Danny Jones Podcast
#303 - Ancient Religion Expert on Secret Gospel Coverup & Jesus True Origins | Bart Ehrman
Thu, 15 May 2025
Watch BONUS episodes on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including six New York Times bestsellers. SPONSORS https://drinkag1.com/dannyjones - Get a FREE bottle of AG D3K2, AG1 welcome kit + 5 travel packs. https://americanfinancing.net/jones - Use the link or call 888-995-2440 today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://www.bartehrman.com https://ehrmanblog.org Bart's YouTube channel: @bartdehrman FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Ancient languages 11:35 - Septuagint Greek vs Hebrew 22:34 - Did Jesus really exist? 27:00 - Thomas Payne's Age of Reason 31:37 - Early Christian drug influence 37:13 - 'Christ' as a drug term 42:18 - Euripides Phaedra 'christ' drug term 44:52 - Drinking death poisons 54:28 - Christos drug term in Euripides 57:53 - Jesus arrested in park references 01:00:43 - Ancient virgin birth & c-section 01:08:33 - Greater questions of Mary 01:16:47 - John Marco Allegro 01:25:02 - Ancient dictionary unreliability 01:30:06 - The Secret Gospel of Mark 01:39:08 - Biblical scholar bias 01:42:54 - Satan & The book of Job 01:48:45 - Ancient Mug containing psychedelic drugs 01:55:42 - Younger dryas hypothesis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Bart Ehrman's background in biblical studies?
My background? How long do you have? At least three hours. Yeah, okay. Well, right. So I'm a scholar of the New Testament, early Christianity. I have a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Testament studies. My background, I got into biblical studies because I was a Christian as a teenager, a born-again evangelical Christian.
And I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college after high school and then went off to an evangelical liberal arts college. And I got really interested in studying Greek. Greek is an ancient language and decided to do graduate work analyzing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
And so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where the world's expert in the analysis of Greek manuscripts worked. And I spent years there working on that and did a master's degree and a PhD. Ended up teaching at Rutgers University for a few years, and I've been at North Carolina Chapel Hill now for, well, since 1988. Oh, wow.
Teaching both undergraduate students and PhD students in early Christianity, New Testament, those kinds of things. Wow.
And you mentioned that when you were younger, you had a belief and you were a practicing Christian. That's right. And what happened to you? What was your evolution through your belief in Christianity?
Well, I was raised in the church. I was raised in the Episcopal Church. But then when I was a teenager, late teenager, mid-teenager, I had a born-again experience and became a very conservative evangelical. And a lot of my faith at that point was built on the idea that the Bible has no mistakes in it, completely inerrant.
That was the view taught at the Moody Bible Institute I went to and also at Wheaton College where I finished my undergraduate degree. That view started shifting when I went into graduate school. As I started, I learned Hebrew, and so I was reading the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew.
And I learned French and German, so I could read what modern scholars are saying in these countries and learned other ancient languages. And the more I studied, the more I realized, in fact, the Bible does have mistakes in it. There are contradictions, there are discrepancies, there are geographical errors, there are problems with the Bible.
For a number of years, I became more of a mainline Protestant type who had a fairly liberal view of the Bible, a pretty liberal view of social issues and politics and things, but I've still identified with the church. I ended up leaving Christianity maybe about 30 years ago or so, and it wasn't directly related to my scholarship.
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Chapter 2: Did Jesus really exist according to historical evidence?
Chapter 3: What controversies surround the translation of the Septuagint?
And I just got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore, that there's actually some kind of divine being who's in charge of the world.
What is the, in your view, the difference between biblical scholars and classical scholars?
They're very closely related, and it depends which kind of biblical scholar you're talking to. Most biblical scholars work in a theological context, in divinity schools, in seminaries, and they would be more closely related to theologians than they'd be related to classicists.
My training was mainly in that kind of world, the theological world, because even my master's degree and my PhD were at Princeton Theological Seminary, which trains Presbyterian ministers. But they were also very interested in serious scholarship. And so it kind of was more kind of crossing the lines.
My professor, my main professor, Bruce Metzger, was actually, his graduate degrees were in classics. And so I had a bit of that. But once I started teaching, I really shifted more kind of away from anything having to do theology and interpreting the Bible for the church kind of thing, and far more into kind of the classics.
And so I have a secondary appointment at UNC Chapel Hill in the classics department. And those are the people I really resonate with are the classicists.
And in your opinion, which one of the ancient languages is the best ancient language?
The best? Yeah.
For what?
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the virgin birth in Christianity?
Chapter 5: How does the concept of 'Christ' relate to ancient drug terms?
But Greek and Latin, which is what the classicists do, we're really well set with those in comparison.
Yeah. This has been a highly contested topic on this podcast recently when it comes to exactly what you were just talking about with Greek being everywhere in antiquity and there being no Hebrew outside of like the Dead Sea Scroll.
um all the ancient hebrew texts were religious texts however greek you you have legal shit you have uh medical stuff you have all kinds of all kinds of stuff in greek poetry comedy everything but then you have like the dead sea scrolls come about and we just have the dead sea scroll religious texts right and there's no other hebrew you can find there's no libraries with any hebrew in them or anything like that so that's basically true but it's not completely true okay
There are inscriptions, for example, in Greek. So an inscription would be things written out on stone that are not religious. In Hebrew? Yes. Okay. And some of the – there have been other discoveries of texts that are in Hebrew from – there aren't very many of them, but like they'll find a cache of letters, for example, written in Hebrew.
And so there are some things, but not for the Hebrew Bible period itself. The Dead Sea Scrolls are much – Later than the – I mean the Hebrew Bible period dates basically from – it's debated when the first texts were written, 10th century maybe BCE up to maybe the 2nd century BCE. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are more around the time of Jesus. And so it's a different period. Right.
Right. And so the scholarly consensus, and this is another thing I don't understand that I've heard so much from Bible scholars, is they always say most scholars would agree. Why is consensus so important when it comes to this stuff? Why doesn't, for me, I just, maybe I don't understand this because I didn't come from a university or anything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's not important as evidence. So that's the first thing to say. And no really good scholar ever uses it as evidence. In other words, the fact that everybody says so doesn't make it so. The reason people say that, and I say it as well, is because if you have a counter opinion, then it needs to be examined. And you need to look at it.
But you need to realize that there's a reason that everybody thinks the other. And these are, you know, when it comes to biblical scholarship, for example, you know, biblical scholarship's been around for 300 years. And lots and lots and lots of things get changed, have been changed, do get changed. But if somebody says that virtually all scholars agree that the gospel,
Whoever wrote Matthew was using the Gospel of Mark. And you say, like, virtually everybody agrees with that. You say virtually because there will be some exceptions. But the reason that you say that is because these are— Most of these people are ones who have actually looked at it seriously and thought about it really hard and seen all of the evidence.
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Chapter 6: What is the scholarly consensus on biblical contradictions?
Yeah.
To me, it just feels like a cop-out.
Well, it's a cop-out if you're using it as an argument. Yes, exactly.
Correct. But nobody uses it. People... People object when someone says that. They say, well, that's not an argument. But nobody's using it. They shouldn't be using it as an argument. If they are using it as an argument, that's stupid. I mean, you know, so the fact that everybody agrees the world is round doesn't mean it's round.
But, you know, if you don't think it's round, you really have a burden of proof. So by saying it's a consensus, you just say, yeah, okay, well, if you think otherwise, let me see your stuff.
Right. So one of the folks I had on here recently believes that the Septuagint, it was originally written in Greek and that it was translated into Hebrew. And the reason he said that is because, and I'll try to elucidate this argument the best I possibly can, and you can basically deconstruct it and give me what you think. is that ancient Greek is a language that had over a million unique words.
Ancient Hebrew is a language that had maybe 7,000 at best unique words. And he made the argument that you cannot translate from something less technical Hebrew to something way more technical ancient Greek. He says you translate down. You don't translate up.
So you don't – like if I was to – the analogy I think of that I try to explain when I talk about this is like you find a flying saucer in the desert and you want to like reverse engineer it and make your own flying saucer. When you try to reverse engineer that flying saucer, you're not going to make something better than that flying saucer. It's going to be something not as good, right? So –
That was his main argument with the translation of the Septuagint, meaning that's why he thought it was an original Greek. And then it was translated into Hebrew after. But the argument of this is that the Greek that we read in the New Testament or the Old Testament is like Koine Greek. It's like a very unsophisticated Greek compared to like Homer and some of the ancient stuff.
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Chapter 7: How do ancient manuscripts affect our understanding of the New Testament?
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There wasn't a Septuagint. So when people talk about the Septuagint, they're using, when scholars say the Septuagint, they're using a shorthand. There were numerous translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek that were floating around.
And it'd be kind of like today if you go to some developing country and you have missionaries there who are trying to put parts of the New Testament into that language. So like you have these translators, these conservative missionaries who try – Wycliffe translators, they'll take the Bible and they'll put it into some language in Africa that hasn't ever been put into English before.
So you do that so that the people in that language can read it. In the ancient world, after – After Alexander the Great, so after the fourth century, Jews are spread throughout what was then – at one point it was kind of a Greek empire, but then became the empires around the Mediterranean. The educated people read Greek. They didn't read Hebrew.
They would read Hebrew in Israel, but not in other places. So in different places, the Bible is being translated into Greek. Mm-hmm. Eventually, there was one form of that Greek that came together, and that is what they're calling the Septuagint. But it's a mistake to think it was a one-time event. Oh, interesting.
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Chapter 8: What role do modern scholars play in interpreting ancient texts?
or is not normally used in the language you're translating it into, but you keep the grammatical construction of the original language for the sake of authenticity or because you don't know quite how to. And so, just as an example, in Hebrew, if you want to say the Holy Spirit, there's no way to say Holy Spirit in Hebrew. The phrase in Hebrew is the Spirit of Holiness, right?
The way you make an adjectival attribution in Hebrew is not by using an adjective, but by putting together two nouns and saying of. So the spirit of holiness means the Holy Spirit, or the way of righteousness means the right way. Okay? So Greek speakers don't do that. They use adjectives. Okay. But when you get in biblical Greek, Septuagint and the New Testament, you have these Semiticisms.
That shows these are not original Greek compositions. Okay. They're being translated from Hebrew with using Semitic forms.
Okay, interesting. But so the original Hebrew we don't have other than the Dead Sea Scrolls, is that correct? Correct.
Well, I don't know what you mean by the original.
Like the original Hebrew. So it was translated into Greek from Hebrew, but that original Hebrew.
We have Hebrew manuscripts, yes.
We have the manuscripts. But we don't have the original manuscripts. We don't have the originals, but they're basically, what I'm trying to say is like scholarship tries to date them to a certain spot, but we don't know actually when they are because we don't have them.
I'm not sure what the them is that you're referring to. The manuscripts. We don't have the ancient – we don't have original manuscripts for any writing from the ancient world.
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