Bart Ehrman: Is Jesus Responsible for Our Moral Common Sense?

Bart Ehrman, an atheist New Testament scholar with a penchant for annoying evangelicals, now claims that the teachings of Jesus determined the moral instincts of the West. Bart joins us to talk about his new book Love Thy Stranger and why acts of care for immigrants, refugees, and people outside “our tribe” may be downstream of Jesus, even when the people doing the caring don’t believe in him.

We get into what makes Jesus’ ethics so hard to swallow when you read them straight: giving up status, becoming last, serving the powerless, and treating “the least of these” as the real test of faith. Bart explains why many scholars see Jesus as an apocalypticist, how that urgency sharpens the radical demands, and why modern politics can feel like a relapse into the ancient ideology of dominance. Along the way, we ask what loving enemies actually means in real life, not as a feeling but as a set of actions aimed at the other person’s good.

Then we discuss a theological lightning rod: the relationship between forgiveness and atonement. Bart argues they’re competing concepts and claims Jesus teaches forgiveness while later Christians developed atonement frameworks after the crucifixion. We also explore the historical ripple effects, like the rise of public charity and institutions like hospitals and orphanages, and we look for honest common ground between atheists and Christians around ethics, service, and human dignity.

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Transcript

Welcome To The Bar

Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink at the back corner of a dark pub.

Strangers Protecting Immigrant Families

Why An Atheist Praises Jesus

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar. So they don't get evicted, paying for their groceries, because these families haven't been able to get out of the house. They don't want to get separated. They don't want to have be taken, basically, by the government. And so we've been supporting them. But the reality is that many of the people that we're supporting that we're kind of using are non-Christians. They're not people who follow Jesus. They're just people who really, really, really care about their neighbors and about these who we would put in scare quotes, strangers, people who are not Americans, people who are not from originally our communities, that but they've come here for a better life, and all this chaos is happening, their lives are getting ripped apart, and these strangers are just loving them, are just literally setting aside their own lives to provide for them, to care for them, to protect them, to come stand between them and the government. And I think it's beautiful. But our guest today, Dr. Bart Ehrman, would say they're probably doing that, loving the strangers around them and caring for the people around them, even though they have no familial ties, no tribal ties, no, no nothing. They're probably doing that because of Jesus, even if they don't believe in Jesus. And that's a fun, fascinating concept.

Kyle 2:04

Isn't it? Yeah. So the book is called Love Thy Stranger, How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West by uh Bart Ehrman coming out soon, probably out now by the time you're hearing this. And without telling you anything else about Bart, if you're an evangelical or post-evangelical, uh, especially if you were ever into like evangelical apologetics, like we were, his name is probably already familiar to you. But if you're not, I just want to read you a passage from the book and then uh ask a provocative question. Because this seemed to me, as I was reading it, like the sort of thing that I've heard Randy preach. Or the sort of thing I'd like to hear Randy preach. I I bet you could, I bet you could really nail this. And apologies for the length of this, but I think it's worth quoting. So in a book uh about the Jewish roots of Jesus ethics, he says the Jesus' view was so contrary to ancient ideology and almost universal common sense that still today, 2,000 years later, people have difficulty getting their minds around it, let alone endorsing it, especially in this period of national aggression and the assertion of personal rights, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker. It's the rich and strong who rule us, who make our laws, who control our media, enforce their will. It was that way in Jesus' day as well, of course, and it has been that way in virtually all cultures and societies over the course of human history. Jesus had a different view. Some of his followers today still accept his view, but as an empirical reality, most do not, and even his most vocal supporters. Nearly everyone has come to be served and not to serve. Jesus, however, repeatedly insisted that to be his follower required becoming as powerless and insignificant as a child. These are all direct quotes from things Jesus said, by the way, becoming a slave to others, taking up the cross and giving one's entire life for others. These injunctions are often treated when they are not simply ignored, as prompts to be nice. They are rarely taken seriously as actual instructions for how to live. But Jesus was quite explicit. When two of his disciples, James and John, requested places of power and glory in the coming kingdom, Jesus rebuked them, told the entire band of disciples to reject the ideology of this world. To become great requires giving up greatness. To become the most important requires giving up importance. It is not the masters but the slaves who are superior. Jesus says the last shall be first, the first shall be last. This wasn't a clever witticism for us to remember when we're stuck in the slowest line at checkout. He meant it. The lowly, poor, and outcast will be rewarded in God's coming kingdom, the powerful, rich, and influential will be humbled. This was an eschatological reality. The way to succeed before God was to fail in the eyes of the world. He goes on in a similar vein. I'd love to hear you preach this. I'd love to hear anybody preach this. I have heard a few people preach it. This was written by an atheist. An atheist who has made a career of um saying things that have pissed off a lot of evangelicals. He's made a lot of enemies in that world by taking seriously and being very uh particular and paying close attention to the sorts of things that the Bible actually says and the sorts of things that it doesn't say, uh, and the way that it was put together and compiled. He's written, I don't know how many books, most of them about the formation of the Bible. He's a New Testament scholar, he's a textual critic. Um, he's an expert, an authority in the life of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus. He's very good at describing the ways that textual critics decide things Jesus actually said versus things he probably didn't actually say, later interpolations, how texts were redacted together, etc. etc. And he's made a lot of enemies in the Christian world.

Randy 5:37

You've talked a lot about him. I've heard a decent amount about him, but I've never read anything by him. I ironically, as I was studying John 1, I like paid to be part of his blog because I wanted to see some fascinating things he had written about John 1.

Kyle 5:50

Yeah, and he's has such a bad reputation among evangelicals that if you came out of that world, yeah, you'd be so disposed against it. Yeah. Yep. And to be fair, like he does have a phenomenon where if you just read the subtitles of his books, you would think he is much more radical than he is. I remember the first book of his I read in college or maybe grad school. It's called Misquoting Jesus, and it might be his most famous book, one of them.

Randy 6:16

I've seen, yeah, I can picture the cover even.

Kyle 6:18

Yeah, and just the title and the subtitle make you think, oh, he's a new atheist, he's tearing down everything about Christianity.

Randy 6:25

No, he's not Richard Dawkins, nope.

Kyle 6:27

Not at all. I mean, I mean and he gets owned by some of those people sometimes. He even wrote a book about um against the most extreme of those folks, just like laying out the evidence that Jesus was a real person. Because a lot of those folks want to go as far as to say Jesus didn't exist at all. And he's like, that's bullshit. Yeah, there's the thing. I can't take people like that seriously, yeah. No, I can't either. And but he's part of the reason for that. But that misquoting Jesus book, it was literally just an introduction to text criticism. It was very helpful. It was the sort of thing you'd get in a good seminary, an intro to you know that field. But his titles make and the way it's spun sometimes in the PR and the articles that are written about it make it seem like he's a kind of new atheist figure, and I don't think he ever has been.

Randy 7:09

I mean, I can appreciate it.

Kyle 7:11

And he debates some of the people, you know, like the evangelical.

Randy 7:15

I can just appreciate sensational titles that bring people in. I like doing that myself. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle 7:20

Um in this book he's trying to take seriously Jesus' ethical teaching and trying to see how it may have served as the foundation for a lot of your, and I'm pointing at listeners here, a lot of your likely ethical intuitions, things that you take to be common sense. Yeah. Things that when you hear someone deny them, like for example, a current politician, maybe, that we're gonna mention in this episode, you think that they're not just being, I don't know, the they're they're they're they're contradicting something that you probably take to be core to human nature. That it sounds that it sounds like they're actually doing something evil because they're questioning the essence of goodness itself. And the case that Bart is making in this book is that that intuition that you have can be traced historically and sociologically and conceptually back to Jesus and the things that he taught.

Randy 8:17

Yeah, as I said, this is my first exposure to Bart Ehrman as far as reading his work and hearing his actual words. I've seen him trashed by other Christians and have had no context for why. But I will tell you, from reading this book, at least, um Bart takes the words of Jesus seriously. Like really seriously, more seriously than most Christians. And in the conversation, you're gonna hear Bart say, Look, I'm an atheist, but I try to follow the the ethics of Jesus. I try to follow the way of Jesus. I try. He's humble enough to say, you know, like it's pretty much impossible, but I try to follow it. That's remarkable to me, and that's super interesting, and um, that's somebody that I want to hold space with.

Bart Ehrman Joins The Conversation

Kyle 8:58

Yeah, totally is really interesting conversation. We hope you like it. Maybe we'll get to talk to it again. Well, Bart Airman, thanks so much for joining us on A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walking to a bar. Thank you for having me. Sounds like a great thing you got going here. We've wanted to talk to you. I've wanted to talk to you since we've been doing this. I think we put together a list. We've been going for about five years, and I think you were probably on the first list we put together. And then uh somebody from your publishing company reached out about this new book that you've written, Love Thy Stranger, which is coming out soon, I believe, dropping in the near future. March 24th. I was immediately intrigued by the title. I've read, I think this is maybe the fourth book of yours that I've read. Um, and so this was this seemed like a different direction for you, which I recognize is a tiny, tiny percentage of the number of books that you've written. But they all, you know, mostly revolve around the Bible and Jesus. And this one was more in my wheelhouse, which is ethics. My training is in philosophy, and uh one of my specializations was meta ethics. Um, and so I was immediately intrigued by this because uh you're making a very strong case that as you put it in the subtitle, the teachings of Jesus, specifically the ethical teachings about uh loving strangers and uh acting on the behalf of people you don't know uh and who are not in your family or whatever, uh, that that those ideas can be traced to Jesus and that they ultimately transformed ethics and the moral conscience, as you put it, of the entire Western tradition. Huge, huge thesis. And I have lots and lots of questions about it. Uh and I know Randy does too. Um so if I may, just sort of as a preliminary, so some when I picked it up, I thought, you know what, a lot of conservatives are gonna see this on the shelf and think, well, duh. Exactly. Yeah, and you're you're not known for writing things that make conservatives go, well, duh. Or or or be very, you know, happy at all. Um, so quickly, what do you think is gonna be the main complication from your thesis for that audience, the the conservative, maybe evangelical audience who's gonna easily write this off without reading it?

Bart 11:16

I don't know. It it'll be interesting to see because a lot of evangelicals really do not like my work because I, you know, I mean, I'm a I'm a historical critic uh who recognizes that there are contradictions in the Bible and uh things described in the Bible that didn't happen. And you know that people often see me as kind of attacking Christianity. I've never felt that way myself. The the kinds of things I write about. Yeah.

Randy 11:39

For the record, I'm a Christian pastor who affirms both of those things you just said.

Bart 11:43

So the the things I learned, the the basic things I write about are things I learned when I was in seminary, being trained as a Presbyterian pastor. You can feel it. I was a Presbyterian. But you know, a good high-level seminary would teach would teach those kinds of things. Um but so I I've never really written a book that kind that celebrates an aspect of Christianity. And I thought, you know, really, I I do not have a negative view of Christianity. I have a negative view of a lot of kinds of Christians, especially fundamentalists and people who use their their faith to harm other people, either knowingly or not. But but I I do recognize the really good parts of Christianity, and I thought I should write a book about that, because the the ethical teachings of Jesus really did make a big difference in the Western world in ways that even these evangelicals who are going to say, duh, don't know, in my experience. Um, they the things I talk about are things, you know, they um they won't they might not be surprised. Oh wow, I didn't realize that. But and it might not be, I you know, but but it would be that, huh, really? Okay. So so there is that there is that side of it. The other thing with the evangelicals is of course there'll be other things in the book they won't like. So so yeah, okay.

Deconversion And The Problem Of Suffering

Randy 12:57

Little bit, a little bit, yep.

unknown 12:59

Yeah.

Kyle 12:59

Yeah, there's a few of those. Quickly before we get into the book, um, almost as an aside, although the it does come up, you said you started out as uh going into Presbyterian ministry, you talk about going to seminaries, you went to Wheaton, right? And before that, like Moody. So you were like firmly ensconched in in the evangelical world, and then you deconverted. And you I believe now describe yourself as an agnostic. Right there with you, buddy. And uh you say though in the book that it was not for reasons related to your biblical scholarship. And I've heard you talk about this elsewhere. I think you have a whole book about it, but it was more related to the problem of suffering. That's right. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this here, um, but I am curious if you want to briefly describe what that process was like and why that was the thing that clinched it for you.

Bart 13:44

Well, my biblical scholarship showed me that my uh the fundamentalist beliefs that I had had for some years were based on the inerrancy of the Bible, the complete historical accuracy of the Bible. And as I did serious research, I realized, you know, there are contradictions in the Bible. And that was emotionally quite wrenching for me, just moving away from the more fundamentalist conservative evangelical side of things. But I remained a Christian for years after that. What ended up getting me, as you said, was just realizing just how much pain and suffering there is in the world. And I I came to think I really don't believe that there's a God who intervenes and answers prayer and who helps people who are suffering. I mean, we, you know, eight children die every, I mean, it's like every second. It's like it's unbelievable how much suffering and pain there is in this world. And so uh I ended up, you know, of course I looked into everything. You know, I read all the the theologians, not all of them. I read theology on the problem of suffering, I read philosophy, I read, you know, I just read a ton of stuff. I finally got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore. I just didn't believe there was a God. And so I actually describe myself as an agnostic and an atheist. Uh I'm an agnostic about what I know. You know, do I know whether there's some kind of superior being in the universe? Well, no, how would I know? Do I believe there is? No, I don't. So I'm an atheist with respect to my beliefs. Um, but I don't know any more than anyone else does.

Kyle 15:07

Is that weird at parties when people find out you're an atheist biblical scholar?

Bart 15:11

Well, no, what's weird at parties is people find out I'm a biblical scholar. I mean, try try going to a cocktail party and have a conversation with somebody asks you what you do. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm a New Testament scholar. Huh. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. What?

Kyle 15:26

Philosophers get similar things. Yeah.

Randy 15:28

How are you received, Bart, within uh biblical scholarship? With in in particular, because when when we Christians think of biblical scholars, we think of people who are committed to the way of Jesus and who are Christian themselves. Um, but how do you see that ecosystem within which you you live and operate?

Bart 15:47

My agnosticism and atheism seems to have had no effect on my reception by scholars. And so, you know, I have a I wrote a textbook back in the 1994 or something that for ever since then, I guess 1997 it came out. And ever since then it's been the best-selling book in the field. By biblical. I mean, so people teaching this stuff. Yeah, it's just like because I I don't think uh, you know, my my biblical scholarship isn't isn't particularly radical. It's it's what I learned at Princeton Theological Seminary, what they teach at Duke and at Yale and at Harvard. I mean, it's like it's what they teach. So uh I don't think it's affected my scholarship too much.

Randy 16:21

This is your only book that I've read, um, but I I I really, really enjoyed it as well and really appreciated the scholarship and the thoughtfulness. How would you say being an uh atheist, let's just say, atheist agnostic, um, affects your ability to see this the scriptural narrative? And where I'm getting at there is there's a lot of uh connection between theological thinking and biblical scholarship, but they're not the same thing. But in order to set kind of sometimes see the whole, for me at least, to see the whole biblical narrative fit together, I need some theology along with the with the you know historical criticism and all that all the things. How do you navigate that work coming from the background and belief system that you do? I hope that made sense.

Reading The Bible As Many Books

Bart 17:08

It does it does make sense. I would say that that doing it theologically is not the only way to do it. Okay, uh, that if you had a very strong kind of literary sense, you could absolutely make the whole thing unified without without believing it. It's not it what you believe about the Bible has really very little relevance about what it teaches.

Randy 17:27

Okay.

Bart 17:28

And so, but what I would say in my case is that when I read the Bible, I don't read it as a book, I read it as 66 books. And each book, it's not that every book has a different author, but there are lots of different authors living in different times, different places, with different views, different perspectives. And in my view, if you don't recognize that Matthew's view about Jesus is very different from John's view, that you're misinterpreting both of them and you're really missing out.

unknown 17:56

Yeah.

Bart 17:56

You're missing out on interpretation because it it's precisely what that what that makes them distinctive that is that that matters, because if you collide just with the four gospels, if you put them all together so they're all saying the same thing, basically you've written your own gospel because you're not listening to what Luke's trying to say, because he's not saying the same thing that Mark's saying.

Randy 18:18

Yeah.

Bart 18:19

And so I mean a lot of times he is, of course. But he has, and so for me, it's it's giving each author their own uh integrity as an author, rather than artificially trying to make them all kind of put them together into one kind of big thing, uh, some kind of monolith, uh, which I think is I think that's a mistake, whether you're a Christian or not.

Randy 18:39

Mm-hmm. Okay. Last little add-on question here before, because this is going to turn into way too long of a conversation, but two two little questions that are very related. Two questions. First thing is, I think it might be confusing for some people to hear you were a Christian, sounds like a very passionate, ardent, fervent Christian, and you renounce Christianity and renounced faith. Why didn't at that point in time was it just simple practicality? Why didn't you say, I don't believe anymore, and I'm gonna give my life to a different, you know, field of study at least, if I'm gonna stay stay within academia? Why did you stay within biblical scholarship? And two, then how do you see the Bible as a biblical scholar but not a Christian?

Bart 19:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's it's a really good question. I get it a lot. You know, why why is it you're teaching the Bible? Right. You're an atheist, right? So, but you know, the thing is, I teach at a I teach at a university, I just retired, but I teach at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It's a secular research university. And, you know, in universities, people don't believe what they teach. They don't have to. My my wife's a my wife's uh started out as a scholar at of Chaucer and of medieval English, and she she teaches a Duke. And it's not that she believed Chaucer, no, that she didn't she didn't have any kind of faith commitment to the Canterbury Tales, it's just that's what she taught. You know, and I've got friends who teach um mid-20th century German history, but they're not Nazis, you know, and I you know I know criminologists who have never robbed a bank. It's just like, you know, so so people who teach, and it it'd be like it's like Kyle and philosophy. It doesn't mean he had in order to study philosophy, it doesn't mean you have to accept, you know, if you're an expert on Kant, it doesn't necessarily uh that mean that you accept his his moral imperative, you know, or you know, you just but you know what so for me historically, there's no question the Bible has been the most important book in the history of our civilization, period. I mean, there's nothing close. The church has been the most powerful institution. The Christian the Christian movement completely took over the Western world, and it is the most powerful social political institution, economic institution ever. And so why wouldn't I study it? I mean, that'd be crazy not to study it. This is and for me, and I just find it endlessly interesting where Christianity came from.

Randy 21:05

Thank you.

unknown 21:06

Yeah.

The Weird Radical Ethics Of Jesus

Kyle 21:06

Um, so let's get into the book a little bit. One of the things I loved about it, really appreciated, and this comes out early on, is how nicely it highlights how radical Jesus' ethics really are. Um, by both historical standards, but I think also contemporary standards. So, for example, at one point you say over the centuries, many many, possibly most people who have heard Jesus' teachings have thought he just could not mean them. That that seems right to me. And you juxtapose it really nicely with pre-Christian, you call them pagan uh ethical traditions, including Aristotle's, which you give some, you know, uh focus to. And those, particularly Aristotle's, I think, are a lot more commonsensical. And it's not without, you know, reason that they've seen a huge resurgence, both within um academic philosophy, but also I think within sort of public consciousness, the way people are thinking about right and wrong, what it means to live a good life. You go watch a show like Like the good place, and you get Aristotelian ethics like all over the place, right? And it's just a lot of it is a whole lot more commonsensical than the stuff that Jesus actually said. Yeah. Um, so do you think that Christians today are fully appreciative of how sometimes weird, radical, how many adjectives can we put here? Counterintuitive, unreasonable, the the things that Jesus actually said we should do really are?

Bart 22:25

Um, I my in my experience, most most Christians who read what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount or or in other places, when they come to the radical statements, it's not that they're shocked by them or they realize that they're too difficult to keep. It's that they they kind of take them in stride and they interpret them in ways that uh soften them significantly. Or they say that Jesus didn't really mean it for me. So when he tells the the rich young man to sell everything and give to the poor, he doesn't mean that for me. That's just that guy, you know. Uh, but that's what you know, you have to look deeper into Jesus' teaching to see when you actually look how he's talking generally, and not just to this one guy. This is actually what he thinks that you should you should give everything for the sake of others. When he says you should take up your cross and follow me, people think that that means you know you should be a nice person or something. You know, you ought to be, you know, you ought to be like be willing to kind of sacrifice, you know, maybe give 10% or something, you know. No, man, take up your cross means take up your cross. And I don't think people tend to recognize the radical nature. And sometimes, sometimes when they do recognize the radical nature, the response is rather interesting. Uh, because like in the Sermon on the Mount, when he makes these radical demands, people say, well, he obviously was teaching that because it's impossible to do that. And so what he's teaching is that you can't earn your way into heaven by following good ethics, so that's why you need him to die. Right. Which means he didn't mean what he said, he means to show that it's impossible to be a good person, which is the opposite of what he says.

Kyle 24:11

I've heard that interpretation from you know, legit people with stature.

Randy 24:16

Let's let's just say would you say, Bart, Jesus advocated for a religion? And I know that Jesus didn't really advo advocate for starting a new religion or whatever, but would you say pure Christianity or a more Christ-like Christianity would look like a religion that's devoted and focused on ethics and the way we live and show up in the world, or a religion that's more based on what we believe?

Bart 24:46

I think Jesus was not nearly as interested in what you believe in how you be as in how you behave. Um I take the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew to be a clear representative representation of what he really thought, where he has the nations of earth, not just Jews, not just followers in him, nations of earth who don't know who he is, who are either brought into the kingdom or sent to be destroyed based on how they behave toward other people. So, so I mean, you know the story quite well, obviously, but you know, the you know, he's on the throne and he's telling these people who he says, you know, you fed me when I was hungry, you gave me something to drink when I was thirsty, you visited me when I was lonely. And they said, Lord, when did I do it to you? They don't even know who he is. And he says, Well, you did it to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, and so come into the kingdom. It's not about, oh yeah, you need to believe in my death and resurrection, or you need to believe in the virgin birth, or you need to believe, you know, the Bible's inspired word of God. No, it's it's explicit, it's how you treat people. And people who don't treat people well, whatever they believe, they're out of there. That's why he says, you know, people say to me, Lord, Lord, and I say, and I say, get away from here. Because they they confess him, but they don't know what he wants.

Randy 26:02

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Do you think it's sensible, coherent with the scriptures, even for a person to say, you know what, I'm a Christian, but I don't know what I think about the afterlife. I don't know what I think about the Trinitarian doctrine, I don't know what I think about the divinity of Christ, but Jesus keeps me Christian, and I'm Christian because I want to live in a way that's consistent with the ethic and in and way of Jesus. Is that a coherent theology and way of living and kind of out outworking of our lives, or would that be best to say, no, why don't you give it up and you can still follow the way of Jesus, but you don't have to you hear what I'm asking, Bart.

Bart 26:43

I do, and I I appreciate it very much because I think you absolutely people can can question the uh traditional theological beliefs, the doctrines, the resurrect the physical resurrection, the virgin birth. Uh, you know, you can question all these things and still be a follower of Jesus. So I, you know, I'm in this weird thing. I'm kinda I sometimes call myself uh, you know, a Christian atheist because I I'm on the other side of that because I I decided I could not retain my Christian faith. But I I have I have very good friends who are pastors of churches who really don't believe the traditional doctrines, but they are absolutely committed Christians.

Randy 27:23

And you would say they're committed Christians because they're committed to the Christ and his way of living and showing up in the world?

Bart 27:30

I don't think that there's a definition of Christian written in the sky.

Randy 27:34

Yeah.

Bart 27:34

You know, it's it's not like a platonic form where there's this thing and like you've got to conform to it or else. Everybody, of course, has their own definitions of things. But technically, a Christian is somebody who thinks that Christ shows us the way, you know, that Christ Christ it's a follower of Christ.

Randy 27:51

Yes.

Bart 27:51

And my view is if you're a follower of Christ, it means you follow what he taught you how you how you ought to behave. Good.

Randy 27:57

Thank you.

Kyle 27:58

You say this reminds me of something you said in the conclusion, which I just finished today. And I think at this point I literally stood up and said, Hell yeah. Um but it's coming at it from a different direction. You're talking about all the terrible things that has been done in the name of Christianity by Christians, and you say many Christians will defend the faith by saying none of this represents true Christianity. And they are right that none of it is true to the teachings of Jesus, but they are wrong to say it is not Christianity. It is Christianity. These are the things done in the name of Christ by his followers against those who have not believed in him or have not held the right beliefs about him or were different in some other way. So uh similar thing, right? We can't just say by fiat, um, I don't get to decide what counts as Christian, who's in, who's out, you know.

Bart 28:39

Well, it's and horrible things. You know, it's interesting because my uh a lot of my atheist friends who are like former evangelicals or former Christians in a way, all they see is the dark side of Christianity, and it's very easy to make the list, right? From anti-Judaism that leads to pogroms and slaughter of entire villages to the Holocaust, you know, uh Islamophobia, uh hatred of you know, crusades crusades, inquisitions torturing people to death because they didn't believe the right thing. These are all Christians and Christian things and justification of slavery, oppression of women. I mean it's a very long list. And people look at that and say Christians, Christianity's awful. But then you have on the other side, you have the people say, oh no, no, that isn't Christianity. Christianity is all good. It's only good. And both sides are right and both sides are wrong. And because it's part of the problem we have, you know, more broadly, of course, that people can't see the other side. So part of my book is meant to show, look, there's a really positive side to Christianity in the world. It has done a huge amount of good. I don't say that without acknowledging what what you're pointing out. It's like there's there's also a very dark history here. Yeah.

Kyle 29:50

Yeah, I appreciate that. So one of the reasons I wanted to ask about the weirdness of Jesus' ethics as as a lead-in to this next question, which is about apocalypticism, uh, which is a thing you've written a ton about, not just in this book, but elsewhere. Pause for a second.

Randy 30:04

Could you just one of you define apocalypticism and what it means to be an apocalypticist?

Bart 30:10

So apocalypticism comes from the word apocalypse. And uh within Judaism, about 200 years before Jesus, there developed a view that um God had um God had supernatural enemies, the devil and demons. And this is not a view you find in most of the Hebrew Bible, but it develops. And the idea is that this world is being controlled by the powers of evil, which is why there's so much pain and suffering, especially among the people of God, and that God has allotted a certain amount of time for that to happen, uh, for evil to run amok here, but he's soon going to intervene and destroy everything that's evil, all the forces of evil, the devil, the demons, all that, and everybody who sided with them on a day of judgment. And at that day of judgment, uh, those who are opposed to God will be destroyed. Those who have been on God's side will be brought into a paradise here on earth to live forever. And so to say Jesus is an apocalypticist is to say that he held that point of view.

Randy 31:10

And imagine that happening within his lifetime or within Well, he says, he says his disciples will be alive when it happens.

Bart 31:17

He says this generation won't pass away before all these things take place. And so this is a this this is a common scholarly view. It's been around since Albert Schweitzer in the early 20th century, and it's the dominant view among scholars that again, it seems weird to a lot of people in the pew, but it's not weird to a lot of their pastors because they heard it in seminary.

Kyle 31:38

Yeah, because they're teaching. I heard it from I heard it from my pastor as a kid, and um before I before my parents became Southern Baptist, and we went to uh a more mainline denomination, and and he heard it from seminary, you know. The way he put it, and it always stuck with me because I'd never heard anything like it before. We were talking about something about Paul, and he was like, Well, Paul thought Jesus was coming back next Tuesday, he thought the world was ending next week. And that kind of frames you know the whole thing. And it it frames a lot of what the radicalness of Jesus' ethical teaching, I think, because some of the really crazy things that he says that it seems like are literally impossible to carry out, or that would lead you to what any other ethical system would view as a compromising moral position, right? Following him and giving up everything to do so means hurting people that you're connected to, not taking care of your children, right? It would lead you into these moral dilemmas, um, things that are both difficult uh materially and psychologically, and also possibly immoral, according to other ways of looking at it. And like one way of making sense of that is to see that, well, if he was an apocalypticist, it makes sense some of this to do more extreme things. So um I guess I want to ask you about that, and this is maybe a dumb hypothetical, but and we can't possibly know the answer. But do you think his ethical teaching might have been different if he had known that things were not going to end uh right away? And I guess that's a way of approaching a more fundamental question, which is what do you think Jesus' fundamental ethical motivations really were? Or maybe more specifically in your wheelhouse, what do the texts justify us into saying what his fundamental motivations were?

Bart 33:17

Well, I'm happy to talk both about text and what I think the historical Jesus said, but you know, on your point about um these these rigorous demands, uh, you know, he praises his disciples for leaving their jobs, their families, their spouses, their children, their homes to follow him. And I point out in my book that you need to think about the implications of that in a world where only the head of household could make money. And so how are these people supposed to eat the children? And the unless they're they're uh they have family members who can help them out, they either starve or they do things that are unpleasant to think about to survive. And Jesus praises that. Well, that really? Yeah, but if you think the end is coming on Thursday, then you know it makes sense that you commit everything to it. You know, it's like if you it's kind of like look, if you absolutely know you're gonna die in August, you might, you know, you might take some wild trips and do a lot of things you wouldn't normally do, and you just because that's the time you got, and so you're gonna do it. And I think Jesus is like that. It's like it's coming soon, and so it requires radical action now, and so people do that. What I'd say was at the heart of it, which is what you're what you're asking, apart from the apocalyptic view. So suppose he doesn't think it's gonna come immediately. Um at the heart of it, the heart's still the same, and that's what the Christians carried on. The Christians eventually, by and large, gave up on this idea it's gonna come very soon. By the second century, that's no longer the big view anymore. But they keep the basic ethics that have been de-radicalized. It's no longer sell everything, but it still is. Your ethical concern should not be only with your family and your friends and your type community, uh, people of your own race or ethnicity or nation. It's to be for anybody in need. And that's Jesus' teaching. It doesn't matter if these people are related to you, if they're in need, that's whom you're supposed to help. And the Christians kept up with that, and that's what they started preaching from the pulpits. And when Christianity took over the Roman Empire, it became the moral common sense, even though it wasn't the moral, it was nobody's moral sense before that, as so far as we can tell.

Randy 35:37

So Bart, just humor me a little bit. I I obviously thinking of Jesus as an apocalypticist is inevitable if you really think through the Gospels. And at the same time, let me push just a little bit. Um it feels to me like maybe if we see Jesus as completely an apocalypticist, we're taking a couple of um quotes from Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, um and and using that as a universal ethic or belief that Jesus had. And also what what place does hyperbole have to do with Jesus saying, if you want to follow me, you're gonna have to leave everything. You're gonna have to give up your ever your your livelihood, your family, your mother, your father, your son, daughter, whatever. Um Jesus uh frequently speaks in hyperbolic language. Couldn't we it put that to some of the extreme apocalyptic things that Jesus said as well? Isn't it would you say it's could it be a bit of a stretch to say Jesus was a pure apocalypticist who thought that the world was going to end in a couple of years?

Bart 36:48

It could be a stretch, but I don't think it is. Okay, and so I I think so my the first book I ever wrote for a popular audience explained it was a full-length ex explanation of how historians go about deciding what Jesus really said and did. And you're right, you can't pick a few verses from Matthew and then like make that the center. Um, and so what you do is you you take our earliest sources, which in this case would be Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and you uh you look at the kinds of teachings that are spread throughout them. Uh you look for teachings that are independently attested in different kinds of sources about Jesus. You look at um the kinds of things that are on his lips that that nobody would have made up later, that it he certainly must have said that one. And you you go very carefully through every every book, every chapter, every line, every word to figure out which things look like they go back to Jesus based on these historical criteria. And so when you do that, that's so scholars are not just you know cherry-picking a couple verses in order to make him seem radical. It's when you do that, when you go through that entire process of figuring out what Jesus probably really taught, it does appear to be this apocalyptic message. Um, and it's I know it's threatening to a lot of Christians to think of it that way, but if you want a theological way to think about it, uh it's taking the incarnation seriously. Because the incarnation means that God became a human at a certain point of time, in a certain place, and he uh, you know, if you know kinetic Christology where Christ empties of himself in order to become a human, then he is very he is a human in a human situation, and he's not thinking like a 21st century American, he's thinking like a first century Galilean. And so if you put him in this historical context, you're taking the incarnation seriously.

Randy 38:36

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Thank you.

Kyle 38:39

How so how common, as a quick aside, how common was this apocalypticist view? Would it have been kind of in the water? Would he have been marginal among other Jewish teachers of the time? Was this weird at all?

Bart 38:51

No, that's that's actually one of the things is that is very, very common. Um so of the, you know, we look, I mean, John the Baptist had this message too. The axe is already laid at the root of the tree. Every tree that doesn't bear fruit will be chopped down and cast into the fire. It's it's a judgment image. You're gonna be destroyed, and the axe is already laid at the root of the tree. The chopping is gonna start. It's the view in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's the view of Jewish writings at the time. Even the Pharisees had this view. And so it's it was a widespread view. So naturally, it's I mean, it's not weird that Jesus would have it. In fact, it's it would be kind of weird if he had something else.

What Is Going On With Apologetics

Kyle 39:30

Okay, thank you for that. That's helpful. Um, I want to ask you about something that seems kind of out of left field, but it came up in your book, and I thought I have to ask about this, and that's about apologetics. Of course. So Randy, yes, Randy and I both had phases. Uh, I think mine might have been a little worse than his. Uh, and it sounds like you're you also had a phase. Um, maybe this is a certain kind of thing for a certain kind of white guy in America. Wanting to win arguments, yeah. I don't know. But you mentioned in one of your chapters, chapter three, I think, that you had a phase where you were into kind of evangelical apologetics. I've heard you participate in debates with some of these guys since then, like very prominent ones who I won't name. Some of these dudes, it seems like they're always dudes. There are a few women, but for the most part, it's the dudes doing the debating. I don't know how to ask this, but what is their deal from their perspective? I have my own opinions about what the deal is, was for me when I was in it. But having talked to them and debated them, how do you because some of these are extremely smart people, extremely sophisticated in their argumentation. They should be aware of the evidence and they go about this in a way. I won't answer the question for you. I just wanted you to tell me what you think is going on.

Bart 40:38

Well, what I you know, I I sometimes I have trouble believing that they really believe what they're saying. Um and I I think you know that surely, surely he knows, and you're right. It's always I've always debated he's. Uh never been invited to debate a she in this guy, but I'd love to, but um, he is um he's smart, he's gotta see that that's a flawed argument because it is a flawed argument. And so I think is it that he's you know, is he willingly like because he's afraid he'll lose his livelihood and his family if he if he doesn't come out saying this? Or is it that he's like, is he blind? Or what you know, is he duplicitous? What is it? I don't understand because really that is a bad argument. He surely can see that. Um so what I do to try and understand it is I try and put myself back in that situation when I was a I was like that too. I mean, I was a big fan of Josh McDowell, evidence that demands a verdict, and you know, and I I had all the apologetic arguments proving the resurrection and you know everything else. And and I don't think I was being dishonest at the time. I think I genuinely believed it. Um and it was so deeply rooted in me that I couldn't see something else. I just I couldn't see it. I mean, when I went to Princeton Seminary my first semester, I took a class on the gospel of Luke, and my professor was talking about how this passage in Luke stood at odds with the one in Mark, and I thought he was an idiot because it's clear as day how to reconcile that. And I literally couldn't see it. Years later, I can't believe that I couldn't see it. So I don't, I don't know. I sometimes I think there is duplicity, you know, again, not to name names or anything, but I think there's gotta be. But other times I think you know they really they generally believe it.

Randy 42:27

Similar question, Bart, but this is just just for fun for me. I mean, I I read a lot of biblical scholars and theologians, and um I can smell, I mean, it doesn't, it's it doesn't take a rocket scientist to smell the ones who are kind of um saying the Bible says this because they it's just affirming their belief system, right? Yes. Um which I'm assuming is not uncommon in all of scholarship, but especially religious one like this. Um do you have who are some of your favorite contemporaries who you would say are Christians, but actually approach the text faithfully? And by faithfully, I don't mean faithfully to Jesus, I mean faithfully as like an a coherence, you know, you know what I'm asking.

Bart 43:09

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, as as one of you said earlier, I mean, most scholars of New Testament are Christians, committed Christians. And the kind of scholarship I do is, you know, is what they think. And so two of my best friends are Presbyterian ministers who both have PhDs in New Testament, and they basically agree with me on everything. But they're in church every week and preaching and teaching Sunday school, and it's like, you know, doing funerals or whatever. And so, um, but if you you know, top scholars, look, the top scholars in New Testament are most of them are Christians. I mean, um Dale Allison um is a is a famous name. It's funny.

Kyle 43:45

We were talking to Scott McKnight, and I think we asked him a similar question, and that's who he named.

Bart 43:49

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well, Dale's a very honest guy, and I disagree with him a lot of things, but he's a very honest guy, and he he looks at historical evidence. Um Friend Joel Marcus, I think, is one of the best exegetes. Uh, he's not as pro popularly known, but he wrote the best book ever on John the Baptist and and other things. And he's he's absolutely as critical as me. My best friend for many years was Dale Martin, um, who taught at Yale, and before that he taught at Duke. And before that, we were we were friends in graduate school. And he was a very devout uh Episcopalian, um, smells and bells, complete uh devout Episcopalian, who was also um far more radical than I am in his biblical scholarship, and thought that I was a I was I was way too conservative. Um and uh so so it isn't matter look, you know, knowledge and faith are not the same thing. And you can people confuse them, but they think, well, if you really you like if you really think the Bible is contradictions, you can't be a Christian. Says who? Yeah, yeah.

Randy 45:01

Yeah.

The Return Of The Dominance Ethic

Kyle 45:02

Here, here come Kyle. Okay, uh one more aside and then we'll get back to the book, I promise. Um, this is my one political question that I'm gonna allow myself, and it is related to the book, so I feel fine about it. So you you discuss in your book the global and nearly unquestioned view in antiquity that the powerful should dominate the weak. You give it a name, you call it the ideology of dominance. As I was reading about that in your book, I was reminded forcefully of a recent interview with Stephen Miller, which you may have heard about or seen. Uh, I think he was interviewed by Jake Tapper from CNN. And I won't recount the sort of bullshit that he said, but it was this ideology of dominance as pure as it can get. Um I'm curious, as someone who has carefully studied the historical development of this kind of ideology of ethical perspectives, seeing that today in 2026, does that seem bizarre to you? Because it seemed bizarre to me. It was almost like watching someone interview Alexander the Great. Yeah, and like exactly, and like he sounds vile, he sounds cruel, but he also sounds stupid, like in the sense of there are two and a half thousand years of ethical progress that have happened, and it's like you're somehow unaware of it or or are aware worse, you're aware of it and don't think it mattered at all, like you've figured it out and that was all silly, and we should get back to it's like none of that happened or was worth our attention. So, like, you know, how do you how does this sort of thing strike you? How do you interpret this? What's going on?

Bart 46:33

Well, yeah, when I when I heard about that interview, I thought of Thucydides. I mean, it you in the I mean it ancient Greek historians talk about uh, you know, you mentioned Alexander the Great, but I mean, uh, you know, before him, the generate couple of several generations before him, it was clear, clear, you know, when the generals conquering a city and they'd send out the envoys to say, uh, yeah, look, you know, don't conquer us, we haven't done anything against you. And and you have these this line in Thucydides about the the conqueror saying, Look, uh, we're gonna conquer you. You can either be murdered and enslaved by us, or you can give us what you want, either way, but we're gonna do it. And and they say, Look, it's just always been this way. And you have this line in Thucydides that the mighty do what they want and and the weak uh deal with it the best they can. You know, basically, sorry, this is the way it is, and that's what Steve Miller was doing. I mean, it's just but it's it is it has become again a dominant discourse in our world that if you've got the power, it's okay to do it. Um, and um it's I I think it's particularly frightening because a lot of people who have that view, whether it's because of your your own nation is more powerful, so it can do that, or if you yourself can dominate other people because of your position, because you know, might makes right. What scares me is that many of these people are Christian. Or Christian, they're self-professing Christians. That's what I'm gonna say.

Kyle 48:05

If you were to press him on this, I bet you could get him to say that that's that's the Christian view.

Bart 48:10

Did well, I don't know his religiosity or anything. I mean, uh, I don't know whether he considers himself a Christian.

Kyle 48:16

I well, we know that it's important to the administration to pretend to be Christian, so I bet you would you would not get him to say a thing that he thought was interesting.

Bart 48:22

Well, it always has been. I mean, I don't know as much anymore. I don't know. I mean, because it's clear as day. This is just it is anti-Christian to say that you're going to run over anybody else who gets in your way because you know, because might makes right, but that's what it is. And so I think it's it's precisely the message that Jesus was opposing. I mean, that's my that's my argument in the book. The core of Jesus' message is precisely against the ideology of dominance and puts in its place the ideology of service to help other people and to serve other people. And you know, Christ did not destroy the Roman Empire, he got crucified. And in the Gospels, that's what he chooses to do. He chooses not to conquer. So if you're gonna be his follower, I mean I'm not, I'm an atheist, but if you're gonna be his follower, at least pay attention to his teachings. Right.

Randy 49:15

Yeah. It would make more sense for me to someone say, for someone to say who follows Stephen Miller, Trump, all that, to say, well, I'm a Christian and so I don't believe that, but I just I support their policies. I think in the in the end, their policies are gonna be better for for me, for my family, for my America. That would make sense to me instead of twisting and and changing and warping your spirituality and and faith tradition in order to fit this obviously. I'll use the word pagan in really just ancient, antiquated, ugly way of seeing the world. That's the troubling thing to me, where there's no where there's such cognitive dissonance.

Bart 49:55

I mean, the problem is that it's in our DNA to dominate. I mean, it's we we wouldn't have survived if we didn't conquer uh our opponents.

Randy 50:05

Sure.

Bart 50:05

Um, as a species. It's true of every species. But also every species has, in order to survive as a species, just in terms of evolutionary terms, you've got to have modes of cooperation as well where you help people within your community. And so part of my claim about Jesus is that the that everybody in the ancient world, I mean, every philosopher thought that, of course, you should help your family and your friends, but Jesus thinks you should, you know, love your enemies. And there's another one. He means it. He doesn't mean that you have like a nice feeling for them, or it's not an emotion. When Jesus talked about loving others, he's not talking about how you how you feel about them. It's what you do for them, and you're to help them. Within the human DNA, there is this aggression that is there, that has to be there for us to be human, but there's also this thing about you need to help others. Jesus radicalized that. And in theory, that could have taken over the world, but it didn't. Even the Christian church exercised dominance, and now it's coming to this kind of crazy extreme where people who uh who insist on uh aggressive violence in the name of Christ for not for to advance Christianity, but to advance their own agendas. Okay.

Kyle 51:24

Yep, yep. Thank you. Do you personally buy that part of his ethic, the enemy love stuff?

Bart 51:30

Yeah, I think that he I think he really means he does again, he doesn't mean you're supposed to like them. What he means is you want the best for them. You know, I have a podcast, my misquoting Jesus podcast. And a couple years ago, when you after Ukraine got invaded, I I interviewed a Ukrainian theologian who had escaped uh to Poland and was running a charity for refugees. And I asked him, I said, look, he was a Christian. He's writing a dissertation on Bonhoeffer, this great German theologian. And I asked him, Look, how what do you do with Jesus' teachings, love your enemies? I mean, do you love the Russians? And he said, Well, I the way I take it is that I should wish for the best for them, and the best thing for them would be to pull back and stop committing these horrible acts against us. And that would be better for them, and that's what I hope that that they do. You know, and so it's not just, you know, I mean, it is, of course, it's you know, for himself and his people as well, but there's this element that would be better for them.

Kyle 52:28

Yeah. Which is in in some ways very platonic, right? It's better for their souls in addition to the city.

Bart 52:35

Well, it is, but also it would keep two million people from being killed. Right.

Kyle 52:39

Their own people, right. Um, okay, on to some theological stuff, which is getting atonement.

Randy 52:45

Let's go.

Kyle 52:45

A little over my own schemes here.

Randy 52:48

I want you to write a whole book about for forgiveness and atonement, Bart, just for what it's worth. He probably already has.

Bart 52:53

I have not I actually I I got I got hooked on that doing this book, and as you know, I've got a big section on it. And I'll tell you, um, so Randy, I don't know if you I don't know in your when you were in seminary, but when I was in seminary, when we studied the gospel of Luke, we would always hear that Luke does not have a theology of the cross. That was like the line they would use. And I I accepted that, but I didn't realize what it meant. What it really means is Luke does not think that Jesus died for your sins. Whoa, wait. But you know, a professor in a seminar would never say that. That is what it means. And it's so right, atonement and forgiveness. I assume we're gonna begin.

Kyle 53:36

Yeah, so let me just set it up. So you think there are these are opposed concepts, right? Forgiveness and atonement. I'll just read your quote here. Forgiveness is not possible if there is atonement, and where there is atonement, there is no forgiveness.

Randy 53:47

So pretty mutually logically exclusive. Really quickly explain that.

Bart 53:53

Okay, so I want to it's important. What you said, Kyle, is right. These are two different concepts. It that it's important to stress that because people use words that conflate them. So I'm not interested in what word you're using, but there are two different concepts. One concept is uh so if you just think about God, got humans in relationship to God. Suppose you've done something wrong and you ask God to forgive you. If God forgives you, then there's no price, no penalty, uh, no punishment, he forgives you. You know, just like if uh you know, if a friend of mine does something really mean to me and then feels badly about it, and and it realizes he shouldn't have done it, and tells me that he's sorry and he'd like me to forgive him. If I forgive him, then I don't humiliate him in public, I don't make him pay for it, I don't give him, there's no price, there's no punishment, nothing. It's just that's forgiveness. You're just letting it go. Let go the anger, the reprisals, anything. That's forgiveness. So I'm using the term, the word forgiveness for that, but it's the concept I'm interested in. The concept of atonement is that if you've done something really bad against God, he requires a penalty. There's got to be a penalty, there's got to be a punishment. You have to atone for it. To atone for it. And so uh so Christ dies for your sins because somebody's got to pay the price. And Christ pays the price for you. And so that is um so you okay, so here the analogy that I use sometimes to clarify this to my students is that, you know, suppose you owe me a thousand bucks, okay, and you can't pay it back. Uh, how do we deal with it? Well, I could I could make you pay back like some of the money. Uh I could have you call your friend or family member to pay for me. I could get a payment form to satisfy the loan, okay? Or I could just say, forget about it, it doesn't matter. If I say forget about it, don't worry about it, that's forgiveness. If you like have to work it off or pay it in installments or have somebody else pay, then a payment is required. That's atonement. You can't have both at the same time. The you can use the word simultaneous, people do. Jesus died so that God will forgive your sins, but that's confusing the two concepts. Either God forgives you or he requires atonement. And my my argument in the book is that Jesus taught forgiveness, and his followers after his death taught atonement. And atonement has become the standard Christian doctrine rather than what Jesus taught forgiveness.

Randy 56:38

Okay. I got questions. Pardon. Okay. All right. Uh that's really good, and I'm really grateful to you for pointing that out. Um, because I think go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle 56:49

Just a quick semantic thing, and then I'll let Randy ask his questions. Yeah. So I think it's a semantic thing. I don't know. So my first thought was, but there's lots, you know this, of course you know this. There's lots of atonement theories that are non-penal, that are overtly, explicitly not retributive, not um like Anselm's, uh, you know, somebody's paying, they're not economic, you know, they're nobody's paying anybody. Like there's lots of ways of cashing out atonement that are very popular, that have nothing to do with that kind of paradigm. Are you saying that those that's just not what you mean by atonement, and that's not what you think the text means?

Bart 57:26

Yeah, I'm saying that like Anselm's view is not in the Bible. So I'm just I'm just talking about early Christianity, uh, which didn't have there are a lot of uh sophisticated views of atonement. Atonement is, you know, most really good theologians will admit it's the biggest problem. I mean, why would Christ have to die for your relationship to God to be restored?

Kyle 57:48

Or how did it happen, whether he had to or not? I actually don't think find that aspect of the question very interesting. He didn't have to. It happened. How did it work? That's what atonement means for me. Like I know it's not that to a lot of people, but I'm more interested in the question of what did it do? What did it accomplish? How did it actually achieve the thing that it was supposed to?

Bart 58:05

Well, yeah, but I mean, it achieved nothing if it's forgiveness.

Randy 58:10

Or or achieved nothing in regard to our eternal destination or security, but maybe achieved other things that are really could be important as well.

Bart 58:20

No, no, no, exactly. That's right. But in terms of but when you're talking about forgiveness, you're talking about somebody who's been offended, who um somehow there's a there's a split. There needs to be some kind of reconciliation, some because there's a fracture in the relationship. And if you think that Jesus' death is what healed that fracture, then without his death, the fracture would not have been healed, then that's some kind of atonement.

Kyle 58:46

What do you think about the um my understanding is I could be totally wrong, please correct me if I am, that this whole like Christ is victor motif where uh there's other powers at play here. And you're just taking all my questions, Kyle. Well, oh, I'm sorry. What God is really doing, I'll let you take over what God is really doing uh is, and maybe Jesus knew this, maybe he didn't, I don't know. It doesn't really matter for me. Uh maybe what God is really doing is defeating those powers and like setting free. Maybe you know, the Eastern folks use more of like um he's healing them. They were sick and in bondage to sin, and sin is more like a disease than it is like a choice. God is doing something that doesn't have anything to do with like being paid back for his dishonor or some Anselmia kind of thing. Like my understanding is that that's the oldest view of atonement, the one I would be most likely to find in the text, or at least in the context around which the text was written. And if so, that to me is not a penal view and therefore is not automatically inconsistent with forgiveness.

Bart 59:42

The text, the early text, I'll talk about dying for your sins. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. Yes. You know, this this is the cup of the new covenant in my blood that is shed for you. So the for you thing is the is what's the earliest.

Kyle 59:59

I guess my my thought is that the earliest interpretations of what that meant were that um God is fighting some some demons here.

Randy 1:00:07

Kind of like Lewis in Lion the Witch in the wardrobe. There's you know, the enemy Satan has power over humanity because of some cosmic transaction, blah, blah.

Bart 1:00:18

But even there, it's because of the older magic. It's got to happen. Aslan has to die because of the He knows the references, Randy.

Randy 1:00:25

You're not gonna get him with the Oh, I'm not trying to get him.

Bart 1:00:28

No, no, no, no, no. But but but the qu in that, who made the older magic?

Randy 1:00:32

Uh-huh.

Bart 1:00:33

And why is that what's necessary? Yeah. Even if it means that Christ died to defeat the demons, why did he have to die to defeat the demons? Why couldn't God just zap them with a ray gun?

Kyle 1:00:43

Right. But my only point is if that is like in the water when these concepts are being written. No, it's not. Maybe it's not. Maybe that's a mistake. But that doesn't automatically seem to me to be incompatible with forgiveness as you understand it. Well, the incompatibility is very clear where there's the penal thing. It's less clear to me in the other paradigms.

Bart 1:01:00

We could certainly, you know, we could certainly move into like later interpretations because the earlier interpretation, the reason you start getting those later interpretations is because the early interpretations were not satisfying. And so, so, but the early interpretation, it's quite clear in the New Testament, whether you're reading Paul or Matthew or Mark or John, whatever you're reading, uh, or um you know, the revelation, I mean, it's it's atonement in the sense that somehow Christ had to die uh in order for people to be put into a right relationship with God. And that half die business is what's against forgiveness. You know, like I mean, if when when when my daughter did something bad and she apologized, I didn't tell her, yeah, I appreciate that. Uh as soon as I kill your cat, then we'll be okay together. Yeah. I'm sorry about little, you know, little coco, your cat here, but I'm gonna have to kill them, or else we're not gonna be reconciled.

Randy 1:02:06

Well, let me let me let me ask this, then this is more of less of trying to parse between atonement and forgiveness and making them both live together happily. Um, I mean, in my Christian journey and even in my ministry career, you know, of about 20 years now, I've gone, I've I've I've gone on this like journey with atonement. I was super fascinated about it for a while. Came out of the womb of evangelicalism with penal substitutionary theory of atonement, because I think we pretty much all do, and then saw the problems, like major, major problems with that, really kind of graduated to what Kyle's talking about with more of a Christus Victor theory of atonement. Then even here's here's where I've gotten to closer to today is kind of questioning and doubting whether atonement is a real concept, uh a concept that God needs, or whether that's just a concept that fits in with the Judaism that Paul and the first Christians had, which was a sacrificial system and a system of atonement, and that it's kind of formulaic. And now I'm kind of thinking like maybe God doesn't need that at all. Maybe forgiveness is just forgiveness, and that's that's what it is. And the the crucifixion was about something more, I think, still cosmic, and maybe the resurrection is kind of what does that work rather than the death. I don't know if anything that I'm saying just now makes sense, but what I'm trying to say is what I'm trying to say is that my evolution and my thinking of atonement has changed the way I see God and it's changed my the shape of my faith. Yeah. What do you think this movement away from forgiveness and towards atonement did to the Christian faith in practice? And how would it look differently if we were more committed to the way of Jesus, which is seems to be the way of freely given, unconditional forgiveness?

Bart 1:03:56

Yeah. I think if Christianity moved that way, they'd be moving back to the teachings of Jesus. I think it's important to understand why atonement came about. And I wouldn't say that Judaism is all about atonement. You know, the the Bible, the Hebrew Bible has both forgiveness and atonement. When you read the Psalms, Psalm 32 or Psalm 51, uh, where the psalmist begs for God to forgive them, it's not based on a sacrifice. They've done something wrong, they've apologized, and they want God now to, you know, revoke his anger at them. Um and you get that throughout the Hebrew Bible, and I really think that is Jesus picks up on that. I think Jesus was not a fan of the temple sacrifices myself. So if you move that way in your own thinking away from some kind of penal substitution thing, that's more like Jesus. I think what happened, I think what happened was the followers of Jesus, um, of course, during his lifetime, they heard him preaching this forgiveness thing, and but they thought that he was going to be the one who saved them. He thought he that he was gonna be the Messiah who ruled the people of God, and that meant conquering the enemy. But instead, he got arrested and tortured to death by the enemy, and it completely shattered their views of Jesus. I mean, I thought he was the Messiah. He was going to, you know, destroy the Romans or whatever. And but when they started thinking he got raised from the dead, they they thought, well, that means he really is God's chosen one. But if he's God's chosen one, why why did God have him, why did God let him die? It doesn't make any sense. But they so I think they almost immediately thought, sacrifice. He must have died not for his sins. He didn't do anything wrong. He must have died for the sins of others, and that starts the atonement language, I think, right off the bat. And then Christianity becomes a doctrine uh thing of atonement. And you know, I think, Randy, like that you've gone through a What a lot of theologians went through over the centuries, which is you got to a point you just thought, well, you know, actually, I don't think that makes sense that God is like that. And so then you start getting these other theories, very complicated theories later. I think it's I think being a Christian probably should mean thinking what Jesus thought. And so it turns out he thought forgiveness. The only author in the New Testament who does not subscribe to atonement in the sense that Jesus had to die for you is Luke. In Luke's gospel, Luke gets rid of all of Mark's references to atonement. And in the book of Acts, when the the apostles preach to convert people, they don't say a word about Jesus dying for you. But they they think that what happened is Jesus was an innocent victim. He didn't deserve to die. Uh he was God's prophet and you killed him. Yep. Is what they say to the crowd. You killed him. And when they realize, oh my God, what have we done? They repent, they turn back to God and they forgive. God forgives them. Yep. That's it.

Did Jesus Invent Forgiveness In The West

Randy 1:06:58

Yep. Yep. So you made what you yourself in the book said is a bold thesis, and you said that forgiveness as a free gift was introduced to the Western world by Jesus. That's a huge claim. Um similarly, you cite Hannah Arnt. Is Hannah not a Christian? Arnt? Is she not a Christian?

Bart 1:07:18

Uh no, she's a she's a very she was a very famous Jewish philosopher who wrote um books about the Nuremberg Twart trials, and she was a very uh so she was definitely but she says she says that Jesus introduced the idea of forgiveness into the Western world.

Randy 1:07:33

Yes. So can you explain that? And um I I want to say in please don't don't hear me as like trying to r reconvert you, Bart, because that's a that is something that's like has no motivation for me whatsoever. But when you say something like Jesus might be responsible for the concept of freely given forgiveness in the world, in the Western world, whoa, that's something that like for me that makes it hard for me to walk away from Jesus if I'm thinking about it.

Bart 1:08:09

Yeah, I know. I I try to show that that's true because in the Greek and we we know what Greek and Roman moral philosophers thought, and they did not believe in forgiveness in the sense that I just laid it out. Um so I think he did introduce it. Um I uh even though I don't believe in God, I do try to follow the teachings of Jesus. And you know, yes, not very well. I mean, you know, I got a lot of possessions here. But uh, but um so I I do subscribe to the ethics of Jesus. Uh I just don't I don't believe that there's a God in the world. Yes. And so I can't I there are I know people who also who agree with me that there's no God, but they can they they have no problems calling themselves Christian. Uh I probably because of my background, I just don't think I can call myself a Christian if I don't believe in God. And I absolutely don't believe in God.

Randy 1:09:00

Thank you. Yeah, no, that's that's completely fair. Let me ask you just uh probably an impossible question to answer. But if it wasn't for Jesus, do you think we'd have this concept of freely given forgiveness? Do you think it would have just emerged in the in the consciousness of the world?

Bart 1:09:14

Well, I as I said, there does seem to be there there is a sense of it in the Hebrew Bible. When I say that it's because of Jesus, it's because a lot of Jesus' teachings, a lot of his ethical teachings were taught by other people, uh other Jewish, other Jewish teachers, but those teachers didn't have followers who took over the Western world. Jesus is the one, I mean, his followers became within 400 years, most of the Roman Empire was Christian. Within 500 years, they virtually all were. And ever since then, the Western world, until well, until the Enlightenment, but especially until recently, was Christian. Um, and so you would not have gotten this teaching of forgiveness from Greek and Roman circles at all. Um they had a different way of doing things, but um, yeah, so would it would have emerged, he may have done, may have come in from some other way.

How Christianity Grew Without A Miracle

Randy 1:10:08

Quick follow-up. You you had a like a two sentences in the book that just captivated me where you said something about like by the end of the first century, there are probably five to ten thousand, and I'm gonna get these numbers wrong. Correct me, please. But you said by the end of the first century there's probably five to ten thousand Christians or something like that, and then by the end of the second century, maybe there was a hundred and fifty-ish thousand uh Christians, and then by the end of the fourth century, I think it was like two and a half to three million. What do you attribute that crazy explosion of Christianity in the church? Is it just Constantine in the Roman Empire, or what would you attribute that to in part?

Bart 1:10:43

Yeah, so I wrote a book on this. There you go. There it is. Just on this question. It's called The Triumph of Christianity, and it tries to explain how it worked because at the very beginning, according to the New Testament, I think it's probably historically right, at the very beginning, Jesus had a very small group of people who believed he got raised from the dead. So in the New Testament, it's 11 disciples and a handful of women. So say 20 people. So uh by the year 300, there are three or four million of them. How do you get from 20 to 3 million in 300 years? That's the question. So um I actually um I borrow a concept from uh Rodney Stark, who is a sociologist of religion, who actually just crunched the numbers. Sociologists are good at doing population growth issues, and the way it works is that um, you know, like if you invest your money, if you if you're making 10% on your money and you invest a dollar, you'll get a dime. But if you invest a million dollars, you'll get a hundred thousand dollars. And what happens is over time that dime at the same rate, that dime goes to a hundred thousand dollars. See what I mean? It's it's an exponential curve. What happens in Christianity is that there is this exponential curve where people so the basic thing I argue in my book is that if you have a growth rate of about 35 percent every decade within Christianity, or say 40 percent for the sake of ease. Suppose you've got a hundred Christians this year, in 10 years you need to have 140 Christians, that's 40 percent. Then after that, you need to have 196 Christians, the decade after that. And so, and getting 40 Christian, new Christians out of 100 isn't that much really, because if you do it a decade, that's like three three and a half people a year that convert. And in the Roman world, if you convert the poter familias, the father of the household, you convert the whole family. So you convert one one man, adult man, you got your quota for the next decade. So the things you do at that at that rate, and by the and you just crunch the numbers, by the time you get to the year 300, you've got three million Christians. So it's not a miracle, and you don't need Constantine.

Randy 1:13:03

Okay. But you said you don't need a miracle. No. So would you say, are there other religions or world movements that have had that kind of 40% year after, you know, decade after decade growth if we're staying within this, you know, mathematical system?

Bart 1:13:19

Yeah, yeah. So this is the interesting thing about Rodney Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, which was a very problematic book in many ways, because he's dealing with ancient Christian sources and he's not an expert in these sources, and he there are a lot of problems with the book, but he's a sociologist who can crunch the numbers. And what he's an expert, he's a sociologist of religion, and he's an expert in Mormonism. When he wrote this book, whatever it was, 20 years ago, he came up with a 40%. I had to modify his numbers, but he came up with 40% a decade, and it turns out that was the growth of the Mormon church from the time it was founded until the time he was writing his book. 40%. So when I read his book, I concluded that means in 200 years, we're all gonna be Mormon.

Randy 1:14:03

Yes.

Bart 1:14:03

No, so it's all you look, if all you have to do is convert three people, if if a hundred of you have to convert three people a year, there's nothing miraculous about that. You can still say God did it. You're gonna say God did it though. You'd have to ask, why do you wait 400 years to do it? Why didn't he like, you know, just kind of do it overnight because he can't do it anyway. I feel like I'm in an Amway meeting or something.

Randy 1:14:27

Exactly.

Jewish Roots And Expanding Neighbor Love

Kyle 1:14:29

Well done. Well done. Exactly as miraculous as that is. Yeah. Yeah, right, right. So Jesus was Jewish, right? This is a thing that lots of evangelicals have recently discovered. Actually, a lot of them have not yet discovered it. Um, and so he said things that were very Jewish. He said things that were very similar to, maybe even borrowed from, things that other Jewish rabbis had already said. Um, you talk about some of that in your book. Um, some of his ideas, some of the things he emphasized were shared with others in Jewish history. He was working within the context of the same Torah that a lot of the other ones were working within. Your book focuses on Jesus as the historical locus of this kind of altruistic ethical teaching focused on strangers, enemies, etc. And for good reasons, right? Because Christianity won the day, whether it was mathematics or something else, it won. That's a big reason why we all believe some of the ethical things that we do right now. But there's still a significant sense in which we owe that ethics to Judaism more broadly. And I I I want to just name that. Uh and I don't even know how to phrase this question, but stepping back a bit from Jesus specifically, how do you understand the difference between uh the sorts of Jewish ethical emphases that there were in that time period, which were of course also religious emphases for them, and the emphases that you find in the broader pagan world? Judaism seems from that perspective like a w a kind of aberration historically. Is that accurate? And if so, what do you think explains it?

Bart 1:15:59

Uh yeah, I think it's accurate. I think there in a couple ways, uh Jewish ethics are different, or ancient Israelite ethics are different from what you get in the wider world. Uh everybody else in the world is polytheistic. Um in polytheistic religions, the religions themselves are uh do tend not to have much of an ethical emphasis. That I don't mean that people were unethical, but uh but the ethics were not mediated to them through religion. It was usually more just kind of um understanding how communities had to function together, and uh and when you had people thinking about it, seriously, there was philosophers rather than religious leaders in the wider world. So uh Judaism did have mandates from God about how you were supposed to behave. Um so that's one thing that was different. Um the other thing from the rest of the world, the other thing that was different from the rest of the world is that within the Israelite tradition, um, there's the the idea that Jesus picks up on and runs with, uh, which is that you should uh love your neighbor as yourself. Within the Israelite tradition, so that's that's in the Torah, it's Leviticus 19, 18, you should love your neighbor as yourself. It's quite clear just within that verse that it means you're supposed to treat other Israelites well and fairly to help help the Israelite in need, even if you don't know them. Even strangers among the Israelites, you've got to help if they're needy Israelites, you help them. And that's different from in the Greek and Roman worlds. Uh a chunk of my book early on shows that in the Greek and Roman worlds the focus was on family, friends, local community. Uh, those are the people that you help and you're concerned about. You're not concerned about outsiders. In Israel, you are concerned about Israel uh outsiders just within Israel. Uh so any Israelite you have to treat well, and any immigrant into Israel. Anybody who immigrates into Israel is to be treated like an Israelite. And so uh this is a so it's a very serious uh emphasis on uh Israelite immigration policy. Um what happens with Jesus that makes him different? He he accepts that, he buys that, and absolutely buys it, but he expands it in ways that we don't have records of others doing, which is that you're to love your non-Israelite. This the neighbor is is not just the people within your religious or ethnic community or your nation, it's anybody in need. And so he's expanding this teaching, as he does other teachings in the Torah. I mean, you know, if Moses says you shouldn't murder somebody, Jesus says don't even get angry with them, right? And so it's kind of like that where he's taking this thing, love your neighbor, and it means love anybody who's in need. And so that's why you get the parable of the Good Samaritan, right? The Samaritan who's the enemy of the Jew is the one who takes care of him in the in the parable of the Good Samaritan. So uh I I don't know, does that answer your your question, Kyle?

Kyle 1:19:13

It helps for sure. Yeah, it helps me to contextualize it a little bit. It just seems having been in immersed in so much like secular quote unquote secular ethics, right, from so many different traditions for so long, the the Jewish take on this seems increasingly strange. And this book really brought it out, and and so it's nice to hear why that might have to be.

Bart 1:19:33

Well, it's very strange in the ancient world because we have you know more these moral philosophers that you know they're a lot, you know, they're amazing going back, especially to Aristotle, and they did not think you should help people in need just because they were in need.

Kyle 1:19:46

That's right. But we can, I think it's important to say that we can still take those ideas and those emphases and they're definitely their starting points, their first principles ethically, and get to the conclusion that we should. Like that is very much possible. Um whether they were blinded for reasons that we're not encumbered by or whatever, like it is still possible to points and get to that conclusion.

Bart 1:20:06

Maybe it it might be a little tricky.

Kyle 1:20:08

It 100% is you have to leave behind Aristotle's like peccadillos and and uh biases for sure. Uh you can't think like an Athenian thought, but you can think that, for example, human happiness is the foundation for what ethics should be about. Uh you could define flourishing in the way that they've defined it and definitely get to an altruistic perspective.

Bart 1:20:30

Well, it's it is altruistic. I mean, look, I mean, books uh eight and nine of the Nicomachian ethics are about friendship, and people should read these books, they're fantastic. But it's about how you treat friends, it's not about how you treat somebody, and so it could have led to it, but when you said earlier that people today follow Aristotle more than they follow Jesus, even the Christians, they they really do, but they don't know they do. Yeah, um, but Aristotle's all about having that kind of internal sense of well-being and contentment and flourishing. Uh they call it eudaimonia, but it's you know, and that's you know, that's what most people seek now.

Kyle 1:21:07

Yeah. Randy, did you have further thoughts about that or different? Yeah, your turn, your turn.

Randy 1:21:12

The whole thesis of the book, and you in chapter eight, you just sum it up really well, Bart. You say, and I'm quoting here, you say, to reiterate, such public charitable institutions. By that, just for the listeners, you mean I think hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, shelters for the unhoused, etc., etc., right? These things that are just commonplace in the Western world today. To reiterate, such public charitable institutions were nowhere to be seen in the Roman world prior to the Christian movement. Less than 400 years after Jesus' death, they started to become an expected feature of civilization. That's that's a huge bold statement. Can you just contextualize that for our listeners just a little bit and make your case that really Christianity and the teachings of Jesus could be responsible for the world changing and becoming other-oriented and providing the safety net? Even so far into the future, you cite Franklin Roosevelt and your grandpa's response to the New Deal and to Social Security. But we're talking all these entitlements and public welfare with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, even though you know we we we make poor people go bankrupt to get medical care in in this country. But these are major claims. Can you just contextualize those for our listeners?

Bart 1:22:30

No, look, they're they're look, I uh people are gonna when people just hear me say that, Christians invented public hospitals. You know, they say, no, no, no, that can't be right. You know, orphanages, you know, homes without no, they but Christians did. And you know, I'm not a I'm not an apologist. I'm not a Christian apologist, because I'm not even a Christian. I mean, but but historically it's true, and you can show it. And so the deal is that in the Roman world they didn't have they didn't have public hospitals. They had doctors. If you had, if you were rich, you could buy, you know, you could pay for one. Um, and the military had hospitals for their soldiers who got, you know, had their arm cut off or something. They somebody there to take care of them, but but they didn't have public hospitals and they didn't have orphanages, they didn't have uh foster homes, they didn't have, you know, uh orphanage, they just they didn't have these things. Christians took seriously Jesus' demand to help others, and in the fourth century, we can actually date it and locate it when hospitals started. It actually started in what's the middle of now Turkey in the in the middle of the fourth century, when we first start getting public hospitals. And so I talk about all that in the book, and I show that it's it's the case. And um people, you know, when I tell people that they always think, no, like there were things going on like the governmental help. What about the grain doles in Rome? You know, they bread and circuses, right? And so I have to explain why that ain't the same thing. And and so all of this, you know, this is based on research, but it's not like I'm the first one who's recognized this. Okay. Yeah. Uh there are not there, I don't know people who've actually written it for a general public before, but it this I'm not the first one who found this.

Common Ground Between Atheists And Christians

Randy 1:24:14

Yeah. Another quote from the book, you say, as an agnostic atheist myself, with regard to at least this particular offshoot of Jesus' teachings, I say, thank God for Christianity, ironically. Uh first of all, I love that. Second of all, um, how is that kind of thought received among your peers? And primarily I'm talking about your atheist peers. And I I just am fascinated by this and really love this because I want to create a dialogue where atheists and Christians are not kind of feeling like we have to debate one another all the time, we have to argue with one another, we have to win against one another, but rather where we can have some commonality and see that we're more alike than we're different, right? So, how how are how is this message received? And the ironic thing too, Bart is that I'm jumping into your scholarship through this book, and that's probably I'm not getting the full picture of Bart Ehrman here. Yeah.

Bart 1:25:09

Well, I don't know how it's received because the book hasn't come out yet. And um and so I think among scholars it's going to be fine. I think that there are a lot of, uh, as I've seen before, a lot of um people who uh left their evangelical faith or their Catholic faith, they've left their faith, and um they're they've been hurt by their faith, uh, tradition, they've been hurt by the church or by people in the church, and they have raw wounds and they just don't want to hear it and they don't believe it.

Randy 1:25:40

Yeah.

Bart 1:25:40

Uh I try to have some distance because I think common ground is possible between atheists and and Christians, uh especially on the issue of ethics and morals, and especially in our day, when we so see so much violence and hatred toward the other, and a lot of atheists don't like it any more than believers do. And uh, I think it can be common ground that we agree that that we should be helping each other rather than just trying to dominate each other.

Randy 1:26:14

Thank you. Uh Dr. Bart Ehrman, the book is Love Thy Stranger. It's a wonderful book. Everyone should read it, as Kyle said in the beginning of this interview. Thank you for this book. Thank you for chatting with us. It's been fascinating and delightful to talk with you, Bart.

Bart 1:26:30

Well, it's been my pleasure. You two have something going here. This is great.

Randy 1:26:36

Hopefully, we can talk again. I would love to talk.

Kyle 1:26:38

I have 14 more questions just about this.

Support The Show And Stay Connected

Randy 1:26:42

Okay. Well, blessings to you and your retirements, and thanks again, Bart. Okay, thanks. Thanks for listening to A Pastor and a Philosopher Walking to a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreon.com slash a pastor and a philosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks, and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle 1:27:14

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Randy 1:27:22

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Kyle 1:27:30

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