Thank you for inviting me to another conversation, Dr. Ehrman. Yeah, I want to officially invite everyone to another seminar that Dr. Burt Armand is doing, which will be on December 5th. This could be an all-day seminar titled Did the Christmas Story Really Happen? The Birth of Jesus in History and Legend, and of course, include details in the description below. Now, I wanted to have the last time we spoke. I wanted to have a discussion on the mix of Jesus in history and legend because while I do not think that Jesus was entirely fictional, as some other people do, I have to account that, you know, there's some questions about how Jesus is raised, born in two different places, raised in two different places, all seemingly designed to fulfill previous prophecies. And when I bring up to other people, I want to bring up certain stories about things that Jesus did that called into question, you know, it would make me think that maybe he was historic. I find out that

The story about cursing the fig tree was reportedly added later, and apparently, there is some consensus that the story about the adulteress and the stoning was also added later and not part of the original Jesus story. So, with some of Jesus's story being added after whatever fact there might have been, it reminds me of like Robin Hood. If you had a time machine, you can go back and find Robin Hood. If you mention Maid Marian to him, he's not going to know who you're talking about because she wasn't added to his legend until 300 years later. So, that's my sort of a take on the Jesus mythicism, that Jesus is heavily romanticized. We know that some of his legend is based on, or it has, is not original. It's certainly based on prior characters. So, I want to hear your take on that, just as a free-flowing conversation, because I didn't get that opportunity before. Yeah, no, it's a really key question.

and um you know it's it's really the question that scholars who work on the historical Jesus deal with um apart from having conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists. The conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists would say, Look, what the Bible says happened, happened. Um, and so they wouldn't be what I would call a critical scholar, somebody who's able to examine the evidence and go one way or the other. They already have their opinions set. But critical scholars for um for a very long time, since the end of the 18th century, since the 1770s, scholars have realized that there are elements of the gospel stories that are not historical, that are uh, you might just call them legendary, as we as we are doing now. And and the the trick, it's not a trick, it's it's a scholarly discipline that people spend many many years working on figuring out what actually is historical in these accounts and what are legendary accretions. And it's it is a complicated task but in

theory. It's no different from the task of figuring out what Abraham Lincoln did because there are lots of stories about Abraham Lincoln that aren't true historically. They might reflect something of his character and they might tell you something about what storytellers wanted to think about him, but they didn't really happen, and so it's not true just of Abraham Lincoln. It's true of most figures in the past. I mean, it's probably true of you. It's certainly true of me. I hear stories about me all the time that aren't right. Yeah, I found out that I'm apparently the lowest-paid member of the Illuminati. Okay, well, there you go. If you're more influential, you get a higher pay rank. My ex-wife told me that she went to some place back east, and she went to some historical foundation kind of thing where they had on display George Washington's axe. And this was the famed axe from the cherry tree incident. Yeah, which is really surprising since the

cherry tree incident never occurred. Well, you have the artifact for it. Yeah, no parks and weems made it up, and he, the guy who made it up, who'd written a biography, said that he made it up. He later admitted he made it up. He also made up the fact that he claimed to be George Washington's pastor, which wasn't right either. But it's very ironic, of course, because the whole point of the cherry tree is I cannot tell a lie. It's a weave, just lying about the story. So, yeah, so, but you know, George Washington scholars have to try and figure out how do you decide, and the principles are the same with the historical Jesus. Historians don't have like a different way of doing history when it comes to Jesus than they do with Charlemagne or Julius Caesar or Abraham Lincoln or Donald Trump or anyone else. You do history, and there are criteria that you follow. When you follow those criteria, there are things, there are clearly things that have

been added to the story. Um, that either the gospel writers have heard that are not actual facts, or that later scribes have added to what the gospels themselves said, or they're all sort of. And so, this is what I'm scholars. Uh, it's got many scholars devote decades after learning, you know, Greek and Latin and Hebrew and Aramaic. We spent decades pouring over these texts, trying to figure it out. And, you know, I think for the most part, we have a pretty good idea. So, there are gospels. If I remember correctly, you wrote about 16 gospels that didn't make it into canon. And one of them included a story about where Jesus kills some kid at some point. I mean, so is there any truth to any of those other stories? So, uh, yeah. So, in this webinar that I'm doing on December 5th, I'm going to be talking about some of these other traditions about Jesus as a, as he was born and as a young child. The gospel

you're talking about now is called the infancy gospel of Thomas, and it's one of my favorite gospels not in the New Testament. It tells stories about what Jesus did between the ages of 5 and 12, and it's very interesting because Jesus, as a five-year-old, already has miraculous power. But you know, he's a five-year-old; he doesn't have it under control yet. And so, yeah, there is a story where he's walking through Nazareth, and some kids are playing, and a kid runs up and kind of bumps him in the shoulder. And Jesus, five-year-old Jesus, turns to him and says, You'll go no further on your way. And the kid falls down dead. I said, Whoa. This whole gospel is filled with this kind of thing, and it turns out that, in fact, these people who are reading this gospel in the early church may not have thought that this was funny. They may have taken it seriously, uh, and

There are reasons, actually, for thinking it might be a serious account to demonstrate how powerful Jesus went and how he treats his enemies. Because my favorite passage of wisdom concerning Jesus actually comes from one of the non-canonical gospels, and I think it is the Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus's disciples ask him about circumcision, and Jesus's answer was, If God meant for us to be circumcised, we wouldn't be born with foreskins. Yeah, yeah, that's a different Gospel of Thomas. So, there are two Gospels of Thomas, but so there's this other Gospel of Thomas that is called the, sometimes they call the Coptic Gospel of Thomas because it's to differentiate it from the Infancy Gospel. This one is written in Coptic, which is an ancient Egyptian language. This is from the Nag Hammadi library. Yeah, it was discovered among the Nag Hammadi library. It's probably the most famous, and it has 114 sayings of Jesus in it.

it's just sayings of Jesus, no narratives, but it's no stories, but just these 114, and it has some very, very interesting sayings, including the one you're talking about. So, that reminds me of the Abraham Lincoln quote that you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Yeah, exactly. So, there was a Robert Price who told a story in one of his books about how Josephus was known by a Jewish name of Josephus Barmathias, and Robert Price suggested that perhaps Josephus was confused with Joseph of Arimathea. And his take then compares this part that Jesus, Josephus wrote about finding three of his friends up on crucifixes. He goes to Titus instead of Pilate to have them taken down, and two of his friends lived, and one of them died. And reading that and then comparing it to Luke, it seems as if both accounts were written of the same event from two different perspectives. I'd love to hear your take on that.

I think you lost me, or maybe Robert lost me on the bar Matthias and Arimathea. He's thinking that who confused Joseph of Arimathea because, yeah, this is Robert Price's suggestion forever, Price's suggestion. Yeah, that Josephus being under the Jewish name of Joseph Barba, Joseph Bar Matthias. Yeah, that sounds very similar to Joseph of Arimathea. Yeah, and maybe it's the same character. Oh, it can't be the same character because Josephus is well documented. He wrote an autobiography that we still have, and he was writing his account of the Jewish wars in the '90s, around '93 or so, around '93 CE. Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in Mark's gospel in the year '70. And so, um, I don't, maybe Robert has something more in mind than that, but we have Joseph of Arimathea stories before Josephus was writing because he just does this.

Yeah, Joseph does have the story about this, this, you know, this account of him asking for people to be taken from the cross. And it is a very interesting story. And it's interesting that there are some parallels. The most obvious parallel difference is that the whole point of Jesus' story is he was dead already. So, but you can see how. So, yeah, that was one of the interesting things about. About like Josephus wrote about 19 Gzi, if you want to put up the plural to it, or arguably 20 if you want to include the one that was already dead on the cross. Okay, yeah. And so why I've talked to a handful of Christians who will go to Josephus's writings and they'll say, they'll mention, you know, James, the brother of Jesus, the anointed. And they would say, Well, that's our Jesus. And it doesn't matter if they're talking about Jesus of Damnedes or Jesus ben Ananias. They say that both

of them are there. Jesus, this is proof that historical proof of their Jesus. Yeah, even though we know that these are different people in book 20. It's in book 20 of his antiquities. And he's the problem is that the name Jesus, as you said, it was a very popular name. Just, you know, it's the name Joshua put into Greek. And so people are calling their kids Joshua because he's a great, great hero. Just as, you know, in the 1960s when I was growing up, a lot of middle infielders in the major leagues was named Jesus, right? Yes, playing shortstop. And so, um, so it was a common name in the age. So when Josephus identifies a particular Jesus, he has to have some way of saying which one he's talking about. So is it Jesus son of Ananias? Is it, and so, but in this case, he says that James is the brother of Jesus, the one who was

called the messiah, and these other Jesuses are never called the messiah. And Josephus, the only one called the messiah, is Jesus of Nazareth. Okay, so if I understand it, it was Jesus the anointed, but I'm reading a translation, so I don't know. Yeah, it's the Greek word is Christos. Well, yeah, it's Christos, which means it doesn't mean anointed one, but that's what the word messiah means. Messiah, Hebrew word means that heart can be bit to a line from Jesus Christ Superstar. You know, you Jews produce messiahs by the sackful, but I'm not aware of the sack full of other Jesuses or Gzi. I do, I do, but yeah, but there weren't others named Jesus. I've seen how the Muslims have appropriated Jesus into Islam through the Quran, by taking elements of stories and then recasting those stories somewhat, and then they would have like there's

this one Persian story where a Persian who's wandering away from Zoroaster goes to meet Jesus because he wants to find out the truth of God. And then Jesus says, But I'm not the final prophet. You need to go talk to Muhammad. Because Jesus never died in Islam, was never crucified, never died, right? That's right. So this guy meets Jesus, and Jesus tells him to now go to Muhammad. Much the same thing happened when suddenly you have John the Baptist, who had quite a following already. Well, now he gets appropriated by the Jesus cult. Yeah, so he's now telling all of his followers to follow Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is similar, and I assume that the Quran picked it up from the John the Baptist story as the forerunner that now Jesus becomes the forerunner of Muhammad. The Quran does have stories about Jesus. Interestingly, the Quran appears to take in one of the stories from the infancy.

gospel of Thomas get the story about making a sparrow, which is a so yeah. So it had a number of sources, and faithful Muslims, of course, think that it's telling the absolute truth, but it's obviously getting their stories from someplace, and you know, partly from the gospels and partly from other stories they've the authors heard. Well, thank you for addressing the story of the Joseph bar Matthias thing, because as I said, when I heard Robert Price's argument, I read the Josephus passage, contrast with Luke, and I thought these two were both telling the same story from different sides. Yes, I don't think so, but it's an interesting comparison. The word, the names are different. Arimathea is a, we don't know who this person is, we've never heard of this person before, but it's, I've suspected that Arimathea actually in Greek, Ara, it might mean something like best disciple indeed. Now, that's my time. I'm going to

have to let you go. These aren't much too short. That was what my audience complained about last time I spoke to you. So, uh, one more time, just please pitch your seminar if you. Yeah, so it's going to be on December 5th. It'll be an all-day set for. I'm giving four lectures. After each lecture, there'll be a question and answer. People, participants can ask questions. Um, we'll have a lunch break. And, uh, it's all going to be on did the Christmas story really happen. And so, you know, you know the trip to Bethlehem. Was he born in Bethlehem? Virgin birth. And lots of virgin births in the ancient world. I mean, I'm going to be dealing with all this from a historical perspective and trying to see if we can know anything historical about the birth of Jesus. Thank you very much, sir. Okay, thank you.

Jesus was a man, a myth, AND just a legend

Jesus was a man, a myth, AND just a legend