transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[00:30] The rapture, the ascent of Jesus' faithful flock to heaven at the end of the world, is enthusiastically anticipated by many evangelical Christians. But is this expectation grounded in what the Bible actually says? Today, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to talk about the rapture, what it is, and whether it actually appears in the Bible. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Welcome back, everybody, to Misquoting Jesus, where today we are talking about the rapture. We've also got our bonus segment this week, which is listeners' questions right at the end, where I'm going to be asking Bart if Jesus and Paul want psychedelic drugs. So make sure you stick around for that. Before all of that though, Bart, how are you doing this week?

Speaker 3:
[01:36] Yeah, doing pretty well. I'm up in New Hampshire, visiting my daughter and her family, and this is a gorgeous part of the world, and lots of trees and lots of lakes, and it's not yet spring yet. I'm having two springs this year. So how are you doing?

Speaker 2:
[01:56] Yeah, very well. Thank you. We've had some lovely weather. It's been really nice to get outside, see some friends and do just gardening things. So yeah, doing well, enjoying the spring that has actually arrived in Maryland.

Speaker 3:
[02:09] Ah, very good. Good.

Speaker 2:
[02:11] Now, before we get to the rapture, I have our usual icebreaker question. And I would like to know this week, what's the most rewarding moment that you have had as a teacher is?

Speaker 3:
[02:24] The most rewarding moment I've had as a teacher. That's a really good question. I think one of the most rewarding was I want to, I won my first teaching prize was like in 1994 or something. And I was just really kind of honored by it. That I had gotten, you know, at the university, they give out teaching awards. And it just made me feel really kind of good about how I was doing things because it's, it's, they're not easy awards to win. And they, and they're student nominated. And so I thought, you know, this is really, it's really good because my, my classes are controversial, were controversial, but students still, you know, appeared to have gotten a lot out of them. And so for me, that was just, it was just huge, hugely gratifying to get that kind of recognition.

Speaker 2:
[03:21] And that recognition from students is really, that's saying something.

Speaker 3:
[03:26] Yeah. You know, the funny thing is there, they got this thing online called Rape My Professor, where students can go on and say like, and so students go check out how did this person do? But it's always, it's a bit of a joke because, you know, the students are really ticked off about the grade, you know, sending this nasty report, you know, and if you really like it, it'll send a real positive report. They don't tell you anything, but you don't know that that's why they're writing it. It's like you look up some profession you know is fantastic and you see these negative report, like I created too hard, you know, too much work, you know, complaining all the time. And so I guess they think this is a good tool, but it's not.

Speaker 2:
[04:06] So moving on to the rapture, I want to start by just kind of establishing a baseline about what we're talking about. So when evangelical Christians talk about the rapture, what is it that they're talking about?

Speaker 3:
[04:19] Well the word rapture refers in those circles, refers to a future event where the end of the world is near and there's going to be cataclysm on earth. There's going to be a long period of disasters that destruct the earth sent from heaven as God destroys the world as we know it in order to bring in salvation. And the rapture is the idea that Jesus will come back before the destruction begins. In most evangelical circles, the destruction lasts for seven years. And so it's called the tribulation, the seven-year tribulation. And a pre-tribulation rapture means that Jesus comes to take his followers out of the world so they don't have to suffer through this tribulation. And so this is, so the raptured, meaning they're from, it's from the Greek word for being snatched up, they're being snatched up.

Speaker 2:
[05:20] So when you think about the Christian understanding of the end of the world, the Book of Revelation tends to spring to mind. What does that say about the followers of Jesus being taken from the world before all hell breaks loose?

Speaker 3:
[05:34] Yeah, so this is the interesting thing, is that this idea of the rapture is actually not in the one book that everybody turns to, to see what's going to happen in the future, the Book of Revelation, it's not there. When people say it's there, they put it there, because it's not there, and the reality is it's not anywhere in the Bible. This is, as we're going to talk about later, this is like, it's this modern theological invention that nobody in the history of Christianity thought about for over 1700 years, even though they read their Bible. But the Book of Revelation has nothing about a rapture. The Book of Revelation is about the destruction that's going to come to earth when God sends his judgment against sinners. And there is, there's disaster after disaster after disaster as God wreaks havoc on the earth through Christ and through his angels. But there's no idea that the followers of Jesus will be taken out of the world before that happens in the Book of Revelation.

Speaker 2:
[06:39] So if rapture isn't taken from the Book of Revelation, what Biblical passages do Evangelicals use to support the idea?

Speaker 3:
[06:51] So, it's one of these things where, like, this idea that Jesus is coming back to take his people out of the world is so firmly entrenched in people's minds that they can find it lots of places. So that if you, like if you're, if this is what you think is going to happen, you read a passage, oh, that's what it's talking about. And so, the, when I was, when I was an Evangelical Christian, there were a couple of main passages that were used. The most, the one that most people use is, is in 1 Thessalonians. So 1 Thessalonians is Paul's letter to these Christians in Thessalonica that he had converted. It's Paul's earliest letter. It's the first Christian writing of any kind we have, probably written around 49 or 50 of the Common Era. And in this letter, Paul is trying to comfort the Thessalonians because they had heard that the Day of Judgment was coming soon, and that they, as followers of Jesus, would survive this Day of Judgment and everybody else would be destroyed. But they're worried because some of their members in the congregation have died. And they're afraid that they've lost out now, that the people who have died aren't going to be around for, when Jesus returned, bringing in the kingdom. And so they're upset. And Paul's heard they're upset. He writes this letter to explain to them, partly, largely to explain to them, that it's okay that these people have died. Because when Jesus comes back, the dead in Christ will rise first. And so this is in First Thessalonians chapter four, it's verses 13 through 18, where he says the dead, when Jesus returns, the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who still remain, will rise up after them and we will all meet the Lord in the air. And so, well, okay, that's the rapture, right? Yes, if you already believe in the rapture, that is the rapture.

Speaker 2:
[08:44] It sounds pretty rapturous. I mean, I don't believe in the rapture, but I have had it explained to me by former evangelicals. You've got the rising up into the air kind of thing. What is actually going on there if it's not the rapture?

Speaker 3:
[08:59] So the problem that people have who, often people have who read the Bible, who read it by like picking out a verse or passage here and there, and they kind of sound like what they already think, is that they don't read the entire passage, or they don't read the entire book. And when you do that, it really changes what passages mean. And in this case, it's pretty significant. So these are the last verses of 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. And one problem people have, one problem isn't just they don't read the entire book or the entire passage, it's that we have chapters and verses in our Bibles. And we tend to think that the next chapter is gonna be about something else, right? Like in a novel, the next chapter is about something else. But when Paul's writing 1 Thessalonians, he wasn't writing it in chapters and verses. They didn't have chapters and verses until centuries and centuries later. He was just writing a letter. But that means that the end of chapter 4, chapter 4 verse 18 of 1 Thessalonians, is followed by chapter 5 verse 1 of 1 Thessalonians. But for Paul, it's just the next sentence. So he's going on. And when you start reading chapter 5, you realize that Jesus is not coming to take his people out of the world prior to there being a destruction. He's coming to destroy. He's not coming to save. People who believe in the rapture think that the followers of Jesus will be taken out of the world, and seven years later, Jesus will come to destroy the world. No. This is Jesus coming back in judgment. And the idea that Paul had, that he probably inherited, was that Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah, and people expected him to overthrow God's enemies. But instead of that, he was thwarted by the enemies. He was captured and he was crucified. But he was raised from the dead, and he's going to come back again, this time to get even. He's going to destroy the enemies. And so Paul believes that that was going to happen soon. What's going to happen is he's going to come in, and he's going to wipe out everything opposed to God. And when you read chapter 5 of 1 Thessalonians, it's quite clear. Paul says that's what's going to happen, so you need to be ready for it. Because if you're not ready for it, you're going to be wiped out. You need to be ready for it. The reason he doesn't take the Christians out of the world in order to go up to heaven for seven years. What's happening in this passage is, Paul is likening Jesus' return to the return of the angry king who's ticked off that his people have been disobeying him. And he comes to a city where people are faithful to him. He comes to a city that he knows is not on their side. And they send out their delegates to go meet him. And the delegates go out to meet him. This is a very common thing in the ancient world. When a king is going to war, you go out to a city that you're supporting, and you meet them there, you go out, and the representatives of the city go out, and they escort the king back into the city, and he starts the campaign against the enemies. This is what's going on in 1 Thessalonians. Jesus, the king, is coming back. His people are going out to meet him, and they don't stay up in the air. They come back to the city, back to earth, so that the destruction will begin. And so if you read 1 Thessalonians in the context, it's not about taking people out of the world before the tribulation.

Speaker 2:
[12:28] Do we have any suggestion in the New Testament that Paul or the early writers were expecting Christians, faithful Christians, to be removed from the world, or is this all completely a later invention?

Speaker 3:
[12:44] Yeah, a later invention that we can date. 1833 is when somebody came up with this idea. But yeah, so it's not in the New Testament. There are other passages that people appeal to. One that we really liked when I was an evangelical was the one in Matthew chapter 24. In Matthew 24, Jesus is talking about the end of things when the day of judgment comes. And he says that it's gonna come suddenly, and some people will be wiped out, some people will be saved. And he says, there'll be two people in the field, one will be taken, one will be left. Two women working at a grindstone, one will be taken, one will be left. And so we always interpret that to mean that the people who were taken were taken away prior to the destruction happening. So we thought that's the rapture, right? But again, if you read the passage in the context, Matthew 24, what he says right before this is that the Day of Judgment is going to be like what happened in the days of Noah, where when the flood came and took everyone away and destroyed them, the only ones who were saved were Noah and his family. Then he says they'll be like that on the Day of Judgment. One will be taken, one will be left behind.

Speaker 2:
[14:08] One left is the one who is saved.

Speaker 3:
[14:13] The one who is left is the one who survives. The one who is taken is the one who is destroyed in the flood or in this case in the Day of Judgment. And so we always thought it meant you want to be taken out before the destruction hits. No, you do not want to be taken out that you're the one to be taken out to be destroyed. Just read the passage. But we didn't read the whole passage. We just read the verse. And so these are the kinds of things that people use to try and explain what's going to happen with a rapture. But these verses are definitely not talking about a rapture.

Speaker 2:
[14:44] Thank you very much, Bart. We're going to take a brief break for an announcement and then we will be right back with more rapture information. I would like to announce a brand new course that's coming up. It's very exciting. It is taught by someone. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's called Bart Ehrman. It is an eight lesson course called Through the Eye of a Needle, Jesus' Teachings on Wealth and Their Modern Relevance, which, yeah, very excited about because you see this kind of prosperity gospel thing all through social media, all through the news. And you and I have spoken briefly about it before. So having an entire eight lesson course on it will be fascinating. Can you first tell us what this Eye of the Needle reference is and what you have in store for us in this course?

Speaker 3:
[15:34] Well, you know, Jesus said that a rich, he told a rich person he had to sell everything he had and give all the money to the poor. Then he tells his disciples that that's the way it has to be, because it's easier for a camel to go through the Eye of the Needle than it is for a rich person to get into heaven. And his disciples don't believe him. What? I thought rich people are the ones God was blessing, right? They got all the goods. Yeah, no, it's easier for a camel. And so, you know, the big question since he said that is, could he possibly mean it? And so, I'm going to be talking about Jesus' views of wealth. And what, if any, relevance they might have for today. This is actually, it's based on a book that I'm working on. And another book I'm working on, which is Jesus' relationship to things like capitalism and socialism, if there is a relationship. And would Jesus support a kind of capitalistic system or not? And, you know, what would you think about people who believe that his gospel was all about getting rich? What would you think of that? So, it's going to take eight lectures though, because there's a lot involved, right? You could just pick a couple of verses and say, yeah, there it is. There's a lot involved. And so, it'll be eight lectures, and all sorts of interesting things connected with that.

Speaker 2:
[16:55] And when we take Jesus' teachings on wealth and kind of place them in the correct historical context, I assume that shifts everything that people think they know.

Speaker 3:
[17:05] Yeah, because, you know, the ancient world didn't have capitalist economies or socialist economies. They had different kinds of economies, and the demographics were very different in the ancient world. In, you know, it's not, I mean, there are very few people who were wealthy, and they didn't have really much of a middle class. We, you know, most people are kind of in middle class, or 50% of people. And it's not like that in the ancient world, where, I mean, it's not that everybody is either filthy rich or completely destitute. But most people were living pretty close to the edge. And a lot of people were destitute, a lot more than today. We were just starving. And it's in that context that Jesus talks about wealth. And it seems like wealth would be a good thing in a world of poverty. And so what does Jesus say about it? And can it make any sense today or not?

Speaker 2:
[17:58] Fantastic. Thank you. Again, that's Through the Eye of a Needle, an eight lesson course to be recorded live. The recordings are going to be taking place May 16th and 17th. And Early Bird Pricing is available now until May 2nd. If you want to check it out or grab your spot, you can go to bartermann.com/eye of a needle. And as always, use the code MJPodcast at the checkout for a special discount. And now back to the episode, we are returning to the Rapture. So you mentioned before the break that there is really nothing in the New Testament that supports this idea of Jesus' faith being taken up to heaven to avoid His destruction. And actually the opposite seems to be true if we look at certain passages like Matthew. Where does the idea of the Rapture come from then?

Speaker 3:
[18:51] Well, we can actually trace it. You know, we have the history of biblical interpretation from... We have authors who talk about, you know, what the New Testament is saying and what it means, going back to the second Christian century. And you end up in the fourth and fifth Christian centuries, have serious intellectuals who are Bible scholars, who are quite learned in the Bible and talk about the Bible, and talk about the various things the Bible talks about, including the Last Judgment and Jesus' Return and all of that. And so we know what people were saying about it. And nobody talked about this idea of a Rapture until the early 19th century. And we actually know who came up with it. And so John Nelson Darby was a, he was an English person who started the group called the Plymouth Brethren. That's a, they don't like to call themselves a denomination. They were kind of a back to the New Testament group and who tried to understand the Bible literally and tried to understand how they ought to live and what they ought to believe based on the literal interpretation of the Bible. And they thought the Bible had many mysteries in it that needed to be resolved. And so John Nelson Darby started this group, if you want to call them a denomination. And he, there were various disputes going on in the 1830s about what was going to happen at the end of time, whether the end of time was coming soon. For most of Christian history, people did not think that the end was coming soon. Most Christians did not think the end was coming soon. After the early period, after the first or early second century, most Christians didn't think that. But they started thinking it again in the end of the 18th century, especially with the French Revolution, as it turns out. The French Revolution led Christians in England to say, man, it is crazy over there. This is like all hell's breaking out. It's like the Book of Revelation. And then they started thinking, oh, it is like the Book of Revelation. And they said, it is. And so the French Revolution gets people thinking this way. And so some decades later in England, it's taken seriously. But there are questions about how it's going to happen, what's really going to happen. And this John Nelson Darby came up with the idea that there are different periods of history for God acts in certain ways and saves people in different ways, in different periods of time. So, you know, the way Adam and Eve is saved is different from the way people are saved during the days of Moses. And after Christ, it's different from the way it is in the days of Moses. And so you can actually periodize history. And the last period is the millennium on Earth, the thousand year reign of Christ. So what John Nelson Darby did is he came up with this periodization of history, and he included the idea that there's going to be this horrible period of punishment on the earth. But obviously, God isn't going to let his followers experience that. He's going to take them out for this period. And so in 1833, John Nelson Darby pronounced this idea to his fellow Plymouth Brethren leaders, and many of them rejected it. Some of them accepted it. But eventually, over time, this became a belief that people started to latch onto. And so by the beginning of the 20th century, it became a standard view among Evangelical Christians.

Speaker 2:
[22:31] Now, the Plymouth Brethren, I believe, are still around today, but I wouldn't say they are a particularly large group. Do we have any ideas how this idea spread to be such a widely held belief, especially among Evangelical fundamentalists?

Speaker 3:
[22:47] Yeah, we do. You know, I'll tell you, when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute, I stopped going to my Episcopal Church at home that I'd been raised in, and I started going to a Plymouth Brethren Assembly. And so I was connected with the Plymouth Brethren for several years, and actually preached in the churches and things. And so I got pretty familiar with them, at least, you know, there are different kinds of Plymouth Brethren like everything else. But the belief spread not just because of the Plymouth Brethren, because they never were a large group, although they still exist. The reason it spread is because there were debates within evangelical Christianity in the 19th century about all sorts of things, but including the status of the Bible. And somewhat after this declaration of the rapture that John Nelson Darby gave, sometime after that, you started getting advances in the sciences, where geologists started realizing the world, in fact, is not 4,000 years old, or that biologists started realizing that survival of the fittest and Darwin, and origins of species and things. And many conservative Christians, evangelical Christians, began to double down on the Bible, because science was threatening what biblical believers had thought. And so this is when fundamentalism arises, when they have to double down and say, no, every word is literally true. It literally happened this way in opposition to science, and in opposition to what German scholars were saying over in Europe about how the Bible actually has contradictions in it, and in implausibilities and historical discrepancies and things like that. And so part of the doubling down was you have to figure out why there are these differences in different parts of the Bible about things like how do you get saved, you know, and how do you have saints in the Old Testament before there's Jesus, you know? And so this periodization thing started making sense to people. And the idea that things were, you know, throughout the 19th century, most Christian theologians thought we're progressing, things are getting better, the kingdom of God is coming soon. And so you have all these theologians saying this kind of thing. And there was a pendulum swing where people started saying, actually, you know, things aren't that great. And when World War I hit, it kind of exploded this Christian enthusiasm about the positive developments of history. And people started saying, man, we're just going down into hell here. And it started them thinking again, renewing their thinking about the coming day of judgment when God is going to destroy everything that's making life miserable. And it's at that point that Rapture then enters into the thinking, yeah, it's going to be hell here on earth, but we ain't going to be here for it. And so that's when it became popular.

Speaker 2:
[25:39] So that's clearly quite a long period of time since the idea originally took hold. Do you have any ideas on why it remains such a popular concept?

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 3:
[26:53] Well, when I was at Moody Bible Institute in the 1970s, we were all influenced by an author, Hal Lindsay, who wrote a book, Late Great Planet Earth. This was the best-selling book in the English nonfiction, allegedly nonfiction, nonfiction book sold in English in the 1970s. The best-selling book in the 1970s in nonfiction and English. And people read it and people believed it because he took different passages throughout the whole Bible and explained exactly what was going to happen very soon. Before the end of the 1980s, Jesus was coming back and then all hell was going to break out on earth. And he actually explained how the wars in the Middle East were going to develop, why they were going to develop based on the Bible, how China was going to intervene, how there was going to be a kind of a union of the European Union was going to get involved, and how nuclear bombs are going to start going off and is going to destroy the world. But Jesus would come back at the last second in order to keep the world from destroying itself. But he would come back earlier than that in order to get the believers out of that. So it read like a good novel. And later, of course, more in most people's lifetime, you have the Left Behind series, which is also based on the millions and millions of copies sold to this thing, where people just read it as gospel truth. And so they're told it's in the Bible, so they think it's in the Bible, they assume it's in the Bible, and it's just what they think, even if they're not evangelical Christians, they think the Bible says this, even though the Bible doesn't. So in part, it's the popularity of evangelical Christianity and part of it's these evangelical authors.

Speaker 2:
[28:42] My husband has been terrorized as a child by, I think the TV show or a movie based on the books, I don't remember.

Speaker 3:
[28:51] Yeah, it's called Thief in the Night.

Speaker 2:
[28:53] Yeah, that's it. So this told me about it and I'm like, who is showing this to children?

Speaker 3:
[28:59] Oh, every evangelical kid when I was in high school, every evangelical kid saw this movie, was shown this movie in church, sometimes 20 times. It's about, it's a very low budget movie, let me say. If you see it now, you think, wow, really? It's kind of down below where those original Star Trek were in terms of quality of production. But the idea is that Jesus comes back and the rapture happens. And it's a story about what people, what happened to people who were left behind. When the Antichrist rises up and 666 takes over, and there's this liberal minister in the church, there's a liberal Methodist minister or something who's preaching, before the rapture happens, who's saying, oh, yeah, no, that's not going to happen. That's just, you know, those Evangelicals making this, I didn't have, he gets left behind. And then he realizes, oh my God, I was wrong. So this became, it terrified people, because so many Evangelical Christians then who were kids, I've heard tons of stories of this, where they would come home from school and their mom wouldn't be home and nobody would be there. And they would be terrified because they realized the rapture happened and I wasn't taken. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, I'm going to tell you an anecdote about this, though. Okay, so years later, when I was in graduate school, we had a pool party with a bunch of friends, and we were all former Evangelicals sitting around talking about it, and we all start about our past, and we start talking about The Thief in the Night, this movie. And we were all laughing, telling jokes and stories about it, but this one guy was really silent, and he also became a professor of religious studies. Actually, I'm not going to name his name, but he became a well-known professor of religious studies. We didn't know that at the time. He was in graduate school. I was in graduate school, and he's not saying anything, while we're all making jokes about it. And finally, at the end of my turn, I said, are you okay? He said, yeah. He said, it's just, the thing is that my dad was one of the actors in the movie. He was the minister in the movie, and my youth group leader actually wrote the screenplay for it.

Speaker 2:
[31:13] All right, then. That's a good thing to say.

Speaker 3:
[31:17] Yeah. But, but still today, people who grew up in that period are evangelicals. Talk about how terrorized they were by this.

Speaker 2:
[31:25] Well, that is all I have for today's interview, Bart. Thank you very much. We are going to move on to this week's bonus segment, which as I said, is listeners Q and A. Okay, we are starting out with the synoptics. Why do you trust the synoptics when they talk about the public ministry of Jesus and his early teachings of repentance and the coming of the kingdom of God, but don't trust them when they say that Jesus predicted his death in Jerusalem?

Speaker 3:
[31:55] You know, you don't go into the study of the historical Jesus with any assumptions about what's going to be accurate and what is not. At least you shouldn't. And you take every source that refers to Jesus' words and deeds quite seriously, whether it's in the New Testament or outside the New Testament or whatever it is, you look at every source carefully. And so what scholars, there are scholars who devote their entire lives to try and figure out what our best sources are, what our most reliable sources, where those sources get things right, where they get them wrong, and how do you figure it out, you know? And so it's actually a very, it's a discipline. It's not simply kind of guesswork, and it's not like chemistry where you can do the experiment and prove that something happens. But as with any historian, a historian is studying Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar. Whoever you're studying in the past, you look at your sources, you analyze them, you try to figure out what probably is historically accurate based on kind of historical criteria people use. And so I don't go into the synopsis saying, well, this is probably right and this is probably wrong. You go in and examine it based on the criteria that one applies. And when one applies the criteria, which we, maybe we'll have a whole thing on this, maybe we have already, I don't know, on the criteria that people use for doing history, then it's pretty clear that there are some things that Jesus said that look like the almost certainly he said and there are other things he said that look really doubtful. And his prediction, his discussions about that you need to repent because the kingdom of God is coming soon and you need to be ready for it, that those sayings do appear to go back to the historical Jesus. The sayings where he talks about being crucified and being raised from the dead look like they're sayings that are put on his lips by later followers who didn't want him to be taken by surprise when it happened. And so we could justify all that. We probably should in some episode, but that's why. It isn't that I'm assuming one thing or the other. I'm just doing the analysis, and this is what seems to be the result.

Speaker 2:
[33:58] Thank you. How did Jews in the diaspora, such as Philo, regard to the temple before its destruction? Were Paul and Jesus unique in de-emphasizing its importance, or was there already an idea that God could be worshipped anywhere?

Speaker 3:
[34:13] Well, those are different questions, I would say. Jews throughout the world would say that God can be worshipped anywhere. Once the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, many Jews left the Jewish homeland to settle in other places. Some were taken back to Babylon. Some of the law of the elites were taken back to Babylon, and some of their families didn't return for 50 years or so, but others moved to different places. And so by the time of the New Testament, you have Jewish communities in not just in Judea and in Galilee, but you have them in Asia Minor and in Rome and in Alexandria, Egypt and around. And so that's what the diaspora was. And Philo lived in Alexandria, Egypt. He was a philosopher about the time of Paul. And he certainly thought he could worship God. But he didn't spend a lot of time in the temple in Jerusalem because he lives in Alexandria, Egypt, hundreds of miles away. And so I think most Jews did accept, of course they accepted that in the Torah, God says how you're supposed to perform sacrifices in the temple and what the sacrifices are supposed to be. And they were efficacious before God and they had their effect. They were supposed to have, but they also realized that God could be worshiped outside of Jerusalem. One of the differences is that there were a number of Jews, even in Judea or Galilee, there were some Jews who thought that the temple worship had become corrupt and that the high priests were not doing things right. You didn't even have the right high priest and that the temple cult was problematic. And it looks like Jesus was one of those. The Essenes who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls also had that view. It was somewhat differently from Jesus' view that there was a problem with the temple. Paul didn't really say much about the temple. So it's not just that there were all the other Jews and then Jesus and Paul. It's that there were a range of views, but almost every Jew thought he could worship God elsewhere.

Speaker 2:
[36:29] In the Letter to the Romans, Chapter 10, Paul is talking about Jesus being Lord and writes, For the scripture says, No one who believes in him will be put to shame. Can you tell me where in scripture is this quote, or does it not exist in his paraphrasing?

Speaker 3:
[36:47] I don't know. I'd have to look it up. I don't know if it's a precise quotation or not. Sorry, don't know. This should be in a stop part.

Speaker 2:
[37:04] Do you think that the Eucharist goes back to the historical Jesus? If so, how would this hold up with the idea that Jesus didn't expect to die? And if it doesn't go back to the historical Jesus, how did it come about?

Speaker 3:
[37:17] Well, Jesus definitely had a last meal with his disciples. I mean, he did. I mean, he ate something that night and probably with his disciples. So I think there definitely was a last supper of some kind. The question is, what happened there? And in the tradition that you find in Paul, in already in 1 Corinthians 11, and you find it in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus institutes the Lord's Supper, which is that he takes the symbolic foods of the Passover, two of the symbolic foods. The Passover was the annual feast that commemorated the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt. And they, you know, the exodus happened, children were released from their slavery, they end up in the promised land, and it's celebrated every year. This event is celebrated every year by Jews. And they have a special meal. They, in the time, they could, if they're in Jerusalem, they could eat the lamb that's slaughtered in the temple. And they had other foods in commemoration of this event, including unleavened bread and wine. And according to the Gospels in Paul, Jesus took the three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and Paul. Jesus took the bread and broke it and said, this is my body. And he handed it around to the others. He said, took the cup of wine. He says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. And so he's telling them that his body is soon to be broken and his blood is to be shed for the sake of others. And so this person is asking, did this really happen like that at the last meal of Jesus? I don't think so. I don't think we'd have any way of knowing what happened at the last meal. Paul does say that he acquired this knowledge from others. So possibly, possibly he heard it from Peter, maybe. I don't know where he heard it from, but the passage presupposes, of course, Jesus knowing that he's going to be crucified. Now, it's possible, it's possible that like at the last minute, Jesus started realizing, yeah, you know, this is not going well and I may be, I may be arrested, you know, people are after me here. He may have recognized that or not. It may be if this doesn't go back to the last meal itself, then what happened after Jesus' death is people did know that he had a last meal with his disciples and they celebrated this last meal and they remembered what Jesus was going to do for them or what he did do them in the future. And so, and so they commemorated it. And so it's not, I don't think we have good, we don't have good evidence of what he said because we don't have any eyewitnesses who report it. But, and it's hard to, it's hard to think that, you know, 20 years later, you know exactly the words he said. So, but, so that's it. It certainly is in the three. It's not in the Gospel of John, by the way, interestingly.

Speaker 2:
[40:19] Thank you. Final question for the week. What thoughts do you have about the possibility that early Christians were consuming drugs, possibly Paul or Jesus himself, and how this may have impacted Christian ideas, things like death and rebirth, the resurrection and ascension, or even Paul seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus?

Speaker 3:
[40:41] Well, it makes for a really good book, and several people have written them. I think the most famous one was John Allegro, that talked about Jesus and the mushroom cult, where he and his disciples are taking psychedelic mushrooms, and that would inspire visions and things. My view is that there's very little reason to think so. I don't think that up in rural Galilee, there were a lot of psychedelics floating around. People will say there were, I don't think so. And the fact that Paul has visions does not mean that he's dropping acid or something. There are people who have visions, or people who report visions, who didn't have them, but people have visions all the time, and it's not necessarily because of psychedelics. There are all sorts of things, including neurological events that lead to visions. And so I don't, if people are interested in kind of visionary experiences that involve psychedelics, but other things as well, Oliver Sacks has this fantastic book. What is it? Is it called Hallucinations? But he was this famous neurologist and it's an interesting book you can read. But the answer is there's zero evidence for it. If you're looking for evidence.

Speaker 2:
[42:06] Thank you. Now, Bart, before we finish for the week, could you remind us what we spoke about today?

Speaker 3:
[42:11] Well, we're talking about this interesting and important doctrine that's held by many Evangelical Christians, that Jesus is coming back at the rapture to take his followers out of the world before the end of the age comes, before the terrible destruction that's going to hit the earth. And we're talking about how that's actually not in the Bible, even though they claim it is, and that it was actually invented in the 1830s. And we try to explain why this became a popular view that people still hold on to today.

Speaker 2:
[42:40] Audience, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss any future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJPodcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. Misquoting Jesus will be back next week, but what are we talking about next time?

Speaker 3:
[43:01] You know, we've alluded before to the idea of what Jesus' view of hell was. Did he believe that people would be consciously tormented forever if they were on the wrong side? And we're going to talk about that. Is that what Jesus believed? Is it in the Bible at all? Where did it come from, if not? And so, we're going to... I was going to say we're going to have a hell of a good time. We're going to have... But we will be talking about hell.

Speaker 2:
[43:29] Make sure you join us then. Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis, thank you for joining us.