Episode 620 - Interview with Bart Ehrman (New Testament Scholar, Author - Love Thy Stranger)

It is a great honor to welcome Dr. Bart Irman to the podcast. He is a new Testament scholar who has 10 numerous books, the latest of which is titled "Love Thy Stranger, How the Moral Teachings of Jesus Change the. " Excuse me. How the Teachings of Jesus Transform the Moral Conscience of the West. Welcome to the show. How are you? Well, yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Likewise. Thanks for coming on. So as of January 1st of this year, you have retired from your long-term post at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I wonder what do you love most about teaching there? Well, the thing I liked best was the actual teaching with undergraduates, especially. You know, a university position in America, and probably in most places, involves a lot of things other than just teaching. You know, working on committees and dealing with university politics and all that and grading. And but the teaching itself is fantastic. The rest of it not so much, but I taught there for 37 years and absolutely loved my students and loved the classroom and so is a real honor because it's a very fine university. So I was very privileged to be able to be there. That's beautiful. And I'd like to talk about one of your teachers, Bruce Mesker. I've been reading a book of his called The Text of the New Testament, which I believe you serve as a co-author of. So how does he influence your scholarship? Well, so I was kind of the co-author. So he had first published this thing many years ago in the 60s, I think, in 1960s. And it had gone through three revisions and there was going to be a fourth revision when he was passed retirement and he asked me if I would assist him in producing the fourth edition. And so I did that. I wrote portions of it, but it's really his book. He was hugely influential on my scholarship and on my life. He was, Bruce Mesker was one of the great textual scholars of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Probably the most significant scholar of ancient Greek manuscripts of the Bible in modern times. And I wanted to study at Princeton Seminary only because he taught there. And so I went there to do a master's degree with him, which was a three year degree. And then I stayed on it and did my PhD there for four years. And so I studied with him for seven years. And he was quite an amazing scholar. He was quite brilliant. New millions of things that the rest of us don't know. And so it was very important for me. And now you are writing for the a block that bears your name, the art, Bart Erman block. And you donated all the proceeds to charitable causes. Well, first, why and secondly, which are the causes? Well, so this thing started 14, 14 years ago. Some about 16 years ago, somebody suggested to me, why don't you do a blog? And I said, why would I want to do a blog? I was very busy. I was writing. I was teaching. I was doing my research. And he said, well, you know, because that way you can get your message out more widely. And I said, well, I can do that through my books. And he said, well, you can make money doing it. And I said, I make a fine salary. I don't need to make money. He said, well, you can give the money away. Well, that's an interesting idea. Really? You can do that. And he said, sure. I said, really, people would pay to be on a blog. He said, yeah, sometimes it happens. So I wasn't willing to do it because I thought it would be too much work. But about two years later, I started thinking, you know, I really should give it a try. And so I started it. It's called the Barterman blog, as you said. I post five times a week, five or six times a week. My post are between 1200, 1400 words long. I've done it every week for 14 years. And to belong to the blog, people have to pay a small membership fee. So and there are different levels that people can pay. But to the beginning, the beginning level is like $2 a month or something like that. And so people pay. And I don't keep any of the money. I don't make any money off of it, never have. And we don't take any overhead out. So we don't take expenses out of it. Every penny goes to our charities that we support. We support five charities. Three of them are kind of local to me. There's the local food shelter and soup kitchen in Durham, North Carolina where I live. There's a food bank in North Carolina that we support that provides free food for people who can't afford to eat. And a local literacy center which trains people who especially immigrants who need help with English as a second language so they can get employment. And then there are two international charities, Care, which C-A-R-E, which deals with disaster relief and doctors without borders, which provides medical assistance to places in need. So those are the five charities. And the reason I do the blog, I have two reasons. One is because I do want to spread what scholars have learned about the New Testament, early Christianity, the historical Jesus, and related fields such as Hebrew Bible and Roman religion. I want a broader audience to know about that. But the main reason I do it is for the charities because it's a way that I can use my talents in order to raise money for people in need. We have raised over three and a half million dollars from this endeavor and we're growing and so we're going to be raising more and more, I think, over the years. And so it's something I'm really committed to. It takes a lot of my time, but it's absolutely worth it. Clotter here. I believe much has been said about your journey in and out of the Christian faith. So I do wonder at this point, what have you learned more about, I guess, Christianity, Jesus, God and the Bible? Well, yeah, so I started out as I was raised as a Christian. I was raised in Kansas and fairly conservative area. And I was raised Christian. We went to an Episcopal Church. When I was in high school, I had a born-again experience and became a conservative evangelical. And after high school, I went to Moody Bible Institute, which is a fundamentalist college and I majored in Bible theology. And at that point, I was a very committed conservative Christian who believed that we had to evangelize people and convert people to our form of the Christian faith. We believe the Bible was the inerent revelation from God with no mistakes in it of any kind. And that belief in Christ was the only way of salvation. So that was my view for a number of years. When I went to Princeton Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger, I of course had to take courses in a large range of areas, in theology and biblical studies, but also in church history and in just, you know, in ministry. I had to learn how to be a, you know, I was trained to be a minister there. While I was there, I had learned Greek already. I had learned Greek in college. And my first semester at Princeton, I also took Hebrew. I wanted to be able to read the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew. And I intensified my study. And I started realizing that in fact there are. And what I had thought for years, there are contradictions in the Bible. There are mistakes in the Bible. There are things that are not historical in the Bible. And it started changing my view of things. And so I actually, I remained a Christian for many years, but I left the evangelical fold and became a fairly kind of mainstream Protestant. I was involved with the Lutheran church for years. And then I was a pastor of a Baptist church for a year. I went back to the Episcopal church. And so I was active in church until about 30 years ago when I left the faith altogether. I decided I could no longer be a Christian. And my reason for that wasn't so much about my scholarship or my understanding of Jesus. It was because I was wrestling with how there can be a good and powerful God who's active in this world, given how much suffering there is. And I studied why there can be suffering in a world with a all powerful, all loving God in charge. I knew at the bid my I knew what the Bible said, I knew what theologians said, I knew what others, Osfer said, what poppio preachers say, I mean, I read all of that, and I just got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore. So about 30 years ago, I left the faith, but that, you know, it didn't really affect my scholarship very much. I left the faith, it was pretty much the scholarship I did of when I was in the faith. - Of course, what an answer, like, can you pass it regarding that, you know, for any of the question which, you know, philosophers call it the problem of evil. - Yeah, well, I can tell you, I mean, there's, we're the kinds of believers have, which is that God gave, for example, God gave us free will, and if we have free will, then we can do evil as well as good. And if we didn't, then we would just be, you know, computers or robots, and God wanted free people to be able to love him and serve him. And so there was the free will issue. I thought, sometimes I thought, you know, that suffering is meant to last week. Loving. But, I'm suffering well. Sometimes I thought that it's all here now, but God's gonna make it all up in the afterlife. And that God will provide justice after death. A lot of the time, I believe, that the reason for suffering isn't because of God, but because of their powers of evil in the world, the devil and demons and other alien forces that are creating suffering. So these are all solutions that I had that I found acceptable for a long time. Today, when I'm not able, I don't find any of those explanations or others that we could come up with. I don't find any of those explanations satisfying for me. I don't think that they, I don't think they really work, in my opinion. So today, I think they're suffering because there is no God who's in control of the world. And the world is a, it's not a forgiving place. And when hurricane hits, if you're in the way of it, you'll be hurt. If a flood happens and earthquake, and people are people, and they can do as much to you as they want, if they choose to, and they can hurt you. And so there's nothing, nothing, no supernatural power stopping them, and no supernatural power controlling the weather, et cetera. So now, I just, I think it's just a nature of being a human being, living in a vast universe that there's no other being in control of. It's just this is the universe we're in. - I understand. So here's a somewhat deceptively simple question. Who's Jesus? - Ah, yeah. I spent a good bit of my adult life studying the historical Jesus, both as a believer and as a non-believer. I think that if we want to know who Jesus is, we have to apply the kinds of historical methods that we would use to learn about anybody in the past. Whether we're talking about a great political figure of a hundred years ago, or if we're talking about a great religious leader of a thousand years ago, or if we're talking about a Roman emperor. If we're talking whatever we're talking about, we basically have the same ways of trying to figure out who they really were. What they said, what they did. And it's the same with Jesus. We don't know about Jesus unless there are ancient sources that can inform us. But as with all ancient figures, the sources that are available to us have their problems with them. And so the main sources of information are the gospels that are in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's because those are our old resources. So I don't say that there are best sources for Jesus because they're in the Bible. They are our old sources, and they appear to have the most information in them. But we take information from anywhere we can get. And we look at everything that survives from the ancient world. As to who is Jesus, I think that the, I think there are certain things that are certain. He was a Jew. He was from Cali. He was raised in Nazareth. He came from a Jewish family. He was raised Jewish. He followed Jewish law and Jewish customs. He was poor. He was living in a rural area. He was not highly educated. He left his home and his work to begin an itinerant preaching ministry. He had a number of followers who with him, he chose 12 of them to be his followers. And he preached that God's kingdom was soon to arrive. His main message was that the day of judgment was coming soon and people needed to be ready for it. They needed to turn their lives around. They needed to repent and return to the ways of God so that when the divine destruction came, they would be saved when everybody else was destroyed. And those who were saved would be brought into God's great kingdom here on earth. The God created this earth as a place for humans to live and paradise. Humans had messed it up, but God that's still God's plan and that those who are faithful to God and live the way God wants them to, those people would enter into this glorious kingdom when everybody else was destroyed. So it would be a kingdom here on earth and there'd be no evil in that kingdom, no suffering, no pain. And it would be an eternal kingdom here for those who follow God. And for Jesus following God meant, of course, keeping the Torah, the Law of Moses, but in particular, understanding that what God really wanted was for people to love God above all else and to love others who, especially those who were in need and to help those who were in need. People who did that would enter into this kingdom. So I think that's who Jesus was. - I find it incredibly interesting coming from a non-Christian background, but I'm a convert to the Christian faith, but I grew up in Vietnam, which is a majority Buddhist country where I think people can and are faithful Buddhists without ever really looking into the historical Buddha question. And we also have a Confucian heritage and people can be faithful Confusions without knowing about the historical Confucius. So why is Jesus both an object of historical and religious interests unique to, I guess religious figures who are major? - Yeah, it is pretty unique. I think you could say the same thing about Moses in the Jewish tradition that, of course, Jews respect, who they think Moses was. And but the historical Moses isn't that important to them. They just kind of know the stories about him. And so there are, even in Western traditions, especially, but especially in Eastern traditions, the history of it isn't really the thing. So why is it for Christianity? And I think with Christianity, there is a difference from most other religions, which is that Jesus himself is the center of religion, particularly what's at the center is something that happened to him. Jesus, whatever anybody thinks about Jesus as a religious figure, whether they are Christian or not, I think that it's safe to say that Jesus was crucified by the Roman government under Pontius Pilate in Judea that he was crucified. And it's safe to say that some of his followers believed that he was brought back to life by God and that he was raised from the dead. And that Christianity is rooted in that, the death and resurrection of Jesus. And there are things that had to have happened for Christianity to be true according to traditional Christianity. And that's not, there's nothing like that with Confucius or with the Buddha or with Moses that like what is related is having happened to him is the basis of the religion. But it is for Christianity and always has been. There are other kinds of Christians, of course. There are some Christians who are not that. There are people who call themselves Christian who do not think that the death and resurrection of Jesus is the main thing. But for most of Christianity, for most of its history, that's the main thing. But that means that history ends up being more important to Christianity than for almost any other religion. And it's because it's rooted in the idea of Jesus death and resurrection. Far more, for example, than his teachings. You know, with Confucius, I mean, you know, that the teachings are the teachings are the thing and with most other religion, I mean, you know, even, I suppose even with Moses, the teachings are the thing whether or not Moses delivered those teachings. But interestingly within Christianity, the teachings of Jesus are important, but they're not the main thing. The main thing is a historical event. crucifixion and then his resurrection. I believe you've addressed this before, but what did Jesus taught that change the moral conscience of the West? So this book that I wrote, Love, Life, Stranger, is an unusual book for me because most of the books I've written are showing what scholars have said about Jesus or about the new Testament, about early Christianity, in ways that are challenging to many people of faith. In my, so I live in the American South, and in the American South, Christians tend to be people who are, who are believers in the Bible, who think the Bible guide is to guide their lives. And they have a literal understanding of Jesus, virgin birth and his, his life, his crucifixion, his resurrection. They have literal understandings of these things. And scholars for a couple of hundred years have challenged a lot of those ideas about the literal truth of the, of the Bible and of Jesus life. And most of those scholars have been Christians, but they have not been of the evangelical kind of Christian and they've recognized that the Bible has problems and their contradictions in the gospels. It's hard to know what Jesus really said and did. Their question is about his resurrection, question about whether he fulfilled scripture. These are all questions that were raised by Christian scholars, going back to the 18th century, actually, the end of the 18th century. A lot of what I've done is I've written books showing why scholars challenged these things and many traditional Christians find my books a little bit upsetting because I'm saying things are contrary to what they've thought. This book has some of that. Love Thy stranger has some of that. But mainly in this book, I'm celebrating something really important about Christianity that I think has been, has done a great good in our world here in the West anyway. What I argue in the book is that because Jesus thought that the kingdom of God was soon to arrive and that people needed to turn their lives around, they needed to repent. And in order to, to follow them, he gave them instructions about what it meant to be right with God. And his main point was that God is concerned for those who are in need, for the poor, for the outcasts, for orphans, for widows, for anyone who is marginalized. God is concerned for the needy and that those who follow God will also be concerned for the needy. And those who take care of those in need are the ones who are on God's side, whether they're Jewish or not. And it doesn't matter if they're really devout Jews, if they don't, if they don't help those in need, they're not on God's side. And anyone not on God's side will be destroyed. So Jesus had a fairly radical ethic. He believed that since the end was coming soon, people needed to take care of the poor and help people in a radical way. And so when he says things like when a rich person wants to know how to get into the kingdom of God, Jesus tells him you have to sell everything you have and give to the poor. And I think Jesus met it because he really did think the end was coming very soon. And there was no time to take any half measures. So what I argue in this book is that Jesus had this ethical view that was unlike what you could find in the Roman Empire otherwise. There were a lot of there were a lot of Greek and Roman philosophers who talked about how we ought to live and what we should strive for and what our values should be and what our priorities should be. But none of them said that you should radically help those who are in need as your top priority at all. And even with in Judaism, that was a teaching in Judaism to help people you aren't familiar with who aren't your friends or your family, but only fellow Israelites. Jesus extended this to a universal universal idea. Anybody in need people should take care of. And my argument in the book is that the followers of Jesus after his death didn't keep up with his radical teaching sell everything and give to the poor. But they did keep up with his idea that our our attention should be should be focused on people in need and we should do what we can to help them. This was an idea not in the Greek and Roman world otherwise. And when Christianity took over the Roman world, this became the ethic of the West. And it continues today to be something that people even people don't follow Jesus still feel that if somebody's in need, we had to help them. And I argue in this book, it comes from the teachings of Jesus. See, speaking personally, I've engaged with your scholarly work for quite a number of years now. I find it more edifying that challenging. Speaking as a Catholic Christian, my favorite is your book on the Da Vinci code. Yes. Right. Well, you know, I don't a lot of evangelical Christians accuse me of trying to destroy the faith. And it's simply not true. I have a lot of students when I teach when I was teaching at Chapel Hill all of those years, I had a lot, most of my students were Christian. Most of them came from conservative Christian households. And a lot of them came out of my class with, you know, they were confused by a lot of things I said and they found a lot of things I said troubling. But a lot of them would tell me that it strengthened their faith. And I think the reason was because they they had to try and understand why they believed what they believed. And they had to think about whether there are other alternatives that are more satisfying to them. And sometimes they would change their mind about things. Sometimes they wouldn't change their mind about things. But whether they changed their mind or not, they were forced to think about it. And if you think about what you believe, it makes you believe stronger. And so that's I think that it's had for some people have that effect. Yes. And also your personal effect on may has been an interest in the textual scholarship of the Bible. So I have to thank you for that. Well, you're welcome. I'm glad some of some use. Okay. Now, in terms of changing moral consciences, I could think of two examples. One is John Newton and the others will be the will for force. They had a dramatic experience of conversion. And that led them to do objectively speaking morally better things that have done before. And I suppose speaking when I'm speaking to someone who has doubts about the veracity of the Christian faith, I'd point to that example, can someone be morally changed for the better based on, I guess, that are, I guess, objectively suspect or whose veracity can be doubted? Well, I think the answer is yes. And it's not just Christianity. If somebody is supposed somebody's a complete has no kind of spirituality at all. And they they become Buddhist. Often that will improve their their ethical view and their improve their ethics in the way they live their lives. And so in the US people who become Mormon, you know, often Mormons can Mormons are Christians, but they're a kind of Christian that most people in America, when I was growing up, most people didn't think Mormons were really Christians, but people convert to Mormonism tend to become in my experience highly moral people even more than before. So that so I think that that's true. I don't think that's always the result. I think some people don't change at all. In my case, the morality issue was a big question that I had going when I was wondering whether I was willing to leave the faith or not. I had been a Christian for all my life. And as I said, it was about 30 years ago, so I was about 40 years old. And I had always been a Christian. And I had always thought that the Christian message had made me more of a moral person. It made me want it to be more ethical to to help people more and to be just to be a better person. And I was afraid that if I left the Christian faith and I left the church that I would have nothing to guide my morality. Like there'd be no there'd be no moral compass. There'd be no way to know how to behave. And I thought, you know, my it might be bad. It might be bad for me if I become just kind of this immoral person who cared about nothing but himself the whole time. And so I worried about it. But once I left the faith, it had absolutely no effect on me in terms of my morality. And I think if just you know, if you just use kind of objective criteria, I probably do, I probably have a higher morality now than I did then. And so I don't think it's just based on religion. But I think religion can be a catapult for somebody. So it can kind of drive them into a greater sense of concern for their fellow fellow human being. Yes, it. So what is the status of the stranger before Christ? So the thesis of my book is that all of us as human beings are, we are built to be concerned about those who are close to us. It's just part of our DNA, part of our genetic makeup, that we, as a species, like every other species, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about bumblebees or gorillas, or every species has something written into them that drives them to want to help the larger group that they are a part of. If we didn't have that in our DNA as a species, then like if it is every person for themselves with no concern for those who are connected with us, then we wouldn't survive as a species. Because without cooperation as a species, it's too easy to pick off every individual member for their, you know, the predators. And so we as humans have built into us the idea that is to us, and it's been clearly shown scientifically that we are most, we're going to care the most for those who are most closely genetically related to us. And so a mother is more likely to save her children from a house fire than to save strangers from a house fire. And it's just that's built into our genetic code. So we tend to help those who are close to us either biologically because we're related to them, or socially people who are friends with us, or who are in our neighborhood, or who are our community. We tend to want to help them more than people who are outsiders. And so that's, you know, to one of the reasons we have so many wars is because the people we're going to war with are often very different from us. And we don't understand them and we want what they have. And whereas, you know, we usually don't go to war with people within our own city. Like we don't start, I mean, people do, of course, lots of, lots of violence within. But we tend to be more interested in helping people close to us either biologically or socially. Within the Jewish tradition, in ancient Israel, there was, there was a difference that emerged. Within ancient Israel, as found in the Hebrew Bible, Israelites were to care not only for those who were their family and friends, but any Israelite who was in need was to be helped, even if they were a stranger, even if you didn't know them. Jesus inherited that view. And Jesus was raised thinking, of course, we need to help fellow Israelites. But because of his views of the coming day of judgment and that this day of judgment was going to affect everybody on our not simply the Israelites, he came to think that you should help all people, even, even people you've got nothing to do with who are not your religion, they're not your ethnicity, they're not your nationality, they're not, you know, related to you in any way, if they're a need, you're supposed to help them. And so the title of my book Love by Stranger is about the idea within Christianity that we should help anybody in need, regardless of whether they're close to us or not. I think that was a revolutionary thing. One of the things I argue in my book is that in the Western world, okay, so I'm not, I'm not dealing with Eastern philosophies or Eastern religions or Eastern culture, but within the Western world that comes out of the Roman Empire, the reason we have things like public hospitals and orphanages and old people's homes and private charities dealing with hunger and homelessness and governmental assistance of the poor. These things all can be traced to Christianity in the West. They didn't come out of the Roman world, the pagan world, the Greek and Roman world, they came out of Christianity. And so that's why I say that I think it's such a significant development and it's part of Christianity that I celebrate in the book. And it's not that I think that Christianity's always done great things, they've done very horrible things too, but this part of it is really good, I think. What I find also very interesting about Jesus and his teaching is that unlike say, well, the great philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, so on. People call themselves Christians, despite the fact that they are not theologians or they're not new testament scholars that you. So you're saying the followers of Plato normally would have to be philosophers to follow Plato? I understand that. I think that that's probably right. My sense is that a lot of people follow philosophers without knowing anything about the philosophers. And like in people, I mean, kids, kids I grew up in just like in Kansas who believed in the law of non-contradiction had no idea that this is something Aristotle taught. They just seem bright to them. Or the idea that you die and your soul lives on. Well, that's, that's an idea that Plato popularized. The idea of Plato popularized, they just think it's true. But you're right, they don't call themselves platenists, unless they're trained in philosophy. Whereas I think it's because Christianity starting in about the fifth century, so 1600 years ago, Christianity became not just the religion of the Western world, but the culture of the Western world. And it shaped the ethics of the Western world. And for century after century after century, it was just assumed to be right. And so it just became part of us more than philosophy does. I mean, if you want to become a platonic philosopher, you really have to study Plato. But if you want to live in the Christian world, you're basically born into the Christian world. You see what I mean. Of course, and I guess me being coming from an Eastern country where Christianity is not the common assumption, we have very different like built in assumptions to our culture. Yeah. Right. I know this is part of the problem we have in a world where, you know, we're all together in this world. And we can all communicate with each other now, but we all are raised in particular ways and the ways of others and the thinking of others seems so strange to us. We think they're just going to be wrong, right? Because our common sense isn't their common sense. But in the ancient world, you didn't know what they're, I mean, you know, people who lived in Rome had no idea what was going on someplace in China, for example. You know, they might have heard something from some traders along the Silk Road or something, but basically they didn't have any interactions. But when you have the interactions and you really know what they think, it just seems so weird. Because it's not what I think. And what I think is kind of obviously true isn't what they think is obviously true. How does Jesus is teaching changes the Western world's view about life and death? So that's a good question because my view is that Jesus own teachings are not the teachings of his followers about life and death. I talked about this in another book I wrote before this one. The book was called Heaven and Hell. And most people in the world I grew up in and I would say probably most people in the Western world for, you know, 1600 years have thought that the way it works is, you know, that you live, you know, you come into being when you're born. And when you die, your soul lives on, but your body dies. And so your body decomposes, it decays, it disappears, it's no more. But your soul lives on. And it goes either to Heaven to be rewarded or to hell to be punished. And that's the common view even among people who are not Christian believers, but they just kind of think that's what happens. And it definitely is the view among most Christians. And they think that that's taught in the Bible. And they think that that was Jesus view. They just, they just assume it was. What I argue in my book, Heaven and Hell is that this idea that your body dies and your soul lives on to be rewarded or to be punished is never found in the Hebrew Bible at all in the Old Testament. And it's not the teachings of Jesus. And so the question in my book is, where to come from then? And why do Christians think that's the right view? They think it's the right view, it's because that's what they were raised with. And they were taught that that's what the Bible teaches. But my book shows, in fact, the Bible doesn't teach that Jesus own view. Actually, it's different from most of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. Most of most of the authors of the Old Testament think that when you die, that's the end of the story. You don't have an afterlife anymore than, you know, if you swat a mosquito, you know, the mosquito doesn't keep you. There's not a soul that lives on. It's an animal dies. And in the Old Testament, we are created as finite beings who were brought to life for a while. Then we die and we don't live anymore. And Jesus had the idea that had been started within Judaism about 200 years earlier. It's not found very often in the Hebrew Bible. It's found in maybe one book of the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Daniel. The idea that Jesus had that was common in his day was that what will happen is that when the body dies and on the day of judgment, it's going to be brought back to life. And just as you live when your breath is in you or your spirit is within you, what happens is at the end of time, the day of judgment, God puts the spirit back into the body, puts the soul back into it. He breathes life back into the body and everybody is raised from the dead who's ever lived. When that happens, those who have disobeyed God will be shown their error of their ways and will be ruthlessly destroyed for all time. Those who have sided with God will be rewarded and brought into God's kingdom. So this is a view that scholars call an apocalyptic form of Judaism, that the apocalypse is coming soon and that there will be a resurrection of dead bodies. So it's not that your soul dies and goes to heaven or hell. It's the old Jewish view that the human being is not two separate things, the human being is one thing, soul and body together. And that when they're together, you're alive, when they, when they're, when you die, they need the one of them exists anymore. And so Jesus had that view. So that means the only way to come back to, the only way to live after death is for the soul to come back into the body, the resurrection. His followers, starting in the second century or so, were far more influenced by Greek ways of thinking about the body and soul than Jewish ways. Greek ways especially found in Plato, who separated the soul and the body and the soul will live on, the body will not. Christians picked up on that view and it's been the standard view for, you know, since the second century, basically. And so, so my point about the Jesus view of life and death, I don't think is, is held by very many Christians today at all. Now, this, this is a question that I would like to ask someone who's of an agnostic view. Why was Jesus crucified? Because I know that the traditional Christian view is pretty obvious. He claimed divinity, the powers that be did not like it all that much. And they viewed as blasphemy. And they didn't want to do the dirty work, so they sent him to the Romans. But if what you presented in the book, "Laftei Stranger" is true, that Jesus was this very devout and adherent member of the Jewish faith, then I guess the logical conclusion would be that he would end up in a rather cushy job at the Sanhedrin or something like that. But is that what happens to him? Yeah, I don't think he'd end up with a cushy job in the Sanhedrin because he actually criticized them as having their own views. And, you know, even the New Testament does not say that Jesus got killed for calling himself divine. Not in the gospels. The reason all the gospels agree, he got killed for calling himself the king of the Jews. He got crucified because he called himself the king of the Jews. That's the question that's brought up at his trial before Pontius Pilate. It was Pontius Pilate who killed him, the Roman governor. He asks, "Simultist trial, are you the king of the Jews?" Jesus either says nothing or he suggests that maybe he is. And he's crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews. And the placard over his head is this man was the king of the Jews mocking him. So that's the reason he gets crucified in the New Testament. And I think it's right. It's right because Jesus was thought by some of his followers to be the Messiah. The Messiah in Jewish thinking was going to be the future king, the future ruler of Israel. Jesus was claiming to be that king. I think Jesus really thought that when the day of judgment came, God would bring in his kingdom. And there has to be a king to rule the kingdom. And Jesus thought he would be the king. He's the one who would rule the kingdom. And he taught his disciples this. He taught his disciples that they too would be rulers with him in the kingdom. The word got out that that's what he was saying. And that's why Pontius Pilate crucified him because he was calling himself the future king of the Jews. And that was a capital offense. The reason that they would crucify somebody for that is for Jesus to become the king would mean that Rome could no longer rule Israel. And that would mean that Jesus would have to raise an army and destroy in Pilate's mind. Pilate's saying, well, if you're the king, that means you've got to destroy us to get there. And so that's insurrection. So they, they, they, cruised out for insurrection. I think that's clear in the Bible itself. I don't think that that's just an agnostic view. I mean, it's the view I had when I was a Christian too. So it's not, it's not because he offended Pharisees or he offended Sadducees per se or not because he called himself God. It's because he was seen to be an insurrectionist. How do, how do does Jesus and his teaching in some ways fuse religious belief and practical ethics in the book? You've mentioned that religion before Jesus, I guess minus Judaism, have a rather radical separation between what you believe and what you do. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, we think Roman religions. So there were, there are hundreds, thousands of Greek and Roman religions. And there were lots of differences among them, but there were some commonalities roughly speaking in the, in the Greek and Roman worlds, which is true. I think it's true of a lot of, a lot of polytheistic religions elsewhere outside the Western world, but within the Western world, Greek and Roman religions were a person who worshiped many gods. Most people did worship many gods. And the gods principally wanted to be worshipped and religion was about how you worship them. And worshipping them entailed, praying to them, acknowledging their greatness, and asking them for things and thanking them for things, because the gods were providing you with things you could not provide yourself. You can't make sure the sun goes up every day. You can't make sure the crops grow. You can't make sure that a woman survives when she gives birth to a child. You can't make sure that a person gets well once they're sick. You can't make sure that you win the war. There are also most things in life. We really can't control, but the gods can in these religions. And so we pray to the gods for their help and their assistance, and we thank them when they provide it. And we give them things. So that would make them happy. And so you make offerings to the gods. Sometimes it means an animal sacrifice. You sacrifice an animal to the God. And you burn the parts that the God want and creates an aroma that feeds them. And so you burn the fat and the bones. But then you have a party. You eat to meat. And so, and it's a festival in honor of a God. Gods like that. But it doesn't, the offerings to the gods don't have to be animal sacrifices. If you're eating a meal at home, you can thank the God of the house, the house that you're in by taking some of the wine and putting it on the hearth or taking a little bit of the grain that you've made the bread out of and throwing it into the fire. There are things you can offer the gods. So in Greek and Roman religions, it was all about worshiping the gods mainly through prayer and offerings. And the gods weren't that concerned about how you lived your lives. You know, they didn't really mind. I mean, they didn't want you murdering people and things, especially relatives. They weren't big on that. But the main thing, they didn't care whether you so much if you weren't faithful to your spouse or if you were mean to other people or if you did like rotten things or cheated on your taxes or they didn't care about things like that. Within Judaism though, Judaism, the law of Moses entails both how to worship God and how to relate to one another within the community. And so there are laws about not committing adultery, not stealing, not bearing false witness, not, I mean, there are things you cannot do and there are things you need to do. You need to keep the Sabbath day. You need to keep the festivals. You need to keep kosher. And so there are rules about how to live your life within Judaism. Jesus was a Jew and he inherited that idea and Jesus Jewish ethical teachings were very much intricate within his religion. Jesus thought that those who behaved properly before God would be either ones who would be saved. When Jesus died and his followers came to think he got raised from the dead, that shifted the emphasis within Christianity. Christianity was less about helping those in need and more about revering Jesus who died for your sins and was raised from the dead. Doing that did have ethical implications. But the ethics weren't going to save you. Your good behavior was not going to save you. You're believing in Christ is going to save you. And if you did believe in Christ, you'd behave ethically. Jesus, I don't think Jesus taught that. Jesus did not teach that believing in his death and resurrection is a proclamation. He taught you need to do what God wants and he'll bring you into the kingdom. And I think the central premise or the starting premise of both Judaism and Christianity is that there's one God and all the other commandments and preserves flow from that. Whereas I think all more religions before the advent of Judaism and Christianity believe in Christianity. in the plurality of gods. Yeah, you know, you can make the case that even within earliest Judaism there was the recognition that there were many gods. And so when you read the Ten Commandments, you know, first off, right at the beginning is, you shall have no other gods before me. There the commandment is not, I am the only God. It presupposes. There are other gods, but you're not supposed to worship them. You're supposed to worship only this God. And so that, so I think scholars wouldn't call that monotheism. They would call that Hano-theism or Hano-theism, which means there are lots of gods, but this is the only one we're going to worship. By the time Jesus lived, most Jews, I think, had become monotheistic. Yeah, there's really only one God. And Christians, of course, pick up on that too. Christians think there is only one God, but it gets complicated with Christianity as soon as they say that Jesus is also God. And he's not God the Father. Jesus is God and God the Father are God. And then they said, and the Holy Spirit is also God. And so, and the Holy Spirit is not Jesus. And Jesus is not the Spirit, it's not God. And so many people said, well, okay, so you've got three gods. And Christians insisted, or the doctor Christians insisted, no, we have only one God. We just said there are three. Well, there are three, but they are one. How's that work? Well, that's the doctrine of the Trinity that emerges. But you could argue that Christians have these other divine beings that they that they revere. Of course, yeah, the first like five centuries of the Christian church was about like, what is the blessed Trinity? Yeah, well, especially in the fourth, especially toward the end of the fourth century, which they had to figure it out because they were firmly committed that Jesus is fully God and God is fully God. And they're not the same thing. So how does it work? So they come up with the Trinity. And I explain to my students that the Trinity, it's not logical in the sense that Western logic works, or it doesn't follow Aristotelian logic. And it doesn't work mathematically. You've got three beings and all of them are equally God, but there's only one God, like mathematically that doesn't work. But this is theological thinking. It's not philosophical thinking, strictly philosophical thinking, or mathematical thinking. It's theological thinking. And so you can't apply, you know, you can't apply math and that Aristotelian logic necessarily to theology. How does the Western world's understanding of love change because of Jesus? So love was a major form of discussion in the world generally, of course, in society. It always has been among people, as long as we've had thinking human beings, they've thought about what love is. And in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the Christianity emerged out of. There's a lot of discussion about love. The main interests among people who talked about love and especially philosophers were the kind of love that involves deep passionate love, especially sexual attraction, what that's all about because it's such a powerful emotion for humans. And what friendly love is about? Where you're friendly with people and you connect with people and you like people. And so what are those two different kinds of love and how do they relate to each other or do they relate to each other and how do we promote them and how do we correctly observe them in ways that are helpful rather than hurtful. So within the Christian tradition, the idea is that love is not simply either a passion for somebody or a kind of good feeling towards somebody, liking somebody or having passion for somebody, that love really is an action, that there's another kind of love which is where you help somebody in need. They pick Christians picked this up, Jesus picked it up from Judaism and in Judaism, loving your neighbor did not mean necessarily engaging in like passionate sexual activity with them and it didn't necessarily mean even liking them, loving your neighbor meant helping them out. So when the Hebrew Bible says, love your neighbor as yourself, it's not talking about like a feeling you have about yourself. You treat yourself well, if you're hungry, you eat. If you need clothing, you get clothing. If you need shelter, you get shelter. And if your neighbor is hungry or needs clothing or needs shelter, you provide that for them as well. So love there isn't passion for somebody and it's not necessarily liking them, it's helping them. Christians picked up on that. And it was Jesus' view, he insisted on it, his followers insisted on it, and they actually started using a whole new, a different word for it than that used in Greek and Roman, in Greek moral philosophy. They started using this word agape, which was not a noun used in the ancient world until the Jewish translation of the Old Testament, but agape becomes a big thing than with Christianity. And that's the kind of love that Christians emphasize. But once it came around, that's how you need to treat others, then that, you know, it changed how people thought about ethics. Okay. Finally, I suppose the audience that are largely gravitated towards your scholarly work consists of evangelicals who have this rather rigid view, biblical inerity in our looking for ways to challenge you. Or agnostics who, I guess, wish to have their views about the Bible and Christianity confirmed. So I wonder, what do you hope that they would get out of reading your work? I would say there's a third audience from my work, which is more liberal Christians who are not evangelicals, but who want to understand Jesus and the Bible better on historical terms. And so I think those are the three audiences. I would like Christians to recognize that the morality that Jesus taught is a morality that they should follow if they are Christian. And that there are a lot of Christians in the world today who embrace other values that are quite contrary to the values of Jesus. And I think that's especially evident in the world we live in where, as we were saying before, there's so much, we know so much about the other parts of the world. And people have often become more focused on their own communities and the people, their family and friends, to the exclusion of outsiders. And you have Christians saying that that's what the Bible teaches you. You need to be careful your own. The Bible actually says you need to help outsiders. And this becomes especially problematic because there are so many people who think that if somebody is not like me, there's something wrong with them. And so in my, you know, in American culture right now, there's a movement toward nationalism, toward white nationalism, toward racism, toward, you know, if somebody is different than, you know, somehow they're opposed to God and we should like go after them. And that's completely wrong from a Christian point of view. So I hope Christians would recognize what the teachings of Jesus are that you need to love others who are different from you. That's his whole point. For the Christian audience, I think one thing I hope is that they recognize that there's really something good about Christianity, of my agnostic friends, my atheist friends. Some of them are ex-7 Geolachos who have left the faith. Many of them are raised agnostic or atheists who really just think Christianity is a major disaster on the face of the planet. And they think that nothing good has ever come out of Christianity. And you know, it's easy to make a long list of bad things that Christians have done. The destruction of pagan art and architecture in the Antigua. The opposition to Jews, the hatred of Jews, the pogroms leading to the Holocaust. These were Christian incentives, originally. The hatred of Muslims in the West, and the crusades leading to modern Islamophobia. The hatred of those who believed differently from you, leading to inquisitions and torturing heretics to death. People you didn't agree with because of their belief. And the justification for slavery and the justification for wars in the name of Christ. And so they have a long list of things that Christianity is awful. And they know a lot of Christians today who are awful. And so they're Christianity is awful. But I want that reader to realize that in fact, Christianity is done a lot of good for the world. It brought us public hospitals. People don't believe me when I tell them that, but you can prove it that they, without Christianity in the West, this is what brought about public hospitals and orphanages and poor people's homes and charity relief and you know, disaster relief and private charity. of all kinds and governmental assistance to those in need. These are Christian innovations. So it's wrong to say that Christianity is a horrible thing and nothing good about it. There's a lot of good about it. And so I basically want both sides to see something different. And so I hope I hope the book goes to, you know, some way to do some of that. Yeah, you mentioned charity and we started with the Bartonman Blossess charity. So I guess you're doing something adhered to Christian ethics. Yeah, well, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a believer in Jesus because I don't believe in God. But I sometimes I call myself a Christian atheist. I'm an atheist. I'm an agnostic because I really don't know. Yeah, I don't know if there's a superior being in the universe. But I don't believe there is. I'm an atheist that way. I don't believe there's a superior being. But I also believe that the teachings of Jesus to help those in need are something we all need to take seriously and probably and more seriously than we do. And to that extent, I consider myself a follower of Jesus' ethical teachings. Thank you very much, Dr. Barterman for the gift of your time and your insights. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.