Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate.

22:49So we have four Gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus' life. Outside of those four accounts, there's very little information about the historical Jesus, even within the New Testament. The New Testament has 27 books, and most of it doesn't say very much at all about what his life was like between the time he was born and the time he died. Paul has more writings than anyone else and doesn't say anything about his miracles or any confrontations or, you know, he doesn't tell us about his life. For a reason, I mean, for good reasons.

23:23But what that means is we basically have four accounts in the New Testament about his words and deeds. We have accounts from outside the New Testament, lots of them, other Gospels, for example. But generally, they're seen to be not historically reliable, even by people who wish they were. So basically, if we want to know about Jesus' life, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

23:44Ross Douthat:And what is the, just very quickly, what is the scholarly consensus on the relationship of the four Gospels that we have? Or what is your own view, or both? Well, my view is the common view. The first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, have very many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence, and often word for word the same. And that has long been thought by scholars to indicate that somebody's copying somebody. So almost everybody agrees that Mark was the first gospel written. It's our shortest gospel. And it appears to have been used by both Matthew and Luke. so that Matthew and Luke have most of the stories in Mark, often the same sequence, same words, word for word.

24:23So Mark is first. Matthew and Luke used Mark and had material of their own that they added to it. Sometimes Matthew and Luke have similar material. Sometimes they have different material. Those three are then called the synoptic gospels, which means you can see them together because you can put them in columns next to each other and actually read each version of the same story.

24:43Ross Douthat:Yeah. And it's interesting to see how they differ at that point. But John has very little of the material in Matthew, Mark, and Luke up to the time where Jesus is arrested. So the passion narrative, the account of his death, has similar stories in John. But John records mainly his own miracles, his own encounters of Jesus, his own teachings of Jesus that are different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And Jesus talks longer in John, right? Very much so. When you get to John, entire chapters are Jesus talking. At one point, he starts talking in chapter 13 at his last meal, and he talks through chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16.

25:22Then he launches into prayer chapter 17. That's all Jesus, virtually all Jesus talking. So that's right. That is different.

25:28Ross Douthat:Yeah. And then in addition, you've already mentioned Paul's letters, but there's a large number of letters, and there are the Acts of the Apostles, which seems to be written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. That's right. And both of those in different ways are sort of windows into the early church. And then it's fair to say since the 19th century, maybe the late 18th century, there's just been endless attempts to sort of drill down skeptically into the claims that these books make and how closely they are actually connected to the early church. You have debates about who wrote the gospels, when they were written.

26:08Ross Douthat:You already mentioned lost gospels, books that were supposedly suppressed. debates about whether Jesus really claimed to be divine, on and on and on. I think it's notable to me as a reader of your work that as an agnostic and skeptic of sort of the full historicity of the New Testament, you do think some kinds of skepticism go too far. So one of the books you've written is about people who think that Jesus didn't exist, right, that he's a mythological figure. Why should we think that Jesus existed? Well, let me say that I don't—I mean, historians by their very nature are skeptical because they're dealing with sources that they have to evaluate.

26:49And so this isn't a thing about Jesus per se. It's about how history works, that you've got to evaluate your sources. I don't—you know, I've never gone into my scholarship trying to, like, disprove things. It's just you try to figure out what happened in the past. And there are people today who call themselves mythicists who think that Jesus did not even exist. And I don't object to that because it's too skeptical. I object to it because it's not historical. And so, you know, I'm just interested in knowing historically what really happened. And when it comes to the historical Jesus, the evidence is just so overwhelming.

27:24I don't think you can really have a bona fide question about whether the man existed. The question is, what did he say and do? And that's where you start getting into trouble. But the reason, there are lots of reasons for thinking Jesus really existed. I mean, for one, just kind of one very basic thing. The Apostle Paul, we mentioned, he was writing letters in the 50s and the 60s. Jesus probably died around the year 30. Paul, in his letters, talks about his meetings with James, the brother of Jesus. So what I put it sarcastically is if Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know that.

27:56Right? But Paul's conferred with James. So it's things like that. Right. And so, yeah, Jesus, I think he certainly existed. That doesn't tell you what he said and did, though.

28:07Ross Douthat:But it's fair to say it's even by the standards of secular history, right? He's an unusually well-attested figure just in terms of how many people are writing about him. Yeah. And this is something I think that people kind of overlook because, I mean, I often say, and it's absolutely true, that Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek and Roman source of the first century, except for outside of Jews and Christians, not mentioned at all. And people say, oh, well, then he probably didn't exist. Well, how many people are mentioned? I mean, Philo is like the most famous Jew from the period. I mean, how many people talk about him?

28:44No one.

28:46Ross Douthat:The Romans and Greeks generally thought they had better things to do. But also, right, again, even extremely well-attested figures, You're dealing with sources that come later and, you know, where you're sort of putting things together. Yeah. If you're talking about even like the life of Julius Caesar. Well, that's it. I mean, you know, you'll have Roman emperors and things talked about, but who else is talked about? You know, in a world like the Roman Empire had about 60 million people. How many of those 60 million people in Jesus' day do we actually have a record of? Very, very few. So the fact you don't have a record isn't like weird.

29:22It's what you'd expect.

29:24Ross Douthat:Right. So then another point, the idea that basically there were just tons of Gospels that have just as good a claim to be connected to Jesus as the ones in the New Testament that were then suppressed for political and theological reasons later. And this gets sort of the full treatment in the Da Vinci Code and sort of popular culture like that. You've written, obviously there are lots of rival Gospels. Yeah. Why should we give at least a certain degree of priority to the ones that we have in the New Testament versus the others? Well, it's not on a priori grounds. I mean, it's not because they're in the Bible.

30:03It's that—so I actually did an edition of these other Gospels.

30:07Ross Douthat:I believe that I own it. Yeah, so I—and I'm really interested in these things. But everybody who's interested in the historical Jesus from a historical point of view has to take every potential source seriously and examine it in detail and consider, does this provide historical information or not? On the grounds of the kind of historical criteria that historians use to figure out, you know, what did Abraham Lincoln really say or do? You know, what did Julius Caesar? You use the same criteria. And when you apply these criteria to these other Gospels, there's almost none, there are virtually none of them that you can consider as historically reliable.

30:45Possibly the Gospel of Thomas, which has 114 sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945, about half of which are like you get in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the other half are not. Possibly some of those sayings in there could go back to Jesus. Apart from that, virtually none of these Gospels is going to give you historical information.

31:03Ross Douthat:So the New Testament, the books we have, the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Acts of the Apostles, all of this maybe takes us as close to Jesus' life as we're likely to get pending some. novel discovery in a cave or in the ruins of Pompeii or something else. Pompeii, the timing might be wrong. But you don't think that's close enough for them to be truly credible as historical narratives. Why? Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don't think that you can simply read the Gospels and think, oh, that's what Jesus really said and did.

31:43So there are a lot of reasons for that.

31:46Ross Douthat:Give me three. Three reasons. They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event. They both can't be right because they are contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn't live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They're living decades later and are recording accounts that they've heard. So that's two things. The authors living much later and the contradiction to the third thing is these authors got their stories from somewhere. If we don't know where the authors lived, we don't know who the authors were. The gospel circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them.

32:30So we don't know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I'm just going to go on. We can get back to that because that's about some point. There's some debate. Oh, there's debates about everything. Welcome to history. So these authors do not claim to be eyewitnesses. They do not narrate things in the first person. They describe Jesus and his disciples in the third person. As I said, they're writing in a different language living decades later. The question is, where did they get their stories? The one thing we can say about Christianity in this period, from the time Jesus died to the time, say, the end of the Gospel of John, say that's a 60-year period, is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Mediterranean.

33:11It started out as a small group in Jerusalem, and by the time, the end of the first century, we know of Christian groups who were scattered throughout Judea, Galilee, Syria, over to what we today think of as Turkey, Asia Minor, over to Greece, in Rome, possibly North Africa, possibly Spain. So in those 70 years, Christianity has spread. There's no social media. There's no newspapers. most people, the vast majority of people, are illiterate, cannot read. It almost certainly spread by people telling stories about Jesus. So somebody in Jerusalem tells a story to somebody else in Jerusalem, and then somebody from Antioch comes, and he tells them the story.

33:54This goes on for 30, 40, 50 years before they are written down. So what happens to the stories? They change. And And the evidence that they change is we have different accounts of the same story that are different. Where does the fact that the Gospels contain stories of miracles, including most notably the resurrection, also plenty of secondary miracles, healings, and so on. Where does that fit into the reasons for historical skepticism?

34:31Ross Douthat:Is it itself just an automatic reason for skepticism that you should discount historical narratives that claim that someone walked on water? No, I think saying historical skepticism is a tautology. History is skeptical. So it's not that you're doing historical skepticism, you're doing history. um but i mean i agree 100 but suppose you present to me two stories right that follow the same trajectory you've described they've they're written down later they pass through some kind of oral history they're written in a new language they're the same story except one of them has a miracle in it one of them doesn't does the skeptical historian tautological again say the miracle is an extra reason to think that one of these stories has been garbled compared to the other.

35:24I think what the historian does is they look at the miracle story and they judge whether it probably happened or not. Because that's what you do with history generally. And so what's the probability of Jesus walking on the water? Like how do you establish that as a historically?

35:40Ross Douthat:That's a very good question. How do you establish that historically? You cannot. Okay. Because all historians can do, it doesn't matter who you're studying in history. You can be studying Charlemagne, whoever you're studying. Studying Belshem Tov, who is the founder of Hasidic Judaism, who has eyewitness accounts of his miracles, fantastic miracles, just within the last, you know, and we're not talking about thousands of years now. And so historian looks at the accounts of Beel Shem Tov doing things like sticking his finger up against a tree and making it come on fire to burn, you know, to warm themselves up or whatever.

36:18I mean, you have all of these accounts. And you ask, how do we account for the story? Well, how do you establish things happening in the past? I mean, what kind of criteria do you use as a historian to figure out whether something likely happened or not? And you have a set of criteria. You know, for example, do you have independent witnesses? Is it something that's plausible? Is it something that ever happened ever in the history of the universe before? So suppose you've got a story and you're not sure, did somebody make this up or did it actually happen? Like Jesus walking on the water. Did it actually happen or did somebody make it up?

36:53Now, has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn't happen? Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Has anybody ever actually walked on water? Yeah, well, no, not in recorded history. In other words, so what is the likelihood? So I'm not saying that it's impossible. I'm not saying it's impossible that Jesus walked on the water. I'm saying that if it did happen, there's no way for us to establish it historically because other explanations are always far more likely.

37:22Ross Douthat:But does that mean then that you are essentially taking a kind of a view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened just because you'll always default to, by definition, miracles are things that don't normally happen, right? To take a different example, the Yale historian Carlos Ayer wrote a book recently called They Flew. It's a book about accounts of levitating saints in the 16th and 17th century. and Ayer basically makes the case and this is of course debatable like all such things but he makes the case that the level of historical attestation for these events is at the level or above the level that you would normally need to say these things happen like independent witnesses lots of different writers writing about it people have reasons to be skeptical saying it happened all of these things right but then you're still left with the fact that you know do people normally fly?

38:22Ross Douthat:No. Do people normally levitate? No. So I'm just curious in, like, is there any level of historical attestation where you would say, okay, this makes this miracle more likely to have happened? Or are we just defaulting to the idea that miracles are impossible and so the historian can never assert that one possibly happened? I would say you have to consider every possible account and consider who the witnesses are and evaluate whether it's more probable that that happened or that witnesses got it wrong or somebody made it up at every point. So you don't make a categorical decision. This could not have happened.

39:06Part of the problem with history is that history is actually not explaining just what happened. History is explaining what we can establish probably happened. And so the past is not history. The past is the past. Our only access to it is through historical inquiry. So let me give you a separate, like a different example just to kind of explain for people who aren't quite following this. It is impossible for you to take your coffee, your black coffee, and pour half and half into it and stir it, and to stir it enough that the half and half comes out of it. I I mean, basically, it's the second law of thermodynamics.

39:45It can't happen. At least it never has happened. So suppose somebody from 1950 says that they saw somebody in 1920 do this. And suppose you've got five people who say, yeah, 30 years ago we saw this person stir the coffee, stir the milk in the coffee, and he stirred it right out of it. What's the likelihood that those five people would be right? I'd say the likelihood is virtually zero. Is it likely somebody could have made it up? That somebody could have seen something that they thought was that, that it was a magician, that it was somebody that's sleight of hand? Do those things ever happen?

40:23Yeah, that happens all the time. Does anybody do this thing? No, it never happens. So which is more probable?

40:28Ross Douthat:Do you think that there's a risk in New Testament historical scholarship of taking the fact that the Gospels include miracles and using that as a reason to become overly skeptical of them? Yes, I think that is a risk. But I would say that it's not that people who are critical of the—the vast majority of critical scholars of the New Testament are actually Christian believers. So I'm an odd duck. I mean, I'm an agnostic, I'm an atheist, and I'm a New Testament scholar, and that is weird. So it's not that everybody's approaching this thing trying to destroy the miracles or anything like that. Most people doing this are actually church-going Christians.

41:17Right.

41:18Ross Douthat:Let me just give you one example of sort of how this problem might manifest itself, and you can tell me why you think I'm wrong. So you mentioned earlier that you yourself would probably date the Gospels to the later part of the first century, right? So the 80s. Usually it's thought, the typical view is that Mark was written in the first around 70, Matthew and Luke around 80, 85, John around 90, 95. Right. And this makes a difference to the question of their credibility for the reasons that you've already laid out. The longer stories are circulating in oral tradition, right, the more errors, confabulations, all of these things creep into them, right?

42:04Ross Douthat:So the Gospels look, they're still important historical sources, but they look less historically credible if you plant them in 85 versus 60. Well, I wouldn't say necessarily. I mean, somebody could write a book on Thomas Jefferson today and be more accurate than an account that was written a year after his death. And so it's not necessarily that the length of time is the issue. The other thing about oral tradition, of course, is that stories change overnight. I mean, you know, I'm sure you've had things told about you the next day that just aren't true, right? I mean, I know I have. Never. Never.

42:38Okay. Well, I'll start tomorrow then. I'll say something.

42:41Ross Douthat:Well, no, I want to get at that question in a minute. But just on this question, right, there are many reasons that scholars have for offering that kind of later dating, right? But one of the reasons that shows up pretty consistently in the literature is the fact that at various moments in the Gospels, Jesus has discourses where he seems to predict something like the destruction of the Jewish temple, which happens in 70 AD at the hands of Roman armies, right? And just to take us as the example, the Gospel of Luke. So the Gospel of Luke then connects to the book of Acts, the story of the Acts of the Apostles.

43:20Ross Douthat:They're written seemingly by the same author. That's right. The Acts of the Apostles is, you know, it starts out with the early church. It ends up following the career of St. Paul. And it ends pretty abruptly in the early 60s with Paul a prisoner in Rome. and that's just sort of where the book ends. Soon after that, a lot of incredibly crazy stuff happens, right? You have the martyrdom of Paul and Peter. You have Nero's first persecution of the Christians. And then you have the Jewish war and the destruction of the temple, right? So it's a very action-packed decade. It has always seemed to me that the most straightforward reading of Acts ending where it does without any detail of those subsequent events is just that the writer wasn't aware of those subsequent events and was writing, was ending his story roughly where he was.

44:19Ross Douthat:It's the early 60s. Paul is still alive. This is the end of the story because this is when he's writing it. And that one of the key reasons that scholars reject that sort of intuitive conclusion is that they don't want to give Jesus credit for a prophecy. They don't want to say, like, you know, and which is so. Go ahead. Tell me why you think that's a mistake in reading. Yeah, no, I understand that argument. Yeah, I understand it. Wow. I absolutely don't think that's why scholars came up with that. Okay, good. Yeah, of course, that's what I thought for many years is that that's the best way to explain it.

45:00There are reasons for thinking the Gospels were written later than that. And so then it's a legitimate argument. Well, then why does the book of Acts end while Paul's in prison in Rome in the 60s? So two things about that. One, I agree that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem. So I don't late date them because of that. Number two.

45:21Ross Douthat:And Jesus predicted it because it was just in keeping with Old Testament prophecy. Right. You're saying not, you don't think, just to be clear, you don't think Jesus literally knew the destruction was going to happen. I don't think he had supernatural knowledge. Right. No. There were other Jews at the time who were predicting the destruction of Jerusalem. So, you know, thinking, you know, it's kind of like people today, you know, might predict something that's going to happen about the war in Iran. You know, and they'll come up with some prediction. And somebody will be right. Somebody will be right.

45:48Right. So, you know, you can read the handwriting on the wall kind of thing. There are good reasons for thinking why the author of Luke Acts would have wanted to end Acts before Paul was finally put on trial and executed. The whole point of the book of Acts is—so for those who don't know, the book of Acts, as you said, begins after Jesus' resurrection. And then he ascends into heaven, and then the day of Pentecost happens. And Christianity starts spreading throughout the world. So it covers about a 30-year period of the early spread of Christianity. One of the major theses of Acts, one of its themes is that this is a movement that cannot be stopped.

46:28Paul, in particular, cannot be stopped. Paul goes into a town, and he gets persecuted, and they beat him, and he just goes to the next town and starts another church. And they try to stop him there, can't stop him. At one point, they stone him, gets up, goes to the next town. There's nothing you can do because the spirit is behind this whole thing. That's right.

46:49Ross Douthat:It's like podcast. Yeah. Unstoppable. Unstoppable and very interesting. So the deal is if Paul's execution had been narrated, he would have been stopped. Luke is trying to show that this is an unstoppable movement. So he's not going to narrate the execution. Okay. I promised my producers we wouldn't do the seven-hour debate. But. So I'm resisting. I am resisting the urge to argue incredibly deeply. Just two questions. First, one, I've read your work, and so I know that you think it's possible or likely that Jesus made these predictions. Yeah. Aren't there a lot of scholars who think that Jesus' predictions are a reason to date the Gospels later?

47:36Ross Douthat:Isn't that not—again, I agree, it's not the only reason, but it is a significant reason given. It would be. The deal is with that is that it's not quite that simple. It's that some of these predictions, especially in Luke, seem to show a detailed knowledge of what's going to happen when it happens. It's just not that the temple is going to be destroyed. It's that Roman troops are going to surround the city, that the Gentiles are going to trample. It goes into detail that looks like it's projecting backwards something that they know about. But some of those details are also wrong, right? Like there's claims about what season it happens in, right?

48:14Ross Douthat:Like pray that it doesn't happen in... Well, yeah, no, but the prediction that people say is wrong is when in Mark 13, Jesus says not one stone will be left upon another. And people today can go to the Western Wall. There are stones still there. But the problem is that Mark wasn't from Jerusalem. And when people talk about the destruction of Jerusalem, even today, they talk about it was completely destroyed, and it wasn't. So the fact that Mark has it wrong doesn't mean that he was living before the event. Okay. But so you're saying that there are more specific reasons to think that the prophecies are written.

48:50So if you just, first of all, it's fine for you to say, okay, Luke's theme is that Paul can't be stopped.

48:57Ross Douthat:So he doesn't want to end with Paul being stopped. But if Luke is writing decades and decades later, everyone knows that Paul was stopped. Everyone knows that Paul was martyred, right? Right. And it seems that and it seems that but he's telling a story to an audience that is aware of events. Right. So if you're telling a story, just just let me you're telling a story about Martin Luther King. Right. And you write the story and you end the story somewhere just, you know, short of his assassination. And it's not a history just of Martin Luther King. It's a history of the whole civil rights movement.

49:29Ross Douthat:And it leaves out like a whole sort of back half of these events. that would be an an odd narrative choice given that everybody knows everyone involved in the civil rights movement everyone involved in american history ever since knows that the signal thing about the end of martin luther king's career was that he was assassinated and by the way there were riots there you know there's a whole transformation of american politics associated with it it just seems like a big one it's a big challenge to write about that without letting that creep into your text. That's right. Two, why, if your theme is that Paul could not be stopped, and you're a Christian who believes in the resurrection, why wouldn't you end with Paul's martyrdom and say, like, you know, like other Christian martyrs, of which there are many, he continues to, you know, influence and shape the church to this day and give sort of further examples?

50:22Ross Douthat:Wouldn't that be just the much more rhetorically natural style? Well, it may have been, but you can't tell an author what he needs to write. And the Martin Luther King thing, it's an interesting analogy, but I don't think it quite works, because that's really kind of the point, is the assassination. For Paul, according to Luke, that's not the point at all. For one thing, we don't have a lot of records of people being martyred at the time. We actually don't know a lot about Paul's death. The earliest reference we have to Paul experiencing martyrdom is around the year 95, by a book called First Clement.

50:54And so we don't have records. We don't we don't know what this author even knew, actually.

50:59Ross Douthat:But if he's writing later, by the time he's writing, Nero's persecution has happened. You have had substantial Christian martyrdoms of some kind. Martyrdom would be, you know, part of the story that Christians have to tell. It just seems odd to leave it out. Well, it seems odd. But, you know, we have lots of historical writings from the ancient world, and they don't end where you would end them. And so it's common to tell a biography that has a section of a person's life. So I understand it might seem weird, but I think it seems weirder if you already assume that Luke was writing before 70, then it would seem weird to you to think that somebody would think otherwise.

51:44I get that. But the question is, what is the actual evidence? It's not where he stops. You can't—

51:52Ross Douthat:That is evidence. It's not the decisive evidence, maybe, but it is evidence, right? So, yeah. No, that's right. You look at every piece of evidence and you weigh the probabilities.

52:24Ross Douthat:I'm Robin, and I am excited to open my crossplay app. I'm challenging John, my colleague at the New York Times. Robin played the word grunge, which has a G, which is four points. She got that triple word multiplier. I'm going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points. I might just take another two-letter word here with whoa, gets me at 23. I think this will put me back in the lead if my maths are mathing. I like to play it more from a strategic point of view and see where I can block the other player from scoring high. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers. And also you get to learn new words.

53:01Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games. Download it for free today.

53:07Ross Douthat:I think he thinks he has this in the bag, but I'm not so sure.

53:19Ross Douthat:All right. Let's go back to the very first point you made for reasons to treat the gospel skeptically, which is about contradictions between them. Just give me a couple examples, just so listeners have them, of places where the gospels contradict themselves or contradict each other in ways that cast doubt on their historical viability or validity, not viability. Sorry. Well, yeah. So, you know, I've written kind of a long book on that. Jesus Interrupted is this book where I deal with a lot of these. But they're all levels. I mean, it's interesting because they're at all levels. I'm just on a basic level.

53:54In Mark's gospel, usually thought to be the first gospel, Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. And he says, when you go, don't take a backpack, don't take extra sandals, don't take any money, but do take a staff. You've got to take a staff because you're going to be walking soon. So Matthew is exactly the same episode. word for word the same in places and in matthew he says to the disciples okay so don't take a backpack don't take extra sandals don't take uh any extra money and don't take a staff it's like wait a second this is right so like so this is kind of like an obvious thing where it's either like uh okay he either said take a staff or don't take a staff but he probably didn't say so so things like that you get you know those are those are little things but sometimes you get fairly big things, like what day did Jesus die?

54:46All the Gospels locate his death around the time of the Passover feast. Mark explicitly has Jesus himself eat the Passover feast with his disciples, and he takes the symbolic foods of the Passover feast, the bread and the wine, and he instills new significance in them, says, this is my body that's broken, this is my blood's given for many. And so they've had a Passover meal. He's arrested afterwards, and he spends the night in jail. He's crucified the next morning at 9 o 'clock in the morning. Mark specifically dates all of these things. John, our last gospel, also gives specific dates for when things happen.

55:25Jesus does have a last meal, but it's not said to be a Passover meal. He talks with his disciples for five chapters, as I said, and then afterwards he's arrested, put on jail, And Pilate condemns him to death, and he's crucified afternoon on the day they're preparing the Passover meal, a day earlier. Specifically dated, in both cases, John 19, 14. So, yeah. So, you have that kind of—so those are kind of detailed things that make you think, you know, somebody's changing something for some reason of their own. And that's absolutely, I think, what's happening. People are changing things for reasons of their own.

55:59but there are lots of other things that are simply, I mean, they're just like very big issues involved with like, what did Jesus actually preach? Why did Jesus do miracles? Why, you know, like big issues between the gospels. But for most people like me, when I was an evangelical, it took a little thing that I just couldn't reconcile anymore to make me realize these are not inerrant. And once you realize that, it opens up, it actually improves your interpretation of these gospels. It makes it possible to understand each gospel for what they're trying to say, rather than trying to make them all say the same thing.

56:36Ross Douthat:Yeah, I guess. So to me, as someone, I'm not a fundamentalist Christian. I'm a Catholic and Catholics believe in some version of inerrancy of scripture, but being Catholic, you know, there's like 17 different theological schools, right? About what that To me, though, it often seems like at least some of the kinds of things you're describing, while they would undermine faith, if you feel obliged to believe that, you know, the Gospels can never get a name wrong or a date wrong or anything like that, or else you have to throw them out. if you're evaluating the likelihood that these are texts that actually come from eyewitnesses, come from eyewitnesses through mediation, someone is writing down eyewitness accounts, fine, right?

57:26Ross Douthat:But come from eyewitnesses. They're actually what you would expect, right? Like this is, so I, you know, I've written, I guess, two memoir-ish books. And one of them was about my undergraduate experience. God help me. And one of them was about having Lyme disease. And in both cases, just the nature of memoir writing means sort of at phase one, you, you know, you misremember certain things, you get certain things wrong. You're a writer, so you sort of telescope narratives. Sometimes things are compressed and so on, right? All of that happens. And yet I still think of them as truthful testimonies about what happened to me that some future historian could reasonably rely upon.

58:10Ross Douthat:Then in the case of the Lyme disease book, you know, my wife wrote a book about the science of sort of the maternal transformation in which she discussed some of her own experiences as a mother and included details about being the wife of someone struggling with Lyme disease. And, you know, when I read her account, there were obviously there were things that she interpreted differently. So two people married, living in the same house, raising kids together, right? Differences enter in from the beginning. But that happening in the Gospels seems like, in a certain way, evidence of their basic historical reliability, just in the sense that, like, if I handed you as a historian, right, four documents written by different authors, and they all agreed on every particular, right?

58:57Ross Douthat:They all hit the same point, and their theology It was clear they all had exactly the same theology. Wouldn't you be more skeptical of those documents than you would be of— Yes. Right. Okay, then my work here is done, I guess. No, it's not. Okay. Because, I mean, would that we had memoirs? We don't have memoirs. These people don't claim to be eyewitnesses. They don't claim to—these are not eyewitness reports. I mean, if Peter had written a gospel, that'd be great. Unfortunately, Peter was illiterate. And so, even in the New Testament, by the way, Peter is called illiterate. Acts 4, verse 13, he was agramatas, couldn't know his letters.

59:38So, we don't have anything from these apostles. What we have are stories in a different language, in different parts of the world, from people who weren't there, who are telling us what they've heard. And so, that's not the same as you writing a memoir.

59:55Ross Douthat:So, it's not the same as me writing a memoir. At the same time, though, and this is where I guess we just sort of disagree, like, I think Mark is pretty clearly Peter talking to somebody. Really? Why? Because it appears as Peter's story, right? No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Peter is a dominant character in it relative to the other Gospels. Peter's, there's all these like little grace notes in Aramaic where Peter, it's somebody remembering exactly sort of the word Jesus speaks and so on. Right? You don't think that's... No, no. If you're raised thinking this is Peter's gospel, then it might sound like that.

1:00:34If you have no assumption about that at all, it would never occur to you that this is Peter's version of the story. No.

1:00:39Ross Douthat:Okay. No. And you don't think, and I'm not going to... I just think that there's no, since the gospels don't claim to be by eyewitnesses, to say that they're eyewitness testimonies on what grounds? Why would you think that? You don't think that, I mean, when you read other ancient stories, I mean, you know, and when you read ancient historians like Thucydides, he tells you that he doesn't know what the speeches were like. How would he know? He wasn't there. He made them up. He tells us. He made them up. That's what historians do, he says. They make it up. You know who the person is, and you think, well, what would he likely have said in this case?

1:01:17Well, then you come up with something.

1:01:19Ross Douthat:But in the case, just in the synoptic gospels, right, across the different sources that Mark, Matthew, I mean, that Matthew and Luke are using, since we know they're probably using Mark, setting aside other debates there. Jesus doesn't come across as a character that Thucydides made up. He comes across as someone who's being described by people who listen to him talk. You don't think so? So we have the Sermon on the Mount. It's found only in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's three chapters long. Matthew's usually dated to around the year 80 to 85. Unless Luke was written earlier, in which case Matthew's earlier.

1:01:57Ross Douthat:But sure, yeah. So I asked my students whether they heard the last inaugural address. You know, say, I did this some months after the last inaugural address. They said, yes, I heard it. I said, okay, write it down for me. How could they possibly write it down? How could somebody 50 years after Jesus gave this address know what he said? And if Jesus did give the Sermon on the Mount, why isn't it in any of the other Gospels? Like, they just didn't think that part was important? You see what I'm saying? These are stories about Jesus that have been circulating, that different authors have put together in different ways.

1:02:36And the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke sound so similar is because Matthew and Luke use Mark. They have the same source.

1:02:43Ross Douthat:I will just say the claim about why people would remember the words of Jesus and why they're different from listening to Donald Trump give an endless inaugural address, right, is that these stories were told to people who were explicitly his followers, who believed him to be potentially the Messiah, who were often living in community with one another, and who then experienced a radically transformative event that caused them to have stronger reasons from the beginning to share and circulate and remember these stories. And therefore, they're more like, more like maybe somebody writing a story about their own family 20 or 30 years later or sharing stories about their own family than they are like me sharing a story about what I remember the first inaugural address to be.

1:03:33So the fact that these were followers of Jesus is probably not the reason for thinking they're more historically accurate. Because the followers of Jesus have their own reasons for portraying Jesus in ways that they understand him. People tell stories all the time about people that are important to them, and the stories change. So the question is, what do we know about oral tradition? What do we know about how people passed on stories, both today and in antiquity? And there's actually a whole field of research on this. and it's not favorable to the idea that people remembered things verbatim.

1:04:08Ross Douthat:But they don't have to remember things verbatim to have general accuracy that's different from someone making up a speech, right? To your own example, right? If one community remembers that Jesus said, do take a staff, and one community remembers that he said, don't take a staff, right? You still could have a pretty good sense that Jesus said some version of that dialogue. No, you don't know that Jesus said it. You have to analyze it. What are the grounds for thinking he said it? Just like what are the grounds for thinking that George Washington said something or other? How do you go about establishing it?

1:04:42It isn't just because it's found in several sources, especially if these sources used each other. If you've got three biographies of George Washington that all say he said the same thing, and these biographers all used each other, then that's not, you know, you've got one source. You don't have three sources.

1:04:57Ross Douthat:One of the people you've debated in your many debates is a scholar and writer named Peter Williams who wrote a book called Can We Trust the Gospels, right? Have you seen my debate with him? Yes. So I encourage people who want to know about his views about things and my views to watch that debate. I encourage that as well, and it gives you the extra two hours that this conversation is missing, right? But this will be my last question on this point. Williams makes the argument that if you look at details in the Gospels that are not about sort of things Jesus said, but are about place names, geography, right?

1:05:34Ross Douthat:How often does a given name appear versus what was actually common in the 30s or the 20s, right, in Palestine? They do remarkably well. It looks like the people who are describing, writing, and talking about these things actually knew the geography of the Holy Land quite well, actually knew sort of the nomenclature of people in this region quite well, right? And I watched your debate and you said basically something to the effect of just because somebody gets it right that, you know, New York City has five streets going this way and that the typical name in the Bronx is Vinny. Right. It doesn't mean that they're going to be right about what happened on a particular day in a particular, you know, an actual event.

1:06:24Ross Douthat:Right. Which is a is a fair point. At the same time, in the back and forth we've just been having. right? You've been emphasizing the idea that gospels are written decades later. They're written in another language. They're written, maybe written down all over the Roman empire, right? Not just in the near East. And that, you know, because of this, you know, when you're talking about like things Jesus said, there's just too many cycles, too much distance and so on. Why didn't those cycles and those distance make Williams's argument obsolete? Like why don't people just get the names wrong after 60 years?

1:07:00Ross Douthat:Why don't they start introducing massive errors of geography too? Why are all the errors that you imagine to be there about things Jesus said as opposed to like, where is Jericho in relationship to Jerusalem? Shouldn't there be more errors of fact just through this cycle process you're describing? Well, there are errors of fact that Peter doesn't talk about in the gospels. I mean, they're just geographical errors. So, you know, there are those things. The fact that somebody tells a story about a certain place and gets the place names right doesn't mean that the story's right. No, absolutely. So it's irrelevant.

1:07:38It's irrelevant to the question about whether the stories about Jesus are things that happen.

1:07:42Ross Douthat:But it can't be irrelevant in the sense that, like, if the Gospels got place names badly wrong and introduced a lot of random weird names in place of what were actually the names that were normal in 25 AD, you as a historian would say, well, that's a reason to think it's not true. That's right. So the fact that they get things right has to be a reason for giving them some credit. It doesn't work that way. Why not? Okay. It doesn't work that way because of this. If you know the location of places, that doesn't mean that you know what happened in those locations. You're asking about what is what's described Jesus having said and done accurate.

1:08:19if you say, well, it must be accurate because he knows where Jericho is in relationship to Jerusalem.

1:08:24Ross Douthat:I'm not saying that it must be accurate. I'm saying that you are saying that the process of oral tradition necessarily introduces a large set of errors in terms of memory of statements. I'm not saying it necessarily does. It does, but it doesn't. But look, if there were errors all over the place about geography, that would call the stories into question. If there are not errors of geography, then it's neutral. Are the stories historical or not? No, but it's evidence. It's not evidence. It's not neutral because it strongly implies that the origins of these stories, that certain key elements of these stories were transmitted successfully across the process you've described.

1:09:12Ross Douthat:That's all I'm saying. Yes, if you tell stories— Like the place where the geography of the Near East, allowing for some errors, was transmitted fairly successfully across— It's actually not all that great, if you want to know the truth. But there are geographical errors. But look, if I tell a story about somebody murdered right in front of the Empire State Building, the fact I know where the Empire State Building is doesn't mean the person was murdered there.

1:10:05All right.

1:10:07Ross Douthat:I will return us to our original theme and bring us to a close. Like Luke ending when there was so much more to be said. So just as a historian, then we've sort of walked around this a few times, but just directly, what do you make of the resurrection stories? What do you think happened for Easter week? Yeah, I think the followers of Jesus definitely thought that before he died, I think they thought that he must be the Messiah. or that he possibly was the Messiah. There are different views about what the Messiah would be at the time within Judaism. But whatever the view was, every view of the Messiah thought that he would be a powerful figure who would overthrow the enemies of God and set up a kingdom of some way.

1:10:55That was their expectation. Rather than that happening, though, Jesus was arrested, and he was put on trial and was crucified, publicly humiliated and tortured to death. I think it's absolutely the case that some of his disciples afterwards thought that he had been raised from the dead. My sense is that some of them thought they saw him alive afterwards. I don't know how many people had the visions. I don't know whether there were groups, whether a few individuals. Eventually, they convinced the others, and people came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead. They started proclaiming that.

1:11:32They convinced people of it. And that's the beginning of Christianity. Now, if you're a Christian, that's perfectly fine, because you can just say, well, yes, he did appear to people. If you're not a Christian, it's also perfectly fine. You can say they thought they had visions of Jesus. You don't have to have an explanation. It could be a mistaken identity. It could be a dream. It could There are all sorts of people have visions.

1:11:56Ross Douthat:It's probably not a mistaken identity. Right. I mean, that seems that you see Jesus' cousin who looks like him and you think he's alive again. A couple years ago, I was giving a lecture in Michigan, and there was a guy in the third row who I thought was my dad. Right. My dad had died 15 years before that. So it's just like, oh, my God, that just looks like what? So mistaken identity, you mean one person has this experience? It's not that everybody thinks there's a guy walking around. No, I don't think Jesus appeared to set 500 people one time. I think it's pretty clear. Paul believes he saw Jesus.

1:12:35We don't know how he would have identified Jesus. He didn't know Jesus during his lifetime, but he saw something he said was Jesus. I think Peter claimed to have a vision of Jesus. I think Mary Magdalene probably did.

1:12:44Ross Douthat:Do you think that because as a reader, like the scene where Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus seems kind of like it comes from an eyewitness account? No. No. Okay. Of course not. All right. I can't sell you on that at all? No. Well, how would you verify that? So why do you think Mary Magdalene had a vision of Jesus if you don't? Well, as a historian, you look at independent sources that claim something, and it's independently attested that Peter did and Mary did. And so I think that that's completely plausible. Okay. There's also— But you're never struck by these passages just sort of as a human being encountering another human being's narrative and think to yourself that something like that happened.

1:13:24Well, I'm struck by the passages. They're extremely powerful passages. Right. But that doesn't mean they happened. And so I think that, you know, one of the interesting things about the resurrection, two things that people haven't noticed. My first point is that the empty tomb in the New Testament never brings about faith. It always brings doubt. Yep. And so it was never taken as the evidence.

1:13:47Ross Douthat:And I will say, if I encountered the empty tomb, it would not have turned me into a bubble. No, it's a source of, yeah, which is, again, part of what strikes me as quite realistic about the narratives, that people don't respond to the empty tomb by saying, ah, now we will proclaim Christ risen, right? Yeah, well, okay, fair enough. But that's the other interesting thing, is that all the resurrection narratives are filled with doubt. In the book of Acts, one of the strangest verses in the New Testament is Acts 1, verse 3, where it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples, proving to them with many proofs that he was alive.

1:14:24And you think, how many proofs does he need? And why does it take 40 days? And so, but that is the interesting thing, is that in all of these accounts, you have these doubt traditions. What are those doubt traditions about?

1:14:37Ross Douthat:Aren't they about the fact that, as you yourself said earlier, people do not normally rise from the dead? And so the normal human reaction is the doubting Thomas reaction to say, let me touch him, right? It would be. But if you're sitting here in front of me, I'm not doubting you're sitting here in front of me. Well, if your father, your late father, was sitting here in front of you, you would doubt that he was sitting there in front of you. And the point is that he wasn't. Right. I thought he was. Right. Right. So if he had spent 40 days with me, he wouldn't have to be doing tricks to prove to me he was alive.

1:15:08Ross Douthat:And so my point is, I feel like if my my father is still alive, I feel like if my father died an awful death of crucifixion, and then he started appearing to me, it would take a long time before I was ready to believe that he was really there. You might think that, but in fact, you know, there are a lot of psychological studies of visions, especially of recently deceased loved ones, and virtually everybody who has it is sure it happened. Right, but the claim that the early Christians make is precisely that this isn't just a vision of a departed loved one. This is a world-altering event that is going to inspire them to missionary work and martyrdom, which most people who have a vision, a dream, or whatever about their departed loved one don't have, right?

1:15:51Ross Douthat:I mean, that's it just seems like your account of this as, you know, something that happens all the time. Somebody dies and, you know, and people have visions and they sort of decide that the vision was real. Just seems quite different from a situation where you have more radical claims and a lot of doubt about these radical claims all mixed together in a way that suddenly sets a new religion in motion. No, I can explain that, because we didn't get to that part. So I know we're almost at our seven hours here, but let me just say that my point of saying that they thought Jesus was the Messiah before he died is the critical point.

1:16:30Because when he got crucified, it showed he was not the Messiah. He was not the one who was going to destroy the enemies. But then they had these visions, and they came to think he was alive again. So they thought, oh, we misunderstood. We thought he was going to destroy the Romans. God must have wanted him to die. The fact that God wanted him to die is shown in the fact that God raised him from the dead. He's raised from the dead. His death is the way of salvation then. Jesus must have had to die. God must have wanted him to die because he was the chosen one. How do we know he's the chosen one?

1:17:04He got raised from the dead. Well, if God had his chosen one killed, why? Sacrifice for sins. That's the beginning of Christianity. As soon as these people started realizing, oh my God, he's raised from the dead, They thought that his death was a sacrifice. That starts Christianity.

1:17:19Ross Douthat:So why is there the doubt tradition? Why is there all this material about the need for physical proof? And like, why isn't the collective, I'm saying, why isn't the collective vision enough? Why do the gospels lean so hard? One, on this mystery, the tomb is empty, we can't explain it. Two, on sort of describing these encounters with Jesus that are like hard to figure out. You know, you're seeing him on the road to Emmaus. He's eating fish. He's here, he's there. Like, why doesn't the vision stuff sort of clean things up? Especially, again, given that in your account, these are all being, you know, written later and smoothed out.

1:17:55Because by that time when they're being written later, we have records of Christians who think that Jesus wasn't physically raised from the dead, but was spiritually raised from the dead. And Paul's saying, no, no, no, it was a physical resurrection. These accounts in Luke and John where Jesus is eating fish and, you know, touching my wounds and things is meant to show that it actually was a physical resurrection. So these authors are trying to show that this is not just like some kind of spirit of Jesus going up to heaven or something. This is actually a physical resurrection which fits into the Jewish apocalyptic view.

1:18:26Ross Douthat:But why are they including all of the doubt? They include the doubt because it's historical. There were apostles who doubted it. Right. But you're trying to sell an argument decades and decades after the fact. You want to prove that Jesus really was raised. Right. But why are the stories so strange? Why are they not sort of straightforward? You know, Jesus was raised and then he taught us these things and that's it. Why do you have, you know, you've got all the empty tomb stories, you've got people not recognizing him and then recognizing him, right? You've got he's passing through walls one moment, he's eating fish the next, right?

1:19:01Ross Douthat:Doesn't that seem to reflect a fundamental initial strangeness in how people are experiencing it rather than something that is constructed for propaganda purposes decades later? propaganda, wait, wait, you're putting words on my lips. You're saying that they had to emphasize the physical reality to win an argument with the spiritual eye, the people who said it was spiritual. And I'm saying that it just seems like it's all a weird mixture from the start. It is a weird mixture from the start. Look, if you see somebody that was publicly executed and then you see them alive, it's going to be a weird experience.

1:19:36But my point about the proof, the eating the fish and things, is that these people who are telling you stories about Jesus' resurrection took people who don't believe. And they're saying, yes, you don't believe, it doesn't make sense, but I'm telling you, we saw him eat fish afterwards. So, you know, there was an empty tomb. These are proofs to convince those who are doubting. So you put doubt into the story to show that the doubts were resolved within the story.

1:20:03Ross Douthat:Let's end by just going back to your book, right? And we started this conversation a long time ago talking about the moral transformation that Jesus made and the idea that, you know, you were supposed to love your enemies, love people who persecuted you, love the stranger far away who has nothing in common with you. All of these sort of transformative ideas, right? You like those ideas, right? Yes, I do. If the Gospels ended with the crucifixion and Jesus' death, right, you would have a story where someone came along and preached that, you know, it was important to love your enemies and important to care for the stranger and so on.

1:20:53Ross Douthat:And that person was crucified and died a horrible death. And that was the end of the story. and he's talked about the meek inheriting the earth and the last being first and look where he ended up. Right. Isn't the power of the argument for Jesus's ethics kind of inherently bound up in the idea that he won? Well, Christianity would not have become a thing if Jesus had died and there was no story of his resurrection. He would have been another prophet who preached something and then got killed for it, and boom, that was it. So there wouldn't be Christianity. But the power of the Christian message from the very beginning was the message that Paul has, which is that it seems a little bit ridiculous that God's chosen one is crucified.

1:21:43And it seems a little bit ridiculous that the way to access ultimate divine power is by being a slave. But it's Jesus' message. You have to serve others rather than dominate message. It's so contrary to what's in our DNA and what's in every other culture. But because they thought it got raised from the dead, they thought it proved it. You have to be willing to die for others if you want to have life. If you want to have treasures in heaven, you have to sell everything you have now. Completely contrary to what people would think. But it's because of the resurrection. Yes, absolutely. It's the belief in the resurrection that ends up making this the powerful message that transformed the West.

1:22:21Ross Douthat:And isn't it also just to your own personal reasons for being an agnostic or a non-believer, right? Part of the power is also that it's not a logical answer, but it's at least a poetic answer to the problem of evil, right? The question of why God allows suffering is not resolved by God himself suffering, but it is at least addressed. It's a powerful message. When I was still a liberal Christian, I thought that the point of the gospel message was really that God had entered into the world and suffered with us. And that's a very powerful message. I mean, it's not one that I agree with anymore, but I can recognize it is a really powerful message.

1:23:04And it's so contrary to the way of the world that it has special poignancy to it.

1:23:11Ross Douthat:And here you are, you know, so many years later, a sterling example of academic historical skepticism, and you're writing a book trying to persuade people that, you know, Jesus's message has something to it. Is it possible that you're still, in some sense, a follower of Jesus of Nazareth? I sometimes call myself a Christian atheist because I don't believe in God. I absolutely don't believe in God or any supernatural powers. But I do think that the teachings of Jesus are something that I want to replicate in my life as much as I can. Although, you know, I'm not a very good follower of Jesus. I haven't sold everything and given to the poor.

1:23:50But I think that that message is one that I want to embrace. Okay.

1:23:59Ross Douthat:Bart Ehrman, thank you for joining me. Thank you. And happy Easter in advance. Happy Easter.

1:24:27Ross Douthat:Interesting Times is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Victoria Chamberlain, and Emily Holsneck. Jordana Hochman is our executive producer and editor. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy and operations by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelowski, Andrea Batanzos, and Emma Kelbeck. Special thanks to Jonah Kessel, Alison Brusik, Marina King, Jan Kobel, and Mike Puretz. And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.