Messiah or that he possibly was the Messiah. There were different views about what the Messiah would be, at the time, within Judaism.
But whatever the view was, every view of the Messiah thought that he would be a powerful figure who would overthrow the enemies of God, set up a kingdom in some way. That was their expectation.
Rather than that happening, though, Jesus was arrested and he was put on trial and was crucified publicly — humiliated and tortured to death.
I think it’s absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterward thought that he had been raised from the dead. My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterward.
I don’t know how many people had the visions. I don’t know whether there were groups, whether there were few individuals who eventually convinced the others — and people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. They started proclaiming that and they convinced people of it, and that’s the beginning of Christianity.
Now, if you’re a Christian, that’s perfectly fine because you can just say, well, yes, he did appear to people.
If you’re not a Christian, it’s also perfectly fine. You can say, “They thought they had visions of Jesus.” You don’t have to have an explanation. It could be a mistaken identity. It could be a dream. There are all sorts of people who have visions.
Douthat: It’s probably not a mistaken identity.
Ehrman: Why?
A couple of years ago, I was giving a lecture in Michigan, and there’s a guy in the third row who I thought was my dad.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: My dad had died 15 years before that.
Douthat: So by mistaken identity, you mean one person had this experience? It’s not that everybody thinks there’s a guy walking around.
Bart Ehrman: No, I don’t think Jesus appeared to 500 people at one time. I think it’s pretty clear that Paul believes he saw Jesus. We don’t know how he would have identified Jesus — he didn’t know Jesus during his lifetime — but he saw something he said was Jesus.
I think Peter claimed to have a vision of Jesus. I think Mary Magdalene probably did.
Douthat: Do you think that because, as a reader, the scene where Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus seems like it comes from an eyewitness account?
Ehrman: No. Of course not.
Douthat: No. OK. I can’t sell you on that at all?
Ehrman: Well, how would you verify that?
Douthat: So why do you think Mary Magdalene had a vision of Jesus? I think Mary Magdalene probably did.
Ehrman: As a historian, you look at independent sources that claim something. And it’s independently attested that Peter did and that Mary did. So, I think that that’s completely plausible.
Douthat: OK. But, you’re never struck by these passages, just as a human being encountering another human being’s narrative and think to yourself that something like that happened.
Ehrman: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I’m struck by the passages. They’re extremely powerful passages. But that doesn’t mean they happened. One of the interesting things about the resurrection — two things that people haven’t noticed.
My first point is that the empty tomb in the New Testament never brings about faith. It always brings doubt.
Douthat: Yep.
Ehrman: So, it was never taken as the evidence.
Douthat: And I will say if I encountered the empty tomb, it would not have turned me into — it’s part of what strikes me as quite realistic about the narratives, that people don’t respond to the empty tomb by saying, “Ah, now we will proclaim Christ risen.”
Ehrman: And fair enough. But the other interesting thing is that all the resurrection narratives are filled with doubt. In the Book of Acts, one of the strangest verses in the New Testament is Acts 1:3, where it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples proving to them with many proofs that he was alive.
And you think, how many proofs does he need? And why does it take 40 days? But that is the interesting thing, is that in all of these accounts, you have these doubt traditions. What are those doubt traditions about?
Douthat: Aren’t they about the fact that, as you yourself said earlier, people do not normally rise from the dead?
So, the normal human reaction is the doubting Thomas’ reaction to say, “Let me touch him.”
Ehrman: It would be, but if you’re sitting here in front of me, I’m not doubting you’re sitting here in front of me.
Douthat: Well, if your father, your late father, was sitting here in front of you, you would doubt that he was sitting there in front of you.
Ehrman: And the point is that he wasn’t. I thought he was.
Douthat: Right.
Ehrman: Right. So, if he had spent 40 days with me, he wouldn’t have to be doing tricks to prove to me he was alive.
Douthat: My father is still alive, but I feel like if my father died an awful death of crucifixion and then he started appearing to me, it would take a long time before I was ready to believe that he was really there.
Ehrman: You might think that, but in fact, there are a lot of psychological studies of visions, especially of recently deceased loved ones. And virtually everybody who has it is sure it happened.
Douthat: But the claim that the early Christians make is precisely that this isn’t just a vision of a departed loved one. This is a world-altering event that is going to inspire them to missionary work and martyrdom, which most people who have a vision, a dream or whatever about their departed loved one don’t have. It just seems like your account of this as something that happens all the time — somebody dies and people have visions and they decide that the vision was real — just seems quite different from a situation where you have more radical claims and a lot of doubt about these radical claims all mixed together in a way that suddenly sets a new religion in motion.
Ehrman: No, I can explain that. We didn’t get to that part, and I know we’re almost at our seven hours here. But let me just say that my point of saying that they thought Jesus was the Messiah before he died is the critical point.
Because when he got crucified, it showed he was not the Messiah. He was not the one who was going to destroy the enemies. But then they had these visions and they came to think he was alive again. So they thought: Oh, we misunderstood. We thought he was going to destroy the Romans. God must have wanted him to die.
The fact that God wanted him to die, shown in the fact that God raised him from the dead. He’s raised from the dead. His death is the way of salvation, then. Jesus must have had to die. God must have wanted him to die because he was the chosen one. How do we know he is the chosen one? He got raised from the dead.
Well, if God had his chosen one killed, why? Sacrifice for sins. That’s the beginning of Christianity. As soon as these people started realizing, Oh my God, he’s raised from the dead, they thought that his death was a sacrifice that starts Christianity.
Douthat: So why is there the doubttradition? Why is there all this material about the need for physical proof? And why isn’t the collective vision enough? Why do the Gospels lean so hard on this mystery?
The tomb is empty: We can’t explain it. Two, on sort of describing these encounters with Jesus that are like, hard to figure out. You know, you’re seeing him on the road to Emmaus. He’s eating fish. He’s here, he’s there. Why? Why doesn’t the vision stuff sort of clean things up? Especially, again, given that in your account these are all being, you know, written later and smoothed out.
Ehrman: Because by that time when they’re being written later, we have records of Christians who think that Jesus wasn’t physically raised from the dead, but was spiritually raised from the dead. And Paul’s saying, no, no, no.
It’s a physical resurrection. These accounts in Luke and John where Jesus is eating fish and, you know, touching my wounds and things is meant to show that it actually was a physical resurrection. So these authors are trying to show that this is not just some kind of spirit of Jesus going up to heaven or something. This is actually a physical resurrection, which fits into the Jewish apocalyptic view.
Douthat: But why are they including all of the doubt?
Ehrman: They included the doubt because it’s historical. There were apostles who doubted it.
Douthat: Right, but you’re trying to sell an argument decades and decades after the fact ——
Ehrman: You want to prove that Jesus really was raised.
Douthat: But why are the stories so strange? Why are they not straightforward? You know, Jesus was raised and then he taught us these things, and that’s it.
You’ve got all the empty tomb stories. You’ve got people not recognizing him and then recognizing him. He’s passing through walls one moment; he’s eating fish the next.
Doesn’t that seem to reflect a fundamental initial strangeness in how people are experiencing it rather than something that is constructed for propaganda purposes decades later?
Ehrman: Propaganda. Wait, you’re putting words in my mouth ——
Douthat: You’re saying that they had to emphasize the physical reality. To win an argument with the spiritual eye, the people who said it was spiritual. And I’m saying that it just seems like it’s all a weird mixture from the start.
Ehrman: It is a weird mixture from the start. If you see somebody that was publicly executed and then you see them alive, it’s going to be a weird experience. But my point about the proof — the eating fish and things — is that these people are telling the stories about Jesus’ resurrection to people who don’t believe. And they’re saying: Yes, you don’t believe. It doesn’t make sense. But I’m telling you, we saw him eat fish afterward. There was an empty tomb.
These are proofs to convince those who are doubting. So you put doubt into the story to show that the doubts were resolved within the story.
Douthat: Let’s end by just going back to your book.
We started this conversation a long time ago, talking about the moral transformation that Jesus made and the idea that you were supposed to love your enemies, love people who persecuted you, love the stranger far away, who has nothing in common with you.
All of these transformative ideas. You like those ideas, right?
Ehrman: Yes, I do.
Douthat: If the Gospels ended with the crucifixion and Jesus’ death, you would have a story where someone came along and preached that it was important to love your enemies and important to care for the stranger and so on, and that person was crucified and died a horrible death and that was the end of the story. He’s talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the last being first, and look where he ended up.
Isn’t the power of the argument for Jesus’ ethics inherently bound up in the idea that he won?
Ehrman: Well, Christianity would not have become a thing if Jesus had died and there was no story of his resurrection. He just would have been another prophet who preached something and then got killed for it and boom, that was it. So, there wouldn’t be Christianity.
But the power of the Christian message from the very beginning was the message that Paul has, which is that it seems a little bit ridiculous that God’s chosen one is crucified and it seems a little bit ridiculous that the way to access ultimate divine power is by being a slave.
But Jesus’ message that you have to serve others rather than dominate is so contrary to what’s in our DNA and what’s in every other culture. But because they thought he got raised from the dead, they thought it proved it.
You have to be willing to die for others if you want to have life. If you want to have treasures in heaven, you have to sell everything you have now — completely contrary to what people would think.
But it’s because of the resurrection — yes, absolutely — the belief in the resurrection that ends up making this the powerful message that transformed the West.
Douthat: And isn’t it also — just to your own personal reasons for being an agnostic or a nonbeliever — part of the power that it’s not a logical answer, but it’s at least a poetic answer to the problem of evil? The question of why God allows suffering is not resolved by God himself suffering, but it is at least addressed.
Ehrman: It’s a powerful message. When I was a liberal Christian, I thought that the point of the Gospel message was really that God had entered into the world and suffered with us — and that’s a very powerful message. It’s not one that I agree with anymore, but I can recognize it is a really powerful message. It’s so contrary to the way of the world that it has a special poignancy to it.
Douthat: And here you are, so many years later, a sterling example of academic historical skepticism, and you’re writing a book trying to persuade people that Jesus’ message has something to it. Is it possible that you’re still, in some sense, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth?
Ehrman: I sometimes call myself a Christian atheist because I don’t believe in God. I absolutely don’t believe in God or any supernatural powers.
But I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can. Although I’m not a very good follower of Jesus. I haven’t sold everything and given it to the poor. But I think that that message is one that I want to embrace.
Douthat: OK. Bart Ehrman, thank you for joining me.
Ehrman: Thank you.
Douthat: And happy Easter in advance.
Ehrman: Happy Easter.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Emily Holzknecht, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Victoria Chamberlin. It was edited by Jordana Hochman, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker and Isaac Jones. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Arpita Aneja, Steph Khoury and Kristen Williamson. The supervising editor is Jan Kobal. The post-production manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Emma Kehlbeck and Andrea Betanzos. The executive producer is Jordana Hochman. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. The head of Opinion is Kathleen Kingsbury.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Can We Trust the New Testament? appeared first on New York Times.
