Making Sense - Sam Harris - #125 — What Is Christianity？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.680 Today I am speaking with Bart Ehrman.

00:00:50.040 Bart is the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus

00:00:56.620 Became God.

00:00:58.200 He's a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,

00:01:02.420 and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity.

00:01:08.320 He's been featured in Time and The New Yorker and The Washington Post and many other places.

00:01:13.660 He's been on The Daily Show.

00:01:15.600 He's been in many documentaries.

00:01:17.500 And his most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity, and this details the history

00:01:23.960 of how Christianity spread through the world.

00:01:28.540 Bart, as you'll hear, is a former believer.

00:01:32.260 He's now, I think he calls himself an agnostic at this point, though that didn't come up.

00:01:37.700 But we had a great conversation.

00:01:39.220 This was really the full tour of what Christianity is as a belief system and how it got that way.

00:01:48.440 I wanted to come at it as though from Mars and consider the whole doctrine as though I'd

00:01:55.660 never heard of it before.

00:01:57.620 We did that, and it was fascinating.

00:02:00.080 We talked about his background as a born-again Christian and then his loss of faith once he

00:02:06.340 became a true scholar of the New Testament.

00:02:09.640 I asked him what the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity is.

00:02:15.300 We talked about the status of miracles.

00:02:18.300 We spent some time talking about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus and the nature

00:02:23.300 of heaven and hell.

00:02:25.120 We talked about the end times and biblical prophecy and about who Jesus likely was and

00:02:31.780 who he thought he was.

00:02:32.880 We focus on Paul as the most important apostle and then discuss how it was that he likely

00:02:43.000 converted so many people to the faith.

00:02:46.800 Anyway, I thought it was a very interesting conversation.

00:02:50.140 Sometimes it's good to examine something that you're familiar with as though you've never

00:02:56.240 seen it before.

00:02:57.520 And that's what we do here.

00:02:59.540 I now bring you Bart Ehrman.

00:03:02.880 I am here with Bart Ehrman.

00:03:09.420 Bart, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:03:11.820 Thanks for having me.

00:03:12.900 So you have a fascinating new book, The Triumph of Christianity, How Forbidden Religion Swept 0.99

00:03:18.080 the World, which we will definitely talk about, I want to talk about.

00:03:22.180 But it comes on the back of many books you've written about Christianity.

00:03:27.000 And you have a very interesting story with respect to your own faith and scholarship.

00:03:33.040 So I just want to start there, which is not really the subject of your current book.

00:03:38.100 For those listeners who don't know you, take us back to some of the crucial moments in your

00:03:45.420 development as a thinker on this topic.

00:03:47.820 What is your background religiously?

00:03:49.560 And where did you wander on the landscape of faith and doubt?

00:03:54.500 Yeah, no, I'm a bit of an odd duck in the field of New Testament and early Christian

00:03:58.920 studies, because I'm a scholar of the New Testament.

00:04:02.660 My PhD is in New Testament, but I'm actually not a Christian myself.

00:04:07.500 And there aren't very many non-Christian scholars of the New Testament out there.

00:04:11.480 I was raised Christian, though.

00:04:13.840 I was raised when I was a kid.

00:04:15.880 I was in the Episcopal Church and grew up fairly religious.

00:04:20.980 When I was in high school, I had a born-again experience.

00:04:25.260 And I committed my life to Christ.

00:04:27.740 And that's how I got really interested in the Bibles, because I was religiously committed.

00:04:32.720 Tell me more about that.

00:04:33.500 What is a born-again experience?

00:04:36.300 We're going to talk about Saul and the road to Damascus that made him Paul.

00:04:40.200 But what was your experience?

00:04:42.280 So I was a church-going Episcopalian, and I started in high school attending a youth group

00:04:48.740 that was not connected with the church, but was a very religious youth group.

00:04:53.980 It was called Campus Life Youth for Christ.

00:04:56.760 And the leader of this group was a 20-something guy who was very charismatic in his personality,

00:05:02.700 who insisted that the only way to be a real Christian was to ask Jesus into your heart

00:05:11.040 and to commit your life to him as your Lord and Savior.

00:05:15.100 And so I decided I had to become a Christian.

00:05:18.860 It wasn't clear to me what I was before that, because I went to church every week.

00:05:23.380 But this was sort of a personal commitment that somebody would make.

00:05:29.260 And so being born again meant making this commitment.

00:05:32.120 And then you were given a new life.

00:05:33.960 Your old life was over, and now you began your life as a Christian.

00:05:37.700 But was it merely a matter of deciding to do this?

00:05:41.460 Did it entail some experience that seemed confirmatory of the belief structure?

00:05:48.740 Was there some evidence that came crashing down subjectively that seemed to verify the truth of the doctrine?

00:05:58.260 Yeah.

00:05:58.660 So the way it worked and still works in these circles is that it involves saying a prayer

00:06:04.040 and making a personal profession of God, of faith in Christ.

00:06:09.340 And the confirmation is in a kind of feeling of elation,

00:06:15.020 where you have this kind of psychological moment of heightened emotion.

00:06:20.480 And that is sort of the beginning confirmation that something's actually happened,

00:06:25.720 and you're a different person now.

00:06:28.480 And so as a 15-year-old, having only been born 15 years earlier, I was born again.

00:06:34.660 Well, the liability here is at the level of epistemology is hard to ignore,

00:06:43.040 because what sort of group induction experience as a teenager wouldn't produce a feeling of elation?

00:06:51.420 I mean, you could imagine so many other things being swapped in for Christianity there.

00:06:55.740 Did you worry about this at the time,

00:06:58.320 or was it just was the truth of the beliefs that you were taking on

00:07:04.480 just kind of baked into you based on your background?

00:07:08.440 Yeah, no, I didn't worry about it a bit for many years.

00:07:12.620 I was convinced that I knew the truth,

00:07:16.200 and that if somebody wanted to have eternal life,

00:07:20.520 they had to also know this truth.

00:07:22.940 And there was one truth,

00:07:25.200 and it was rooted very much in an understanding of the Bible,

00:07:30.020 that the Bible was the revelation from God,

00:07:32.640 and one had to commit oneself to the truth of the Bible

00:07:36.680 in order both to know God and to have eternal life.

00:07:40.320 And anyone who didn't accept this message

00:07:43.300 was destined to the fires of hell forever.

00:07:47.200 So you would have called yourself an evangelical at that point?

00:07:50.320 Does anyone call themselves a fundamentalist,

00:07:53.000 or is that a word of opprobrium spoken by secularists who don't agree with him?

00:07:58.460 Well, not just secularists.

00:08:00.460 Fundamentalism tends to be the term you use for the guy who's to the far right of you.

00:08:05.880 Right, right.

00:08:06.400 And so even in Christian circles,

00:08:08.480 you have a lot of Christians who talk about fundamentalists,

00:08:11.560 and what they mean by that often is somebody who's sort of rabidly conservative.

00:08:16.080 But I'll say, I mean, when I went off to college,

00:08:19.380 I went to a fundamentalist Bible college,

00:08:21.400 and we were somewhat proud of the term fundamentalist,

00:08:24.620 because for us it meant that we subscribed to the very fundamentals of the faith.

00:08:30.260 Right.

00:08:30.560 And there were other Christians who were more liberal in their orientation,

00:08:34.260 who didn't accept even the very fundamentals.

00:08:36.580 And so we considered ourselves to be fundamentalists in what we thought was a positive sense,

00:08:41.860 that we held to the essential elements of the Christian faith.

00:08:46.080 Yeah.

00:08:46.540 I mean, wasn't it originally a coinage of Moody Bible College?

00:08:51.160 No, I'm not sure where it originally started,

00:08:53.880 but I think it actually started later than Moody started.

00:08:56.500 Moody started in the late 19th century,

00:08:59.460 and the term fundamentalist became a big deal in the 1920s,

00:09:03.880 when there was a split in several denominations over issues such as,

00:09:10.500 you know, was there a literal virgin birth?

00:09:12.820 Or is the Bible inerrant in all of its wording or not?

00:09:16.500 With conservatives saying, yes, it's inerrant,

00:09:19.120 and yes, there was a literal virgin birth,

00:09:20.800 and other Christians saying, no, not so much.

00:09:23.280 And so it divided into fundamentalists and liberals.

00:09:26.140 Okay, so take me forward from there.

00:09:28.900 So you're 15, you're now a fundamentalist Christian.

00:09:32.500 You believe, presumably, a whole raft of doctrines.

00:09:37.860 And now you're becoming, at some point, more of a formal student of the faith.

00:09:44.560 What did your academic background begin to look like?

00:09:47.720 So in high school, I was very active on the high school debate team,

00:09:51.680 and I was very involved in debate.

00:09:54.280 And when I was graduating from high school,

00:09:55.780 I had to decide whether I'd go on to Kansas University to be on the debate team

00:10:00.440 or to go off to a Christian school and further my understanding of the Bible.

00:10:05.680 And I ended up following the latter path.

00:10:09.080 This 20-something fellow who was the head of this youth group

00:10:12.380 had gone to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago

00:10:15.520 and told me that if I was going to be a serious Christian,

00:10:19.520 I, too, would go to Moody Bible Institute.

00:10:22.100 And so I did.

00:10:23.180 I went to Moody Bible Institute,

00:10:24.640 which was a three-year degree program that focused on Bible and theology.

00:10:32.360 And there, my classes, my initial post-high school education was taking classes.

00:10:39.400 One semester, I'd have a class on the Gospel of John

00:10:41.820 and another on the Book of Hebrews

00:10:43.460 and another on how to evangelize the pagans.

00:10:48.040 And it was all Christian kind of stuff.

00:10:50.900 And so I did that for three years.

00:10:51.640 That always comes in handy.

00:10:52.880 So did you start with the study of the relevant ancient languages at that point?

00:10:58.060 No.

00:10:58.560 When I was at Moody,

00:10:59.460 I wanted to take all the Bible and theology classes I could.

00:11:03.180 And even though I knew the importance of learning Greek for the New Testament,

00:11:07.280 I didn't want to waste time doing that

00:11:09.280 because I just wanted to master the Bible as well as I could.

00:11:13.960 And so I took all my classes on the English text.

00:11:17.860 But, you know, my first semester at Moody,

00:11:20.280 I took a class on the Gospel of John.

00:11:22.080 So the entire semester on this one book of the New Testament.

00:11:25.920 And during this class,

00:11:27.480 the guy who was teaching this class seemed really smart to me.

00:11:30.760 He was really organized.

00:11:32.080 And I thought, you know, this guy's getting paid to do that.

00:11:34.900 I want to do that.

00:11:36.560 And so already as a 17-year-old,

00:11:38.500 I decided I wanted to become a New Testament scholar.

00:11:41.460 So then you just went to graduate school still full of faith?

00:11:45.240 When did your study begin to erode your conviction in the truth of the doctrine?

00:11:52.100 Right.

00:11:52.400 So Moody was a three-year institution.

00:11:55.480 And to get the bachelor's degree,

00:11:57.840 you had to transfer somewhere else to get credits.

00:12:00.140 And so I transferred to, after Moody, I went to Wheaton College,

00:12:03.700 which was Billy Graham's alma mater.

00:12:06.420 And for me, that was a step towards liberalism

00:12:09.580 because they were not quite as fundamentalist as I was used to.

00:12:14.020 And at Wheaton, I took a, for my foreign language requirement,

00:12:17.960 I took Greek, ancient Greek.

00:12:19.860 And it turned out I was pretty good at it.

00:12:22.800 And so then I decided I wanted to do my graduate work

00:12:26.380 dealing with the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament,

00:12:30.460 studying the New Testament in the original Greek language.

00:12:33.740 And the world expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament

00:12:36.860 was a man named Bruce Metzger,

00:12:38.480 who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary.

00:12:40.600 And so when I graduated from Wheaton with a degree in English,

00:12:44.480 I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary

00:12:47.680 to further my education in Greek manuscripts.

00:12:51.420 And then did that take you through your PhD?

00:12:54.940 So I did a master's degree there, a three-year master's degree.

00:12:58.140 And then I applied and got into the PhD program.

00:13:03.440 And so it was another four years getting my PhD.

00:13:08.160 And in the process, my first year of my master's program,

00:13:11.200 I took Hebrew so I could read the Old Testament

00:13:14.460 and the original Hebrew.

00:13:16.020 And I learned German so I could read what scholars in Germany had said,

00:13:20.180 and French so I could read what scholars in France had said.

00:13:22.420 And so I started getting involved in serious scholarship

00:13:25.940 as opposed to simply memorizing the Bible

00:13:29.640 or, you know, learning about the Bible.

00:13:32.120 I was actually studying it in the original language.

00:13:36.060 And that was largely what led me away from fundamentalist Christianity.

00:13:41.880 Well, so before we talk about the epiphanies you had

00:13:45.440 that led you to doubt or the various stages of doubt,

00:13:50.140 take me back to before that moment.

00:13:54.100 And at that time, if we had met you at your most educated,

00:13:58.640 with respect to the Bible, but also full of faith,

00:14:03.020 at that point, what would the young Bart Ehrman have said

00:14:07.720 is the most convincing argument in favor of Christianity?

00:14:12.160 I would have said that historians can prove

00:14:16.320 that Jesus was raised from the dead.

00:14:18.480 And that there's no explanation for the evidence

00:14:24.400 other than an actual resurrection,

00:14:26.800 which means that God must have raised Jesus

00:14:29.240 and that that proved the historical reliability

00:14:33.940 of the Christian claims.

00:14:35.440 And what would you have said the evidence was,

00:14:38.180 given that there's no doubt that most historians

00:14:41.100 would balk at any challenge to prove the resurrection?

00:14:45.700 So how would a historian go about doing that?

00:14:49.520 So again, so this is back in my very conservative day,

00:14:52.740 Christian days. 0.62

00:14:53.540 I would have said that there are two basic historical facts

00:14:59.100 that virtually everybody agrees on,

00:15:00.960 and people need to explain these two facts.

00:15:02.900 The two facts are that three days after Jesus was put in a tomb,

00:15:06.780 the tomb was empty,

00:15:07.480 and that some of his followers said they saw him alive again afterward.

00:15:13.100 And that any explanation for those two facts

00:15:16.860 has to explain both of them satisfactorily.

00:15:20.020 And then what I would do is I would go through various explanations

00:15:25.280 for why there would be an empty tomb

00:15:26.820 and why people would say they saw him alive afterward,

00:15:30.140 including groups of people.

00:15:31.820 And I would say that none of the naturalist explanations

00:15:36.380 simply work for those phenomena.

00:15:40.980 Well, so as a skeptic here,

00:15:42.840 some explanations just come rushing in for me,

00:15:47.560 as you might imagine.

00:15:48.560 And so I'm just wondering why,

00:15:51.540 and I guess I'm not speaking about you personally here,

00:15:54.880 but just as a matter of culture,

00:15:57.260 the culture of people like you

00:15:59.960 who are very well-versed in the Bible

00:16:02.780 who believe the central doctrines of Christianity

00:16:07.780 and anchor their belief to this claim.

00:16:12.500 I mean, so here's the first thing that,

00:16:15.220 as an atheist debater on this topic,

00:16:17.700 would come to mind to say.

00:16:18.900 I mean, obviously there's Hume's famous line

00:16:21.480 about there being, you know,

00:16:23.300 no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle

00:16:25.980 unless that testimony is of such a kind

00:16:29.480 that its falsehood would be more miraculous

00:16:32.860 than the fact which it's,

00:16:34.840 I think his word is endeavors, to establish.

00:16:37.980 So, again, translating that into modern English,

00:16:41.380 the testimony about the miracle,

00:16:44.200 it would have to be an even greater miracle

00:16:46.720 for that testimony to be false.

00:16:49.960 And that bar is almost never cleared.

00:16:52.880 I mean, like you can think of

00:16:54.240 an uncountable number of modern situations

00:16:56.940 where you have Western devotees of Indian gurus

00:17:01.060 who believe that their teacher has performed a miracle

00:17:05.300 and the culture of confirmation bias

00:17:08.160 and self-deception is just palpable

00:17:11.060 when you talk to these people.

00:17:13.300 I mean, you're surrounded by people

00:17:14.360 who even in a modern context

00:17:15.840 where they have all of the resources

00:17:17.260 of scientific skepticism at their disposal,

00:17:19.940 and when they haven't been indoctrinated

00:17:22.640 into these beliefs since birth,

00:17:24.520 you can still find Ivy League educated people

00:17:28.440 who are convinced of the veracity of various miracles

00:17:32.320 really on the basis of hearsay.

00:17:34.900 I mean, they're not disposed to put these claims

00:17:38.500 to any kind of empirical or logical test,

00:17:41.360 and certainly they're not meeting Hume's criterion here

00:17:45.520 that the testimony of these people,

00:17:48.620 the people who are delivering the hearsay,

00:17:50.480 is somehow so rock solid

00:17:53.680 that it would be an even greater miracle

00:17:56.660 that you'd have to admit

00:17:58.280 if you were to suspect that it's false.

00:18:01.700 How is it that you account for what seems,

00:18:05.040 at least from the outside,

00:18:05.900 to be such a disinclination

00:18:08.960 to put these claims to some obvious skeptical tests?

00:18:13.600 Right. I mean, I completely agree

00:18:16.960 with your view on this now,

00:18:19.100 and I have debates with people today,

00:18:22.900 public debates with people who want to argue

00:18:25.040 that resurrection really happened,

00:18:26.440 and it's incredible to me

00:18:28.140 that they continue to think that you can prove this.

00:18:30.360 But, you know, as you know from your debates,

00:18:33.060 people who are inside a particular tradition

00:18:36.580 evaluate probability differently

00:18:39.200 from people who are outside that tradition.

00:18:41.360 And so the Christians, people who, like me,

00:18:44.900 were fundamentalists,

00:18:46.580 what we would argue at the time

00:18:48.260 was a couple of things.

00:18:50.340 One is that the disciples

00:18:53.220 absolutely thought they saw Jesus raised from the dead.

00:18:58.240 They talked with him.

00:18:59.420 They ate with him.

00:19:01.220 They spent time with him after his crucifixion.

00:19:04.320 And the reason we know that they really did

00:19:07.440 is because they all were willing to be martyred

00:19:10.100 for this belief that he'd been raised.

00:19:11.960 And that, for us, was evidence that it happened.

00:19:16.260 But not only that,

00:19:17.280 but we're not just talking about individual things

00:19:19.200 where you could say that somebody had a dream

00:19:20.820 or a hallucination.

00:19:22.400 We have authors claiming

00:19:24.700 that 500 people saw him at the same time.

00:19:27.820 So it couldn't be a hallucination

00:19:29.920 because there, I mean,

00:19:31.140 you can't have a group of hallucinations

00:19:32.700 and 500 people.

00:19:33.620 So these are the kind of arguments we have.

00:19:36.260 And these arguments made real sense

00:19:39.060 to people who already believed in the resurrection

00:19:41.340 because it just seemed plausible.

00:19:44.560 And to outsiders, of course,

00:19:46.360 it just seems kind of crazy.

00:19:48.240 But to insiders,

00:19:49.900 you know, for everything with the past,

00:19:52.460 you're trying to evaluate

00:19:53.260 what probably happened.

00:19:55.240 And there's no reason

00:19:56.460 it probably didn't happen.

00:19:57.620 And so, well, okay,

00:19:58.700 it seems like it probably did happen.

00:19:59.940 Yeah, well, so the other issue here

00:20:03.660 which comes ready to hand

00:20:05.560 is the time at which

00:20:07.600 these various Gospels were composed.

00:20:10.600 Perhaps you can remind me

00:20:11.620 of the history here.

00:20:12.940 None of these documents

00:20:14.780 that are ostensibly reporting

00:20:16.860 these eyewitness accounts of miracles

00:20:19.820 were actually contemporaneous

00:20:22.580 with the miracles

00:20:23.920 or with the ministry of Jesus.

00:20:25.960 What is the earliest account we have

00:20:29.460 of anything that Jesus

00:20:32.280 is reported to have said or done?

00:20:35.600 Right.

00:20:36.020 So, yeah, so the basic dating

00:20:37.760 is that Jesus died around the year 30

00:20:40.400 of the Common Era.

00:20:42.240 Our earliest Gospel

00:20:43.580 is probably the Gospel of Mark,

00:20:45.180 which was written around the year 70

00:20:47.160 of the Common Era.

00:20:48.140 So it's 40 years later.

00:20:49.960 This is a kind of contemporary view

00:20:52.280 of critical scholars.

00:20:53.840 Matthew and Luke would have been

00:20:54.960 later than that,

00:20:55.720 maybe 80 to 85 of the Common Era.

00:20:58.100 John, maybe 90 or 95.

00:20:59.960 So we're talking 65 years later

00:21:01.560 for the Gospel of John.

00:21:02.780 And so when I was a fundamentalist Christian,

00:21:06.420 though, I didn't accept those dates.

00:21:07.920 I thought that Matthew and John

00:21:10.300 were written by people

00:21:12.000 who were actually disciples of Jesus,

00:21:14.660 and Mark and Luke were written

00:21:16.280 by people who knew eyewitnesses.

00:21:18.780 And moreover,

00:21:20.540 I would point out at the time

00:21:22.720 that even prior to the Gospels,

00:21:25.380 the Apostle Paul was writing,

00:21:27.280 and Paul wasn't one of Jesus' disciples,

00:21:31.180 but Paul claims that he himself

00:21:32.960 saw Jesus alive soon after his death,

00:21:36.300 within a couple years of his death.

00:21:37.880 And Paul tells us

00:21:39.400 that he knew 500 people

00:21:41.600 who had seen Jesus at one time.

00:21:43.240 And so, you know,

00:21:46.400 today, critical scholars would say,

00:21:49.340 look, we don't have these accounts

00:21:50.320 until decades later,

00:21:52.040 which I think is right.

00:21:53.560 But when I was a fundamentalist,

00:21:55.160 I would try to kind of argue back

00:21:57.640 closer to the time of Jesus

00:21:58.980 that we actually have people

00:22:00.180 who said they knew eyewitnesses.

00:22:02.440 And is that standard among fundamentalists,

00:22:04.600 however well-educated in the text,

00:22:06.620 that they would not agree

00:22:08.260 with the modern academic dating?

00:22:10.380 That's right, because the deal

00:22:11.920 with the modern academic dating

00:22:13.240 is the Gospel of Mark

00:22:14.740 seems to know

00:22:16.840 that the temple in Jerusalem

00:22:18.520 had been destroyed by the Romans.

00:22:20.800 That happened in the year 70.

00:22:23.020 And so probably it's written

00:22:25.060 sometime after the fact,

00:22:26.160 but fundamentalist Christians would say,

00:22:28.340 no, it's predicting it's going to happen.

00:22:31.340 And so, you know,

00:22:32.080 it could have happened,

00:22:32.800 it happened well before,

00:22:33.980 this Gospel is well before that.

00:22:35.660 And if you don't agree with that,

00:22:36.960 it's because you have

00:22:37.660 an anti-supernaturalist bias.

00:22:40.380 Oh, interesting.

00:22:41.540 So they get a kind of

00:22:42.620 an added benefit there.

00:22:44.280 They not only get

00:22:45.260 the contemporaneous record,

00:22:47.680 they get the truth of prophecy.

00:22:50.820 That's right.

00:22:51.960 Interesting.

00:22:53.000 It's good to focus on

00:22:54.480 why all of this is important.

00:22:56.580 There's a lot riding on this

00:22:57.760 because the resurrection of Jesus

00:22:59.780 is really the core miracle

00:23:02.620 that I guess I should just ask you,

00:23:05.380 what do you think,

00:23:06.220 or what is the,

00:23:07.040 is there a standard conception

00:23:09.140 of the minimal set of beliefs

00:23:12.340 that makes a person a Christian?

00:23:15.560 I understand that the fundamentalists

00:23:17.120 would draw the line

00:23:18.180 differently than others,

00:23:19.780 but I'm just reminded of

00:23:21.720 the line from,

00:23:23.500 I think it's 1 Corinthians,

00:23:24.920 from Paul,

00:23:25.580 where he says,

00:23:26.200 if Christ be not raised,

00:23:28.200 your faith is vain,

00:23:30.060 which is to say,

00:23:31.060 completely ineffectual,

00:23:32.260 you know, in error.

00:23:34.060 So there is no Christianity. 0.95

00:23:35.860 On Paul's account,

00:23:37.520 there is no Christianity 1.00

00:23:38.520 unless the miracle

00:23:40.660 of the resurrection is true.

00:23:42.760 At least that's how I read that line.

00:23:44.540 Is that the center of the doctrine

00:23:47.840 for most Christians,

00:23:50.860 or certainly anyone

00:23:52.320 who wouldn't be,

00:23:53.680 whose Christianity

00:23:54.260 wouldn't have evaporated

00:23:56.180 to a point where it really

00:23:57.240 has no supernatural characteristic?

00:24:00.180 Yeah, so the reality on the ground

00:24:02.000 is that there is a bottom line

00:24:04.900 for what one has to believe

00:24:06.260 in order to be a Christian,

00:24:07.600 and every Christian draws

00:24:09.140 that bottom line

00:24:10.060 in different places,

00:24:11.320 and every Christian thinks

00:24:12.520 that they're the only ones

00:24:13.500 who have the right line.

00:24:15.320 So yes,

00:24:16.980 there are lots of Christians

00:24:18.480 who would say,

00:24:19.520 if you don't believe

00:24:20.360 in a literal resurrection of Jesus,

00:24:22.460 then you really aren't a Christian,

00:24:24.060 whatever else you might say.

00:24:25.640 And they would quote that line

00:24:27.080 from Paul,

00:24:27.740 from 1 Corinthians 15

00:24:29.140 that you were quoting just now.

00:24:30.560 I know lots and lots of Christians

00:24:33.340 who don't believe

00:24:34.100 in a literal resurrection of Jesus.

00:24:36.820 They think that his body

00:24:38.360 stayed in the grave,

00:24:39.680 rotted in the grave,

00:24:40.580 and that the resurrection

00:24:41.740 is more of a spiritual event

00:24:43.440 or it's a metaphorical event,

00:24:44.980 but they still consider themselves Christian.

00:24:47.940 I mean, there are lots

00:24:49.200 of very highly educated Christians

00:24:50.940 who are sophisticated.

00:24:53.120 The more evangelical Christians

00:24:55.280 would say,

00:24:55.800 well, you're not really a Christian,

00:24:57.520 and the other Christians would say,

00:24:59.320 well, actually, you know,

00:25:00.140 you're not the one

00:25:01.340 who's been given the right

00:25:02.160 to define what a Christian is.

00:25:04.000 And so there are these

00:25:05.000 very large debates

00:25:06.360 within Christianity itself

00:25:08.440 about where the bottom line is.

00:25:12.420 Yeah, and I must say,

00:25:13.000 I have met very sophisticated people,

00:25:16.080 very well-educated people,

00:25:17.260 very successful people

00:25:18.320 who are believing Christians,

00:25:21.200 and when pressed on this point,

00:25:23.420 I have been astonished

00:25:25.300 to discover that

00:25:26.300 they actually believe

00:25:28.300 the literal story of resurrection.

00:25:31.020 I mean, these are not people

00:25:32.300 who I would have thought

00:25:33.680 were Bible thumpers 1.00

00:25:35.060 or fundamentalists of any sort.

00:25:37.360 This is like the last trench

00:25:38.780 that has to be defended

00:25:40.160 in the war against doubt.

00:25:42.300 Yeah.

00:25:42.600 No, there certainly are

00:25:43.640 a lot of people like that

00:25:44.720 who are otherwise,

00:25:45.740 I mean, who believe in evolution

00:25:47.000 or believe in,

00:25:47.680 I mean, they believe,

00:25:48.540 you know,

00:25:49.220 they believe in science.

00:25:50.640 I mean, you know,

00:25:51.160 they think the universe

00:25:51.960 is 13.8 billion years old

00:25:53.500 and whatever,

00:25:54.200 but they would draw the line

00:25:55.740 at a literal resurrection.

00:25:58.020 And there are a lot of other people,

00:25:59.580 not as many,

00:26:00.500 but there are sophisticated

00:26:02.040 Christian thinkers

00:26:03.820 who say,

00:26:04.780 no, that it's not

00:26:06.300 a literal resurrection

00:26:07.680 and that, in fact,

00:26:08.780 the earliest Christians

00:26:09.800 didn't believe

00:26:10.440 in a literal resurrection,

00:26:11.760 that that was a later

00:26:12.540 imposition on the faith.

00:26:14.720 Hmm.

00:26:15.320 Let's talk about

00:26:16.340 a few other doctrinal claims

00:26:18.400 that may or may not be central.

00:26:20.640 So, what is the place

00:26:22.740 of heaven and hell,

00:26:24.780 would you say,

00:26:25.460 in Christianity generally

00:26:27.580 and your version

00:26:29.680 when you were a believer

00:26:30.840 in particular?

00:26:32.080 Yeah, so this is something

00:26:32.980 I'm very interested in

00:26:33.980 because it's what

00:26:34.500 my next book is on,

00:26:36.160 is where the question

00:26:37.460 of heaven and hell,

00:26:38.180 where the issue

00:26:38.980 of heaven and hell

00:26:39.520 came from.

00:26:40.080 Because, you know,

00:26:41.640 the standard Christian belief

00:26:43.480 is that when a person dies,

00:26:47.120 their soul goes to heaven

00:26:48.460 or hell,

00:26:49.000 goes for eternal reward

00:26:50.340 or eternal punishment.

00:26:52.140 And that teaching's

00:26:53.800 not in the Old Testament

00:26:54.820 and it's not what

00:26:56.140 the historical Jesus thought.

00:26:57.900 And so, where'd it come from?

00:26:59.820 And so, that's what

00:27:01.240 my next book is.

00:27:02.780 When I was a fundamentalist Christian,

00:27:05.500 I was a fervent believer

00:27:07.060 in a literal heaven

00:27:09.200 and a literal hell.

00:27:10.880 And I believed that hell

00:27:12.480 was a place of eternal torment,

00:27:15.920 that it would never end,

00:27:17.900 with no possibility of escape,

00:27:19.640 and it was the destination

00:27:22.120 of the vast majority

00:27:23.560 of the human race.

00:27:25.420 So, you know,

00:27:27.340 the kind of arrogance,

00:27:29.440 you know,

00:27:29.740 involved with that kind of claim,

00:27:31.340 you know,

00:27:31.540 that I'm going to be

00:27:32.580 rewarded forever,

00:27:33.420 but my next door neighbor,

00:27:34.620 well, poor sap, 0.99

00:27:36.000 he's going to hell forever. 0.99

00:27:37.120 That's the arrogance of it, 0.97

00:27:38.920 I don't think,

00:27:39.440 actually struck me at the time.

00:27:41.680 And were you actually

00:27:42.840 psychologically affected by it?

00:27:45.360 I mean, presumably,

00:27:46.400 you knew people

00:27:47.600 who you recognized

00:27:48.880 to be good people,

00:27:50.760 who you had nice connections with,

00:27:53.340 but who you were sure

00:27:55.060 were going to spend eternity in fire.

00:27:57.820 Was that belief deep enough

00:28:00.160 so as to cause you

00:28:02.140 any feeling of psychological pain

00:28:05.060 or compassion,

00:28:06.200 or how did you feel

00:28:08.040 interacting with people

00:28:08.920 who you knew were destined

00:28:10.400 to be tortured for eternity?

00:28:11.660 Yeah, no,

00:28:12.600 it absolutely did have an effect.

00:28:15.080 And where it was practically manifest

00:28:18.300 was in my desire to convert people,

00:28:21.120 because I believed that goodness

00:28:24.160 had nothing to do with it.

00:28:25.480 It didn't matter

00:28:26.140 whether you were a good person 0.73

00:28:27.560 or a rotten person.

00:28:28.800 If you didn't believe in Christ

00:28:30.780 for your salvation,

00:28:32.160 you were destined for hell.

00:28:33.820 And so this is what drove my attempt 0.96

00:28:37.400 to try and convert people,

00:28:39.000 just as in early Christianity,

00:28:40.820 it was this belief

00:28:41.940 that drove the evangelism

00:28:43.320 of the early church.

00:28:44.620 So it's always been

00:28:45.780 this kind of motivation

00:28:46.700 for Christians that,

00:28:48.140 you know,

00:28:48.420 if you really love somebody

00:28:49.540 and you know they're going to hell, 0.88

00:28:50.640 you need to sort of crack the whip 0.99

00:28:53.140 and make them convert.

00:28:55.060 There certainly are

00:28:55.920 scriptural justifications

00:28:58.340 for that belief.

00:29:00.600 Now we're up against the limits

00:29:01.820 of my Bible scholarship,

00:29:03.420 but I seem to remember

00:29:04.900 many passages

00:29:05.700 where it's suggested

00:29:07.700 either directly

00:29:08.600 in the words of Jesus himself

00:29:10.760 or at least by

00:29:11.640 one of the gospel writers

00:29:13.600 that there is no path

00:29:15.860 to the Father

00:29:17.140 but through the Son, right?

00:29:19.360 That's right.

00:29:20.140 That's the emphatic teaching

00:29:21.600 of the Gospel of John

00:29:22.620 and that everybody

00:29:23.720 who doesn't believe

00:29:24.500 in Christ

00:29:26.380 is going to be condemned.

00:29:28.960 But in the Gospels,

00:29:30.940 it's not clear

00:29:32.320 that this is eternal torment

00:29:34.280 in a particular place.

00:29:35.940 The idea of eternal torment

00:29:37.700 comes more clearly

00:29:40.460 in the book of Revelation

00:29:41.680 at the end of the New Testament

00:29:43.320 where those who are opposed to God

00:29:46.340 are thrown into a lake of fire

00:29:48.320 and they burn in this lake of fire forever.

00:29:52.820 I seem to remember

00:29:53.440 that Jesus is presiding

00:29:55.100 over that lake of fire.

00:29:56.240 Well, so, yeah,

00:29:58.360 it's very, it's actually,

00:30:00.240 part of the intrigue

00:30:00.980 of the book of Revelation

00:30:01.780 is how intricate the scenario is,

00:30:05.280 which is, I think,

00:30:06.080 one of the reasons

00:30:06.700 people have been so drawn to it

00:30:08.000 over the years

00:30:08.480 because it isn't just kind of

00:30:10.280 a straightforward statement,

00:30:11.460 it's actually this graphic narrative portrayal

00:30:14.940 and trying to piece it all together

00:30:16.920 because you've got, you know,

00:30:18.340 you've got Christ

00:30:19.020 and you've got God

00:30:19.920 and you've got the angels

00:30:20.820 and you've got the Antichrist

00:30:23.380 and the prophet of the Antichrist

00:30:24.720 and so you have this entire scenario going on.

00:30:27.700 But, yeah, Christ and his followers

00:30:30.360 are given an eternal reward

00:30:32.340 in the new Jerusalem

00:30:33.940 and all those opposed to Christ

00:30:35.960 are sent to the lake of fire.

00:30:38.220 So if one were going to read the Bible,

00:30:41.400 both Old and New Testament,

00:30:42.940 straight through

00:30:43.640 and form on the assumption

00:30:46.080 that everything there is true

00:30:48.620 and inerrant

00:30:50.100 and that it's sort of on the reader

00:30:53.340 to resolve any apparent contradictions,

00:30:56.840 what rational understanding

00:30:59.140 and expectation of the afterlife

00:31:02.120 would one form?

00:31:04.100 And so this is now a picture

00:31:05.420 of the end times

00:31:07.280 and one's personal end,

00:31:09.160 you know, after death

00:31:10.120 and I guess after the resurrection

00:31:13.020 and this is now sort of uncontaminated

00:31:15.520 by the rest of the literature

00:31:17.480 that has grown up on this.

00:31:18.900 So let's leave Dante and Milton

00:31:20.740 and everything else

00:31:21.500 that has come since aside

00:31:23.040 what do heaven and hell look like

00:31:25.280 and what does the end of the world look like?

00:31:27.820 Yeah, so it really depends

00:31:29.140 on what the assumptions

00:31:30.580 of the reader are.

00:31:32.240 If you're a reader

00:31:33.540 who knows nothing about Milton

00:31:35.000 or Dante or anyone,

00:31:36.840 is just coming to,

00:31:38.460 but is intelligent,

00:31:41.880 but tries to reconcile everything,

00:31:45.220 what that person would argue

00:31:47.160 probably is in a view

00:31:50.700 of progressive revelation

00:31:52.260 where the ideas

00:31:54.740 that are most true

00:31:56.440 develop over time

00:31:57.680 and some of the earlier authors

00:31:58.980 don't recognize the truth,

00:32:00.980 the full truth.

00:32:01.980 They only have partial revelation.

00:32:04.400 And in that understanding of things,

00:32:06.020 the idea in the shield

00:32:07.620 of the Old Testament

00:32:08.800 where everybody goes

00:32:10.860 to this kind of netherworld

00:32:12.580 and they stay

00:32:14.860 in this netherworld forever,

00:32:16.120 that gets modified over time

00:32:18.060 until you get into

00:32:18.920 the Gospels

00:32:19.680 where the righteous

00:32:21.620 are rewarded

00:32:22.300 and the wicked

00:32:23.600 are punished,

00:32:24.720 but it looks like

00:32:25.580 they're punished

00:32:25.980 by annihilation.

00:32:27.820 That develops yet further

00:32:29.080 when you get to

00:32:29.600 the book of Revelation

00:32:30.360 when you find out

00:32:31.140 that in fact people

00:32:31.760 are not annihilated,

00:32:33.360 they're tortured forever.

00:32:36.100 And so the idea then

00:32:37.120 would be

00:32:37.600 that it's all consistent,

00:32:39.080 but only in the sense

00:32:40.260 that there was

00:32:41.340 a progressive revelation

00:32:42.520 and this reader of the Bible,

00:32:44.380 this hypothetical reader

00:32:45.200 of the Bible then,

00:32:46.260 basically agrees

00:32:47.060 with the final book

00:32:48.420 that there's eternal torment

00:32:50.100 or eternal reward.

00:32:52.380 Islam has a similar concept

00:32:53.940 of abrogation

00:32:55.440 where later verses

00:32:57.160 abrogate earlier verses

00:32:58.980 and as luck would have it,

00:33:00.920 the more violent verses

00:33:02.640 tend to abrogate

00:33:03.560 the more peaceful ones

00:33:04.940 to the benefit of all humanity.

00:33:07.520 So that is viewed

00:33:08.440 in the Christian tradition

00:33:10.340 that progressive revelation

00:33:12.140 not as any sort of data point

00:33:15.140 against this notion

00:33:17.080 of inerrancy.

00:33:17.960 You can still be inerrant

00:33:19.180 even while various gospel writers

00:33:21.920 or their predecessors

00:33:23.280 are laboring under incomplete

00:33:26.620 knowledge of God's plan.

00:33:29.140 Yeah, it's because of the view

00:33:30.540 of inerrancy

00:33:31.220 that this view developed

00:33:32.320 because you have to reconcile

00:33:34.140 these things.

00:33:34.900 And so what a critical scholar

00:33:35.960 would look at and say,

00:33:37.080 well, you know,

00:33:38.080 this is just inconsistent.

00:33:39.420 One author has one view

00:33:40.400 and another has another view

00:33:41.520 and they can't be lined up to you.

00:33:43.560 Then the way to get around that

00:33:45.180 is by saying,

00:33:45.940 yeah, it's progressive revelation.

00:33:47.900 So then what would heaven

00:33:49.720 look like to someone

00:33:51.360 who has gone through

00:33:53.040 this whole progression

00:33:54.000 and come out with

00:33:55.700 some kind of final expectation?

00:33:57.720 What is the picture

00:33:59.640 of the afterlife

00:34:00.620 if you go to the good place?

00:34:02.060 So this is the interesting point

00:34:06.300 is that if you're just

00:34:07.520 sticking with the Bible,

00:34:09.220 you don't have the idea

00:34:10.880 that you die

00:34:12.560 and your soul goes to heaven forever.

00:34:14.520 It's that at the end of time,

00:34:16.720 bodies are going to be raised

00:34:18.680 from the dead

00:34:19.360 and that there'll be

00:34:21.180 a final judgment on the earth

00:34:22.540 and God will destroy

00:34:24.380 the forces of evil

00:34:25.380 and he will send everybody

00:34:29.120 who is opposed to him 0.98

00:34:30.200 into eternal punishment

00:34:31.300 but he will raise from the dead

00:34:33.440 all of his righteous

00:34:34.900 and they'll live here on earth

00:34:36.900 forever in a utopian kingdom

00:34:39.420 and so the earth

00:34:40.180 will be returned

00:34:40.920 to the state that it was in

00:34:43.600 during the days of Adam and Eve

00:34:45.280 and it'll be

00:34:47.040 a perfect paradise forever.

00:34:49.140 So it is a terrestrial paradise

00:34:51.900 that presumably now functions

00:34:54.640 by a slightly tweaked

00:34:56.580 laws of physics

00:34:57.380 so that it can last forever here

00:34:59.520 but it's not somewhere else

00:35:02.080 and it's not in some

00:35:03.360 ethereal condition.

00:35:05.400 That's right

00:35:05.740 and in this view

00:35:06.960 the tweaking actually happened

00:35:08.380 with Adam and Eve

00:35:09.220 that originally

00:35:09.880 this world was created

00:35:11.620 as a paradise

00:35:12.520 and because of their sin

00:35:17.260 it got corrupted

00:35:18.860 and so God is going to reverse

00:35:21.500 the sin that was brought

00:35:22.980 into the world

00:35:23.520 by Adam and Eve

00:35:24.440 and bring it back

00:35:25.560 to its original state

00:35:26.740 which is supposed to be

00:35:28.100 a place of eternal bliss.

00:35:30.300 I must say

00:35:31.320 I'm rarely in conversations

00:35:32.880 with Christians

00:35:33.540 about these sorts of things

00:35:35.540 but this is certainly

00:35:36.980 not a scientific poll

00:35:39.020 but I am certainly

00:35:41.240 walking around

00:35:42.020 with the feeling

00:35:42.760 that most Christians

00:35:44.360 are believing

00:35:45.720 in a very different heaven.

00:35:48.020 I mean I think

00:35:48.560 when someone dies

00:35:49.900 close to them

00:35:50.960 who they think

00:35:51.600 is still in the faith

00:35:53.400 and destined for heaven

00:35:54.820 they're not picturing

00:35:56.620 that person

00:35:57.580 moldering in the ground

00:35:59.520 for thousands of years

00:36:01.960 or however long it takes

00:36:03.540 for Jesus to come back

00:36:05.100 and usher in the end

00:36:06.040 of the world.

00:36:06.720 They're picturing

00:36:07.660 that person's soul

00:36:10.100 more or less

00:36:11.520 moving directly

00:36:12.620 from the hospital bed

00:36:14.860 or wherever they were

00:36:15.740 when they died

00:36:16.460 into some ethereal condition

00:36:19.680 which is the afterlife

00:36:21.760 and it is eternal

00:36:23.260 and it's in the company

00:36:25.040 of God

00:36:25.620 or Jesus

00:36:26.300 or some circumstance

00:36:28.100 that's just a matter

00:36:29.640 of pure satisfaction

00:36:31.300 and well-being.

00:36:33.060 Two questions.

00:36:34.080 Am I wrong about that?

00:36:35.380 Isn't that what many

00:36:36.440 if not most Christians believe

00:36:38.440 and if so

00:36:39.940 what are the scriptural

00:36:42.720 antecedents for that belief?

00:36:45.880 You're right.

00:36:46.780 That is the belief

00:36:47.700 and that's one of the reasons

00:36:48.600 I'm writing this next book

00:36:49.920 about where these Christian ideas

00:36:51.740 of the afterlife came from

00:36:52.980 because most of the Bible

00:36:55.400 doesn't teach them.

00:36:57.620 You can get to that view

00:36:59.200 from a few passages

00:37:00.520 sort of random

00:37:01.960 and isolated passages

00:37:03.240 which don't actually

00:37:06.200 say quite that

00:37:07.420 about this ethereal

00:37:08.840 afterlife for the souls

00:37:10.140 but you do get

00:37:11.360 a couple passages

00:37:12.140 in the writings of Paul

00:37:13.380 where he seems to think

00:37:14.780 that yes,

00:37:15.380 there is going to be

00:37:15.940 this resurrection of bodies

00:37:17.260 at the end of time

00:37:18.140 but in the meantime

00:37:19.560 when people die

00:37:21.300 they've got this

00:37:22.300 immediate presence

00:37:23.060 with Christ in heaven

00:37:24.160 and I think

00:37:25.740 that that idea

00:37:26.720 that you have

00:37:27.460 this immediate presence

00:37:28.460 with Christ

00:37:29.140 at your death 0.70

00:37:30.160 gets transformed

00:37:31.760 into this idea

00:37:32.720 of an ethereal existence.

00:37:34.860 The thing is

00:37:35.460 that most Christians

00:37:37.180 who have this idea

00:37:38.180 of this kind of

00:37:39.140 existence of your soul

00:37:40.640 but not your body

00:37:41.620 have conflicted views

00:37:43.520 because they also think

00:37:44.760 that when they get to heaven

00:37:46.120 they'll be able to see

00:37:47.860 their grandmother

00:37:48.500 and talk with her.

00:37:50.400 Well, I mean,

00:37:51.280 if she doesn't have a body 0.57

00:37:52.880 what are you going to see

00:37:55.380 exactly

00:37:56.000 and how are you going

00:37:57.400 to recognize her

00:37:58.240 and, you know,

00:37:59.280 so they have to come up

00:38:00.100 with kind of weird explanations

00:38:02.080 for how, in fact,

00:38:03.640 it's your soul

00:38:04.360 but the soul has

00:38:05.720 the physical appearance

00:38:07.500 of your body

00:38:08.120 or, you know,

00:38:09.280 and even though

00:38:10.080 you don't actually

00:38:10.720 have eyes anymore

00:38:11.560 you can still see

00:38:12.620 and you can still hear

00:38:13.900 and so forth.

00:38:15.540 And how old

00:38:16.140 is your grandmother?

00:38:17.520 Is she restored to her

00:38:18.820 the prime age of 30

00:38:20.100 or is she still

00:38:20.880 granny in that condition? 1.00

00:38:22.360 Well, that's right

00:38:22.960 and if you've had

00:38:24.160 an infant child

00:38:25.020 who's died

00:38:25.640 is the child

00:38:27.420 still an infant

00:38:28.720 or, you know,

00:38:29.940 do they

00:38:30.280 what are they in heaven?

00:38:31.860 And so

00:38:32.180 you actually

00:38:33.160 you have Christians

00:38:34.300 who seriously

00:38:35.120 debate these issues

00:38:36.300 and actually write books

00:38:38.680 trying to explain

00:38:39.580 what it's really

00:38:40.760 going to be like.

00:38:42.120 I recall

00:38:42.480 St. Thomas Aquinas

00:38:43.700 dealing with

00:38:44.180 some of this stuff.

00:38:45.680 You have Christians

00:38:46.320 debating all sorts

00:38:47.740 of issues relating this

00:38:48.680 all the way back

00:38:49.300 into the second

00:38:49.980 Christian century.

00:38:51.040 I mean, you have

00:38:51.460 Christians asking, 0.76

00:38:52.760 you know,

00:38:52.940 if the body's raised

00:38:53.840 from the dead

00:38:54.360 at the end of time

00:38:55.260 and so all of the parts

00:38:57.140 of your body

00:38:57.680 are brought together

00:38:58.460 what happens

00:38:59.500 if you were eaten

00:39:00.360 by a cannibal 0.87

00:39:01.260 so that part of your body

00:39:02.940 became part of

00:39:03.640 the cannibal's body?

00:39:04.760 So when the parts

00:39:05.660 are raised from the dead

00:39:06.600 who gets the part?

00:39:07.680 You or the cannibal?

00:39:10.100 And so you have people

00:39:11.300 debating this kind of thing

00:39:12.320 all the way back.

00:39:13.700 It's tempting to picture

00:39:14.700 a very different history

00:39:16.040 where the doctrine

00:39:17.540 of Christianity

00:39:18.200 was just fatally confounded 0.85

00:39:19.860 by one cannibal.

00:39:21.120 Yes, right, right.

00:39:22.620 So then what is the picture

00:39:25.160 of hell

00:39:25.640 that one can rationally form

00:39:27.380 on the basis of Scripture?

00:39:29.480 So most of the Bible,

00:39:31.480 of course,

00:39:31.760 is the Old Testament

00:39:32.460 and in the Old Testament

00:39:33.480 there isn't a hell,

00:39:35.000 a place of torment.

00:39:36.600 There's this place

00:39:37.260 called Sheol,

00:39:38.300 which is a shadowy existence

00:39:39.960 where everybody goes,

00:39:41.420 good or wicked,

00:39:43.000 believers or non-believers,

00:39:44.240 and it's just,

00:39:45.400 you kind of,

00:39:45.880 you exist there

00:39:46.760 and not much happens forever.

00:39:49.060 When you get to

00:39:49.820 the teachings of Jesus,

00:39:51.840 Jesus thought that

00:39:52.660 there'd be a resurrection

00:39:53.540 of the dead

00:39:54.240 at the end of time.

00:39:56.340 And he appears

00:39:57.240 to have thought

00:39:57.800 that those who were

00:39:58.840 opposed to God

00:39:59.760 were not going to be

00:40:00.960 tormented forever,

00:40:02.100 they were going to 0.92

00:40:02.840 be annihilated.

00:40:04.800 Unlike the righteous, 0.98

00:40:06.440 the righteous will be given

00:40:07.440 an eternal reward,

00:40:09.320 but God will punish

00:40:10.180 the wicked 0.99

00:40:11.900 by destroying them. 0.61

00:40:14.120 And the Apostle Paul

00:40:15.720 never says anything

00:40:16.560 about hell

00:40:17.180 as a place

00:40:17.960 of eternal torment.

00:40:19.120 It's not really

00:40:20.120 until you get

00:40:20.720 to the book of Revelation

00:40:22.200 that you start getting

00:40:23.180 this eternal torment idea

00:40:25.120 of having this lake of fire.

00:40:28.000 Is it Revelation

00:40:28.560 that also gives us

00:40:29.660 the notion of the rapture?

00:40:31.300 Or is that prefigured

00:40:32.840 somewhere else?

00:40:33.400 Is that an Old Testament

00:40:34.600 prophecy that then

00:40:35.980 Revelation connects

00:40:37.480 the dots on?

00:40:38.440 Well, this is an interesting

00:40:39.440 point that even most

00:40:40.480 Christians don't know. 1.00

00:40:42.020 The book of Revelation

00:40:43.140 does describe what's going

00:40:44.700 to happen at the end

00:40:45.500 of time,

00:40:46.160 but it does not have

00:40:47.520 a doctrine of the rapture.

00:40:49.060 There's no rapture

00:40:49.940 in the book of Revelation.

00:40:51.260 The idea of a rapture

00:40:52.700 actually comes from

00:40:53.500 the Apostle Paul.

00:40:54.760 In the book of

00:40:55.480 1 Thessalonians,

00:40:56.660 Paul is talking about

00:40:57.740 what's going to happen

00:40:58.440 at the end

00:40:59.100 when there'll be

00:41:00.020 a resurrection of the dead.

00:41:01.940 And he says that

00:41:02.620 Jesus is coming back 0.76

00:41:03.680 from heaven

00:41:04.200 and those who have

00:41:05.900 died in Christ

00:41:06.760 are raised from the dead

00:41:07.980 and those who are

00:41:09.920 living at the time

00:41:10.700 will be taken up

00:41:11.520 with them

00:41:12.200 into the sky

00:41:13.700 and they'll meet

00:41:14.800 Jesus there

00:41:15.500 up in the air.

00:41:16.340 So it actually comes

00:41:17.620 from Paul's letters

00:41:19.700 rather than from

00:41:20.420 the book of Revelation.

00:41:21.660 Right.

00:41:22.740 So now,

00:41:23.340 did you believe

00:41:23.780 in the rapture

00:41:24.380 when you were

00:41:24.980 at this point

00:41:25.820 at the peak

00:41:26.480 of your faith?

00:41:26.940 I not only believed

00:41:28.380 in it,

00:41:28.720 I knew it was going

00:41:29.360 to happen

00:41:29.680 before the late 1980s.

00:41:32.560 Literally.

00:41:34.720 Wow.

00:41:35.260 So then,

00:41:36.340 had you lost your faith

00:41:37.440 by the time

00:41:38.020 the late 80s came around

00:41:39.340 or was that

00:41:39.860 one of the reasons

00:41:40.780 why you lost it?

00:41:41.660 Well,

00:41:41.900 I'd certainly lost

00:41:42.540 my faith in the rapture

00:41:43.440 by that time.

00:41:44.460 You know,

00:41:44.660 my loss of faith

00:41:45.480 was kind of a long-term process

00:41:47.500 and the rapture

00:41:49.260 was one of the first

00:41:49.960 things to go.

00:41:50.540 So what was the first doubt

00:41:53.620 that was truly insuperable?

00:41:58.700 Did it move in discernible increments

00:42:01.320 where you crossed

00:42:02.600 some kind of bright line

00:42:04.040 and couldn't get yourself back

00:42:05.640 to feeling the faith

00:42:07.300 you had felt the day before?

00:42:08.620 Yeah,

00:42:09.080 there were a number of lines,

00:42:10.860 but the sort of first moment

00:42:13.480 was when I realized

00:42:14.900 that the Bible

00:42:15.560 was not inerrant.

00:42:18.440 I had,

00:42:19.020 my first year

00:42:20.460 at Princeton Theological Seminary,

00:42:21.900 I was taking a course

00:42:22.780 on the Gospel of Mark,

00:42:23.920 which was based on

00:42:24.780 an interpretation

00:42:25.540 of the Greek text.

00:42:26.680 And so I knew Greek

00:42:28.100 by this time

00:42:28.740 and we had to translate

00:42:31.100 the entire Gospel of Mark

00:42:32.440 and we had to write a,

00:42:33.860 we did an interpretation

00:42:34.980 of every verse,

00:42:36.520 you know,

00:42:36.760 it was very deep and detailed.

00:42:38.540 And I had to write

00:42:39.360 a term paper

00:42:40.840 and I wrote a paper

00:42:41.660 on a passage in Mark

00:42:43.880 where Jesus is talking

00:42:45.420 about a story

00:42:46.060 in the Old Testament

00:42:46.840 that happens

00:42:47.540 and he says

00:42:48.720 that this account

00:42:49.560 happened when

00:42:50.380 Abiathar was the high priest.

00:42:52.860 This is in Mark chapter 2.

00:42:54.940 When you read

00:42:55.480 the Old Testament account,

00:42:56.580 actually,

00:42:57.640 the account that he's summarizing

00:42:59.340 didn't take place

00:43:00.040 when Abiathar

00:43:00.760 was the high priest.

00:43:01.660 It happened when his father,

00:43:03.140 Ahimelech,

00:43:03.680 was the high priest.

00:43:04.940 So I write this 30-page paper

00:43:06.500 arguing that even though

00:43:07.780 Jesus said

00:43:08.600 that Abiathar 0.75

00:43:09.540 was the high priest,

00:43:10.340 it didn't really mean

00:43:11.160 that Abiathar 0.75

00:43:11.800 was the high priest.

00:43:12.780 He knew that

00:43:13.380 Ahimelech

00:43:14.240 was the high priest.

00:43:15.280 So I write this long paper

00:43:16.280 and the professor

00:43:17.440 reads the paper,

00:43:18.140 he likes the paper,

00:43:18.860 gives me an A

00:43:19.460 because I had this

00:43:20.060 complicated grammatical argument.

00:43:21.980 But at the end of it,

00:43:22.820 he said,

00:43:23.940 maybe Mark just made a mistake.

00:43:26.640 I thought,

00:43:27.440 huh,

00:43:27.780 that'd be easier

00:43:29.080 than 30 pages

00:43:29.960 of dancing around the problem

00:43:31.220 and coming up

00:43:32.040 with this fancy grammatical thing.

00:43:33.980 You know,

00:43:34.320 in fact,

00:43:34.620 yeah,

00:43:34.840 maybe Mark just made a mistake.

00:43:36.040 And once I recognized

00:43:37.940 that there could be

00:43:39.040 a mistake,

00:43:40.560 it opened up the floodgates

00:43:42.140 and I started

00:43:43.880 finding mistakes

00:43:45.540 without wanting to

00:43:46.780 and then I started wanting to

00:43:48.020 and then I started finding them

00:43:49.140 all over the place.

00:43:50.760 There are mistakes

00:43:51.280 with respect to

00:43:52.380 facts we know

00:43:53.980 outside the text

00:43:55.780 of the Bible,

00:43:56.600 but

00:43:56.780 there are also just

00:43:58.280 there are contradictions

00:43:59.580 within the Bible

00:44:00.520 that are

00:44:01.260 any way you squint your eyes,

00:44:03.620 they are contradictions.

00:44:04.780 I remember there was

00:44:06.440 an old book,

00:44:07.560 I think it's probably

00:44:07.980 150 years old,

00:44:09.320 I remember

00:44:09.700 I have somewhere in the house

00:44:11.100 which I referenced

00:44:12.480 in my first book,

00:44:13.700 The End of Faith.

00:44:14.980 I think the title is

00:44:15.820 Self-Contradictions in the Bible

00:44:17.200 and some of these are just,

00:44:19.680 you know,

00:44:20.080 it's just that

00:44:20.700 the coin came up heads

00:44:22.180 or the coin came up tails.

00:44:23.440 You can't believe both.

00:44:25.480 I think one was,

00:44:26.300 you know,

00:44:26.420 John the Baptist

00:44:27.060 was in prison

00:44:28.240 at the time of

00:44:29.200 the crucifixion

00:44:30.420 or John the Baptist

00:44:31.220 was, you know,

00:44:32.060 somewhere else

00:44:32.540 at the time of the crucifixion.

00:44:33.700 How did you deal with those?

00:44:35.960 Well, you know,

00:44:36.740 the intellectual

00:44:38.780 task of fundamentalists

00:44:41.600 involves

00:44:42.980 reconciling differences

00:44:44.380 and

00:44:45.700 if you work hard enough at it,

00:44:47.560 you can reconcile

00:44:48.220 just about anything

00:44:49.600 and so,

00:44:50.920 you know,

00:44:51.280 this was,

00:44:51.700 it was like solving a puzzle.

00:44:53.480 You assume

00:44:54.420 that there are no errors

00:44:55.520 and

00:44:56.300 if that's your assumption,

00:44:57.760 well,

00:44:58.000 then there are no errors

00:44:59.280 and the task

00:45:00.120 is to find out

00:45:00.880 why this is not

00:45:01.900 a contradiction

00:45:02.580 and so

00:45:04.020 today,

00:45:05.140 I mean,

00:45:05.420 when I talk with

00:45:06.680 fundamentalist Christians 1.00

00:45:07.660 and try and point out,

00:45:08.720 you know,

00:45:09.520 the Gospel of John

00:45:11.260 says Jesus died

00:45:12.420 the day before the Passover

00:45:13.780 and the Gospel of Mark

00:45:15.280 says he died the day

00:45:16.300 after the Passover

00:45:17.320 and they both

00:45:18.600 can't be right.

00:45:19.940 Well,

00:45:20.200 they have a way

00:45:20.660 of reconciling it.

00:45:21.880 So that's what you do.

00:45:23.000 So what is the

00:45:24.560 hardest thing

00:45:26.160 to reconcile?

00:45:26.740 If you were going

00:45:27.400 to point out

00:45:28.060 one thing

00:45:28.880 that you think

00:45:30.700 stood the best chance

00:45:31.980 of toppling

00:45:32.880 the whole house of cards,

00:45:34.820 what is that thing?

00:45:36.660 Well,

00:45:37.060 the example I just gave

00:45:38.560 is the one

00:45:39.140 that I use

00:45:39.920 if I want to convince,

00:45:41.820 you know,

00:45:41.980 if I've got one example,

00:45:43.680 I walk them through

00:45:45.340 what happens

00:45:46.540 in John's Gospel

00:45:48.560 because John

00:45:49.320 explicitly dates

00:45:50.860 the day of Jesus' death

00:45:52.520 as the day before

00:45:53.420 that he explicitly says

00:45:54.780 what time of day

00:45:56.260 and which day it was on

00:45:57.480 and the Gospel of Mark

00:45:59.000 also explicitly says

00:46:00.780 what time of day

00:46:01.740 and which day it was on

00:46:03.020 and they just flat out

00:46:04.460 contradict each other

00:46:05.400 and so when you take

00:46:06.860 somebody actually

00:46:07.420 through the text

00:46:08.160 and show this to them

00:46:09.420 then that does it.

00:46:11.400 What I do with my students

00:46:12.820 is I do a number

00:46:14.880 of things with them

00:46:15.520 to get them to see

00:46:17.100 how there are different

00:46:17.960 views in the Bible

00:46:18.820 but one thing I do

00:46:19.680 is I have them compare

00:46:21.340 either the accounts

00:46:22.820 of Jesus' birth

00:46:23.820 in Matthew and Luke

00:46:25.000 or the accounts

00:46:26.200 of his resurrection

00:46:27.100 in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

00:46:28.540 and I simply say

00:46:29.380 look,

00:46:30.060 list everything

00:46:30.680 that happens in this Gospel

00:46:31.820 then list everything

00:46:33.140 that happens in that Gospel

00:46:34.420 and compare your two lists

00:46:36.320 and see if there's anything

00:46:37.800 that is impossible

00:46:39.420 to reconcile

00:46:40.040 and in both cases

00:46:41.980 there are things

00:46:42.820 you simply cannot reconcile

00:46:44.100 because they just

00:46:45.120 contradict each other.

00:46:46.560 Actually,

00:46:46.960 I think we should go back

00:46:47.780 to the time

00:46:48.720 at which these texts

00:46:49.660 were written

00:46:50.920 based on modern scholarship

00:46:53.720 for a moment

00:46:54.140 because if you accept

00:46:55.500 that there was

00:46:56.560 a significant delay

00:46:57.620 in the composition

00:46:59.100 of even the earliest Gospels

00:47:01.520 so if Mark was

00:47:03.480 40 years

00:47:04.500 after the death of Jesus

00:47:06.480 and that's the earliest text

00:47:08.800 just map that on

00:47:10.760 to our present conversation.

00:47:13.060 It's as though

00:47:13.880 you and I

00:47:15.440 were now talking about

00:47:17.280 without the aid

00:47:18.580 of any media

00:47:20.380 without the aid

00:47:21.100 of any real

00:47:22.160 written materials

00:47:23.360 or anything

00:47:24.760 it's as though

00:47:25.660 you and I

00:47:26.120 are in a world now

00:47:26.880 where we could talk

00:47:28.640 about some historical figure

00:47:30.200 who had a great influence

00:47:31.980 a generation and a half ago

00:47:34.040 we're talking about

00:47:35.000 JFK

00:47:35.740 or Martin Luther King Jr.

00:47:37.700 or somebody

00:47:38.760 who we never met

00:47:40.720 we may not have met

00:47:42.600 anyone who met that person

00:47:44.300 this person has

00:47:45.920 there's a kind of a residue

00:47:47.140 of their life's work

00:47:48.580 in the world

00:47:49.720 based on

00:47:50.980 almost entirely

00:47:52.220 verbal accounts

00:47:54.100 because again

00:47:55.200 we don't have the internet

00:47:56.080 we don't have

00:47:57.120 widespread literacy

00:47:58.760 and contemporaneous records

00:48:01.220 we just have

00:48:02.100 rumors of rumors

00:48:03.940 and now you and I

00:48:05.700 are going to put

00:48:06.500 pen to paper

00:48:07.660 or papyrus

00:48:09.700 and write an account

00:48:12.340 of exactly

00:48:13.980 what happened

00:48:14.720 in the last

00:48:16.040 years

00:48:17.240 and weeks

00:48:18.540 and days

00:48:19.260 of this person's life

00:48:20.960 that's the picture

00:48:22.440 at least I form

00:48:23.480 of what this

00:48:24.780 would look like

00:48:25.480 and the idea

00:48:26.360 that that kind

00:48:27.320 of effort

00:48:27.840 absent some

00:48:29.440 you know

00:48:30.000 direct line

00:48:31.440 to an omniscient

00:48:32.660 being who's just

00:48:33.400 simply telling you

00:48:34.100 what happened

00:48:34.540 that seems like

00:48:35.980 an all too human

00:48:37.180 enterprise

00:48:38.080 that if nothing else

00:48:39.640 will introduce

00:48:40.400 a fair amount

00:48:41.760 of error

00:48:42.260 and creative license

00:48:43.620 and whimsy

00:48:44.320 into the problem

00:48:45.140 if you'd like to

00:48:53.120 continue listening

00:48:53.720 to this conversation

00:48:54.580 you'll need to

00:48:55.540 subscribe

00:48:56.020 at samharris.org

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00:49:17.020 That's a big kind of

00:49:17.500 coming up

00:49:28.220 and I'll see you next time

00:49:30.400 on topic

00:49:30.660 available

00:49:31.260 front

00:49:32.920 and

00:49:33.100 that's

00:49:33.620 what we really

00:49:34.040 need

00:49:34.400 to

00:49:35.400 lie

00:49:36.140 to be

00:49:36.500 and

00:49:36.740 will be

00:49:37.680 open

00:49:37.860 and

00:49:38.240 we're

00:49:38.760 Squid

Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 01, 2018

#125 — What Is Christianity？

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