Focus 580; Lost Christianities: the Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

Good morning and welcome to the first hour focus 580 This is our telephone talk program my name is David Enge. Glad to have you with us. Well it looks like we're not going to be able to do the interview we had scheduled for this hour with Douglas Brinkley author of the book Tour of Duty about Senator John Kerry presidential candidate and his experiences in the Vietnam War we just weren't able to hook up with Mr. Brinkley. We will see if we can get that program rescheduled and we'll do that on another day instead. We're going into the focus 580 archives for something different a conversation that we had on the 9th of January with Bart Ehrman who has done a lot of writing and research on the early history of the Christian church. We talked with him among other things about his book Lost Christianities the battles for scripture and the face we never knew so again this is Focus 580 from January 9th. It is an archive we will not be taking calls this morning. Good morning and welcome to focus 580. This is our telephone talk program for the morning. My name is David and glad to have you with us. If you look around the world today and look at Christiansen look at what they believe and how they practice their faith

you will see differences. But the kind of diversity that exist today is nothing compared with that that you see in the early years of Christianity and here we're talking about the first couple of hundred years after the death of Christ at that time the New Testament as we know it today did not exist. And there were a number of different scriptures that were available at that time for people to use and release and read. And in fact Christians at that time some of them held beliefs that today frankly would be considered bizarre when it came to things like the nature of God how many gods there were who Jesus was and the significance of his life and death. Eventually though. A kind of Christianity the kind of Christianity that we know today solidified so did this collection of writings that we call the New Testament and the question that fascinates many scholars of Christianity and question will be talking about here on this morning is how is it that

given that once there was this great variety and diversity of ideas we ended up with a kind of Christianity that is practiced today. Our guest for the program is Bart Ehrman. He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he has an authority on the early Christian church and the life of Jesus and he's written quite a lot about this. If you're interested in this subject you should look for a recently published book that he's authored It's titled Lost Christianities the subtitle is The battles for scripture and the faith. We never knew this book is published by the Oxford University Press. And also as a companion that same same time the same publisher has put out a book titled Lost scriptures the books that did not make it into the New Testament. So if you're interested in reading what scholars now have available some excerpts from some of these writings you can look at that book and questions here are certainly welcome questions comments are welcome. The only thing we ask is people are brief and we ask that so that we

can keep the program moving getting as many people as possible but of course anyone is welcome to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line good anywhere you can hear us. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Professor Ermine Hello. Hi thanks for talking with us today. Thanks for having me. Well I think it's a fascinating subject certainly and maybe two to begin. I know in the book you do deal specifically with with a few particular groups and what they thought. But just to give people a kind of an overview of the varieties of thought on some very fundamental issues maybe we start there and I'm sure that one of the most basic things about Christianity as it's practiced today is that it is a mano theistic religion. Christians believe there is one God. But if you go back to this period that we're talking about and look at what people believe Christians believed there was a range of belief

and in fact there were some Christians some early Christians who were polytheists. That's right. This is it. It seems strange that you could have people calling themselves Christians who believe that there is more than one God but in fact it's true there were Christian groups in the second and third centuries some of whom maintained that there were two gods and some said there were twelve gods some said there were thirty gods and we know one group of claims that there are three hundred sixty five different gods. So this is one indication of the great variety of groups that at least call themselves Christian and the second and third centuries. How that seems to be. Or rather should significant question there how is it that you could get disagreement on such a fundamental kind of question. Well that's right I mean I would expect that somebody would just go to the New Testament and read it and realize that in fact there's only one God. And so people wonder why didn't they just read their new testaments and the answer is there wasn't an attack. It meant that the

books that came to be included in the New Testament had all been written by this time. But there wasn't widespread agreement on which both were authoritative and which ones weren't there were other books that also claimed to be written by the apostles of Jesus that and embraced these these other perspectives and so there was a finalized New Testament is very difficult to resolve a question like this. Well that gets to an important point and something that you certainly do also explore in the book that is that if you ask how it is that these groups of Christians these early Christians could have these views. The answer is that they had scripture that they believed was authoritative and that said that they they indeed had some basis for believing those things that they did believe. That's right and in addition to that these people could point to authorities that today Christians would accept and say and say that even these authorities these written texts support the idea there is more than one god there. But there's a specific.

This may be a help I clarified by giving this particular case in the second century. There is a there is a teacher theologian named Marsian who was in fact a very famous theologians Christian theologians of the day who whose hero was the apostle Paul and he he understood the part taught that there is a radical difference between the law of the Jews and the Gospel of Jesus that that a person is made right with God by accepting the death and resurrection of Jesus but not by following the law of the Jews and so he wondered how it is that Jesus preaches mercy and peace and love. Where is the God who is found in the Old Testament the Jewish God seems to be a wrathful god and Marston concluded on the basis of his reading of the Apostle Paul that in fact there must be two gods. The vengeful god of the Jews sat in the Old Testament and the merciful God of Jesus found in the writings of Paul. And so

he concluded there were two gods and so in that sense he wasn't really a monotheist he was a DI theist. So here and I'm assuming that the people of the marsian ites These were people that were his followers and went along with his ideas. That's right he wrote. He was the first. Actually to collect a book of a book of a collection of writings to call out the New Testament he he had 10 letters of the Apostle Paul and he had something like our Gospel of Luke and he used these two to support his perspectives and then his followers called the Marcionites had the canon of scripture this 11 book canon. The other groups opposed the Marcionites of course and eventually they were they were wiped out. But one of their chief opponents of course was the group that ended up establishing our twenty seven book canon of the New Testament. There are other very fundamental differences when you look at what early Christians believed what Christians now believe. You know when you talk about the nature of

Jesus you ask this question well who who and what was Jesus. Christians today believe that Jesus was. Divine but also human. It's that's one of the mysteries and things that you know kind of difficult to figure out how that works but. But that is what they believe. If you go back and look though at what early Christians believed there were a range of beliefs there apparently were people who thought that Jesus was a human he was be divine he was see both. And again here that's you would think that that would be a fun that's sort of a bedrock idea in Christianity but here you see this great diversity on a very fundamental issue. That's right. Well these Marcionites for example since they thought that the Old Testament God was not the God of Jesus. They didn't think that Jesus belonged to this God who had created the world that was the Old Testament God and so Jesus came from the other God God who saved people from this world. But that

means Jesus can never really belong to this world which for the Marcionites meant that he had never been born into this world. Jesus for them was a completely Divine Being with nothing human about him he only seemed to be a human being and he took on the appearance of human flesh so that he could speak to people here to tell them about the true God. But he himself wasn't at all human he came in the appear and appearance of humanity. Martin had numerous opponents including a group of Jewish Christians who thought just the opposite they thought the Jewish God was the only true God that there were two gods only one God the God of the Jews. And they maintain that since there's only one God that Jesus Himself cannot be God because then you would have two gods. And so these Jewish Christian groups maintain that Marcin was a heretic and they held just to the opposite point of view that Jesus was fully human but not at all divine. These people were the people called the Ebionite. That's right. And they believe that Jesus was the

Messiah but they didn't think that Jesus was divine. That's right he was and he was a man just like and like every every human he was born into the sexual union of Joseph and Mary. The only thing different between him and everyone else is that he was more righteous than others and so God chose him to die for the sake of other people since he was fully righteous. But he wasn't he what he wasn't himself divine he was adopted by God to be his son but was himself fully human. Let me. Maybe I should just real quick introduce Again our guest where this part of focus 580 for anyone who might just tuned in we're talking with Bart Ehrman. He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And he is an authority on the early Christian church. He's written a lot of the about this and has a new book out that's titled Lost Christianities that looks at this diversity of belief in the early Christian church and also looks at how it is that Christianity came to take on the character that it has now. It's published by the Oxford University Press

also as a companion to this there's a book titled Lost scriptures books that did not make it into the New Testament which takes a look at some of the scriptures that were read and used by some of these early Christian groups. Questions welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. We talk a little bit about at least two major groups and what they thought and another that people may have heard of and I believe really fascinates people are the Gnostics and I think the reason that it fascinates people is is because I think within a lot of rigid religious traditions and Christianity is among them there are certain number of people who have a mystical bent. And these people certainly were mystics and the idea that there can be this connection between the individual and the deity but that it's

it's shrouded in mystery and in a sense it's the kind of thing that each person has to find for himself or herself. That's the kind of thing that now seems to have a lot of appeal and that is the at least as I read it that's some of what the Gnostics believe. Yeah I know that's that's right. These these gnostic it's spelled with a g g and O S T I C Gnostic. These Gnostics were. They were Gnostic Christians and they're called gnostic because the word Gnostic comes from the Greek word for knowledge gnosis. So they were the ones in the know. People who believe that there were secret knowledge that could bring about salvation so that salvation didn't didn't come for them by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. They came by understanding the secret teachings that he delivered. The idea was that that Christ was a being who came from above who delivered the secret knowledge necessary to escape this evil world that

we live in. These Gnostics thought that the created world the material world was an evil place and that some of us are trapped in parts of the divide who are stuck here. And so we have to be liberated from our bodies and liberated from this evil material world. And the only way to get liberation is to understand these secret teachings that Jesus delivered. Part of the reason that I gather that we know these various groups exist and what they believed is that there are surviving writings by those Christians that represent what came to be the dominant view. Attacking their opponents. But part of the reason that we know about these people and it is something that we have learned I think probably more and more about relatively recently or at least within recent last 50 years or something is that we have managed to discover writings that had been lost. Those kinds of things that for example are in the book Lost scriptures those things that

Matt might have made it into the New Testament had those people been the ones who in a sense won the battle over what was the right way to believe. So how how is it that we know who. Not only that these people existed but we know what it is that they believed. And the text that they were drawing on for that. Really. Yeah you're exactly right. For a long time the only way we knew about these other groups is because we had the writings of the Church Fathers. The church writers who opposed them which meant that we had to rely on what their enemies were saying about them in order to know what they really stood for and as you know that's a very difficult way to go. You surveyed during a presidential election year you certainly would want to depend on what one presidential hopeful said about the other two to know what his views really were. Well we that's the situation with these ancient groups. You have their enemies talking about them but you never really quite sure what the enemy saying is is reliable

or whether it's been somewhat twisted in order to win the point that there have been discoveries of manuscripts of other books written by some of these groups especially the Gnostics one of the biggest discoveries of the 20th century took place in 1945 for the whole collection of writings by gnostic groups were found near a village in Egypt called knock the Mahdi. And so these are called the nod how Mahdi library and they contain a number of books including gospels of Jesus allegedly written by some of his followers like Philip and Thomas that have a completely different person trails of Jesus from the ones that you would find in the New Testament. We have some. Callers here I'd like to join the conversation let's go to the phones and we'll start we have somebody on cell phones or get them first. And that would be line too. Hello. Hi thank you very much. I first want to say I have enjoying this discussion so much that I pulled off the road and I'm in the car. Twenty five degrees

listening to you. The question I want to ask you is this in modern Judaism depending upon what you have reconstructionist to go to the ultra-Orthodox there are different views on whether there is in fact an afterlife. And according to Emmanuel Khan the virtue of an act decreases to the extent that that act to serve your own interests. And so I wanted to know is Christianity first of all how did the early Christians differ from the Jews in terms of B.S. the like I don't even know what the ancient Hebrews believed did. And secondly in Christianity did it develop that one was supposed to be virtuous and accept Christ of course in order to get into heaven in other words was there something in it for them or was

with the award system. So I don't know any of those answers and I'd appreciate hearing your response. Thank you sir. Thanks for the call. Yeah well that's it. Those are really good good questions and they end up being even more complicated because in early Christianity there was a range of views about the afterlife and as it turns out there are a range of views within Jewish circles as well. And in the non-Christian non-Jewish circles the there are a range of views just as there are I suppose there are there are today many early Christians believed that that the afterlife would be an existence here on Earth that that God was going to bring his kingdom here on earth and people would live eternally here. The idea is that he would destroy sin so that people wouldn't die any longer and so there be a kingdom of heaven here that this may be a very ancient Christian belief and may have been a belief taught actually by Jesus himself and his followers. But

before long many Christians came to think that the Kingdom of God wasn't a physical kingdom here on Earth but that it was a place up in the sky with God and so these Christians began to teach that a person would be after death their soul would go to heaven. And that's where we get the good. That's the typical Christian belief now. It's not a belief advocated very much within the writings of the New Testament but as a later later belief. Some of these Christian groups though believe that or think there are some Christians who thought these gnostic christians thought that most people simply didn't have any afterlife at all. That when they die they die just like Adam must die and they cease to exist. But that only the Gnostics would have the ones who really know the truth would be the ones who live on forever. So that's that's part of the answer to a complicated set of questions. What about the the other notion of the caller points out the fact that in within Judaism there is this belief that if if you do if you're going to

do something good. The reason for doing it should be the good of the thing itself and not because it does you any good but because it's purely a good thing for for the sake of it for the sake of being a good. Thing Just how did early Christians think about that. Well there again there's a range of views about this one true. One interesting development in early Christianity was the notion that no matter how many good things you do it has no bearing on your eternal life. The idea was that since everybody had committed sins against God everybody was liable to punishment. And the only way to escape the punishment wasn't by trying to compensate for the bad things by doing good things but by having a having the penalty paid for by someone else and so the whole idea of Christ's death on the cross was to bring salvation for people who don't deserve it. So that salvation came not by doing good things at all but only by believing in Christ.

In that case in the system like that which was adopted by a number of early Christians the reason to do good it isn't because it's going to then and allow you to inherit eternal life. It's only because you're doing what God wants you to do. And since you are concerned about what God wants you to do then you simply do the good thing. Let's go on. Other callers. Next is champagne. Actually I guess they're all in Champagne well taken. First line number one. Hello hello yes get back to Amman and one of your teaching company lectures you mentioned Apollonius of Tiana in the context of a general acceptance of the belief in divine Superman in the ancient world. And you didn't see too much more about the parallels between those two figures and I wondered whether that attitude might have had something to do with the.

Diversity of different Christian views. Just the general. Tolerance for diverse views about who could be divine. Yes. Yeah that's a good question that I should say something about who this Apollonius of Tyana was. Because people today are never Most people never heard of them but in the early years of Christianity he was quite well known. This Apollonius of Tyana was actually a pagan. I don't mean that in a native way. Pagan meaning non-Christian non-Jewish is a polytheist philosopher theologians who allegedly was born supernaturally. The Divine Being came upon his mother and impregnated her. He was a child prodigy. He when he was an adult he left home and engaged in an itinerant teaching

preaching minister. Three gathering disciples around him and telling them they shouldn't live from material world but for spiritual things he allegedly could heal the sick and cast out demons and raise people from the dead and that the end of his life instead of dying he ascended into heaven so well that you know that sounds a lot like Jesus. And the point is is that Christians and pagans were telling stories about people who were thought to be divine men people who were somehow human but also somehow partly divine. My sense is that early Christian the early Christians who would talk about Jesus that way were especially those who were comfortable with these kinds of stories. There were other stories about other people who were in a similar situation similarly thought to be dividing humans in some sense or another. It may be that the earliest Christians who were Jewish understood Jesus to be a Jewish messiah Jewish human being chosen by God for salvation. But that as Pagans converted into Christianity they started

talking more about Jesus as a divine healer or divine Exorcist somebody who could raise the dead and so different people with different backgrounds maybe had different views of who Jesus was. I will thank you and I've I've enjoyed your lectures. Thanks. Thank you for the call let's go again to another champagne person this would be Line 3. Hello and good morning I think I think. That's me. Yes yes. And when you when you think that all the Canaanites at one time started with the same knowledge of God. After after Noah's Ark. Yeah the three sons they all knew about God and the Canaanites descended from ham. And now if they had told their descendants about God they would've gotten that awful mess they wouldn't have had and then died later on. So when God told Abraham who was evidently about the only person that still believed in the true

God to exterminate these other people he would have a right to do this. Because the only reason their religions were so hard was because they had forgotten the true God and the way he wanted them to live. What do you think about that. But I think you know it's an interesting question I think. I get a little nervous when without destroying people who have different religions from ours especially the world. Today I think I think you're right that in the Old Testament that that was the understanding that the people who inhabited the land of Canaan were people who were opposed to the belief of the true God and that's why God told the children of Israel to destroy them. This person Martin that I mentioned earlier the second century theologians who thought that there were two different gods actually used the stories of the destruction of the Canaanites in order to show that the God found in the Old Testament can't be the God of Jesus and the logic is

that the God of the Old Testament tells the Children of Israel to go into the land into the city of Jericho and to kill every man woman and child in the city. Martin points out that that doesn't sound at all like the God of Jesus who says that somebody persecute you pray for them love your enemies pray for those who are against you so they turn the other cheek that they sound like those are different different gods. He didn't convince the majority of Christians that there continue to be Christians who think that they're some kind of difference between the God of wrath that you find in the Old Testament and the God of love that you find in the new. Well again I appreciate the comments of the caller let's go to another person here this is also champagne and it's line number two. Hello. I highly I mean if you could talk a little bit at that the early church that something that you deal with and the connection with it from an amp. I I remember talking to some Mennonites in Quakers who who felt that this is how the church went wrong

that if the church its ideology became connected with an entire and whether any of that kind of hedging monic ideology or power politics played into some kind of you know casting out it you know what were called heretical teachings. Yeah no I'm happy to talk about that because it's a very it's a very important issue. Before the before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the early Fourth Century he converted about the year 312 of the Common Era through 12 A.D. before that Christianity had been a small minority persecuted religion by the time of Constantine early Fourth Century. It may have been that something like 5 percent of the empire was Christian so small in 95 percent of the Empire would be non-Christian. But once the Emperor.

Converted it became it became a case where a Christan was no longer a persecuted minority but was a was a favored group. And this led to massive conversions throughout the empire including conversions of people who were in power. These people in power then saw it as part of their duty to make sure that the true belief was maintained. And so you start having people like Constantine calling church councils and helping to decide what the church doctrine is going to be. So the Christianity goes from being a powerless minority minority to being a powerful majority and this powerful majority then has all the tools of the state available to it for persecuting those who have different kinds of theology. And that's so that's when you start getting kind of serious heresy trials and such. Some people think that the conversion of the Empire was a bad thing because it meant that the nature of Christianity necessarily changed at that point.

And I think I don't want to pass judgment whether it was a good thing or a bad thing but it certainly did change Christianity because now Christianity became not only popular but powerful. And that's quite different from how it started out in the teachings of Jesus who was it would have been a lower class peasant in Galilee powerless against the empire is quite different from when you've got the Emperor himself supporting the face. We're a little bit past our midpoint here so we're coming into our last 25 minutes. I want to again introduce our guest We're talking with Bart Ehrman He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he is an authority on the early Christian church. He has authored a book Lost Christianities the battles for scripture in the faiths we never knew that explorers and territory here were discussing So if you like to look at it you can seek it out also there is a companion book which is titled Lost scriptures books that did not make it into the New Testament which gives some examples of Scripture

that was read by some of these different groups the ones that as we you know have discussed did not become the. The mainstream Christianity and those books are both published by the Oxford University Press. Their are out now they just came out this past fall. So you can look for them in the bookstore. Questions comments certainly are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Just here I want to get in question in. And I know that this is something you devote a substantial portion of the book to so it's not something I guess you could probably give an easy or short answer to but given that here we've talked about the fact that within the first couple of centuries after the death of Christ Christians had this range of belief. There were those that believe Jesus was divine and there were those that believe that he was human and there were those that believed his death and resurrection resurrection didn't really have much of anything to do with the salvation of individual Christians. They were Christians who believe there was one God there were Christians who as you've explained believe that the God of the Old Testament was one God the God

of the New Testament was a different god given that they were all of these different views. How is it that that orthodox Christianity the kind that is practiced now. How is that. That emerge the dominant form. Yeah that's that's that's the big question is I don't know I think there are three chapters on that one. It's not it's it's well it's really it is the question and it's the question I get I frequently get asked how how is it that there's one form of Christianity ended up as victorious. I think there was this group that you called the Orthodox women back in the second and third centuries before this Orthodox group became the most powerful group. I call the I call this group the proto orthodox so the Orthodox Christians before they had established themselves as dominant. I think there are things that this proto orthodox group did that helped ensure its success and ensure that it and its other that the other Christian

groups that they called heresies came to be came to be suppressed. There were very well-organized this proto orthodox group and one of the things they pushed for was having one looter over the church. So they pushed the church hierarchy so that in each local church there was one one pastor or at that time he was called a bishop and there were bishops over the bishops so that if you got the right guy elected into the church and he held the right theology then you could you could be assured that people would hold on to the point of view that you yourself supported. And so his proto. Orthodox have an all out effort to make sure that only the right people were chosen to be bishops of these churches. These bishops insisted on a particular creed that their people had to say. And so the Creeds the people who continue to recite today the Apostles Creed the Nicene Creed The emerged out of these conflicts. That's why in these creeds today there are statements that people might be

puzzled by for example a creed starts out by saying I believe in One God the Father Almighty. Well why would you have to emphasize that you believe in One God I mean why else who else would you believe. Well the reason that that phrase is in there is precisely because people used to believe in one of one God and this creed is designed to weed out anyone who doesn't believe the correct thing so that you've got a problem with an ox movement that's stressing the clergy. The one bishop over each church and they're stressing the creed and they're also stressing a canon of Scripture a collection of 27 books the ones that they've chosen that they've decided are the true true depositories of the say so that. Discouraging people from reading other gospels like the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Philip insisting that they read only Matthew Mark Luke and John and that these are the only inspired ones. That's probably what the doc's group then uses the clergy and creed and the canon in order to promote its own

views and ends up because of these things being becoming victorious. Well let me ask one other question and I promise to folks will get right back to the phone. I'm sure that there were some people hearing this story and reading about this history that will you know that will use that as a reason to reject all of Christianity. They will say well then that it's that it's of all made up and that it's sort of artificial and it's just that one. There were these all these wild different sorts of views and people couldn't agree on anything and one groups suddenly you know sort of managed to emerge victorious. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there's any more truth or virtue in their views than anybody else's It's just that they won and you know the old saying about how the winners write history. So I suppose some people would say well then that's that gives us gives one reason to reject Christianity and reject all of it. There are Christians. Though for people who do believe I suppose their tendency might be to reject some of these early Christianity's because it's

just too confusing. So I guess the question is what. What's the significance for Christianity as a faith of its early history. That's a very good question I think. I think one has to stress that Christianity is an unusual religion in the world precisely because Christianity makes historical claims that are central to its faith. This isn't true of all religions. There are there are a number of religions that are not based on historical events or historical persons but Christianity is Christianity makes claims about a historical person Jesus of Nazareth and and the things that he said and did and the things that happen to him. So the Christianity is rooted in historically that that means by its very nature Christianity is historical so that the first thing to stress is that Christians can't simply ignore history because history

is what their faith is based on. That doesn't mean that Christian Christianity is nothing but kind of a history lesson that people accept. But it does mean that there's some relationship between history and the Christian faith and Christians shouldn't be afraid to study the history and understand it because when they study historically how the religion came into being they can get a fuller sense of the riches of the say so I don't think it should terrify anybody to engage in this kind of historical analysis. Instead it is done rightly enriches a person's understanding of their own religion. All right let's go to other callers met in this next line for Hello. Yes I'm my own. Yes OK. The question in the early part of your program was Jesus Christ really was an I. Think and there's this kind of question as to the truth about the Old Testament the New Testament. They have to go together the God of the Old Testament is saying it in the New Testament. Remember

that the Old Testament is full of sacrifices. Those were livestock animal sacrifices destroyed out there was with really Cain and Abel actually for Adam and Eve. And actually what those animal sacrifices were actually innocent of any crime at all and they had been there but had to be shed for the sins of the people. Now you come over in Hebrews and it says the blood of bulls and goats could not take away the sins and now in in the Gospel of John the first chapter of John there it says in the beginning was the word the Word was WITH God and the Word was God in the and then in the 14 verses says and the Word became flesh and dwelt among man. Now this was guarding incarnate. He's the only one to die for the sins of the world. God cannot die but he died in the person of His Son so that Jesus Christ came in the place he was man in place and he was gone. Well that's I think the I think you're you're I think. Well I'll let the

guest respond but I think that the the the answer is yes that in fact is what Christians believe today and that's what Christian scripture says today. But that and that there were. Other Christians who believe other things of you if you take a literal interpretation of scripture from Genesis to Revelation you'll see this all the way through and there no question. Well let's get let's give the guests a chance to respond to the question. Yeah I should jump in and respond I'm not the expert. Yeah no thank you very much for that. I think I think what you have been laying out starting to lay out is exactly the proto orthodox understanding of Christianity that you've got an Old Testament in the New Testament are written by the same God and they're attesting to the same truth and that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the other sacrifices found in the Jewish scriptures. That's exactly that's exactly right that's what the proto orthodox Christians wanted to believe and insisted that people believe in God I think I would add to that is that there were other Christians who had

other books of scripture that are not found in the New Testament and they taught different things. There are some who thought for example that that Jesus sacrifice didn't really isn't really what mattered for salvation but that it was his teachings that brought about salvation. There are some people who thought that Jesus really wasn't the word of God made incarnate and so forth. I mean there are different different views out among different groups. But the but what you laid out Of course this is what the proto orthodox Christians wanted people for all posterity to believe. Well and do we also have reason to believe that the pro Orthodox Christians. They became the dominant form did what they could to destroy the record of the other Christian belief so that there would be would be as is the New Testament as we have it. Yeah absolutely that's that's why. Well what we think of as Christianity believing the creeds and believing in Scripture that that just seems like a natural thing for us because that's all we have. But in fact there was a time when there were other

books competing books which said different things and it wasn't all altogether clear which group was going to win out in these debates and which perspectives were going to be accepted widely. Well again I think the caller I want to go on to Bloomington Indiana That's next. Line 1 Hello. Oh may I have your guess is it Mr. Hamann or ermine May I ask if you regard the unorthodox monument such as these and I go Monday morning is as valid as scripture. No I don't really take a view of that I think. I think all I can say about them historically is that there were Christians who understood them to be scripture but that there are very few people today who would consider them to be scriptural authority don't know there are some groups still I mean there continue to be gnostic churches in the world today who who have other books other than the 27 books of the New Testament. But I think for mainline Christianity

of course we're only going to have these twenty seven books and these will always be the scriptures of Christianity and most of Christians in our world today. Well may I say it. It's the fact that there would be an orthodox. How should we think propaganda. It did not take Jesus by surprise. Jesus knew that there would be unorthodox impostors in his frame a sermon on the Mount. He says not everyone who says to me Lord Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven. He said that there would be some that would claim to be its followers they would not only claim to be his followers they would even do miracles in his name and he says that some of those who called him Lord Lord would be impostures and he would tell them Depart from Me I never knew you you were away from me he said. And the point is that Jesus knew that they would be impostors with false teachings trying to irrigate trying to irrigate the prestige of Christianity to their own false teachings. And that brings.

Whenever a movement that's high praise these. Imposters will try to identify themselves with or without hybrids. Yeah I do have a problem with that is that it well is that when when you have two pastors who are teaching faux teachings then I want to think that they're teaching the true teaching and that the other people are the imposters teaching the false teachings so that there are people teaching different things but there's no you know criteria by which we can step outside of the debates themselves to decide which ones are the impostors. We just got about 10 minutes left and I have two other callers and I want to try to get those people in as well. Let's go on to our panel line number two. Well yes good morning. I'm could speak about Mary Matalin place in the early church as shown by the new writings that have been coming to light. Yeah I'd be happy to say so. Thing about that have you by chance read the Da Vinci Code. Nobody

heard about it but he's asking me now about Mary Magdalen because she's very important in the DaVinci Code. And so she's once again become actually and I was reading the newest book by Miss paddles I think bagels and pen I don't think I have. Yes. And she talks about Mary Magdalene and that are new books coming out. Yes well you know Mary Magdalene was a very important figure in Christian legend through starting fairly early on in second and third centuries but then throughout the Middle Ages she became increasingly important and there are these legends that she had a particularly close relationship with Jesus and some some of our own. Sources suggest that it was a extremely close relationship closer even than Jesus had with some of his disciples including I should say.

Gospels written in the second century. There's a there's a gospel that's called The Gospel of Mary that is attributed to Mary Magdalene. There were she was thought to be the author of this Gospel and in it Jesus gives her the true revelation that can bring about salvation and the men disciples are a little bit upset by this because they want to know why she has given this revelation to a woman. But it turns out it's because she was closer to Jesus than any of them were. She's also prominent in a gospel that was discovered not Hamadi the Gospel of Philip which again indicates that Mary was the one to whom Jesus had given the true revelation. So she was quite important in legend after the second after the second third centuries I think largely among women who wanted to emphasize that it wasn't just male disciples that Jesus dealt with but also women such as Mary Magdalen Having said that I should say that we don't really know very much about the historical Mary Magdalen. She's mentioned only a couple times in the in the New

Testament. She. She was said to be the first one to discover the Jesus tomb was empty and so that has led some people to think that maybe she was a very close disciple of Jesus. She's not called a prostitute in the New Testament. Interestingly enough we don't really know much of a thing about her other than it says in one place that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her. So she was a close follower of Jesus from Galilee but the legends that spring up about her later really are just that they're legends. Again I think the caller we got to go on to Champagne County this is line 3. Hello hello yes. Yeah and well the story that you didn't get at which is about Magdalen is that there was a campaign against her. Her role basically in that she was conflated with another woman who was Mary who was supposedly a prostitute. But I wanted to get back to the I guess the Roman era in some ways.

Earlier caller mentioned that some current Christians lament the orthodoxy in the sense of the staid orthodoxy of Christianity. But and you mentioned that it was it was sort of an oppositional religion before that and indeed it was saw some one British documentary that suggested that you know. Of course there was persecution of the Christians in Rome but the but they allege that there was some kind of burning of Rome. And I don't know whether it was and in some sense apocalyptic or revolutionary or both but that there was some evidence that I don't know that's a little bit away from the scriptural record. But yeah I know that's it. Yeah what they were referring to is that in the year 64 there was a fire in Rome that burned down a good part of the city and nouveau the Emperor was allegedly the one who had started the fire because he had some architect architectural design for the city that he wanted to implement but it you know the city was there already so in order to implement these architectural designs he had to have the

city destroyed. But then once the people found out that he had done it he cast blame on the Christians for having set the fire and so they used them as scapegoats but some. Historians have started thinking is that maybe he's right maybe Christians did start the fire. Reason it was not apocalyptic or revolutionary there is a reading of the Bible that sort of a radical reading the Roman Empire anti-imperial How would that that would be you that would do the argument is that this kind of harsh anti imperial strain of Christianity which was kind of this apocalyptic strain thinking that we're living at the end of the age and God is soon going to bring in the kingdom that that might have fired up so to say the imaginations of the Christians in Rome who may have decided to attack the Empire to burn it. That's possible I. I tend to think that Nero actually started the fire. One reason for thinking that is because the person who says he didn't did it wasn't a Christian apologist trying to

make Christians is actually the Roman historian Tacitus who didn't care at all for Christians but nonetheless indicated that Nero unjustly accused them of this crime and so he wasn't a very he wouldn't dast as wasn't sympathetic for the Christians but nonetheless he thought that Nero was the one who did it so I tend to think Nero probably did it. We're going down to the point where we have just a couple of minutes. Appreciate commas and questions of all the callers I guess I find myself going back to to the to the basic questions about what is as far as Christians are concerned what is true belief and what is not. The fact that that people that present day Christians are going to say well what is true belief is what the pro Orthodox Christians believe and what Orthodox Christians believe today and that they might go back and look at now some of the scripture that has come to light and laying out different views and they might say well that's interesting or they might say that's heretical or to my that they might say that's just wrong.

But we know that they would say something like Well we know that the scripture that we have today was divinely inspired and that's right and that's the word of God but this other stuff. It's not well I guess not. I don't know that I really want to take a position one way or the other but I guess that the question that I have is well how do you know how do you know which isn't which is not that we still go back to the go back to the question of there there where there is scripture and some Christians at some time believe that that was correct. So why why do you have a reason now to believe that one set is correct on one side is not. That's exactly right and the one difficulty that people need to realize is that our New Testament had 27 books in the New Testament was not compiled into one book called The New Testament until the end of the fourth century. The first person ever to list out of 27 books as being the scripture was a guy named AFA Neisha who wrote a letter in the year 367 who listed our books in our lair books before then a name fact after afterwards there

continued to be huge debates about which books to include and which ones to exclude. So it's not as if Christians have always had this canon of scripture to decide matters. These were debates that went on for decades and even centuries. Well it's a fascinating subject and I appreciate very much you taking some time. Time and talking with us about it. OK thank you I've enjoyed being with you. Our guest Bart Ehrman he is the head of the Department of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has written a lot about the history of the early Christian church and the life of Jesus and if you're interested in doing some reading on the subject I should i would suggest you look at the books we mentioned. First of all the book Lost Christianities the battles for scripture and the face we never knew that is out now and published by the Oxford University Press came out in October and then a companion book that contains some of the scripture of some of these groups that we have been talking about. So if you're interested in reading more of those texts

it's titled Lost scriptures books that did not make it into the New Testament. And again as I say that's the Oxford University Press is the publisher for that book.