@@fin5494 I think that’s pretty common. I was brought up in a mainstream Protestant church and Paul was an apostle which seemed almost interchangeable with disciple and it sort of seemed they were all one big happy family. It was like all the events were compressed into this very short time frame. One of the better books I’ve read is Marcus Borg’s “Evolution of the Word.” It’s an attempted chronological New Testament and reading through in that order is very different than the standard NT order. When you read in chronological order the time gaps are much more apparent and you can see the theology evolving. I was once on a mission to try to find what might be the most authentic version of the Gospel in the first century. But I’ve come to the conclusion that it was never static so finding the authentic version isn’t really possible - the authentic versions in the first century were multiple dynamic narratives undergoing constant revisions and refinements. Barts book and podcasts are very helpful in studying early Church history.
@@a-train3503 What death means? and why have we given a death a meaning it never had? Death = out from existence? - what proves it? Bible gives another meaning to death. Biblical meaning for DEATH = existence without GOD in the lake of fire. Souls, do not place REALITY into the box of “religions”, for these have nothing to do with one another. (How can light, which expose the darkness, be in the same box with the darkness? Or can a friend and enemy work together?). I am not in "Christian-ism ", i am in the reality. As getting saved IN SPIRIT is real thing. As going to heaven or hell after death = also reality. Being found worthy to be RAPTURED out from here (without tasting the death, souls going to heaven in the blink of an eyes) Tribulation - the 7 final years for the kingdom of satan, whom son of dearth this whole world waits for. - also reality. The Last Christians shall be BEHEADED and going to heaven - also reality. The parts which "religious"? And as it is clear that CHRISTIANITY is not a religion, then why is it tried to be found among the religions? Was not CHRIST also tried to be found among the dead and was not found? Look around and see The whole WORLD has turned SODOM AND GOMORRAH 2 - We deserving FIRE again and the FIRE shall come again, this time not just for a 1 city, but to the WHOLE WORLD. As it was with the FLOOD, where 8 souls were left alive, the same yet little different shall be with FIRE, leaving no soul alive.
A personal thank you to Bart Ehrman for his amazing work in making Biblical scholarship accessible to a mainstream audience. I am an MA student in theology and your books were among my main primers into the subject, your work and that of J.D Crossan is what I recommend everybody as great introductory texts into early Christianity and New Testament studies!
This helps answer so many questions I have had about Paul ever since I was a little kid raised in the Fire & Brimestone type of Baptist church. Very interesting, since I have always sensed there was 2 different " "religions" being taught between Paul & Jesus. Very different!
Yes. True. Think of how many sermons you have heard about Paul's Roman Road as the way to salvation and how *few* sermons you probably heard about the Sermon on the Mount.
The Pauline Epistles are the only observations we have of the original Christ followers. There is no evidence (no accounts, records, or mentions) of a physical and historical Jesus in any writings of Paul or in writings before or contemporary to Paul. The earliest Christianity, according to this limited evidence, is perfectly in line with Docetist theology and Gnostic religion. As for the Gospels, they were a later invention when the oral tradition of sayings and narratives was written down. th-cam.com/video/u3PnD1TScw4/w-d-xo.html&lc=UgzzCEhRuvTYqseWKKx4AaABAg
I too, feel that Art Garfunkle is the true founder of Simon & Garfunkle, and that there is no distinction between their teachings. They are easily harmonized.
I sometimes almost don't watch some of these because the answer seems so obvious. "Is the Gospel of John Anti-Semetic?" YES. "Is Paul the Founder of Christianity?" YES. But Bart's degree of insight always sheds new light on things I've taken for granted. I appreciate how he looks beyond the knee-jerk answer to provide a broader, fairer answer.
Except Paul did nothing of the kind. That would have been the Emperor Constantine.The early church fathers like Atthanasius wouldnt have not had anything to do with Paul the apostle.
@@zapkvr I think if Athanasius explained his views to Paul he would at least mostly agree, and they would get to some sort of mutual understanding. Though being a Christian, Athanasius would almost certainly defer to so great an "Apostle" if any true disagreements actually remained after a full exposition so that no misunderstandings remain from the use of certain language.
Paul is not the Founder of Christianity. Paul is what Ray Kroc is to the establishment of Mcdonalds. Ray Kroc did not found Mcdonalds the Macdonald brothers did but Macdonalds would not be the popular worldwide restaurant chain without Ray Kroc. Paul was also gatekeeping Judaism becuase he wanted to stop mass populations of foreign Gentiles taking over Judaism but at the same time make converting to Christianity easier.
The Gospel of Jesus was originally one book, written by Lazarus in consultation with the Apostles [John 21:24] and published soon after Jesus left them on their own. The religion was hijacked by Rome, the Gospel was broken up scrambled adulterated into a bunch of competing narratives. Later four of those adulterated gospels were canonized with falsely ascribed authorship and a Gnosticism cover-story. It was the finding of an original Gospel of Jesus scroll in Jerusalem that gained the Knights Templar power over the Church and their eventual undoing when the church finally retaliated against them Friday 13th.
43:47 Matthew 11:11 Suggests that Jesus who has foresight, didn't mention anyone of future importance, felt that John was quite important. In fact, John was the first person in the Christian Greek Scriptures to mention Jesus.
I have enjoyed all of these podcasts but this was ,for me, far and away the most interesting .Paul's influence (for better or worse),not only on Christians, but on all of us has been immense. I say that as an atheist. We all live in a world which bears his stamp. Ta for this.
I think the answer is certainly yes, as you point out with influence, he founded Christianity. There is a threshold question to be answered though. Did Paul KNOW he was founding Christianity? Was it an intentional act or did he remain nominally at least Jewish in his own mind?
@@UrMomsFavSnack Constantine did not declare the religion of Rome to be Christianity, he made it legal, and converted on his deathbed, this then opened the floodgates for proselytization and other emperors policies would more directly lead to its dominance
I'm thrilled to see this - as an Ehrman blog subscriber I always wanted to ask him this. As I was evolving away from Christianity I sort of thought, if there's anything attributed to Jesus that felt actually prophetic, it was his talk about "false prophets" - and then here's Paul, changing the fundamental teaching of Jesus: instead of "walk this way," Paul's teaching is "you just have to repent and acknowledge." It infuriated me that people could do horrible acts and then just wash their guilt away - it's like an organized crime gateway drug. Anyway - valuable topic. Thank you!
Thumbs up. Here is another valuable topic. Jesus was announced as king of Israel in that choice between Jesus and Barabbas. Quickly said, Pilot dressed Jesus up as King, Pilot presented Jesus to the Sanhedrin and high priest among the crowd as "their King". Told the crowd to choose to crucify "their King" or Barabbas. The Saducees and High Priest chose "their king" Jesus to be crucified and instigated the Jewish crowd to choose "their King" to be crucified..... and so the Priesthood anointed Jesus as their king in order for him to be executed. And Pilat published this fact above Jesus head at a time when Jerusalem was most crowded of Jews from all over the realm. What this accomplished was to legalize according to Torah law Jesus' amended covenant and make irrelevant all burdensome Talmudic rules. I think Jesus and Pilat planned it together. Neet trick on the Sanhedrin huh.
@@termination9353 well, I'm no bible scholar, lol - but being that there were no witnesses to actually transcribe these events (I don't think they're in the earliest stories), it makes more sense to me that this is all fiction, added later to sort of "tie the whole room together" in terms of laying at least partial responsibility for the crucifixion on Jews themselves. I'd recommend joining Bart's blog and submitting that question.
I come from a religious tradition (Ebionites) where we reject the beliefs and teachings of Paul. We accept James the Just as the leader of Yeshua's movement after his death. We focus solely on the Jewish teachings of Yeshua, and as a result, our outlook on the world, and towards people of other religions, is completely different to that of mainstream Christianity, especially of Evangelicals
Not likely. Wikipedia: 'The Ebionites are still attested, if as marginal communities, down to the 7th century. Some modern scholars argue that the Ebionites survived much longer and identify them with a sect encountered by the historian Abd al-Jabbar ibn Ahmad around the year 1000.'
@@zed91 I don't know what to tell you my friend, you say I don't exist, not likely an Ebionite, well, here I am, and my fellow Talmidis, Ebionites and Followers of the Way exist, whatever you want to call us. I have followed this faith alongside others since 1987. If you do a search on the internet for modern Ebionites, or Talmidis, then go ahead. But if you don't think I exist, then that's fine by me, I don't have a problem with that😄
If you'd like Bart's thoughts on Amos, I recommend you read his book, "God's Problem - How the Bible Fails to Answer our most Important Question: Why we Suffer". This is the book that explains how and why Bart ultimately lost his faith. His section on the Prophetic view on suffering covers Amos a little.
Holy sh!t man, I just read through Amos and it is more evidence that god is a immoral monster! It's basically stating "I the lord, kicked the living shit out of you and you won't come back to me" like WTF? Yahweh is an abusive boyfriend!
@@GameTimeWhy Precisely. He could no longer reconcile faith in an all loving god with all the horrible suffering we see in the world. I like the verbiage he uses - the 'problem of suffering' - better than the more conventional 'problem of evil', because what constitutes evil can often be seen as subjective. Suffering, for me, is far less ambiguous.
How important was Paul in his own time, and how important was his mission? Three of the most important churches in Antiquity were Antioch, Rome and Alexandria. Neither of them had been founded by Paul.
Considering the authors of the New Testament never met Jesus, and largely told the story they wanted to tell rather than something that is historically accurate, as the Johannine community shows, I think it is fair to say the authors of the New Testament are the Founders of Christianity. Since Paul wrote most of the books of the New Testament, I think it is fair to say that Paul and maybe Luke are the Founders of Christianity. Paul seems to be more like a modern Televangelist than an accurate story teller. His account of meeting Jesus sounds like Oral Roberts meeting a 900 foot tall Jesus who told him to build the City of Faith Medical and Research Center. I'm not a mythicist, but since the only things that remain of Jesus' life were those things written down in the New Testament, I'm not sure the actual historical Jesus, a poor Jewish preacher who was preaching to Jews who somehow ran afoul of the Romans, had all that much to do with modern Christianity, a largely Gentile religion that seems to be based more on Greek and Roman ideas than Jewish ideas. I don't think the real life Jesus is any more relevant to the New Testament or Christian Religions than the real life Abraham Lincoln is to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Paul did not talk about meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus (at least not in any writings we currently have that are attributed to him). The Damascus road stories all appear in Acts of the Apostles, a work not attributed to Paul and currently dated by the majority of scholars to have been written decades after Paul's death. What Paul does talk about in the letters attributed to him is that 'the Christ' appeared to him in a vision as a bright light and revealed things about the coming kingdom of god to him.
WRONG - The Gospel of Jesus was originally one book, written by Lazarus in consultation with the Apostles [John 21:24] and published soon after Jesus left them on their own. The religion was hijacked by Rome, the Gospel was broken up scrambled adulterated into a bunch of competing narratives. Later four of those adulterated gospels were canonized with falsely ascribed authorship and a Gnosticism cover-story. It was the finding of an original Gospel of Jesus scroll in Jerusalem that gained the Knights Templar power over the Church and their eventual undoing when the church finally retaliated against them Friday 13th.
Wondering if you've ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is studying the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
Yes I think you're right on with this. The historical Jesus (assuming he existed, and I think he probably did) became sort of a mascot for Christianity. His name is in every prayer, but his life and teachings are mostly either lost or irrelevant. Paul, on the other hand was smart, but he was also clearly a charlatan and his teachings, dubious as they are, are deeply important to modern Christians.
@@sunburstrose7860 "Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"?" NO - But Paul and the Catholic Church perverted Jesus doctrine into pagan idolatry and Orwellian trained the public to be unaware of the difference.
🔥 *Missing Questions*🔥 ✨1-Did Jesus warn his followers from person who will destroy the Law and will be called least? See Matthew 5 17-20 ✨ 2-Did Saul be called Paul? Did Paul means the least? Is Paul derives from the Roman family name Paulus or Paullus, from the Latin adjective meaning "small", "humble", *"least"* or "little"? ✨3-How did Jesus describ his enemy's work plan in Matthew 13 24-30? The enemy who sowed bad seeds in Jesus's good wheat field, Is Paul that enemy who corrupted teachings of Jesus Christ.
I like hearing Bart say that Paul probably wrote hundreds of letters over his lifetime, and all we have are seven authentic ones. I've thought that for a long time. What has been missed from Paul's full view since we only have a tiny glimpse into his thinking, but created a whole religion on this sliver.
Although 2 Corinthians and Philippians look like composites of multiple letters; so we probably have more than seven letters, at least in fragmentary form. But presumably a lot of what we've lost probably makes 2 Corinthians 9 look positively enthralling. We naturally don't have the letter Paul wrote to the church in Aniaropolis about washing the meeting house steps.
Also, even the letters aren't really his full view, since they're just focused on specific problems and controversies. Imagine if instead of some of that, we had his pitch to new converts.
It is irrelevant whether Paul wrote "hundreds" of letters and Ehman did not claim he did, he only supposed it. We don't actually know if Paul wrote any letters, we only have texts that claim to be letters if taken at face value. We know that some were forgeries. For that matter, we don't even know if Paul ever existed. We know that people attempted to create a new belief system and can see evidence of its aftermath, nothing more.
@@craigjones9372 Scepticism can go to far. We don't "know" Paul existed, but if we apply those standards to history we "know" almost nothing, even where we have documentation.
Was Paul the founder? Well, it depends what you mean by founder. Clearly there was a church/group before Paul.After all, he was persecuting them! On the other hand… the original church was not evangelizing gentiles…. And gentiles eventually exclusively dominated the church. So, effectively Paul DID found what ultimately became the church
@@ihatespam2 Yeah, I mostly agree… but I think there is also a maximalist mythicist contingent who think that there was no Jesus and that Paul totally invented Christianity
I hope that Bart will at some point explain what “salvation” could possibly have meant to Jews, but more especially to Pagans. What exactly would his converts think they were being “saved” FROM? Jews would, I suppose, be hoping for the establishment of God’s kingdom, a new and perfect Israel that would encompass all Torah-observant Jews under the rule of His Anointed; Pagans wouldn’t be expecting or hoping to be “saved” from anything, would they? Would anybody in the Empire have any sense at all of the later Christian notion of being “born in sin” or “living in sin” and needing “salvation from sin”? That seems completely anachronistic. Did Paul make that all up from scratch? Or is he saying “You can be “saved” from death - you can live forever in a perfect world? It’s confusing. I try to imagine an Evangelical preacher of today telling a crowd of first-century Jews or Pagans that “salvation” can be theirs if they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and them being completely puzzled. Salvation? What from? 🤔🤔🤔
It's a question that always confuses me as well. Pagans didn't show homage to their gods because they had sinned in some way. It's my understanding worship was what a pagan god required simply because he/she was a god (and could grant favors). The worshipers' sins, as we understand it, wasn't part of their thinking or world view. I would also appreciate a video from Bart on this concept.
@@quij7ote222 Right! The basic concept underlying all Pagan sacrifices is summed up in the famous Roman saying, “DO UT DES” - I (the worshipper) give [to you, the god] so that you [the god] may give [to me, your worshipper.] That’s why the Romans demanded ritual sacrifice as a universal civic duty - almost like Americans saluting the flag or singing the National Anthem - we have to keep the gods happy or else they’ll get angry and turn our great blessings into curses. I think the same motivation underlies Jewish temple sacrifice too: You keep Yahweh in a good mood by taking your cattle or sheep and killing them because it’s a SACRIFICE - it COSTS you something - it re-establishes the balance sheet between God and the people - He gave, you’re in His debt, so you give back. So I can understand Paul saying that Jesus is the Lamb of God - His sacrifice settles all accounts for everyone who “participates” in it. Jesus is God’s universal “debt relief program.” But “SALVATION”? How would a Pagan even begin to understand that? Is it all down to a kind of universal bartering system? Is that what “salvation” is for Paul? For yesterday’s Pagans? For today’s televangelists?
Remember most Greek religions thought that the afterlife was a dreary place for most people. Only the important people wound up on Mount Olympus. So Jesus was offering to prevent people from going to a boring afterlife
@@nosuchthing8 I think that's part of it. I think a lot of people wanted a more personal relationship with their gods. The mystery religions offered that and Christianity offered it too. Also Christianity flattered human vanity by asserting that humans are cosmically important. Paganism didn't really do this.
@alanpennie8013 wow, I think you nailed it! My memory of the Greek and Roman religions is that unless you were some big shot hero like Hercules, you had no chance of making it to Olympus or heaven. Normal folk went to the underworld which was just boring, mainly.
I think the New Testament's reliance on Pauline works indicates that the church of Christ (as we know it) was founded by gentiles, not Jews, and so they looked to Paul for their right to exist. Jewish proto-Christians may not have considered Paul authoritative at all (which would open up a realm of possibilities), but eventually they were out- numbered by gentiles, so Paul's letters won out (perhaps long after Paul was gone).
Also, the existence and popularity of the "red letter bible" (since 1899, with the words of Jesus printed in red ink) attests to the fact that many Christians consider the words of Jesus far more important than anything else in the NT, including Paul's words.
Yes. And I think this goes back to the beginnings of Christianity. Even if we reject Q as purely hypothetical The Gospel of Thomas does indicate that early Christians carefully preserved The Sayings of Jesus. It would be odd if they hadn't. They were literally the sayings of a living God.
Paul had Luke for biographer. Luke's Gospel shows how creative he can be. How many Founders didn't have biographers? When missionaries came to India, they found a Christian Church already there. That Church attributed its foundation to Doubting Thomas.
I see Paul as the Brigham Young of Christianity. He didn't found it, but after the original founder died prematurely, he expanded it into the religion we know today.
Wondering if you've ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is studying the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
i'd say he is just straight up the founder. Jesus didnt have much intentions of necessarily establishing some new doctrine, and a lot of his teachings can be rounded to companion and love over strict legality and be prepared cause god is coming soon. Paul fleshes out a lot of tenants of the faith that are kind of more than jesus's ideas, especially the growing tradition of jesus being god and the significance of resurrection and what his death means
Idea/suggestion: How about an encyclopedia of Christianity based on the teachings of Mr. Ehrman? How about if Mr. Ehrman writes an encyclopedia of Christianities? Should his students undertake such a project? How about a detailed time-line on the history of Christianity, including the versions of Christianity that were defeated?
Loved the soapbox! I dislike anyone using a tiny snippet, out of context, to make a point. Pick up any book, and use the same method to make any point that one wants. I think the same can be said for trying to use one line from a movie and using it to explain the message of the entire movie. And don’t get me started on rating a book based on what one heard was the message. Read the book first… end of my rant
Hard-hitting reality check with that Amos reference Everybody go read it! And quote the appropriate verses whenever someone tries to get you to go to church
I've jut thought its interesting that we only have 7 of Paul's letters, given the significance of the number 7 in Christianity. I wonder why those were chosen in particular? and by whom?
They were chosen by a council of Bishops. The stated reasoning was that they were written before 100 A.D. and were associated with a Saint. The actual reason was that they were all ready popular.
Yes he is. Paul was the true founder of Christianity. Paul was the one who got Christianity rolling. Paul is the reason Christianity became a European religion.
I say the Roman Empire started Christianity, Paul never started a new religion, as he used Romans and Galatians to preach the Torah given to Abraham, and set aside the Torah given Moses. I have a Ytube video series called 'Myths in so-called Christianity' which proves my point from the words of Paul and Jesus.
@@amayoka I don't quite get the attractive, except many thought grace was alliance to sin, hence Romans and Galatians. Paul directed the Gentiles to the Torah of Abraham away from Moses, not a new religion but a revert to his own lost one as a lost sheep of Israel. You may be interested that I have a Ytube video series called 'Myths in so-called Christianity'.
The Church is so much more than St.Paul. The answer is we don't know about the other founders, missionaries and the growth of early Christianity. The Catholic Church bases its dogmas on the Magisterium, the Tradition and the Bible. Protestants being entirely dependent upon the Bible are inclined to over-emphasise the role of Paul. Paul was a great Apostle and Saint and Christian priest who celebrated the mass. We have his own testimony to that.
Dear Dr. Ehrman, huge fan of yours and enjoyed reading your books. They are very thoughtful and enlightening! Love all your videos and debates over the years. My question for this topic is, could Paul have met Jesus alive during his ministry? Since Paul was a Pharisees, and the gospels have clearly mentioned them followed Jesus many times, while being unnamed.
Do you mean could he have, if things had gone differently, that is, or did he, is it likely that he did? Presumably he did not or he would have said so.
@jeffryphillipsburns How else could've Paul knew who Jesus was or looked and sounded like? There were no paintings or Jewish Digest circulating at the time among these people.
@@Captain-Slow Paul’s knowledge of Jesus came via hearsay. He heard stories from others who heard stories. The biblical narratives suggest he was a good Jew and actively persecuted the bad Jews who were being influenced by this heretic - he was active in driving them out. And then he had his conversation and spent the rest of his life trying to convert others. Oddly enough, his greatness success was with the Gentiles and not the Jews.
Oh. Silly me. You mean how he recognized him in the vision. Didn't really have to, I'd say. Visions are weird. Can be completely convincing even if your mind is inventing the details.
There's a great scene in the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" where Jesus has a conversation with Paul. It's during the period when he's dying on the cross and he experiences his "last temptation". I won't ruin it by saying more, but it's a great scene in a very interesting movie that focuses more on Jesus' human experience than his divinity.
@@melissalittle4369 Yeah, in my country some hardcore Catholics picketed the cinemas. I think their complaint was "Jesus was perfect, therefore he was never tempted and never experienced doubt". They didn't get it at all. If Jesus wasn't having a human experience, with all that entails, then his sacrifice is meaningless. If he was God merely APPEARING as a human then there was no actual suffering, the whole thing was just theatre. Without that human experience, including pain, doubt, and desire, the whole premise of God as a Trinity (and Jesus being God) falls apart, IMO.
Definitely unhistorical, since Paul indicates pretty clearly that he never met the living Jesus, only the ascended one. But I'll forgive it. Dramas follow the rules of drama.
I have been following Bart Ehrman for a few years now and have learned so much about Christianity. He is geniune and teaches about the bible from the perspective of one who was a very dedicated follower of Christ. The Soapbox discussion was enlightening, I knew about the command regarding a fine be paid if a man caused a woman to lose a baby, fetus, child in her womb. Not given the same value as the life of the mother. The verses in Numbers (5: 11-31) were a bit of a shock. God will end a pregnancy if the woman concieved a child with someone other than her husband, also put the woman under a curse. So much in the bible that is easy to read over without really thinking about what is says. Per these verses in Numbers God is good with killing an illegitimate child in the womb, it does not have a right to life in God's eyes. My thoughts regarding life in the womb kind of comes down to how far along is the child developed? Seems any logical person would consider that a baby one day before its birth can suffer the same as that same baby the day after its birth. So for me, I don't want that pain capable creature to suffer any more than I want a puppy or kitten to suffer. A late term abortion requires the baby to be born, seems we as civilized people would make arrangements to allow that life to continue and not condone the torture it will feel when it is dismembered, this has nothing to do with the bible.
Agree with you completely on the abortion stuff. As with so many contentious issues, it's not black and white, and we need a reasonable moderate approach that considers the facts. Too many people want to either ban abortion completely or allow it for any reason even up to birth. Neither solution makes sense.
The Bible contains many doctrines that are unacceptable in today's times, although many things happening today are unacceptable as well. Ex. Save the puppies, kill the babies. God did not write this book. Man did.
I do not think that Numbers 5 mentions "abortion" as we know it. It refers instead to the "jealousy" of her husband, and a punishment for her having sex with someone else. I would have to wonder with this and other such curses, how many people have taken the test and passed it, and so have gotten away with what otherwise would be considered sinful behavior. In the case of men harming a pregnant woman or causing the death of her baby, it is clear that her husband decides the punishment. Like other commandments, the situation is a bit too connected to a story (e.g., what if the men weren't fighting, or what if a husband pushed his own wife down a flight of stairs?) but it seems the societal norms & the judges would decide. It still concludes at the end that if harm is done, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, etc. Forgiveness & grace are always an option, but if the punishment is not there, people can get away with all sorts of crime.
Paul’s conversion from a persecutor of Christians to one of the greatest believers who ever lived is one of the most compelling narratives in the Bible.
If it is true. There is no evidence that it is. The most probable explanation is that it is another legend. A vision while traveling along a road? Highly unlikely.
@@newnoggin2 2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching for reproving, and setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness. ( So God’s spirit guided the author’s of the Bible what to write and everything written in the Bible is the Truth (because it is impossible for God to Lie Hebrews 6:18) So then don’t ever let anyone lead you to believe that the Bible is false because it is God’s Word !!
Bart, I’ve never taken any of your classes, but I would like to ask if the audio and video of your classes will be recorded differently than this video? I have super fast internet and the quality of your video and audio is inferior to Megan’s. I’m not just complaining but I am hearing disabled and both the audio and video quality is very important. Thanks for your info.
Fascinating subject. Excellent video. Thank you for explaining everything so clearly. Paul had so many enemies, yet Paul's variant of Judaism became orthodox Christianity. Was Paul successful because he was more persuasive than all the others? Or was it because Paul performed miracles and miracles happened wherever he went? Did signs and wonders differentiate Paul from his opponents? Did the miracles convince believers that Paul had been taught directly by Jesus? (that Paul was more than a Muhammad or a Joseph Smith, merely asking people to believe he was given messages from a supernatural being?) I note the Marcionites were a variant of Paul's Christianity, but it seems that the leading second century Christians in Rome were not ready to take Paul's Christianity one step further and ditch the OT.
You just acknowledge jesus as a senior guy sent to this planet before mo. You can't follow jesus if you follow mo 'cos they preached different way of living. Btw am neither kristian nor Quslim
Man, I just read Amos 3-5 and wow, that's some words I've never heard people really echo before, maybe bits and pieces, but wow. It makes me wonder how many church people see choirs as a detestable thing.
Thank you for another illuminating talk. I grew up a Catholic and attended a Jesuit University but have learned more about the authentic roots of Christianity from your Teaching Company lectures and books than anywhere else. I will have to look up that Exodus passage and use it in my next abortion debate with a pro-lifer!
Not only that, but the passage where if a husband thought his wife's pregnancy was another man's, the priest was to give her a potion which would abort the fetus if she was guilty, but not if she was innocent.
That would be fitting as most times it is the pro-choice side that brings up religion and/or the bible most often. Secular points are usually what get mentioned by the pro-life side. Points such as human life has value, and should not be ended lightly. A fetus is human life. There really is no way to say it isn't.
Yes. Jesus was NOT EVER a Christian. In fact, even Peter was not a Christian, nor any of the close associates of Jesus (whoever they were) were "Christian". Further, the idea of Christianity was not completed with Paul, but later extended and refined by others, such that people often confuse pseudepigrapha with Paul's apparently original writings. Be careful what you all call "Christianity". Some of it is nothing more than christianISM.
Wondering if anyone's ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy, when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than looking at the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is focusing on the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
Great poscast Bart & Megan! Regarding the soapbox content, Bart paraphrases a verse from Psalms (139?): "You knew me before I was in my mother's womb". Although a similar phrase appears in Jeremiah 1:5 (totally different context), I have failed to find such a statement in Psalms. In Psalms 139:16 the psalmist merely states that God knew him from conception and not before conception. If the whole point Bart is making is that people gets all sorts of (bad) ideas because of what they are told the Bible says, why paraphrase the verse instead of read it? Is anybody else looked into those verses?
Excellent, important question. I just wonder about the silent voices , those of women who offered the first churches, in their homes, long before the first built churches by then, in men's hands. What did they find in the message, that spoke to them; we can only guess, but they provided the first spaces, the "meal", were deaconesses, and cleaned up.... Because like the well known, more active gods & goddesses, Hestia was little mentioned, god of the hearth & home. And more honored daily than all the others. Loved the soapbox BTW. Oh, did you know Hermes, the messenger/ communication god, was also known as "The Good Shepherd"? He, too, was worshipped daily in the home, on the roadside, in many ways not so much in temples. The most human, and friend, to mankind. th-cam.com/video/vYMhcEFrzrU/w-d-xo.html Hermes: The Immortal Guide. YT. I also love that Paul's (or whoever), the beautiful words about LOVE used in so many wedding ceremonies today, his letter to the polis/church of Corinth, was an ancient trading city, a port, full of "sailors" hint hint, whose patron deity was, Aphrodite (Venus). On the other hand, perhaps the Pauline doctrine was not Christian at all. Less inspired by God, than by a single man's vision. This the question, all wrong. THE founder, leaves us with no other answers. It's said that, " Western Civilization is like a family; whose Father was Greek; whose Mother was Hebrew, and they packed up the Family and moved to Rome. " Cheers! And some commentors . . . Get your head out of the Bible sometimes! Take a breath, lol!
Christianity may have more pagan roots than are acknowledged. All those disparate barbaric tribes moving around with their beliefs, Greek worship of the Sun God, Mithra, the Bull God etc.
Bad math, Bart! If Paul's ministry lasted for around 30 years, and he founded, say, 20 churches, and wrote each church, say, 2 letters per year, that does not mean he wrote a total of 30 X 20 X 2, or 1200 letters. After all, he didn't found 20 churches all at once, in the first year of his ministry. Twenty churches in 30 years is an average of one church every 1.5 years. He devotes a year and a half to Church #1, then goes off to preach elsewhere. At that point, he begins sending 2 letters/year to Church #1. So Church #1 gets 2 letters/year over the remaining years of Paul's ministry, i.e., over 28.5 years. That would be 57 letters for Church #1. Following that pattern, Church #2 would get 2 X 27, or 54, letters. Church #3 would get 51, #4 48, #5 45, and so on, until #20, which didn't get any at all. All that means the total would be more like 570 letters. Sorry, but I love math!
There was a teaching of Jesus that was pre-crucification and a teaching of Paul that was post-crucification. Jesus taught being born again from water and spirit and Paul taught salvation from the blood of the lamb of God on the cross. It would seem to me that the crucifix would be the image of the Beast.
Theologians seem to me to get the social status of the disciples of Jesus wrong. Yeah, most of them worked with their hands, but that doesn't make them poor. Fishing needs capital in the boat and the nets, and skill in knowing where to fish, and a sense of markets in knowing where best to sell their catch. If Joseph was a carpenter, that's not a labourer: that is a builder, a contractor. I have a PhD in a fairly recondite area of the Humanities, and I have, frequently, interesting conversations with tradies. This is especially important if one wants to insist that Christian (or, indeed, Jewish) belief is NOT a question of scoring high on the exam. A lack of the intellectual finesse that surplus wealth can buy does not mean a lack of capacity for intellectual enquiry; and religious belief is not a question of intellectual enquiry, anyway. Also, although Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles, he wasn't starting from nothing. The religion of Israel doesn't proselytise, but there were the Godfearers, gentiles attracted to the specifically religious aspects of Hebrew practice. The centurion who asks Jesus for help (Mat: 8, Luke 7) (if we assume that that's a reliable story) presumably was somewhere in the Godfearer region, to take notice of a Jewish teacher and healer.
The Jesus story began in 48 AD with the first of the Pauline Epistles (which comprise nearly half of the New Testament books) when Paul realized the Daniel 9:25 prophesy of a messiah expired without fulfilling so he made one up decades later and set the story decades in the past matching Jewish expectations of the messiah to make the prophesy seem true. The fulfillment of the Daniel 9:25 prophecy written in 444 BC was the test of the true messiah. By 48 AD it was known that the prophecy of a messiah coming in "seven weeks and threescore and two weeks" had not occurred on the prophesied date. It was the 69th Week and the 70th Week was soon to come. The prophesied messiah was expected and the anticipation set off a messiah craze. "Seven weeks and threescore and two weeks" is, 7 plus 60 plus 2 equals 69 total weeks. One prophetic week equals seven biblical years of 360 days (the Julian calendar was created centuries later), so 7 times 69 equals 483 total biblical years beginning with Artaxerxes' decree in 444 BC. Those 483 biblical years equal 173,880 days, or 476 Julian years. Therefore the Messiah would come and be "cut off" in AD 33. One prophetic week equaling seven Biblical years is something “Daniel” invented in about 165 BC, effectively an admission that Jeremiah 25:11-12 failed. Paul made up the entire Jesus story and added historical figures, locations, and events to add authenticity. In the Galatians "road to Damascus" conversion vision tale written in 48 AD he claimed to have gone to the Arabian desert to study the Old Testament for 17 years to align with the Daniel 9:25 prophecy. Paul's goal was to garner support for the insurrection against the Romans which began in 46 AD led by two brothers, Jacob and Simon, in the Judea province. The revolt, mainly in the Galilee, began as sporadic insurgency until it climaxed in 48 AD when it was quickly put down by Roman authorities. Both Simon and Jacob were executed. He created the fiction of having witnessed the risen messiah. He wanted to show that the messiah had come as prophesied but was murdered by the Romans. This was to entice the Gentiles to aid in the Jews' rebellion against the Romans. Instead, he created one of the world's most popular religions that is based on the literal worship of ritual human sacrifice, rape, and cannibalism. The Gospel authors copied, and embellished, Paul's fiction. None of the Gospel authors, or any other writers, were witnesses to the Bible figure known as Jesus.
@@KorKhan89 Are you disputing that the first mention of the prophesied messiah is by Paul in 48 AD? And that the Gospels followed decades later and were written by non-witnesses to Jesus?
@@unsiliquaria _"This is very similar to making mental leaps to interpret the Bible in favour of the christian faith..."_ Like the assertion that God walked around town for thirty years and then died and became a zombie and then the graves opened and the corpses and skeletons rose out and "appeared to many" and all of that happened without any of the locals noticing. :-))
What always trips me up, is salvation for what/from what? And I know he went over this but at least for me it’s a difficult point to remember. Why do they all need salvation in the first place? Especially before hell theology.
The answer is right in the chrisitian bible And they conversed there in the church a whole year; and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians. (act of the apostle 11:26)
I have a question that I'm unsure if Bart answered it here or not, which gospel is most likely the most similar to the stories about Jesus that would have been heard by Paul that led to his conversion?
I think Bart would say that Mark, if any at all, would be the closest since it’s the earliest written gospel and has a lot of material that others seem to use as a source.
Did Jesus not understand His objective in this world if He and Paul's teachings were so different? To find out that Paul's letters were written before the Gospels has really screwed up my thinking!
Imagine creating a religion about a person you never met but only hallucinated meeting them?
I remember thinking Paul was some sort of disciple that met Jesus and whatnot but then I looked into it and... Yeah
@@fin5494 I think that’s pretty common. I was brought up in a mainstream Protestant church and Paul was an apostle which seemed almost interchangeable with disciple and it sort of seemed they were all one big happy family. It was like all the events were compressed into this very short time frame. One of the better books I’ve read is Marcus Borg’s “Evolution of the Word.” It’s an attempted chronological New Testament and reading through in that order is very different than the standard NT order. When you read in chronological order the time gaps are much more apparent and you can see the theology evolving.
I was once on a mission to try to find what might be the most authentic version of the Gospel in the first century. But I’ve come to the conclusion that it was never static so finding the authentic version isn’t really possible - the authentic versions in the first century were multiple dynamic narratives undergoing constant revisions and refinements. Barts book and podcasts are very helpful in studying early Church history.
But did he?
He certainly influenced its direction, but the movement already existed.
@@jeffmacdonald9863 well the version he adopted became the dominant. And he also established many major churches too. So he had a lot to do.
@@fin5494 yup literally never physically met Jesus. Pretty convenient. Says he only saw a blinding light.
It takes an agnostic atheist to explain Paul's gospel better than I ever heard explained in church, and he doesn't even believe it! 😂
That's why he can explain it so well. You need a certain degree of distance to the text that you just don't get through a Christian lense.
That's because, he wasn't always an atheist
@@a-train3503 What death means? and why have we given a death a meaning it never had?
Death = out from existence? - what proves it? Bible gives another meaning to death.
Biblical meaning for DEATH = existence without GOD in the lake of fire.
Souls, do not place REALITY into the box of “religions”, for these have nothing to do with one another.
(How can light, which expose the darkness, be in the same box with the darkness? Or can a friend and enemy work together?).
I am not in "Christian-ism ", i am in the reality.
As getting saved IN SPIRIT is real thing.
As going to heaven or hell after death = also reality.
Being found worthy to be RAPTURED out from here (without tasting the death, souls going to heaven in the blink of an eyes)
Tribulation - the 7 final years for the kingdom of satan, whom son of dearth this whole world waits for. - also reality.
The Last Christians shall be BEHEADED and going to heaven - also reality.
The parts which "religious"?
And as it is clear that CHRISTIANITY is not a religion, then why is it tried to be found among the religions?
Was not CHRIST also tried to be found among the dead and was not found?
Look around and see The whole WORLD has turned SODOM AND GOMORRAH 2 - We deserving FIRE again and the FIRE shall come again, this time not just for a 1 city, but to the WHOLE WORLD.
As it was with the FLOOD, where 8 souls were left alive, the same yet little different shall be with FIRE, leaving no soul alive.
That's because he's a Christian scholar and historian.
@@RashidMBey th-cam.com/video/I1dppMprqyc/w-d-xo.html
Awww sweet, I didn't know if we would have any while Bart was gone
I love these, thanks for posting them
A personal thank you to Bart Ehrman for his amazing work in making Biblical scholarship accessible to a mainstream audience. I am an MA student in theology and your books were among my main primers into the subject, your work and that of J.D Crossan is what I recommend everybody as great introductory texts into early Christianity and New Testament studies!
This was such a great listen. Thanks Bart for actually addressing these topics.
Megan’s glasses are great!! Bart is always giving super information.
The famous Dame Edna Everage passed away last week, so her spectacles might become available to Megan.
Great topic! I've thought about this a lot and it's good to hear the good Dr's opinion.
This helps answer so many questions I have had about Paul ever since I was a little kid raised in the Fire & Brimestone type of Baptist church. Very interesting, since I have always sensed there was 2 different " "religions" being taught between Paul & Jesus. Very different!
Perhaps they should have removed the church from the volcano's edge to reduce the burning sulphur smell.
Yes. True. Think of how many sermons you have heard about Paul's Roman Road as the way to salvation and how *few* sermons you probably heard about the Sermon on the Mount.
Paul is the false Apostle in revelation 2:2
The Pauline Epistles are the only observations we have of the original Christ followers. There is no evidence (no accounts, records, or mentions) of a physical and historical Jesus in any writings of Paul or in writings before or contemporary to Paul. The earliest Christianity, according to this limited evidence, is perfectly in line with Docetist theology and Gnostic religion. As for the Gospels, they were a later invention when the oral tradition of sayings and narratives was written down.
th-cam.com/video/u3PnD1TScw4/w-d-xo.html&lc=UgzzCEhRuvTYqseWKKx4AaABAg
@onejohn2.26 but he helped spread the church
I look forward to every episode of this. Such a great podcast!
Always eager for the next MJPodcast! Megan and Dr. Ehrman are a great team!
so am i bruh
Obvious agenda of the rainbow coalition
Thanks Megan and Dr Bart E. to enlighten us.
This is fascinating. I look forward to the course.
Amazing work, thank you sooooo much. God bless you both
👏🙂
Yay, another episode.
Great video
I have followed Bart Herman on TH-cam for years. I found this particular offering especially informative.
Bar Terhman is the bible G.O.A.T.!
Bart Therman is great
Art Berman has opened up a world of knowledge to me.
I too, feel that Art Garfunkle is the true founder of Simon & Garfunkle, and that there is no distinction between their teachings. They are easily harmonized.
Art Vandelay
Amazing content as always, thank you
I sometimes almost don't watch some of these because the answer seems so obvious. "Is the Gospel of John Anti-Semetic?" YES. "Is Paul the Founder of Christianity?" YES. But Bart's degree of insight always sheds new light on things I've taken for granted. I appreciate how he looks beyond the knee-jerk answer to provide a broader, fairer answer.
Except Paul did nothing of the kind. That would have been the Emperor Constantine.The early church fathers like Atthanasius wouldnt have not had anything to do with Paul the apostle.
@@zapkvr
I think if Athanasius explained his views to Paul he would at least mostly agree, and they would get to some sort of mutual understanding. Though being a Christian, Athanasius would almost certainly defer to so great an "Apostle" if any true disagreements actually remained after a full exposition so that no misunderstandings remain from the use of certain language.
Jesus is Lord
Paul is not the Founder of Christianity. Paul is what Ray Kroc is to the establishment of Mcdonalds. Ray Kroc did not found Mcdonalds the Macdonald brothers did but Macdonalds would not be the popular worldwide restaurant chain without Ray Kroc. Paul was also gatekeeping Judaism becuase he wanted to stop mass populations of foreign Gentiles taking over Judaism but at the same time make converting to Christianity easier.
The Gospel of Jesus was originally one book, written by Lazarus in consultation with the Apostles [John 21:24] and published soon after Jesus left them on their own. The religion was hijacked by Rome, the Gospel was broken up scrambled adulterated into a bunch of competing narratives. Later four of those adulterated gospels were canonized with falsely ascribed authorship and a Gnosticism cover-story. It was the finding of an original Gospel of Jesus scroll in Jerusalem that gained the Knights Templar power over the Church and their eventual undoing when the church finally retaliated against them Friday 13th.
Another banger of a topic, great work!
Great discussion as always, I would also be interested in a comparative analysis of each of your disciplines.
I love this series with Dr. Ehrman. Read and loved his new Armageddon book.
I love Megan's voice and Bart's rationale. Grettings from Chile, South America
43:47 Matthew 11:11 Suggests that Jesus who has foresight, didn't mention anyone of future importance, felt that John was quite important. In fact, John was the first person in the Christian Greek Scriptures to mention Jesus.
2nd time ive listened!! Cant wait for next week 🖒
I have enjoyed all of these podcasts but this was ,for me, far and away the most interesting .Paul's influence (for better or worse),not only on Christians, but on all of us has been immense. I say that as an atheist. We all live in a world which bears his stamp. Ta for this.
I think the answer is certainly yes, as you point out with influence, he founded Christianity. There is a threshold question to be answered though. Did Paul KNOW he was founding Christianity? Was it an intentional act or did he remain nominally at least Jewish in his own mind?
I’d say it’s a tie between Paul and Constantine, since he decreed Christianity to be the religion of Rome.
And exactly what should be be grateful for to this superstitious sexist?
Over a millennia of living under the yoke of the catholic church?
@@UrMomsFavSnack Constantine did not declare the religion of Rome to be Christianity, he made it legal, and converted on his deathbed, this then opened the floodgates for proselytization and other emperors policies would more directly lead to its dominance
@@PasteurizedLettuceIn summary, thus declaring Christianity to be the religion of Rome. 😆🤣
I think its fair to say that Paul the MAIN founder of SURVIVING Christianity.
Doc, one of your most enthusiastic listener from Pakistan 🇵🇰👍
pakistan zinderbad!
I'm thrilled to see this - as an Ehrman blog subscriber I always wanted to ask him this. As I was evolving away from Christianity I sort of thought, if there's anything attributed to Jesus that felt actually prophetic, it was his talk about "false prophets" - and then here's Paul, changing the fundamental teaching of Jesus: instead of "walk this way," Paul's teaching is "you just have to repent and acknowledge." It infuriated me that people could do horrible acts and then just wash their guilt away - it's like an organized crime gateway drug. Anyway - valuable topic. Thank you!
I think it was added like the "no suicide" because it gains subscribers and keeps numbers from dropping
Thumbs up. Here is another valuable topic. Jesus was announced as king of Israel in that choice between Jesus and Barabbas. Quickly said, Pilot dressed Jesus up as King, Pilot presented Jesus to the Sanhedrin and high priest among the crowd as "their King". Told the crowd to choose to crucify "their King" or Barabbas. The Saducees and High Priest chose "their king" Jesus to be crucified and instigated the Jewish crowd to choose "their King" to be crucified..... and so the Priesthood anointed Jesus as their king in order for him to be executed. And Pilat published this fact above Jesus head at a time when Jerusalem was most crowded of Jews from all over the realm.
What this accomplished was to legalize according to Torah law Jesus' amended covenant and make irrelevant all burdensome Talmudic rules.
I think Jesus and Pilat planned it together. Neet trick on the Sanhedrin huh.
@@termination9353 pilate tried to free Jesus by appealing to the crowd,nice fanfiction tho
@@termination9353 well, I'm no bible scholar, lol - but being that there were no witnesses to actually transcribe these events (I don't think they're in the earliest stories), it makes more sense to me that this is all fiction, added later to sort of "tie the whole room together" in terms of laying at least partial responsibility for the crucifixion on Jews themselves. I'd recommend joining Bart's blog and submitting that question.
I think one thing to point out on you last point is, why should people be punished infinitely for a finite act?
I come from a religious tradition (Ebionites) where we reject the beliefs and teachings of Paul. We accept James the Just as the leader of Yeshua's movement after his death. We focus solely on the Jewish teachings of Yeshua, and as a result, our outlook on the world, and towards people of other religions, is completely different to that of mainstream Christianity, especially of Evangelicals
interesting
Not likely. Wikipedia: 'The Ebionites are still attested, if as marginal communities, down to the 7th century. Some modern scholars argue that the Ebionites survived much longer and identify them with a sect encountered by the historian Abd al-Jabbar ibn Ahmad around the year 1000.'
@@zed91 I don't know what to tell you my friend, you say I don't exist, not likely an Ebionite, well, here I am, and my fellow Talmidis, Ebionites and Followers of the Way exist, whatever you want to call us. I have followed this faith alongside others since 1987. If you do a search on the internet for modern Ebionites, or Talmidis, then go ahead. But if you don't think I exist, then that's fine by me, I don't have a problem with that😄
Megan + Bart = Dream team! 😊
Thanks for the soapbox today - excellent video.
Worth watching, even if only to hear Megan speak the word "Bart"! Also, worthwhile discussion on Pauline History & Theology.
Another great episode. After reading Amos 3-5, I’d love to hear Bart’s thoughts on the verses and the context
If you'd like Bart's thoughts on Amos, I recommend you read his book, "God's Problem - How the Bible Fails to Answer our most Important Question: Why we Suffer".
This is the book that explains how and why Bart ultimately lost his faith. His section on the Prophetic view on suffering covers Amos a little.
Holy sh!t man, I just read through Amos and it is more evidence that god is a immoral monster! It's basically stating "I the lord, kicked the living shit out of you and you won't come back to me" like WTF? Yahweh is an abusive boyfriend!
@@ScottyMcYachty sort of the problem of evil?
@@GameTimeWhy Precisely.
He could no longer reconcile faith in an all loving god with all the horrible suffering we see in the world.
I like the verbiage he uses - the 'problem of suffering' - better than the more conventional 'problem of evil', because what constitutes evil can often be seen as subjective. Suffering, for me, is far less ambiguous.
@@ScottyMcYachty it's hard to argue suffering is "good" though. I get what you are saying though.
Thank you for your soapbox stand today Bart, it was very needed. Too bad it couldn't be heard on every street corner on the planet,
Enjoyed this discussion, supporting my personal thoughts on the importance of Paul. Interesting insight in the Soapbox.
thanks Megan and Bart another fine episode.
How important was Paul in his own time, and how important was his mission?
Three of the most important churches in Antiquity were Antioch, Rome and Alexandria. Neither of them had been founded by Paul.
This is great because we heard about Paul from Dr Tabor last time
You guys are so awesome!
Many pastors want to keep their flock blind and ignorant, then Bart Ehrman come to enlighten. I am a Christian yet these help me to see wider. Thanks
Ehrman is very intelligent teacher, I admire his abilities.
Considering the authors of the New Testament never met Jesus, and largely told the story they wanted to tell rather than something that is historically accurate, as the Johannine community shows, I think it is fair to say the authors of the New Testament are the Founders of Christianity. Since Paul wrote most of the books of the New Testament, I think it is fair to say that Paul and maybe Luke are the Founders of Christianity. Paul seems to be more like a modern Televangelist than an accurate story teller. His account of meeting Jesus sounds like Oral Roberts meeting a 900 foot tall Jesus who told him to build the City of Faith Medical and Research Center.
I'm not a mythicist, but since the only things that remain of Jesus' life were those things written down in the New Testament, I'm not sure the actual historical Jesus, a poor Jewish preacher who was preaching to Jews who somehow ran afoul of the Romans, had all that much to do with modern Christianity, a largely Gentile religion that seems to be based more on Greek and Roman ideas than Jewish ideas. I don't think the real life Jesus is any more relevant to the New Testament or Christian Religions than the real life Abraham Lincoln is to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Paul did not talk about meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus (at least not in any writings we currently have that are attributed to him). The Damascus road stories all appear in Acts of the Apostles, a work not attributed to Paul and currently dated by the majority of scholars to have been written decades after Paul's death.
What Paul does talk about in the letters attributed to him is that 'the Christ' appeared to him in a vision as a bright light and revealed things about the coming kingdom of god to him.
WRONG - The Gospel of Jesus was originally one book, written by Lazarus in consultation with the Apostles [John 21:24] and published soon after Jesus left them on their own.
The religion was hijacked by Rome, the Gospel was broken up scrambled adulterated into a bunch of competing narratives. Later four of those adulterated gospels were canonized with falsely ascribed authorship and a Gnosticism cover-story.
It was the finding of an original Gospel of Jesus scroll in Jerusalem that gained the Knights Templar power over the Church and their eventual undoing when the church finally retaliated against them Friday 13th.
Wondering if you've ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is studying the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
Yes I think you're right on with this. The historical Jesus (assuming he existed, and I think he probably did) became sort of a mascot for Christianity. His name is in every prayer, but his life and teachings are mostly either lost or irrelevant. Paul, on the other hand was smart, but he was also clearly a charlatan and his teachings, dubious as they are, are deeply important to modern Christians.
@@sunburstrose7860 "Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"?" NO - But Paul and the Catholic Church perverted Jesus doctrine into pagan idolatry and Orwellian trained the public to be unaware of the difference.
I’m so glad you have an internet presence. Thank you for this fascinating content.
🔥 *Missing Questions*🔥
✨1-Did Jesus warn his followers from person who will destroy the Law and will be called least?
See Matthew 5 17-20
✨ 2-Did Saul be called Paul? Did Paul means the least?
Is Paul derives from the Roman family name Paulus or Paullus, from the Latin adjective meaning "small", "humble", *"least"* or "little"?
✨3-How did Jesus describ his enemy's work plan in Matthew 13 24-30? The enemy who sowed bad seeds in Jesus's good wheat field, Is Paul that enemy who corrupted teachings of Jesus Christ.
Megan is really on the roll interviewing Bart Ehrman!
I like hearing Bart say that Paul probably wrote hundreds of letters over his lifetime, and all we have are seven authentic ones. I've thought that for a long time. What has been missed from Paul's full view since we only have a tiny glimpse into his thinking, but created a whole religion on this sliver.
Although 2 Corinthians and Philippians look like composites of multiple letters; so we probably have more than seven letters, at least in fragmentary form. But presumably a lot of what we've lost probably makes 2 Corinthians 9 look positively enthralling. We naturally don't have the letter Paul wrote to the church in Aniaropolis about washing the meeting house steps.
The apostle Paul knew that he was nothing but dust. The only one who matters is Jesus Christ.
Also, even the letters aren't really his full view, since they're just focused on specific problems and controversies. Imagine if instead of some of that, we had his pitch to new converts.
It is irrelevant whether Paul wrote "hundreds" of letters and Ehman did not claim he did, he only supposed it. We don't actually know if Paul wrote any letters, we only have texts that claim to be letters if taken at face value. We know that some were forgeries. For that matter, we don't even know if Paul ever existed. We know that people attempted to create a new belief system and can see evidence of its aftermath, nothing more.
@@craigjones9372 Scepticism can go to far. We don't "know" Paul existed, but if we apply those standards to history we "know" almost nothing, even where we have documentation.
Thank you very much, so very clear. So much material for thought
Excellent information. Very logical and put things in perspective. Great job.
Was Paul the founder? Well, it depends what you mean by founder. Clearly there was a church/group before Paul.After all, he was persecuting them!
On the other hand… the original church was not evangelizing gentiles…. And gentiles eventually exclusively dominated the church. So, effectively Paul DID found what ultimately became the church
Well put.
Good logic
I think the point is, Xtianity, as we know it today, is primarily outlined, spread and defined by Paul. No one literally founded it,
@@ihatespam2
Yeah, I mostly agree… but I think there is also a maximalist mythicist contingent who think that there was no Jesus and that Paul totally invented Christianity
@@ihatespam2 Paul was Elvis Presley. Jesus was Arthur Crudup.
I hope that Bart will at some point explain what “salvation” could possibly have meant to Jews, but more especially to Pagans. What exactly would his converts think they were being “saved” FROM?
Jews would, I suppose, be hoping for the establishment of God’s kingdom, a new and perfect Israel that would encompass all Torah-observant Jews under the rule of His Anointed; Pagans wouldn’t be expecting or hoping to be “saved” from anything, would they?
Would anybody in the Empire have any sense at all of the later Christian notion of being “born in sin” or “living in sin” and needing “salvation from sin”? That seems completely anachronistic. Did Paul make that all up from scratch?
Or is he saying “You can be “saved” from death - you can live forever in a perfect world?
It’s confusing. I try to imagine an Evangelical preacher of today telling a crowd of first-century Jews or Pagans that “salvation” can be theirs if they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and them being completely puzzled. Salvation? What from? 🤔🤔🤔
It's a question that always confuses me as well. Pagans didn't show homage to their gods because they had sinned in some way. It's my understanding worship was what a pagan god required simply because he/she was a god (and could grant favors). The worshipers' sins, as we understand it, wasn't part of their thinking or world view. I would also appreciate a video from Bart on this concept.
@@quij7ote222 Right! The basic concept underlying all Pagan sacrifices is summed up in the famous Roman saying, “DO UT DES” - I (the worshipper) give [to you, the god] so that you [the god] may give [to me, your worshipper.] That’s why the Romans demanded ritual sacrifice as a universal civic duty - almost like Americans saluting the flag or singing the National Anthem - we have to keep the gods happy or else they’ll get angry and turn our great blessings into curses.
I think the same motivation underlies Jewish temple sacrifice too: You keep Yahweh in a good mood by taking your cattle or sheep and killing them because it’s a SACRIFICE - it COSTS you something - it re-establishes the balance sheet between God and the people - He gave, you’re in His debt, so you give back. So I can understand Paul saying that Jesus is the Lamb of God - His sacrifice settles all accounts for everyone who “participates” in it. Jesus is God’s universal “debt relief program.” But “SALVATION”? How would a Pagan even begin to understand that?
Is it all down to a kind of universal bartering system? Is that what “salvation” is for Paul? For yesterday’s Pagans? For today’s televangelists?
Remember most Greek religions thought that the afterlife was a dreary place for most people. Only the important people wound up on Mount Olympus.
So Jesus was offering to prevent people from going to a boring afterlife
@@nosuchthing8
I think that's part of it.
I think a lot of people wanted a more personal relationship with their gods.
The mystery religions offered that and Christianity offered it too.
Also Christianity flattered human vanity by asserting that humans are cosmically important.
Paganism didn't really do this.
@alanpennie8013 wow, I think you nailed it!
My memory of the Greek and Roman religions is that unless you were some big shot hero like Hercules, you had no chance of making it to Olympus or heaven. Normal folk went to the underworld which was just boring, mainly.
Thank you for this wonderful talk and explanation
Thank you. Watching from Alaska.
I think the New Testament's reliance on Pauline works indicates that the church of Christ (as we know it) was founded by gentiles, not Jews, and so they looked to Paul for their right to exist. Jewish proto-Christians may not have considered Paul authoritative at all (which would open up a realm of possibilities), but eventually they were out- numbered by gentiles, so Paul's letters won out (perhaps long after Paul was gone).
Yes. I agree.
As "The Apostle to The Gentiles" Paul was especially valued by Gentile Christians, who soon became the majority of Christians.
Also, the existence and popularity of the "red letter bible" (since 1899, with the words of Jesus printed in red ink) attests to the fact that many Christians consider the words of Jesus far more important than anything else in the NT, including Paul's words.
Yes.
And I think this goes back to the beginnings of Christianity.
Even if we reject Q as purely hypothetical The Gospel of Thomas does indicate that early Christians carefully preserved The Sayings of Jesus.
It would be odd if they hadn't.
They were literally the sayings of a living God.
He does great courses as well, great teacher
Paul had Luke for biographer. Luke's Gospel shows how creative he can be. How many Founders didn't have biographers? When missionaries came to India, they found a Christian Church already there. That Church attributed its foundation to Doubting Thomas.
I see Paul as the Brigham Young of Christianity. He didn't found it, but after the original founder died prematurely, he expanded it into the religion we know today.
Wondering if you've ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is studying the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
i'd say he is just straight up the founder. Jesus didnt have much intentions of necessarily establishing some new doctrine, and a lot of his teachings can be rounded to companion and love over strict legality and be prepared cause god is coming soon. Paul fleshes out a lot of tenants of the faith that are kind of more than jesus's ideas, especially the growing tradition of jesus being god and the significance of resurrection and what his death means
Brigham Young was a deceiver and so was Joseph Smith.
@@jimyost2585 Are you sure Paul wasn't? Most of these religion promoters seem like they are pretty dicey.
Why don't you see Paul as the Joseph Smith of Mormonism?
Finally! Say, would the term "Pauline Heresy" be considered a strong opinion?
I have a copy of Jefferson's Bible. I also have a Red Letter Bible.
happy holidays dr B.
Idea/suggestion: How about an encyclopedia of Christianity based on the teachings of Mr. Ehrman? How about if Mr. Ehrman writes an encyclopedia of Christianities? Should his students undertake such a project? How about a detailed time-line on the history of Christianity, including the versions of Christianity that were defeated?
He is the founder of todays Christianity
Loved the soapbox! I dislike anyone using a tiny snippet, out of context, to make a point. Pick up any book, and use the same method to make any point that one wants. I think the same can be said for trying to use one line from a movie and using it to explain the message of the entire movie. And don’t get me started on rating a book based on what one heard was the message. Read the book first… end of my rant
Hard-hitting reality check with that Amos reference
Everybody go read it! And quote the appropriate verses whenever someone tries to get you to go to church
Excellent work everyone
I've jut thought its interesting that we only have 7 of Paul's letters, given the significance of the number 7 in Christianity.
I wonder why those were chosen in particular? and by whom?
They were chosen by a council of Bishops. The stated reasoning was that they were written before 100 A.D. and were associated with a Saint. The actual reason was that they were all ready popular.
@@Sewblon oh interesting!
Thanks.
@@Purwapada
Let's hope they chose wisely.
Yes he is. Paul was the true founder of Christianity. Paul was the one who got Christianity rolling. Paul is the reason Christianity became a European religion.
I say the Roman Empire started Christianity, Paul never started a new religion, as he used Romans and Galatians to preach the Torah given to Abraham, and set aside the Torah given Moses.
I have a Ytube video series called 'Myths in so-called Christianity' which proves my point from the words of Paul and Jesus.
Constantine was the reason why it became a 'European Religion'. But certainly Paul made it attractive to Pagans
@@amayoka I don't quite get the attractive, except many thought grace was alliance to sin, hence Romans and Galatians. Paul directed the Gentiles to the Torah of Abraham away from Moses, not a new religion but a revert to his own lost one as a lost sheep of Israel.
You may be interested that I have a Ytube video series called 'Myths in so-called Christianity'.
@@simonskinner1450 It was attractive as it gave dignity to the "least of us" at a time when that wasn't really a thing.
@@amayoka Christianity was already a European religion before Constantine. Most Christians were Greeks and Romans.
The Church is so much more than St.Paul. The answer is we don't know about the other founders, missionaries and the growth of early Christianity.
The Catholic Church bases its dogmas on the Magisterium, the Tradition and the Bible.
Protestants being entirely dependent upon the Bible are inclined to over-emphasise the role of Paul.
Paul was a great Apostle and Saint and Christian priest who celebrated the mass. We have his own testimony to that.
Dear Dr. Ehrman, huge fan of yours and enjoyed reading your books. They are very thoughtful and enlightening! Love all your videos and debates over the years. My question for this topic is, could Paul have met Jesus alive during his ministry? Since Paul was a Pharisees, and the gospels have clearly mentioned them followed Jesus many times, while being unnamed.
Do you mean could he have, if things had gone differently, that is, or did he, is it likely that he did? Presumably he did not or he would have said so.
@jeffryphillipsburns How else could've Paul knew who Jesus was or looked and sounded like? There were no paintings or Jewish Digest circulating at the time among these people.
@@Captain-Slow Paul’s knowledge of Jesus came via hearsay. He heard stories from others who heard stories. The biblical narratives suggest he was a good Jew and actively persecuted the bad Jews who were being influenced by this heretic - he was active in driving them out. And then he had his conversation and spent the rest of his life trying to convert others. Oddly enough, his greatness success was with the Gentiles and not the Jews.
@@Captain-Slow Does he say he knew what Jesus looked or sounded like? He knew who Jesus was from the followers he'd persecuted.
Oh. Silly me. You mean how he recognized him in the vision.
Didn't really have to, I'd say. Visions are weird. Can be completely convincing even if your mind is inventing the details.
There's a great scene in the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" where Jesus has a conversation with Paul. It's during the period when he's dying on the cross and he experiences his "last temptation". I won't ruin it by saying more, but it's a great scene in a very interesting movie that focuses more on Jesus' human experience than his divinity.
Yes! That scene stayed with me, too. Great movie. Fundamentalist “Christians” railed against something they didn’t see. I found it very moving.
@@melissalittle4369 Yeah, in my country some hardcore Catholics picketed the cinemas. I think their complaint was "Jesus was perfect, therefore he was never tempted and never experienced doubt". They didn't get it at all. If Jesus wasn't having a human experience, with all that entails, then his sacrifice is meaningless. If he was God merely APPEARING as a human then there was no actual suffering, the whole thing was just theatre. Without that human experience, including pain, doubt, and desire, the whole premise of God as a Trinity (and Jesus being God) falls apart, IMO.
@@Pushing_Pixels - Exactly.
Definitely unhistorical, since Paul indicates pretty clearly that he never met the living Jesus, only the ascended one.
But I'll forgive it.
Dramas follow the rules of drama.
@@alanpennie8013 - It was Satan who was doing the tempting in the movie.
I have been following Bart Ehrman for a few years now and have learned so much about Christianity. He is geniune and teaches about the bible from the perspective of one who was a very dedicated follower of Christ. The Soapbox discussion was enlightening, I knew about the command regarding a fine be paid if a man caused a woman to lose a baby, fetus, child in her womb. Not given the same value as the life of the mother. The verses in Numbers (5: 11-31) were a bit of a shock. God will end a pregnancy if the woman concieved a child with someone other than her husband, also put the woman under a curse. So much in the bible that is easy to read over without really thinking about what is says. Per these verses in Numbers God is good with killing an illegitimate child in the womb, it does not have a right to life in God's eyes. My thoughts regarding life in the womb kind of comes down to how far along is the child developed? Seems any logical person would consider that a baby one day before its birth can suffer the same as that same baby the day after its birth. So for me, I don't want that pain capable creature to suffer any more than I want a puppy or kitten to suffer. A late term abortion requires the baby to be born, seems we as civilized people would make arrangements to allow that life to continue and not condone the torture it will feel when it is dismembered, this has nothing to do with the bible.
Agree with you completely on the abortion stuff. As with so many contentious issues, it's not black and white, and we need a reasonable moderate approach that considers the facts. Too many people want to either ban abortion completely or allow it for any reason even up to birth. Neither solution makes sense.
The Bible contains many doctrines that are unacceptable in today's times, although many things happening today are unacceptable as well. Ex. Save the puppies, kill the babies. God did not write this book. Man did.
Either you think about what you read or you don't. How is it easier to not think about some things than others?
The DIDACHE specifically forbids ABORTION and INFANTICIDE.
I do not think that Numbers 5 mentions "abortion" as we know it. It refers instead to the "jealousy" of her husband, and a punishment for her having sex with someone else. I would have to wonder with this and other such curses, how many people have taken the test and passed it, and so have gotten away with what otherwise would be considered sinful behavior. In the case of men harming a pregnant woman or causing the death of her baby, it is clear that her husband decides the punishment. Like other commandments, the situation is a bit too connected to a story (e.g., what if the men weren't fighting, or what if a husband pushed his own wife down a flight of stairs?) but it seems the societal norms & the judges would decide. It still concludes at the end that if harm is done, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, etc. Forgiveness & grace are always an option, but if the punishment is not there, people can get away with all sorts of crime.
Paul’s conversion from a persecutor of Christians to one of the greatest believers who ever lived is one of the most compelling narratives in the Bible.
If it is true. There is no evidence that it is. The most probable explanation is that it is another legend. A vision while traveling along a road? Highly unlikely.
@@newnoggin2 2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching for reproving, and setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness. ( So God’s spirit guided the author’s of the Bible what to write and everything written in the Bible is the Truth (because it is impossible for God to Lie Hebrews 6:18) So then don’t ever let anyone lead you to believe that the Bible is false because it is God’s Word !!
Bart, I’ve never taken any of your classes, but I would like to ask if the audio and video of your classes will be recorded differently than this video? I have super fast internet and the quality of your video and audio is inferior to Megan’s. I’m not just complaining but I am hearing disabled and both the audio and video quality is very important. Thanks for your info.
He is at his cabin in the mountains
Poor internet there. Not with most videos
Fascinating subject. Excellent video. Thank you for explaining everything so clearly.
Paul had so many enemies, yet Paul's variant of Judaism became orthodox Christianity. Was Paul successful because he was more persuasive than all the others? Or was it because Paul performed miracles and miracles happened wherever he went? Did signs and wonders differentiate Paul from his opponents? Did the miracles convince believers that Paul had been taught directly by Jesus? (that Paul was more than a Muhammad or a Joseph Smith, merely asking people to believe he was given messages from a supernatural being?)
I note the Marcionites were a variant of Paul's Christianity, but it seems that the leading second century Christians in Rome were not ready to take Paul's Christianity one step further and ditch the OT.
I love & follow Jesus because i'm muslim 😊
You just acknowledge jesus as a senior guy sent to this planet before mo.
You can't follow jesus if you follow mo 'cos they preached different way of living.
Btw am neither kristian nor Quslim
yes we love prophet jesus peace be upon him, but dont be anywhere near paul on judgement day!
@@Endrin911your ignorance on muslims and islam is apparent!
Man, I just read Amos 3-5 and wow, that's some words I've never heard people really echo before, maybe bits and pieces, but wow. It makes me wonder how many church people see choirs as a detestable thing.
Excellent presentation 🙏
Thanks for watching. - Social Media Team
Thank you for another illuminating talk. I grew up a Catholic and attended a Jesuit University but have learned more about the authentic roots of Christianity from your Teaching Company lectures and books than anywhere else. I will have to look up that Exodus passage and use it in my next abortion debate with a pro-lifer!
Not only that, but the passage where if a husband thought his wife's pregnancy was another man's, the priest was to give her a potion which would abort the fetus if she was guilty, but not if she was innocent.
I'm pro life! You can argue with me! :-)
@@timandmonica Are you kidding, bro?
most apologetic and polemic christians would not touch that passage in exodus
That would be fitting as most times it is the pro-choice side that brings up religion and/or the bible most often. Secular points are usually what get mentioned by the pro-life side. Points such as human life has value, and should not be ended lightly. A fetus is human life. There really is no way to say it isn't.
Yes. Jesus was NOT EVER a Christian. In fact, even Peter was not a Christian, nor any of the close associates of Jesus (whoever they were) were "Christian".
Further, the idea of Christianity was not completed with Paul, but later extended and refined by others, such that people often confuse pseudepigrapha with Paul's apparently original writings.
Be careful what you all call "Christianity". Some of it is nothing more than christianISM.
It's wierd to think of all Christians and Jews for Jesus, but that's closer to what we are.
amazing episode!
Wondering if anyone's ever read, "The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God"? The subtitle is a little cheesy and it kept me from reading the book for some time, but boy, when I did, I found it very interesting and illuminating! I highly recommend it. Too often Christians and their teachers are staring at Jesus' finger pointing to the moon, rather than looking at the moon to which Jesus was pointing. I think Professor Ehrman's kind of thing is focusing on the finger, too, but that's OK as that is his area, Biblical history, rather than theology or Christian mysticism. Thoughts?
Paul is to Christianity what Ray Kroc is to McDonald's
I sense sarcasm... heh
Uncle Pauls secret recipe of 13 herbs and spices..
I see Paul as the most successful early promoter.
Great poscast Bart & Megan!
Regarding the soapbox content, Bart paraphrases a verse from Psalms (139?): "You knew me before I was in my mother's womb". Although a similar phrase appears in Jeremiah 1:5 (totally different context), I have failed to find such a statement in Psalms. In Psalms 139:16 the psalmist merely states that God knew him from conception and not before conception. If the whole point Bart is making is that people gets all sorts of (bad) ideas because of what they are told the Bible says, why paraphrase the verse instead of read it? Is anybody else looked into those verses?
The intro to Bart’s Soapbox - I’m dead 😂😂 ⚰️
Excellent, important question. I just wonder about the silent voices , those of women who offered the first churches, in their homes, long before the first built churches by then, in men's hands. What did they find in the message, that spoke to them; we can only guess, but they provided the first spaces, the "meal", were deaconesses, and cleaned up....
Because like the well known, more active gods & goddesses, Hestia was little mentioned, god of the hearth & home. And more honored daily than all the others. Loved the soapbox BTW.
Oh, did you know Hermes, the messenger/ communication god, was also known as "The Good Shepherd"? He, too, was worshipped daily in the home, on the roadside, in many ways not so much in temples. The most human, and friend, to mankind.
th-cam.com/video/vYMhcEFrzrU/w-d-xo.html
Hermes: The Immortal Guide. YT.
I also love that Paul's (or whoever), the beautiful words about LOVE used in so many wedding ceremonies today, his letter to the polis/church of Corinth, was an ancient trading city, a port, full of "sailors" hint hint, whose patron deity was, Aphrodite (Venus).
On the other hand, perhaps the Pauline doctrine was not Christian at all. Less inspired by God, than by a single man's vision. This the question, all wrong. THE founder, leaves us with no other answers.
It's said that, " Western Civilization is like a family; whose Father was Greek; whose Mother was Hebrew, and they packed up the Family and moved to Rome. "
Cheers! And some commentors . . . Get your head out of the Bible sometimes! Take a breath, lol!
Christianity may have more pagan roots than are acknowledged. All those disparate barbaric tribes moving around with their beliefs, Greek worship of the Sun God, Mithra, the Bull God etc.
Bad math, Bart!
If Paul's ministry lasted for around 30 years, and he founded, say, 20 churches, and wrote each church, say, 2 letters per year, that does not mean he wrote a total of
30 X 20 X 2, or 1200 letters.
After all, he didn't found 20 churches all at once, in the first year of his ministry.
Twenty churches in 30 years is an average of one church every 1.5 years. He devotes a year and a half to Church #1, then goes off to preach elsewhere. At that point, he begins sending 2 letters/year to Church #1. So Church #1 gets 2 letters/year over the remaining years of Paul's ministry, i.e., over 28.5 years. That would be 57 letters for Church #1.
Following that pattern, Church #2 would get 2 X 27, or 54, letters. Church #3 would get 51, #4 48, #5 45, and so on, until #20, which didn't get any at all.
All that means the total would be more like 570 letters.
Sorry, but I love math!
P.S. I wrote the above before listening to the entire podcast. Loved, loved, loved this week's Soapbox. Thanks, Bart.
❤🎉
There’s a lot of ifs in that sentence
There was a teaching of Jesus that was pre-crucification and a teaching of Paul that was post-crucification. Jesus taught being born again from water and spirit and Paul taught salvation from the blood of the lamb of God on the cross. It would seem to me that the crucifix would be the image of the Beast.
Theologians seem to me to get the social status of the disciples of Jesus wrong. Yeah, most of them worked with their hands, but that doesn't make them poor. Fishing needs capital in the boat and the nets, and skill in knowing where to fish, and a sense of markets in knowing where best to sell their catch. If Joseph was a carpenter, that's not a labourer: that is a builder, a contractor. I have a PhD in a fairly recondite area of the Humanities, and I have, frequently, interesting conversations with tradies. This is especially important if one wants to insist that Christian (or, indeed, Jewish) belief is NOT a question of scoring high on the exam. A lack of the intellectual finesse that surplus wealth can buy does not mean a lack of capacity for intellectual enquiry; and religious belief is not a question of intellectual enquiry, anyway.
Also, although Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles, he wasn't starting from nothing. The religion of Israel doesn't proselytise, but there were the Godfearers, gentiles attracted to the specifically religious aspects of Hebrew practice. The centurion who asks Jesus for help (Mat: 8, Luke 7) (if we assume that that's a reliable story) presumably was somewhere in the Godfearer region, to take notice of a Jewish teacher and healer.
The Jesus story began in 48 AD with the first of the Pauline Epistles (which comprise nearly half of the New Testament books) when Paul realized the Daniel 9:25 prophesy of a messiah expired without fulfilling so he made one up decades later and set the story decades in the past matching Jewish expectations of the messiah to make the prophesy seem true.
The fulfillment of the Daniel 9:25 prophecy written in 444 BC was the test of the true messiah. By 48 AD it was known that the prophecy of a messiah coming in "seven weeks and threescore and two weeks" had not occurred on the prophesied date. It was the 69th Week and the 70th Week was soon to come. The prophesied messiah was expected and the anticipation set off a messiah craze.
"Seven weeks and threescore and two weeks" is, 7 plus 60 plus 2 equals 69 total weeks. One prophetic week equals seven biblical years of 360 days (the Julian calendar was created centuries later), so 7 times 69 equals 483 total biblical years beginning with Artaxerxes' decree in 444 BC. Those 483 biblical years equal 173,880 days, or 476 Julian years. Therefore the Messiah would come and be "cut off" in AD 33. One prophetic week equaling seven Biblical years is something “Daniel” invented in about 165 BC, effectively an admission that Jeremiah 25:11-12 failed.
Paul made up the entire Jesus story and added historical figures, locations, and events to add authenticity.
In the Galatians "road to Damascus" conversion vision tale written in 48 AD he claimed to have gone to the Arabian desert to study the Old Testament for 17 years to align with the Daniel 9:25 prophecy.
Paul's goal was to garner support for the insurrection against the Romans which began in 46 AD led by two brothers, Jacob and Simon, in the Judea province. The revolt, mainly in the Galilee, began as sporadic insurgency until it climaxed in 48 AD when it was quickly put down by Roman authorities. Both Simon and Jacob were executed.
He created the fiction of having witnessed the risen messiah. He wanted to show that the messiah had come as prophesied but was murdered by the Romans. This was to entice the Gentiles to aid in the Jews' rebellion against the Romans.
Instead, he created one of the world's most popular religions that is based on the literal worship of ritual human sacrifice, rape, and cannibalism.
The Gospel authors copied, and embellished, Paul's fiction. None of the Gospel authors, or any other writers, were witnesses to the Bible figure known as Jesus.
Whatever you say, mate
@@KorKhan89
Are you disputing that the first mention of the prophesied messiah is by Paul in 48 AD?
And that the Gospels followed decades later and were written by non-witnesses to Jesus?
This is very similar to making mental leaps to interpret the Bible in favour of the christian faith, with the exception that you mean to discredit it.
@@unsiliquaria
Which of my assertions are you disputing?
@@unsiliquaria
_"This is very similar to making mental leaps to interpret the Bible in favour of the christian faith..."_
Like the assertion that God walked around town for thirty years and then died and became a zombie and then the graves opened and the corpses and skeletons rose out and "appeared to many" and all of that happened without any of the locals noticing.
:-))
I've been giving the example from Exodus (concerning a miscarriage) for years. People's eyes glaze over and they act as if I have not said a word.
A god who sacrifices himself (temporarily) to himself, to save his creation from himself. Can’t get much more ridiculous than that.
Please make that Soapbox section into a quick TH-cam Short!
What always trips me up, is salvation for what/from what? And I know he went over this but at least for me it’s a difficult point to remember. Why do they all need salvation in the first place? Especially before hell theology.
When is the christian church going to finally admit that Saul called Paul was wrong about almost everything?
The answer is right in the chrisitian bible
And they conversed there in the church a whole year; and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians. (act of the apostle 11:26)
I have a question that I'm unsure if Bart answered it here or not, which gospel is most likely the most similar to the stories about Jesus that would have been heard by Paul that led to his conversion?
@Phil Jermakian an encounter with Jesus can mean a great many different things, especially as it was the risen Jesus and not before the crucifixion
I think Bart would say that Mark, if any at all, would be the closest since it’s the earliest written gospel and has a lot of material that others seem to use as a source.
Did Jesus not understand His objective in this world if He and Paul's teachings were so different? To find out that Paul's letters were written before the Gospels has really screwed up my thinking!
So, if Paul did not originate the idea that it is the death and resurrection of Jesus that effects salvation, who did?
Jeez Bart needs a new camera, anyways great work as always
What happened to the Apostles? Did they start churches or missions?