Jesus in History

The author sort of keeps the, the beginning and the end of something and sort of loses the bit in the middle. And you can sort of see the way he works with his source material.

There and just it reads the introduction and the conclusion.

Oh, I can’t be bothered with that bit in the middle.

We don’t do that with the books that guests on the show have sent us. Just to be clear.

That has never, ever happened.

We read everything very thoroughly. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are wonderful. It’s, it’s the, the weather here in Salt Lake gets springtime and then winter, and it doesn’t know what it’s doing. And that’s always fun. You never know what you’re going to be going out into.

It’s very similar to where I grew up in Colorado, where you would have all four seasons in one day.

Yes, indeed.

And it is enraging.

Yeah, exactly. But better yet, we have a guest that is going to answer some of the main questions that we get asked all the time or answer. She’s going to address some of the main questions. Why don’t you introduce our guest?

Absolutely. Today we’re very happy to welcome to the show Professor Helen Bond, who. Who is professor of Christian Origins at Edinburgh University and also currently the president of the British New Testament Society, that august and venerable institution, and also one half of the Biblical Time Machine podcast. Dave Roos is the other co-host and they do things very similar to what we do here. So we’re bringing in a little competition to size it up today. And Helen, you mentioned that y’all release your episodes every Monday just like us, right?

Yes, yes. I didn’t realize you were Monday too, but yes, every Monday there’s a new one on Apple or Spotify and I think we do have similar content, but we, we’re very much about the history, so, you know, very much kind of getting in our time machine and going back to the past and.

Awesome.

Yeah. Interviewing people about their work and. Yeah. Smelling. Feeling the first century and further back too.

Well, when I first got the email from Dave, I remember seeing the cover image for your podcast and I was like, hey, I see that all the time on Twitter. So I recognized that and I was like, I don’t know who Dave Roos is, but Dave’s a most excellent person.

I mean he’s just amazing. He’s really, really clever and he’s a background in religion and journalism and stuff. So. Yeah, no, he’s, he’s the kind of the, the, the power engine of the whole thing. I just, I’m just there for the ride.

So you know that, that was Dan’s mistake. Dan should have gotten a clever co-host to be. To, to do his show.

Yeah, what I did was take the first one that came back. So instead of interviews. Yeah, but yeah, well, next time. Next time, next time. Yeah, when it’s time to re-up. But, but Helen, you’ve done, you’ve done an awful lot of work with the historical Jesus, which I think is, is a term that probably not a lot of people are familiar with. We get Dan and I on the show and then I on, on my other social media channels get asked all the time about what we know about Jesus, but I don’t think a lot of people know. There’s a whole field of research out there on this. Can you tell us a little bit about what historical Jesus means, what this refers to?

Yeah, a good point. That scholars get so used to sort of talking about these things that they don’t always think, you know, these are not sort of publicly accessible terms. So I suppose scholars make a distinction between the historical Jesus who is, you know, the man who walked the Galilean hills in the 30s CE and, and, and was executed on a Roman cross, and the, the Christ of faith as he’s known in the churches as, as he already is in the Gospels. Really. You know, they’re already interpreted through the lens of Easter and, and you know, several decades of, of trying to work out what it means to be a Christ follower. So, so yeah, that the historical Jesus just really means the Jesus who existed in history as, as a real man in the 30s. So, so that the whole sort of field of historical Jesus research is really trying to get back to, you know, that historical man.

You know, one of the things. Oh, sorry Dan. I did want to say that like one of the things that we see in our comments sections and that we see, you know, in, in sort of the, the world of, of, of public debate about the Bible, there’s some question as to whether there was a historical Jesus. And in terms of what scholars believe, it’s probably not an even match. You know, there’s half the scholars on one side believe one thing and half the scholars believe another thing. Can you give a sense of, of how much of the scholarly world questions the historicity of the person of Jesus?

Very, very little. I mean, and you’re exactly right. And I think actually scholars tend to just dismiss the whole question about, you know, did Jesus exist? They just think it’s, it’s, it’s silly, it’s, it’s not, not a question, it’s not worth engaging with. Whereas as you say, you know, loads of people on social media are, are questioning it. But I, I would say in terms of scholars, probably less than 5%, you know, 1%, 2%, something like that, they’d be considered very much a fringe view because, you know, from scholars’ point of view, there’s actually very good reasons to think that Jesus existed. So it’s, it’s never really questioned.

So. So what you’re saying is that Richard Carrier makes up 1%?

Well, exactly. I’m thinking him and, and Thomas Brodie. I mean there’s, you know, there’s a handful of people wouldn’t say that, you know, there’s no scholars, there are. And, and I can sort of understand how people get to that stage where they, they start to think, you know, is what can we say about the historical Jesus? And there are probably people who feel like that, but just don’t publish anything. So there are scholars, but, but it’s very much the minority.

Now I, when I get asked about how we know what we think we know about the historical Jesus, I think a lot of people assume that there must be some kind of archaeological evidence of some kind, something direct. But the reality is that we’re taking, for the most part, we’re taking these texts, the Gospels, and a smattering of references from non-Christian literature that’s coming, you know, in the 90s in the 110s CE, and basically trying to reconstruct what, what most, like what circumstances most likely led to these beliefs being the way they are. What, what would you say we can reconstruct based on these texts that we have in the New Testament and a few other references about the historical Jesus? What do you think we can be confident about regarding the life of a historical Jesus?

I think we can be confident that he existed, that he was some kind of prophetic figure in the sort of the, the early part of the first century in Judea. There’s, there’s, I mean, you know, Paul’s letters are very, very early. And I, I know Paul doesn’t say a great deal about the historical Jesus, but, but he says a few things and he clearly knew people connected with the movement. And I would imagine that, you know, although the Gospels are heavily theological. They, they see things through, sort of, through the, the resurrection about who Jesus was. But, but still, I think there’s a sort of a basis of historical fact there. I think they’re all ancient biographies and biographies tend to have, you know, a general sort of layer of fact, even if it’s embellished in many ways. So I think he was a, a Jewish prophetic figure. I think he probably was an eschatological prophet as people say, you know, a prophet announcing the end of the world.

I think he thought God was going to intervene very soon and restore Israel in some way. And I think that’s why he had 12 disciples, 12 male disciples and they’re representing the 12 tribes of Israel. Everything we know about his sort of journeys suggest he’s sort of re-walking the land as it was in the great days of David and Solomon. And I think he, he did expect some kind of intervention by God in the imminent future. But then he made his way to Jerusalem, maybe he’d been there many times before and something about this particular visit meant that he ended up on a Roman cross and that as far as the Romans were concerned was the end of him. So, you know, I think we can, we can piece together a reasonable amount about him. And also, of course, I mean, although historians can’t really say anything about the resurrection as such, they can certainly see the effects of it and see that Jesus’s followers certainly believed that he’d been raised from the dead by God.

And this is, and this is one of the main things that we have referred to in other writers. For instance Josephus, we have Suetonius and Tacitus and, and Pliny the Younger, referring to this band of Christians that, that is making trouble in and around Judea and Rome. I’m curious, I get a lot of questions about Jesus, the letters that are in red in the Bible, things that Jesus has said, I’ve been asked. In fact, just yesterday someone reached out and asked me, what relationship do we think they have to Jesus’s actual words? And I go, well first of all they’re in Greek, so there would have been a translation there. So we can’t really talk about a verbatim representation. But what would scholars say are things that we find in the Gospels that have the best chance of going back to, if not Jesus’s own words, at least a memory about something that Jesus said?

Or is there anything in there that we think goes all the way back?

Probably, but I mean as you, as you say, you know, at the very basic level, it’s been all changed out of Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken to Greek. And. And there’s also. There’s a literary dependency between the Gospels. So Mark wrote first, and then Matthew and Luke copied Mark, and probably John copied Mark as well. So, you know, these are not four independent attestations of these words. They’re. They’re. They’re all connected in some way. So it used to be really common in sort of the 50s, 60s to try to get back to the. The actual words of Jesus. And I think Jeremias ended up with something like 21 bits and pieces. And. And people sometimes say things like, you know, these Aramaic phrases like abba and, you know, some of the other bits and pieces in. In the Gospels, particularly Mark’s Gospel.

And.

Yeah, exactly. They. They may go back to. To sort of, you know, real memories. But I mean, equally, you could say, well, you know, the Gospel writers knew Aramaic and they just sort of gave it a little bit of local color. So I think, you know, people realized after a while we’re just in circles here. We actually have no way of knowing which of these Greek words Jesus spoke. Jesus spoke. You know, another approach was to try to say which of these doesn’t fit well with a Jewish context, you know, and then we can be sure that it’s coming from Jesus. But again, the big problem with that is that Jesus was a Jew and his followers were Jews for, you know, several decades, maybe even centuries, some of them. So. So again, where do we go with that? So I think, think. I mean, although, I mean, there are many, many different types of historical Jesus scholars. But I think the main sort of thrust nowadays is to look at the events and to get a general picture, sort of the gist, as Dale Allison called it. You know, these are memories.

They’ve been worked over. But if you can just get the gist of what it was that Jesus said and his kind of message, then I think, you know, we’re. We’re probably as solid as we can get. So. So to some extent, this sort of countercultural, deny yourself, be like a servant, be like a slave, and put yourself last, that seems to be the kind of message that Jesus promoted. But in terms of the specifics, even the parables, you know, again, there’s probably some layer there that. That Jes. That goes back to Jesus, but they’ve probably been shaped and changed as. As they made their way out of a rural context to urban contexts and changed into Greek. All of these things. So, yeah, it’s. It’s very. I think when you ask about specifics, it becomes very difficult.

Yeah, it does seem like you, you, the task that, that, that, that your field has put to itself is a really tricky one because, I mean, you’ve got a book that contradicts itself. You’ve got, you know, you, you’ve got Matthew and Luke telling very different birth stories and you’ve got. So frankly, it does feel like if we’re going to talk about history, a layperson like myself wonders how, how useful is the Bible itself at all?

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t throw the whole baby out just because of the, the birth stories. You know, you’ve picked up on, on probably the most variable bit there. And, and you know, probably neither Matthew nor Luke had very much idea at all about Jesus’s birth and, and the events around it. But what they both want to do is, is to say, you know, it. He had this amazing birth that, that echoed many of the things in the Hebrew Bible and that sort of, you know, gave us to, to see right from the start that he was going to be a great man later on. So, I mean, this is just like a lot of other biographies, you know, stories about Augustus himself tell, tell sort of wild and wonderful legends about his mother being in the temple of Apollo and stuff like that. So, you know, that’s just, that just comes with a biographical territory, I think, once you move into the, the rest of Jesus’s life. I mean, even comparing, say, Mark with John, which is really quite different, we, we still got that sense of somebody who’s originally from Nazareth, you know, a Galilean ministry, spending time in Jerusalem, ending up dying in Jerusalem.

And of course all the miracle stories and the healings, you know, whatever you make of those even hostile sources, you know, the Mishnah and, and possibly the reconstructed bit about Jesus in, in Josephus, again, they talk about him doing these amazing things and whether it’s magic, sorcery, whatever it is, you know, you can, you can sort of piece together some kind of picture that, that’s actually quite coherent with the prophets in the Hebrew tradition. So it’s that kind of, that kind of person that, that Jesus probably was.

So does it make sense to you that Jesus would have had some kind of training, some kind of, of schooling in the, in the Jewish literary tradition? Or is he coming at it from more of the, the apocalyptic kind of social side of things?

Yeah, I don’t think he would have had much training. I mean, you know, there weren’t schools or anything like that at the time. He would have heard the stories of Israel in, in the synagogue. You know, maybe he came from a pious family that sort of talked about them, thought about them very deeply. He spent time with John the Baptist too. So that might be, you know, maybe he was already that way inclined. But you know, John the Bap. Baptist definitely seems to be in that apocalyptic tradition of sort of, you know, get yourself ready. The end nigh. It’s coming just over the corner, just around the corner. So you know that that’s sort of the tradition that Jesus seems to be in. So I think that’s probably where he hones some of his skills and maybe where he picked up some of his abilities to preach because he must have been a really engaging and charismatic preacher, you know. And we know of lots of other characters like Jesus in the first century too. So you know, nobody is saying he’s unique here. He’s a bit like John the Baptist. He’s a bit like these other prophetic characters that come along in the Roman period and most of them do get executed.

That’s just what happens to, that seems to be their lot.

I mean it does seem like you can claim a bit of uniqueness considering the longevity of his particular strain of, of, of prophecy.

Yeah, I think that’s, that’s right. It’s with benefit of hindsight you can see that. And I mean followers of John the Baptist also carried on for a long time after him. And in the early days, you know, I think there was a point at which Christian Christianity had to sort of say, not John the Baptist, he’s not the Messiah, it’s our guy who’s the Messiah. So you know, there’s a bit of sort of competition that.

And then you had to write in that John was okay with this the whole time. The Gospel where John says I must decrease and he must. Yeah, exactly.

And yes, that, that’s exactly it. The way that John is, John the Baptist is remembered in, in these gospels is, is pointing to Jesus and saying, you know, he is going to be the, the, the major one. You know, we don’t know whether he actually said that or not. I mean quite possibly not, but he’s.

Probably been rolling in his grave for a very long time. Now you mentioned earlier one of the, one of the things that, that seems to go back to a historical Jesus is perhaps this kind of deny yourself approach, a more ascetic approach to Judaism. Now there is a, there is a philosophical dimension of asceticism that we see very early in Christianity and we see it in Paul and something that comes up a lot in, you know, the, the social relevance of, of a lot of these stories is, is the sexual ethic of the Bible. And Paul is very famously a celibate. And we have in Matthew 19 , this, this story from Jesus where just kind of out of nowhere we suddenly get this little hey, by the way, you get the, the eunuch statement. Some are born eunuchs, some are, are made eunuchs, some make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Does that kind of sexual asceticism? Does. Do you think that is a part of what Jesus may have preached, or do you think that is something that kind of resonates with that deny yourself attitude, but might be a later kind of philosophical intrusion?

I think it probably does go back to Jesus, but I don’t think, I don’t think he was obsessed by it. I don’t think he was going around saying, you know, make sure you’re single, don’t touch a woman. And the same with Paul actually. I think what’s that, the big deal to both of them is that the end of the world is coming really soon. You know, repent, get yourself ready. It’s, it’s coming, it’s coming. And, and in that situation, you’re not going to marry, settle down, have kids. You know, you’re not thinking about the next generation because there’s not going to be a next generation. And I think that’s the context that you have to read these things in. You know, same with Paul. I don’t, I don’t actually think Paul’s got a problem with, you know, sex and, and you know, having a partner and things like that. I mean, it’s just that it’s irrelevant because the end of the world’s coming. And I, I think that’s, that’s the thing with Jesus too. You know, make yourself a eunuch, just, you know, stay off the opposite sex because, you know, other things are happening. I mean, years later, of course, when the end of the world doesn’t come and, and the second coming hasn’t come, people are reading Jesus’s words about self-denial and make yourself a eunuch and, and, and they’re interpreted in more ascetic ways.

But I don’t think very much about Jesus really was ascetic. You know, he talks about denying yourself, but it’s, it’s all in this sort of whole thing about power and glory and, and he’s saying don’t, you know, don’t try to push yourself up and be arrogant. And you know, the Roman male, the alpha male, don’t be like that. You know, just, just be, you know, self-effacing, compassionate, look after other people, put other people first.

I feel like you’ve just contradicted an entire side of social, of Christian social media right now. Like, alpha male is like, is what much of the social media is demanding, is what Jesus wanted everyone to be like.

That is. Well, it’s not in the versions I’m reading, I don’t think. I mean, why would an alpha male say, you know, deny yourself, be a servant, make yourself last? I mean that, that’s not, I, I mean, I think there are elements in Jesus, of course, that could be an alpha male. He’s the Son of God after all. But, you know, that’s pretty alpha. But it’s because he’s, you know, the ultimate alpha that he can say, don’t be like that.

He’s the Alpha and Omega male.

Yeah, I was gonna. Exactly.

But yeah, we have. And, and that’s something that I talk about all the time, is that when we look back at Jesus, we’re looking through 2,000 years of, of tradition and renegotiation of that tradition. And a lot of times we’re looking at it through history. A lot of Christian nationalists will prop up the Byzantine Empire, will prop up the Crusades, will, will prop up these things that they attribute with the creation of what we call the Western world. But none of that has anything to do with, with the actual texts that are talking about Jesus. That is how Christianity has appropriated the power structures that have developed. But I think it’s important to. One of the things that the historical Jesus approach tries to do is kind of divest ourselves of these interpretive lenses and see what’s left when we get down to the bottom of that. And so there’s so much contradiction as well, because the same Christian nationalists who, who are more concerned with the way Christianity was later appropriated are also like.

But Paul says women have to dress modestly and so they will pick and choose what texts take priority over history.

And Christians have always done that. I mean, I guess everybody does that with their sacred texts, whatever texts they are.

I have a question. We talked about. Well, Dan briefly mentioned the nativity stories and I’ve been fascinated for a while now by the theory that I think more likely Luke, but perhaps maybe even Matthew, that these stories were not originally a part of the Gospels. What do you think the odds are that these chapters are later?

It’s really funny that you should say that because I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, too. So I do think that Matthew’s is original to Matthew. I think Matthew wrote that one, you know, he, he was using Mark too. And, and, and he adds this, this birth story to his, his account. But I think that, that Luke wrote. I think he starts in chapter three where he has the, the genealogy and that complicated dating.

Yeah, yeah. During the reign of so and so in the region of so.

All of these things. That, that doesn’t help at all because we still can’t date it. But, you know, they all have their. In the year of this consul and that high priest and whatever. So I think he started there, but quite soon after, I think he got a look at Matthew and thought, oh, I like what he’s doing there. But I’m not very sure. I think he liked the idea of having birth stories, but I also think that he didn’t like Matthew’s birth stories. So I think he rewrote Matthew’s birth stories. You know, people always say, oh, he gives the female version because it’s kind of with Mary in, in the center. But I think. I think Matthew is a bit vague, actually, on whether whether Mary really is a virgin. It’s. The whole thing is a little bit uncertain, but I think Luke really kind of nails it. You know, he has Gabriel appearing to Mary and, you know, oh, how can this be since I don’t know a man?

And, and, and, you know, it’s very, very clear from, from Luke. So I think he makes certain things more explicit. And, and that’s part of the reason why I think that Luke came second.

Yeah, it’s definitely a more developed one. You’ve got the Magnificat. We’ve. You’ve got a lot more of this praise and development. And that’s interesting. So the. You think it’s. It’s not, it’s. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that when Matthew quotes the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7 , that the idea is not necessarily an actual biological virgin, but maybe he’s just quoting the text and saying she’s a young woman who has conceived. And. But it’s Luke who really nails it down that she has not had sex yet.

Yeah, I think so in my reading of it. I mean, because I do think there’s an ambiguity there because, you know, you’d know better than me, me. The, the Hebrew Bible stuff there in Isaiah 7 . It doesn’t necessarily mean a virgin. I mean, it could just mean a young woman, probably a young woman at court who’s maybe already pregnant by the time she has a baby, you know, or maybe it’s an early, maybe it’s a recent wife of the king, you know, before she has baby and stuff, this, this threat will have gone. So, so it’s not very clear. I mean in Matthew, you know, she’s found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Well, yeah, you know that, I mean children are always of the Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Bible, even when it’s a barren woman. And you know that it doesn’t mean that there’s been no male involved. So I think Matthew is, he’s, he’s ambiguous but Luke is absolutely clear. There’s no doubt that for Luke and, and Luke then does this sort of comparing thing in Luke 1 and 2 between, you know, something happens in the life of John the Baptist and oh, that’s amazing.

His, his parents, you know, were barren. Ooh, great stuff. But then something happens in the life of Jesus and whoa, you know, it’s amazing, you know, his mother is, is a virgin. So, so he’s got this sort of comparison going on between the two as well, which, which again maybe as we were saying earlier that you know, John the Baptist and his following was still a bit of a big deal in, in Luke’s day and he has to kind of, you know. Well, yeah, you know, give John his due, but he’s not, he’s not our man. It was Jesus.

Yeah, he’s the forerunner, the preparer of the way.

Exactly.

I, I have heard, I haven’t read anything on this, any actual of the scholarship yet. I’ve, I’ve got stuff set up that I’m, that I hope to get to soon. But I’m hearing more and more people talk about second century date for Luke. Do you, do you buy this at all? Do you, have you read this? What are your, what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, yeah, I, I, it’s, it’s strange, isn’t it? I think, I think there’s this sort of urge amongst New Testament scholars to sort of, to put it all into the first century. And that also makes things neat if we can say, you know, everything in the, in the New Testament, everything that’s canonical comes from the first century and then the other stuff is second century, you know, so I understand you can.

Kind of compartmentalize it and say it’s there because it’s early, everything else is after.

Exactly. And once you start saying things are maybe second century, then, then you have some awkward things about, you know, what about non-canonical stuff that may well be earlier. Why is that not in the canon? And, and you know, things get messy. But I, yeah, I mean, I, I mean, you know, how do we know given that these, these texts are not dated, how do we choose between 95 and 105 CE? But I, I, I do think Luke shows quite a lot of development and, and, and, and, and say his attitude to women. The fact that, I mean he’s very keen on women sort of early on, but he does tend to limit their role in Acts. And that does make me think a little bit about the Pastoral Epistles, which again may well be early second century. I also think that Luke may well know Josephus’s Antiquities. Steve Mason and his work has sort of persuaded me on that.

So he talks about Luke’s knowledge of, of Josephus.

Yeah, yeah. So if the Antiquities comes from around about 95 or so, again, you know, maybe they’re both writing in Rome. Again we don’t know where Luke is, is writing, but that might tip things over into early second century. But I mean, you know, how do we know? But I think, I think it seems reasonable enough.

Now one of the texts that comes up a lot on social media, I think there are a lot of people who would have loved for Gnosticism to have won out in early Christianity, but the Gospel of Thomas comes up an awful lot. And my understanding of this is that, well one, this is a sayings gospel. It’s just a collection of logia, of sayings, utterances, and so there’s no narrative framework that can help us kind of gain any purchase on much of a dating. But do you think that there are sayings in the Gospel of Thomas that could predate and be independent of the canonical gospels? Or do you think this is mostly coming from later and is mostly copying the sayings of Jesus from the Gospels?

I think it’s, I think it’s mainly later, I mean where, where we can compare things in, in the Gospel of Thomas with the, the canonical gospels. I mean Mark Goodacre has pointed out this strange thing that, that Thomas does that he, the author, sort of keeps the, the beginning and the end of something and sort of loses the bit in the middle. And you can sort of see the way he works with his source material.

Yeah, and it just reads the introduction and the conclusion.

I can’t be bothered with that bit in the middle.

We don’t do that with the books that, that guests on the show have sent us. Just to be clear.

That has never ever happened.

We read everything very thoroughly.

It’s that kind of thing, isn’t it? It’s like almost. Yeah. You know, the middle bit. So I just pick it up in the end. So I just pick it up in the end. So. And, and I do think that, that Thomas knows probably all of the canonical gospels. So, you know, if he’s working like that with the stuff there, what’s he doing with the extra stuff? Where is it coming from? I mean, it’s not impossible that some. That there’s something there that, that. That does go back to something at some point said by Jesus and then, you know, trans. Transmitted down the decades. But I, I wouldn’t want to put money on it, and I wouldn’t want to put money on which bits. So, you know, I mean, I just think you have to be a bit realistic about these things. And I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna spend decades of my life trying to work out which bits could possibly have an earlier version to them. I mean, I wouldn’t exclude it, but I think by and large, it’s coming from the second century.

And what do you think about the sources that were available to the gospel authors? We know Mark is working from different sources, and Mark is one of the sources that Matthew and Luke and probably John are using. But we’ve got to reconstruct anything that’s coming before that. What are, where are scholars on. On what kind of sources are being used by the gospel authors?

Yeah, well, I, Yeah, I mean, Mark is fascinating from that point of view, I think, because people always talk with great confidence. Oh, Mark had all these sources, you know, oral sources especially, you know, that, that this whole sort of form critical idea that. That there were little bits of tradition floating around that people knew and that somehow sort of Mark is capturing them and writing them down. And, you know, I mean, everything that’s been done by scholars in the last few decades has underlined just how carefully crafted and presented Mark’s gospel is. You know, narrative critics have shown that all these themes and irony and, you know, it’s a really clever piece of, of. Of work. So there is no chance that he’s just grabbing bits of oral tradition. And, and I, I think, you know, I, I’m sure there are, you know, I’m sure he does have sources. I’m sure he has written sources. I’m sure he has oral sources. I’m sure he tried to find out stuff and, and he’s probably got conflicting stories.

He’s probably got, you know, six different stories about the death of Jesus, and he’s choosing which one to. To use. But, but in all of this, I think the main thing, creative shaping. So you know, he’s got stories behind him but he’s, he’s working it all out in the way he wants it worked out. So all of those little paragraphs that Mark’s gospel is made up of, it’s Mark who puts his material into those little paragraphs. And, and that was a normal thing at the time. They’re called chreia. You know, they’re, they’re just little, the, the, the, the grammar books of the time tell people to write in these little sort of self contained anecdotes. So I think, no doubt there is stuff behind there, but all, all we can really do is get back as far as Mark.

And so Papias was probably underestimating Mark a little bit, if not completely.

Yeah.

If he was referring to what we have as the Gospel of Mark at all.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean he says he’s, he’s got no, no structure. But, and, and the problem is we just have, have Papias out of context because we only have Papias as he’s mentioned by Eusebius. Yeah. So if we had the wider context of what he was talking about, maybe he was comparing Mark with John. And then the obvious question is why does Mark have Galilee, Journey to Jerusalem, Jerusalem and John has Galilee, Jerusalem, Galilee, Jerusalem. John has Galilee, Jerusalem, Galilee, Jerusalem. You know, so maybe he does, maybe that’s what he was talking about when he said, said Mark didn’t have, have any structure. You know, we just don’t know what it was that Papias was talking about. And, and also, you know, these, these very highly educated elites of sort of second, third, third century, they were a little bit dismissive of, of the abilities of the Gospel writers. But that doesn’t, you know, Mark is a perfectly good biographer.

He’s kind of middle brow. He’s not, he’s not, you know, a Tacitus or a, a Plutarch or anything like that, but he’s, he’s good, you know, and, and his works have survived the test of time. 2000 years later, we’re still investigating them. So, you know, I think he’s a pretty good author. But some of these elites of the second, third, third century, just, you know, they were a little bit snooty.

We don’t know anything about that.

Yeah, thank goodness there’s no more snootiness in scholarship.

It’s been bad.

Now you, you brought up Luke as the gospel that’s kind of centers women more frequently than the other gospel. And, and I think this is one of the apologetic ways to try to harmonize the, the genealogies of, of Matthew and Luke is to treat one of them as, as coming through Mary, and one of them is as coming through Joseph. Seems to me that both the genealogies are literary creations. Don’t go back to anything that probably has any historical value. But we get a lot of listeners and a lot of our audience on social media is very interested to hear more about women in early Christianity, because we have, for instance, one that comes up an awful lot. We have Junia mentioned in Romans 16:7 . We have Phoebe. We have others. We have Mary Magdalene. And we spoke with Elizabeth Schrader Polter about Mary Magdalene and the idea that this is not where she’s from.

This is an honorific title that is being given to her. And you just published, I believe, a book with. It was Joan Taylor, right?

Yes, yes. Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples. Just plug that one.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I saw that on the, on the shelf at SBL in San Antonio. That was just within the last year or two that it came.

No, it wouldn’t be at SBL because it’s, it’s published by Hodder or Hachette, and I don’t think they have a place there.

Did I see.

Did I see it somewhere?

There must have been an ad for it because it has kind of like. Yeah, like shards of things on the.

Cover. Yes, it says maybe it was.

Just an ad I saw for. Yeah, I, I, that’s why I went and looked, because it, it struck me how nice the cover was. Can you talk about Jesus’s women disciples? What do people need to know about this that has been, you know, maybe obscured a little bit over the, over the centuries, and the millennia?

Yeah, definitely obscured. Well, I mean, it’s very clear even from the Gospels. You know, the Gospels, of course, are androcentric texts. They’re shining the light on the men and what the men are getting up to. But even looking in, you know, peering for the little clues in the Gospels, it’s clear that women were a much bigger part of Jesus’s movement. So, for example, Mark waits until the very end, chapter 15. Jesus is on the cross, and suddenly he says, oh, you know, and there are a few women there. They, they’d followed him from Galilee. You think, what, now you’re telling us, you know, all of this time I’ve been thinking Jesus and the 12 men, and suddenly you find that there were women there all the time. So, you know, that mental picture has to change. And women plural, and we’re given the names of a few of them, Mary Magdalene and others. So, you know, even. I mean, even something like The Chosen. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Chosen, but, you know, they have Jesus and the twelve disciples and one woman, so Mary Magdalene.

But it’s clear that it wasn’t just one woman. There were a group of women, and. And they follow Jesus. And of course, that would make a lot of. Because when Jesus is sending these disciples out to. To preach and to heal and, you know, do basically the work that he’s doing, of course you need women because in that sort of gendered society of the first century, you’re going to need women to. To take the message to other women, to go into homes and. And to sit with the women, to go down to the river while they’re washing their clothes. You know, just to. That way in to the women is a lot easier if you’re female yourself than if you’re a big brash guy like Peter. I mean, nobody’s gonna. No females are gonna invite Peter into their homes. You know, you’ve got to. You’ve got to have women to do that. So. So I think women were an integral part of Jesus’s message from the very start. In fact, I mean, I’d go even further and say that, you know, a lot of Jesus’s message, we’ve been talking about that message about, you know, don’t be the big alpha male.

Deny yourself. Be like a servant. You know, put yourself last. A lot of that. That, you know, the Greek word for that, diakoneo, to minister, is also the word that’s used of, you know, cooking and putting food on the table. And, and. And so it’s. It’s a word associated with women. It’s a kind of a. It’s the word that’s associated with women’s work. So I think Jesus is kind of almost saying, you know, don’t be like the alpha men. Be like the women. And so, you know, he’s sort of putting them in their experience right at the center of this gospel.

Why do you think then that. That women didn’t make it into the stories the way that it seems like they should have. If this were. If this were, you know, if this. If the picture that you’re painting is right, which makes total sense that it would be. Why do you think that they were excluded from. From the narrative?

Narrative? Well, they’re not. They’re not entirely excluded from the narrative. So, I mean, you know, one really good test case is Romans 16 , where Paul writes to the church at Rome and he has a whole list of women that he’s saying, not when, sorry, he writes to the church. And he’s got a whole list of people that he says that he sends greetings to. And that’s just a snapshot of people that Paul knows in the Roman church. And a third of them are women, and they’re given titles like deacons and apostles. Apostles and leaders of house churches. So. And, and it’s also fairly clear that Paul is sending this letter, the most important letter he’s ever going to write, by the hand of a woman, Phoebe. And she’s the one who’s taken the letter there. Probably she’s going to read it out. Probably she’s going to explain it to people who don’t understand it. And there’s probably a lot of people who don’t understand it. So, you know, Paul is really putting a lot of trust in this woman. So. So these references are there, but I think there’s a double problem here.

One is that these texts are written in a patriarchal society. You know, the authors, probably male themselves, just tend to focus on what the men were doing. So, you know, particularly once you get to Acts, it’s the movement of the church to Rome and you’re focusing on Peter and then Paul. And these texts are not written to be a social history of Christianity. You know, they’re written about, you know, that they’re written to persuade people to become Christians or to strengthen their Christian faith. So I think it’s inevitable that women drop out a bit. But then I think you get the double problem that, you know, by the late first century, early second century, the. The second coming hasn’t come and, and this is what sort of gave women this sort of liberation. The fact that, you know, thinking that the end of the world was coming and that social orders, as they were known, didn’t matter that much. But once you start to realize that there’s going to be a church for a long time, the church has to start sort of adapting to society and, you know, just embracing those Roman norms, because otherwise people are going to think badly of it, maybe even persecute it.

So. So I think by the time you get to Acts and by the time you get to the Pastoral Epistles, you get this sort of pushing down of women and make sure that women conform, make sure that women are silent and passive and don’t wear sort of flamboyant clothes and, you know, make sure you’ve got respectable women. Because this was. This was a big Roman thing that, you know, women out of control is a bad thing. Any kind of cult or, or philosophy that encouraged women in leadership roles or women not to know their places in society was frowned on. So, so I think you’ve got that, you know, on one hand the fact that the, the Gospels were written by men who weren’t thinking about the women, but on the other hand, this sort of, you know, real need actually to, as for in the later texts to, you know, downgrade the women. And that all conspires to, to meaning that in the end we don’t get many women mentioned in the New Testament.

And I think we, there’s. We spoke a bit about this with Candida Moss recently. We have an episode upcoming regarding her new book.

Oh, yes, yes.

And she’s coming on our podcast too.

Should I just.

Oh, is she? Okay, Excellent. We talked a bit about, and for those who have the video, you can see the cover of her book. We talked about the characterization of Christianity as a, a movement of, of slaves and women, which would fit into that idea that this is probably mainly made up of folks who are excited about the fact that the, the standard social roles are kind of being broken down, at least to the degree that they can, without undermining their, their safety and their, and their integrity within the broader Roman society. So Paul says there’s no, no Greek or Jew. There’s no male nor female. It’s no more slave or free, but all are one. And this obviously is an attractive thing, but when the first person says it kind of seems like Jesus isn’t coming right away. They have to start making plans for, well, I should have kept my bank account.

We should have, we shouldn’t have sold the, the farm and all that kind of stuff. And it seems like then you get the apologists saying, well, let’s, let’s turn this Gospel into something that’s palatable for the Greco-Roman intelligentsia, something that we can, we can make fit into society. But we do have, we also have. And, and I can’t remember if Candida has written about this, but there are, there was an article a bit ago about, I believe, either some inscriptions or mosaics that were discovered in the last decade or so that indicate there were women holding titles indicating some kind of ecclesiastical authority or role within early Christianity later than we suspected, maybe into the 4th or even the 5th centuries CE. What do we have from early Christianity that that indicates women held important roles within the ecclesiastical structure? Or is it, are we limited to just a few mosaics or, or titles scribbled in the ground here and there?

Yeah, I mean, there are bits and pieces from all over. So there’s, there’s some really beautiful pictures in the catacombs in Naples that have, I mean, in fact two women and one of them, Cerula, her name is, she has certain kind of iconography that, that suggests that she is a bishop. And this is the 6th century in Naples, you know, not that far from Rome where, you know, they’re, they’re not envisaging having women bishops by any means. So I think one of the things is that, you know, it took a very long time for Christianity to be homogenized. People are doing their own thing in different places. And probably, you know, there will be women in leadership roles all over the place and, and particularly within sort of slightly deviant groups. You know, we know about Montanists who had women within their, their leadership structure.

Just for this, the benefit of our, our listeners who may not know about this, could you just give a one or two sentence explanation of who the Montanists were?

Well, they’re a second century phenomenon. They’re, they’re very sort of charismatic. And again, that’s possibly one of the reasons why they’re more open to, to women’s leadership. But, and people like Perpetua, the, the, the famous martyr, she may well have been a Montanist. So, and, and, and you know, we have people like Perpetua who was, who were early martyrs. So we do have these, these women who are quite prominent in certain groups. And the thing is, like I say, we probably that there’s no, there’s no homogeneity to this at all. There’s, there’s just different groups, different ways of being a follower of Christ in this. Some of them, it probably happened quite quickly that, that the men sort of asserted their, their leadership roles. In others, you know, there were maybe more charismatic ones. Women were enabled to, to be leaders much longer.

So it sounds like it took some time for the imposition of unity upon the church to kind of cascade out and, and reach everybody.

Yeah, you know, maybe in, in urban places it happened in, again, it depends on, you know, know exactly who you’re living with. And if there’s more of an expectation in an urban setting, perhaps that you conform to Roman norms, then maybe that’s what you do in a, in a smaller place, little town, maybe, you know, maybe, maybe women were deacons and, and all of these things much longer. It’s difficult to say. And, and even something like the Pastoral Epistles, you know, Timothy and Titus and you know, they they’re very much kind of trying to curtail the activities of women. We just don’t know about their setting. It may be that they had particularly sort of, you know, women there who were really asserting themselves. And, and, and this author doesn’t like that. And this author writes to try and sort of push them down. But, you know, the very fact that he’s saying that suggests that there are women in leadership roles. Women are teaching, women are not being passive.

Women are wearing, you know, ostentatious clothing. Women are doing these things. We just don’t.

Quick question. Talking about Timothy and Titus, 1 Corinthians 11:34 through 36. Do you think that’s a later interpolation?

11. And the bit about the, the wearing a veil?

Well, we’re talking about. All right. Excuse me. Yeah, 14:34.

Yeah, no, I think that’s a later interpolation. I mean, okay, if. If it’s not, then, then Paul really doesn’t make any sense. In 1 Corinthians, you know, in, in chapter 11, he said, because of 11. Yeah, yeah, it’s because of 11. Because in 11, he says it’s fine for women to, to prophesy in the church. Just do it with your head covered. I mean, that’s, that’s fair enough. But then suddenly, in 14, I don’t permit women to say anything in the churches. I mean, what’s going on here? Here? It’s much more likely, I think, that somebody just wrote that in the margin and that it got incorporated. And I mean, there have been several studies of that, looking at the ancient manuscripts and found, you know, marks in the manuscripts that shows that the people copying them didn’t find these verses in all of their. In all of their texts. So, you know, we know that that’s a piece of tradition that’s moving about, which is always a sign that it’s a later thing. And you can imagine some, you know, some grumpy church leader saying, you know, I do not permit women to speak.

And then it gets it added to the text. And, and poor old Paul actually ends up with this very negative reputation that, that perhaps he doesn’t really deserve.

Yeah, I, you. You spoke about being a little further away from the centers of. Of power, and, and. Which reminds me of the, the monasteries and the fight that they had. And, and I shake my fist sometimes at Athanasius for everything that he did towards the end of the 4th century to get Revelation into the canon and to. To clamp down on the monastery. Sometimes I, I. Sometimes I, I wish that I could see what Christianity would have become if Athanasian, Athanasius had not been out there berating the, the, the, the Arians quite as much as. As he was. But it, it’s such a fascinating history to, to go back and see what kinds of what individuals, what events, what texts, what. What things contributed to the way Christianity has become the way it is, and, and certainly overwhelmingly silent but still formative role in the way Christianity has, has developed from all the way back in, in Mark and, and the early Gospels all the way to today.

And yeah, I’m looking forward to, to reading your book about that and, and hopefully at some point in the future we can have you back to, to talk a little bit more about that. Although I know you have some other projects that, that are taking up most of your attention these days.

Yeah, I’m lucky. I’m on study leave at the moment, actually, so that’s really nice just having the space to open books and, and, yeah, read what I want to read, so that’s really good.

Very nice. Dan. Anything?

Well, I, I just. Nothing more than just to thank you so much, Helen, for joining us. And let’s, let’s remind people where they can find you and your, your work. The podcast is called the Biblical Time Machine.

Biblical Time Machine, that’s the one. Yes.

A bit of a 90s vibe in the cover art.

I know that probably just reflects Dave and I and our ages and interest. Yeah.

But everything 90s is hip right now. Yeah, you’re totally on board. You’re totally on board.

Know, my daughter, she just, she says, oh, you know, they don’t make music like they used to in the 90s.

Oh, my gosh. See, the oldies, you know, the oldies.

In the 90s, we were talking about the 70s and the 60s this way. And now people who experience the 90s are like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I know, it’s bizarre.

You don’t get to talk about Nirvana as oldies. Okay. That’s just not acceptable.

I heard. I heard REM on an oldies station a little bit ago and almost crashed my car. I was, I was not happy about that. By the way, Michael Stipe follows me on Instagram.

Oh, well, you are. You are a fancy one, which.

So if, if that’s oldies. Yeah, I need to. I think I probably have an AARP card that I need to.

I feel like Michael Stipe just unfollowed you after you told the story.

If he’s watching this.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Helen Bond, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you being here and you’re going to join us for the, for the patrons-only segment. So that’s wonderful. If you friends would like more Helen Bond, sign up over at patreon.com/dataoverdogma. You can, you can, you know, if you sign up at the $10 a month level, you’ll get the, the bonus content every week. And Helen will be there there with us for this week’s version. Otherwise, if you’d like to contact us, you can reach us at contact at dataoverdogmapod. com and we’ll see you again next week.

Bye, everybody.