Transcription
The ability to read and write is almost taken for granted in the modern Western World. I certainly don't think twice about being able to read a book or a road sign or write a script for a podcast. Not so for the ancient world. And the name of the Apostle Peter is given to several texts, including First and Second Peter, found in the New Testament. But would a rural fisherman from Galilee have been able to write well enough to compose whole texts? Is it likely that he would have learned to write in later life? And if he didn't write then, who composed the works attributed to him? We'll be getting into all of that and so much more. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman, the only show where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin.
[Music]
The ability to read and write in the ancient world was very clearly restricted to the wealthy. So why are so many written works attributed to the Apostle Peter? Was he a rarity, a literate peasant, or is something else going on here? Before all of that, but hi, how you doing today?
Doing well. Um, glad I'm in, uh, England rather than the US for climate, if nothing else.
Yeah, there was a, I actually, last week, no, two weeks ago, when I was driving to pick up my daughter from summer camp, had to pull over because there was a fire on the grass in on the like the central strip going down the highway. There was just a patch of grass on fire. And then the other side of the road, I, I had to pull over and call the fire department. It's just been so hot and so dry here. Everything is just like a tinderbox.
Yeah, okay. Right. Well, huh. No, I'm telling you, the thing is, it's not, didn't get any better. No, it's, it's heading in a certain direction. And, yeah, okay. God help it's not the direction that gives us more rain. Yeah. Yeah.
So how, how is London? Are you enjoying yourself?
Oh, yeah. Well, how, how does one not? I mean, you know, London's, I'm sure I've said this, I mean, London's one of the great cities in the world and it's inexhaustible and there's so much to do here. I mean, you know, I don't do it, I sit around reading my books and writing, but I mean, but if I wanted to do things, there's all sorts of things. One, one thing I am doing, um, this summer, which, what usually when I come to London for a stretch, I'll have a, uh, a special dinner with some of my, uh, people on my blog. Um, and so, uh, it's a, you know, it gives me a chance to hang out in London all day, then I go and have a blog dinner. So these are just people, you, I just write a note to people, if people who are on my blog, I just send a note, okay, I'm gonna be in London and, uh, let's get together for dinner this night, you know, and I'll maybe do seven or eight people, just enough to keep a conversation, you know, so it doesn't get, get out of hand with too many people. I do that most places that I go these days and, um, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun because just meeting people from different backgrounds, uh, who do different things, uh, and often I'll do two or three of these things in London over the summer because, uh, you get different people and they're all interested. They're interested in the stuff we do, the stuff we do on the podcast, the stuff I do on my blog. And, uh, and so it's just, uh, yeah, it's, it's lovely, lovely things.
I'm looking forward to that. Next, it sounds like fun. I hope to be able to catch one of them one day. Um, our trips to the UK so far haven't really coincided, um, and my, my family are much further north, so I'm not around London very much these days. One day.
Well, you know, and, and people listening don't know, we've never met each other face to face.
No. Wow. Huh.
We could, we could trade glasses. We could, we could, that would, that would confuse some people.
That would confuse. No, I don't think so. I think the hair might be a giveaway.
I'll like find a costume for you or something.
Yeah, okay. Oh, gosh. Well, we should, we should get into some academic New Testament scholarship type stuff rather than, I mean, I would very happily just chat and and swap costumes all day long, but I suspect that's not what people are here for. So who is Peter and what does the New Testament say about him?
Right. So, um, so Peter is a nickname. Um, this is somebody whose name was actually Simon. Um, before the New Testament, there was no name Peter. That was never used as a name in any circles, Jewish, Greek, any, I mean, whatever. Um, so it comes from the New Testament. Uh, the word Peter is, uh, from the Greek word Petros, which means rock. And it's the nickname that Jesus gave this person named Simon. Simon was his first disciple and his closest disciple. And at some point, Peter, uh, Jes, Jesus gave him the nickname of Peter. Uh, he calls him the rock. And so, I, in modern parlance, I guess we'd be calling him Rocky or something. But he, but he was, uh, he's a rock. And, and I've always thought it's a little bit, a little bit ironic, maybe Jesus was trying to be ironic, because when you read the Gospels, this disciple Simon Peter, uh, he, he is not a solid rock. He's more like shifting sand. He's all over the place. He's always putting his foot in his mouth. He's always doing the wrong thing. He ends up, uh, you know, denying that he even knows Jesus and at the end. And, you know, he's not a solid rock at all. So I, I've sometimes wondered about this name. But the name, in, by the way, Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic, and the, the name in Aramaic is Kephas. That's the word for rock in, uh, in Aramaic. And so that gets translated in English Bibles as Cephas. And so scholars usually have thought that Cephas and Peter are the same person, in part because, uh, there's, you know, they have the same nickname and they're both from. And, and in John chapter 1:41, it says, you know, it translates Cephas as Peter.
So, do we know anything about his background prior to joining Jesus?
Uh, well, we know some things. I mean, so he's, he's talked about in all four Gospels. And so we have independent, um, testimonies about who he was and what he did. The testimonies all agree with each other. Um, I'm not saying that all four Gospels are completely independent of each other, but we have different stories and different Gospels about this figure. He, uh, uh, in the Gospels, he is a fisherman, uh, from, in rural, uh, Galilee. Um, he, uh, uh, and so he fishes on the Sea of Galilee. He's from the, the town of Capernaum, which is on the, um, if you go, if you go to Israel today, or if you see a map of Israel and you have the Sea of Galilee, it's a bit of a misnomer. It's not a sea, it's, it's like a, it's a body of water, it's like a lake. It's not a huge lake, you can see across it. Uh, but he fished on that lake. And, and, um, his, his hometown is on the, Capernaum is on the western bank of the, uh, of the, the Sea of Galilee. And in the Gospels, he has a brother named, uh, Andrew. And both of them are called by Jesus to be his disciples, and they appear to have been his first two disciples. And Simon, uh, eventually then becomes sort of like the head disciple.
So archaeologists have associated Capernaum with the archaeological site of Tell Hum. And do you know whether the site suggests that its inhabitants would have been educated people?
Oh, well, yeah. So that's the relevant question. Because if, if you got these books that claim to be written by Peter, then the question is, could Peter write? Had a very good way to begin answering that question is to figure out what his background was and what kind of education he might have had. And that would be completely dependent on his circumstances. If, um, if Jesus had a disciple who had grown up in an elite Roman family in Rome, uh, then, you know, that'd be one thing. Person like that could write. What about a, a fisherman in rural Galilee? Could somebody like that write? And so the first step is, what you're saying, you have to to see what the environment was. The city, uh, Capernaum has been excavated by, um, by archaeologists. And most people who go to Israel, um, uh, who go up into G, the Galilee, will visit Capernaum because the archaeological site is very interesting. Um, but the question is, what was it like in Jesus' day or in Peter's, in Peter's day? And we have pretty good information about it. Um, it was a small place. Um, it was a very, very poor place. The archaeologists found no evidence of any public buildings of any kind there. No synagogue at the, in the time of Peter, um, has been discovered. There's a, if you go there, there's a fantastic synagogue that everybody visits and, and it's, and you'll see pictures of it everywhere, but it's, it's from about 300 or 400 years after Peter. Uh, and so there's no evidence of there one being in his day. There no paved roads. There's no sign of wealth in the city. The kinds of things you look for is you look for like nice mosaics, you know, or, or, um, various kinds of, uh, ornamentation and things, or large, large luxurious houses. There's nothing like that. The houses were very, very basic, made out of basalt, um, rock, and you can still see the foundations of, you know, lower walls of a number of them. Small, uh, probably insulated with straw or animal manure with maybe thatched roofs. And, uh, so it's a small, it's a small town, um, in a rural area of of Galilee.
Based on that information, is it likely that really anyone in the village would have had any kind of literary education?
So there have been a lot of studies of literacy in the ancient world. That would be, if people are interested in this, it'd be well worth their, uh, taking a look at some of these studies because they're very sophisticated. And we don't have the kinds of demographic information that we can get, you know, to try and figure out what, what were, what was writing like, you know, who was learning to write, who could write in the 1880s, you know, we have good records for that kind of thing, or the 1920s, but you don't for the 20s of the Common Era. Uh, but there, there is evidence. There is evidence and people have gone through the evidence quite carefully, every piece of evidence. The, the classic study of literacy broadly in the Roman world at about this time is by William Harris in a book called Ancient Literacy. It's a classic in the field now. And Harris estimates that at the best of times in the Greek and Roman Worlds, at the best of times, maybe 10 to 15% of the population could read, uh, and write. 10 or 15%. So it means 85 to 90% were illiterate. And by write, that means something like be able to sign your name. Um, it doesn't mean to be able to compose a book. Very, very few people could do that. The people who were educated were, as you said, uh, they had to be. Well, there are actually two groups of people who could be educated. There were the upper class elite who had wealth, uh, and there could be slaves who were educated in order to help the upper class elite with wealth. And so if you weren't a slave or very rich, your chances of getting education were, uh, very, very slim. And that's because, you know, there weren't child labor laws. And the normal way of working, especially in rural areas, is that everybody in the family worked on the farm. They'd have a farm plot, a small plot, and everybody would have to work and do whatever it could be done to keep the family sustained. And so kids started working when they were young. And so they didn't, they didn't have time for school. And in places like Capernaum, there, there almost certainly wasn't a school. And so it seems, it seems, um, that it's really highly unlikely that Peter would have had an education. Especially because we're not talking about the broader empire where 10 to 15% might have been literate. There's a study of literacy in Rome and Palestine, but I think that's what it's called, Literacy in Roman Palestine, by Catherine Hez R. And she, she maintains that the literacy rate in Peter's time, around that part of the world, was more like three or four percent who could read or write. And once again, you're dealing with those three or four percent would have lived in the major cities and they would have been wealthy. And, uh, none of that's true for Peter.
Thank you. We are going to take a very brief break, and then we'll be back. We're going to talk about whether Peter received education in later life and then look at some of the texts that are attributed to him. So please come back and join us. If you're enjoying the Misquoting Jesus podcast, you'd probably like my online courses as well. I've produced a number so far with multi-lecture courses on the New Testament Gospels and the books of the Pentateuch, standalone lectures on the Christmas story and the earliest Christian views of Jesus, and a six-hour debate on whether Jesus was actually raised from the dead. If you're interested, check them out at BartEhrman.com. You'll receive a discount on your purchase simply by entering the code MJPodcast.
So if Peter most likely didn't receive any kind of education in his childhood or as adolescence, is it possible that he may have received something in later life, maybe after Jesus' death?
Yeah, you know, I wondered about that, and people have suggested it, uh, to me as well. Um, you know, to, to learn to read and write would take many years. So kids going through school, I mean, they didn't, it wasn't like you, you could do it in six months. It was years and years to, and they would learn to read first. So they didn't have reading and writing done at the same time in the curriculum the way we do today. Uh, you would read, learn how to read, you'd recognize the letters, learn how to put them together, learn how to pronounce the syllables, learn how to pronounce the words, learn how to read a sentence, do all that. Then you'd learn how to actually make the letters and then write the letters. And then like even later than that, it's composition. We're talking about a very long, many-year process. And so Peter didn't go through that, I'm sure. Um, but so some people have said, look, he, you know, he was a missionary and so he went abroad, he must have learned Greek, right? Well, he, you know, he may have learned how to speak some rough Greek, like, um, like, you know, um, today, um, you know, we have lots of, we have lots of immigrants in our country. I, I know a number of immigrants, uh, from, um, Central America in, in Durham. Fantastic people, fantastic people, very, very smart. Their English is, uh, is good enough for me to, to talk with them, but it's not, you know, it's not great. And they would not be able to write. You know, they wouldn't be able to write anything in, in English. And so, um, so was there, because really what we're talking about here, I guess, we didn't get to this part, but, you know, these books that we talk about Peter having written, they're written in Greek. He spoke Aramaic. And so it's not just getting an education, it's getting an education in a second language. And so, were, were there facilities for to get a further education in the ancient world? The answer is no. There was not. Um, uh, I, I wondered about that at one point, and I, uh, I actually looked into it and asked experts in ancient education about it. And it's a definite no. There was not. It's not like, you know, you could go to the, um, Capernaum High School for evening school courses for adults. There wasn't a high school, and there was no evening school anywhere. And so, no, he would not. There's no evidence of people learning literacy after they were children in the ancient world.
So if it's unlikely that Peter was literate at any stage in his life, what writings do we have that have been attributed to him?
Well, we have two in the New Testament. Um, so two letters, First and Second Peter. Some of the epist, two of the epistles of the New Testament. Outside the New Testament, we have a number of writings attributed to him. We have a gospel allegedly by Peter, which he actually claims to be the author. Peter claims to be by Peter. Um, uh, that nobody thinks Peter wrote. It's a fantastic gospel. We have a letter that Peter wrote to, uh, James, the brother of Jesus, who is the leader of the church in Jerusalem, where Peter trashes the Apostle Paul, not by name, but, but attacks the man who is my enemy, who preaches a lawless gospel, uh, to the Gentiles. And so it's like, it's a, salvation apart from the law to the Gentiles. It's Paul. We have three apocalypses that claim to be written by Peter. One of them is our first instance of a guided tour of heaven and hell that Jesus gives Peter, written in the first person by Peter. Another is an account by a completely different author who, uh, observes Jesus' crucifixion and can't understand why the divine Christ within Jesus has left Jesus and looks like Jesus and is talking to him, Peter, while Jesus is being crucified. It's a very confusing text. It's a Gnostic text. Fantastic. And then we have, we have other letters written by Peter, Peter to Philip, and so forth. We, so we have a, we have a large number of books that claim, uh, to be written by Peter. None of them in Aramaic, all of them in Greek. Or the apocalypse, Peter, I mentioned one of them is in Coptic.
Does the language or the style of writing used in these different texts give us any clues as to what kinds of people could have written them?
Well, let me just stick with First and Second Peter because they're the ones that most people would be, uh, be interested in because they are in the New Testament and they definitely claim to be written by this person Peter. And if they weren't written by this person Peter, that would cause a lot of readers problems. Um, in the modern world, we'd call that a forgery. You know, if I write a, if I write a book on, uh, ancient Assyria and claim to be, uh, Megan Lewis, but in fact, I'm Bart Ehrman, you know, and I publish it in the name of Megan Lewis, like, you know, that's, that's not good. And so, so it would be that kind of situation. And, you know, you have a, I, all the time, I have people tell me that that was an accepted practice in the ancient world to write in the name of a famous person. And often people say, you know, nobody took it seriously, or everybody knew it was going on, nobody, nobody cared. It wasn't like a moral issue. And that's just wrong, just flat out wrong. Uh, and if people want to see why it's flat out, I wrote two books just on this issue, showing that in fact, this phenomenon was, it was widespread, but it was not accepted in, uh, in wider society. In any event, the question is, First and Second Peter. One, so there are very good reasons for thinking that whoever wrote Second Peter did not write First Peter. Their writing styles are very different. Um, so, uh, even, there are even, even evangelical scholars will sometimes say that, yeah, they can't be the same person. Um, and so, uh, so usually, uh, if somebody wants to say one of them was written by Peter, they'll say, well, First Peter was, and Second Peter is a later imitation of some kind. First Peter, though, I think could not have been written by Peter. It is written in very elegant Greek. It isn't like a, I mean, it's the, the Greek is high level. My, you know, I have, you know, I have really top-level students in at Chapel Hill, undergraduate students who have 16 years of education under their belt, who could not write a book like that. And so somebody, in terms of the literary style, like he uses rhetorical, he uses rhetorical techniques, and he uses, uh, tropes, and he uses all sorts of grammatical things that are, uh, that are sophisticated. They're not, they're not somebody writing in a second language, let alone an Aramaic language. So, uh, so I don't, I, I think the writing itself precludes the possibility of Peter having written it.
Okay. So if, if Peter couldn't have written First Peter, is it possible that he dictated it or used a secretary or someone to kind of elevate his, his writing style, maybe?
Yeah, well, that's what, you know, that's what we always heard and learned, learned, uh, even when I was in graduate school, I had professors saying that. At one point, I decided to look into it and to see what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. Um, we know a lot about secretaries because we have a lot of references to secretaries, and we know, we know how they worked, we know what they did. And we have no instance anywhere in the Greek and Roman worlds of somebody writing a kind of a treatise like this, like First Peter, a five-chapter treatise, that has been dictated to him in some of the language where, like Peter, suppose Peter dictates it in Aramaic, and this scribe would translate it and make it really high-level rhetorical Greek. There is no analogy for that that I have ever found, and I've looked at everything I could. I spent, I spent a long time looking up every reference to secretaries in every Greek and Roman source that mentioned them. I can't, I couldn't find anything like that. Um, and so, uh, you know, it's hard enough to think that Pet, that somebody like Peter, who was an Aramaic speaker, who was uneducated, could dictate something at that level in Aramaic, you know, that literary level in Aramaic. And so, uh, uh, he couldn't have done it in Greek. And whether a secretary translated or not, I mean, you can think that if you want, but, you know, for historians, we'd like to see, like, is this something that happens before? You know, it'd be kind of like, you know, you say that somebody writing a letter in the, in the 1950s, they had a secretary put it down on their word processor on their computer. So, well, okay, you know, you can think that if you want, but were there word processors then? So it's that kind of thing. Were there secretaries who did that sort of thing? So far as we know, no. Again, I have a discussion with this where I actually cite the data in, uh, both of my books on forgery.
Now, if people really want to argue that Peter did write First Peter, one of the things that they might look for is a familiarity with Hebrew scriptures that you may expect, uh, someone from his background to have. Do we see this kind of familiarity coming through in the text?
Well, um, so one thing I'll say is that it's, it's unlikely that a fisherman who's a, who's a lower-class laborer, a hand-to-mouth kind of existence, would have been memorizing scripture. Then any more than, you know, some today who's, I mean, you know, today people can read scripture and memorize it. It's very hard to memorize things if you can't read. Um, the author of First Peter knows the, the, knows the Old Testament extremely well. He's, and so, but the other point about it is, he doesn't appear to know the Hebrew Bible. He knows the Greek Bible. The Bible is translated into Greek before the New Testament period, in order to allow Jews from around the world to be able to read it, because most, most Jews didn't live in Israel anymore than most people do now. Most Jews do now, most Jews don't today don't live in Israel. They didn't then either. And so in America, most Jews read, read the Bible in English. And, um, and that was the same throughout the Greek world, even more so, uh, than the now, that they would read in Greek. So this is a person who didn't live in Israel, who didn't know the Hebrew Bible, who, who read this, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, and he uses the Greek Bible in order to support his views throughout his, throughout his book. So he definitely knew the Greek Old Testament. But there's nothing to suggest that, like an Aramaic, uh, speaking Galilean, he, that he knew the Hebrew Bible at all.
If anyone wanted to make like a last, final Hail Mary argument that Peter did write them, is there anything in these texts that suggests that the apost, the Apostle Peter could have tangentially written them?
The only reason anybody would possibly think that this book was written by Peter is because the author begins by calling himself Peter. If you didn't have that name to begin the book, you definitely, there would be nothing to suggest that this is written by one of Jesus' disciples from, uh, from Israel, uh, who was an Aramaic speaker. And nothing about Peter himself prior. Nothing. In fact, some scholars have pointed out that the theology in this book, in First Peter, is very close in many ways to the theology of the Apostle Paul. If the author had called himself Paul instead of Peter, then probably most people would think that this is an authentic Pauline letter because it sounds, it's the theology is very much like Paul's. And so I think the one thing going for it is, um, is that it's, you know, that, that it calls itself Peter. But so do all these other books. Um, you know, writing books in the name of Peter was something of a cottage industry in early Christianity. It's like, you know, if you want authority for your views, man, you write it by calling yourself Peter, and then people pay attention to your writing. Otherwise, you know, if you give yourself your actual name, you know, you're, you're some nobody, nobody's ever heard of. You know, you're like Jacob of Antioch. Who's that? I don't know. So, but, you know, you're not going to read his book. But if you read, "Peter," yeah, I'll read that. And so, so people were calling themselves that to get their views read. And, and that happened in every other instance. I think it probably happened in this instance as well.
So, apart from his lack of literacy, is there any other reason for thinking that Peter most definitely didn't write these texts?
Well, there, there's one, you know, there are other things. And in my books, I, I actually deal with First Peter in both of my forgery books. Uh, the, uh, one other thing that's pretty interesting is that the, that the book is usually thought to have been written from Rome. And people think, ah, Peter's in Rome, okay, so that's it. And there's actually no, there's not good historical evidence that Peter ever was in Rome. So, but apart from that, the reason they think that is written in Rome is because the author ends by sending greetings to his readers from Babylon. You think, well, okay, that means it was written in Babylon, right? Now, everybody realizes that by saying he's writing from Babylon, he's giving Rome the code word that Christians used for Rome, namely Babylon. So you find Rome, for example, talked about as Babylon in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It's, uh, the great of Babylon is the city of Rome. And it became the name for the city of Rome. And so people say, so he's writing from Rome and he's giving it this Christian code name. But the thing is, when did they get this code name of Babylon? Babylon is the bad city in the, the Hebrew Bible. Babylon is the city that destroys Jerusalem under the, uh, under Nebuchadnezzar, King Nebuchadnezzar, in 586 BCE. And so, Nebuchadnezzar's armies, uh, destroyed Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, dispelled the Jewish people from there. And so that is a bad place, Babylon. Christians started calling Rome Babylon because Rome did the same thing. They came in, they destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70. They, they burned the temple, and it was a disaster. It's the second time the, uh, city had been destroyed and the temple burned by foreign power since the first time it happened with the Babylonians. Then the Christians who, uh, who know all about that from the Hebrew Bible started calling Rome Babylon. But the point is, Rome did that. Rome destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70. That's when Christians started calling Rome Babylon. Peter, according to tradition, was, uh, was martyred in the year 64. He wouldn't have been alive yet. That presents a problem.
Would have been alive? Yeah. It's, it's a problem. And so that's another, you know, that's an an additional reason for thinking that Peter didn't write it. It comes out that, you know, there's just so much evidence against Peter having written this that anyone who wants to think he did, as some people do, they really, they have to explain these things. And when you see the kinds of explanations they come up with, it's really kind of special pleading because it just, you know, it's, to me at least, it seemed pretty clear Peter did not write this.
I have one final question before we move on to our next segment. So you said earlier on that forgery was not an accepted, morally accepted practice in the ancient world, and that so many people were using the name Peter in their writings to gain legitimacy, to encourage people to read what they were writing, because you wouldn't just read something written by Jeremy. So how did ancient people try and differentiate between these kinds of forgeries and legitimate writings?
Oh, they did it all the time. I mean, some, you'll even have scholars claim that, you know, that, oh, nobody even bothered to check, you know, everybody just, you know, and it's just not true. There was an whole industry of trying to figure out which books were authentic and which ones weren't. And, and others got really upset if they found that somebody had forged something in their name, which happened. I mean, we have Roman authors who, who complain about people forging things in their name while they're still alive, obviously, because they're complaining about it. And so they, they did the, they used the same kind of tools that people would use today. They, they couldn't have been as sophisticated at it because they didn't have our technological advances, but they could, they could, they would look, for example, at writing style. Is this the style of writing of this author? What kind of points of view does this author set forth in this book? Is the kind of point of view that the, the alleged author himself actually had? And, and what kind of vocabulary is being used? And what kind of situation is being presupposed? And they, so they applied these various criteria, especially stylistic criteria. And Christians did this. Christians often, uh, talked about books that were Christian books that were forged. Uh, into the 4th century, you have people saying that, you know, Second Peter is a forgery, or, uh, the Book of Revelation is a forgery. Uh, they, they weren't speaking English, they used the, the Greek words for this, but the, the Greek words were equally nasty. One of them is just lies. This book is a lie is a word that they would use. And so, they, they certainly practiced this, and we have lots of instances of it that where they talk about it, doing it, and not being pleased when they find something that's for. And when, when Christians said, this book, in fact, is not written by this person, they said, well, it can't be in the New Testament then. And so you have those discussions going up through the 4th century.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. We are going to come back with some updates on what's going on in Bart's life. This is Bart's Weekly Update, where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr. Ehrman's book releases, speaking engagements, blog.org happenings, and online course launches. Now, but you and I obviously are on YouTube together quite a lot, but you do also talk to other people on YouTube. And I know that you've been doing some of that over the summer. So can you tell us about some of that?
Yeah, no, I, um, you know, I, I enjoy doing other interviews for other podcasts. I, I can't do as many as I'd like, but there are some that I really like doing. I did one recently with Alex Conor, who has this podcast called Within Reason. He has a huge following, and it's a really good podc. He's a, he's a really smart and intuitive, uh, intelligent guy. And so he wanted to interview me. I've done a couple of interviews with him. And he, uh, this one was on the Gospel of Judas. And so that was fun. We, we used to do a podcast on the Gospel of Judas, more than one, maybe. It's the most important discovery of a non-canonical gospel in recent times, and its discovery made quite a splash when it happened. And it's a very interesting gospel, connected closely with Judas Iscariot. And, and there are debates among scholars whether Judas is being portrayed as the bad guy here or the hero or something else. And so we, he and I had a long talk about that. And so that's, you know, it's, so when I do these podcasts, they tend to be either about a book I've written, um, or about, you know, something in my, in my field. Um, I wrote a book, actually, about this, the Gospel of Judas, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. But, uh, mainly people are just interested in this kind of topic. And so that's a, that's a good podcast to pay attention to. So I, we're not, we're not entirely sure, excuse me, when that will be released, but definitely take a look at Within Reason and keep your eyes open for that conversation with Bart. And as a last reminder for those who are interested, The Parables of Jesus course will be recorded this Saturday and Sunday, that's July 20th and 21st. This is your last chance to see AJ Levine live and to participate in the live Q&A. You can, uh, buy access to the course over at BartEhrman.com/Parables. And as ever, the code MJC will get you a discount on the price of that course. So definitely take a look at that. We are going to go to our next segment, which is Bart's
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Books. Seeking to expand your knowledge of biblical studies, in this segment Bart shares influential works shaping biblical scholarship. It's time for Bart's Books.
So Bart, what book are you going to be telling us about this week?
Well, you know, uh, when I, when I was in graduate school, I had, uh, a couple of professors who believed, unlike many then and many now, believed in actually reading the classics in the field. And their view was that these people who were writing these classic works were really smart. And, you know, and so many people write books now that try to like undo what others had said before. They're just, you know, they're really not at that intellectual level. So one of the great classics, I mean, arguably the classic for people who ask me, you know, where do I start reading about the historical Jesus? I always say, start with Albert Schweitzer. So Albert Schweitzer was a, just an absolutely, uh, amazing human being and scholar. He won the, no, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Um, his, uh, his, he's best known for for having given up a career as a, as an academic. He, a, he was an expert in philosophy and theology. He was also a major concert organist who wrote books on on pipe organs and wrote a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. But he went back, he went to medical school to become a medical missionary. And he, and he became a medical missionary in Africa and was very, quite quite distinguished that way because he gave up his entire promising career. While he was in medical school, he wrote his book on pipe organ construction in in France and England, and he wrote his, his biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, and he wrote his book that's translated into English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. That is, that is a very remarkable achievement. I just keep telling myself, you know, Albert Schweitzer, you know, he, you know, he did all the, because, you know, they didn't have ESPN back then. So, so now his book, so it was published in German and it didn't have a catchy title in German. It's called *Von Reimarus zu Wrede*. From, so the first person to write an account of the historical Jesus in the Enlightenment was, um, was a man named Reimarus, a German theologian. And then the one, one most recently at Schweitzer's time was William Wrede. And what, what Schweitzer's quest is, it's a foundational study for anybody's interested in the historical Jesus. It traces how Jesus is talked about by scholars from the very beginning of the Enlightenment, first one to do it, Reimarus, up to his own day. And he goes, he goes author by author to explain how they did it, why they did what they said, what they, and why they were wrong. And he realizes that at different periods of time, people portray Jesus differently depending on what was going on at that period of time. And so he has this famous view that every generation of scholars portrays Jesus in its own image. Uh, and what was really funny to me when I was in graduate school is that I would read books by people writing in the 19, you know, 70s who would quote Schweitzer, that everybody writes in his own image, and they, in their own image, and then they say, yeah, I'm not going to do that. And they would do it. You read their book, say, yeah, actually, that's you. And so in the 80s, you have all these books by these, these guys who grew up in the 1960s, that portrayed Jesus as this kind of countercultural revolutionary. Huh, where'd that come from? Historical Jesus. And so, anyway, the thing about Schweitzer's book is that it is so insightful and brilliant and witty. And, uh, so it, you know, if you're not, you know, it's not light reading, it's not like reading, but if you're really interested in this thing, this whole history of the study, Schweitzer is the place to begin. At the end of his book, he sketches out why he thinks Jesus was an apocalyptic. That view has held since his day. His particular specific ways of doing it are held by nobody, but the basic idea that he got absolutely seemed to be right, still today. And so, so it's a fantastic book, and it's one that I, if people who are really the ones who are serious about doing like understanding, uh, the historical Jesus from a scholarly point of view, should look at his book, not to, not to come away with his particular methodology, but for seeing how, how every other generation had done it and what, what they were doing that that really doesn't work. I think those kinds of books are incredibly valuable because they give you this brilliant oversight in the development of a field and the development of an argument that is is just so very difficult to get without sitting down and reading through every single publication. Your own existence, I've had New Testament scholars come up to me and tell me, oh, I've got this great idea about Jesus and here it is, and they kind of lay it out and said, you know, and I'll say, oh yeah, yeah, that's like the 19th century rationalists, you know, like, uh, like, uh, Heinrich Paulus. I say, who? I said, yeah, okay, you really should know the history of the discipline before you try to write a book about it. Just read, just read Schweitzer.
Well, Bart, thank you so much for that recommendation. And now, before we finish for the week, could you just summarize what we spoke about today?
Yeah, we're talking about, um, the books from early Christianity that claimed to be written by the Apostle Peter. So I tried to explain who Peter was historically and why it looks like he probably didn't actually write any of these books, including First and Second Peter in the New Testament. Uh, why he probably didn't dictate them to a secretary, why he didn't compose them himself, why, in fact, it appears to be an author living later after the year 70, claiming to be Peter. Uh, two different authors for First and Second Peter. And it raises the question about people writing in the names of Apostles in early Christianity, a major topic that we, we've talked before about on the podcast, but it continues to be an issue that scholars think about and debate.
Thank you, Bart. Audience, thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJPodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.BartEhrman.com. That includes AJ Levine's course on The Parables, which is BartEhrman.com/Parables. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week. But what are we talking about next time?
Uh, well, next time, we are, uh, changing gears. You and I are, uh, going to be, uh, talking again, but this time I'm interviewing you. So, you know, don't feel any pressure, but, you know, I'm glad that I don't have to have any answers. I'll just have lots of questions. And so this, you know, you have, you too are involved with the study of antiquity, and what you're doing is very interesting. So I want us all to hear about that.
We will, we will see. Thank you, everybody, and
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goodbye.
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.