Interesting interview of Bart Ehrman by Daniel O. McClellan

[DispensatorMysteriorum]

This comment isn't in response to anything anyone has said here. Just an observation:

I've noticed that on the Internet it's really easy to vilify people who see things differently than we do; we make people into one dimensional caricatures. 

Dan and I were in the MTC at the same time, and then at BYU at the same time. He probably has no idea who I am, but I remember him. Here's what I remember: he actually exemplifies the gospel of Jesus Christ in how he treats others and how he carries himself. 

I don't agree with everything he says or his approach to some theological issues. But, I refuse to vilify him because I know how good of a man he actually is. 

[Hamilton Porter]

5 minutes ago, DispensatorMysteriorum said:

This comment isn't in response to anything anyone has said here. Just an observation:

I've noticed that on the Internet it's really easy to vilify people who see things differently than we do; we make people into one dimensional caricatures. 

Dan and I were in the MTC at the same time, and then at BYU at the same time. He probably has no idea who I am, but I remember him. Here's what I remember: he actually exemplifies the gospel of Jesus Christ in how he treats others and how he carries himself. 

I don't agree with everything he says or his approach to some theological issues. But, I refuse to vilify him because I know how good of a man he actually is. 

When you're making it big, there will always be people trying to tear you down.

[sunstoned]

On 5/8/2023 at 7:47 PM, Hamilton Porter said:

Are you an idiot? Is a question, not a statement.

Do you really feel the need to call people names to get your point across?

[pogi]

Sounds like Bart is not a big fan of the book of Revelation and questions the reasons for its acceptance into the canon in the first place.   Bart states, "If we cut him some slack" John gives hope that God will triumph in the end.  But "the imagery he uses to get there is not good.  It's a book that I think runs contrary to the actual message of Jesus himself."    Dan seemed to be in agreement with him on his points.  

Some other interesting points that Bart brings up that go against what we are taught in our church:

"John was talking about stuff in his own time.  He was not predicting stuff that would happen in thousands of years."

He states that  "people have to choose if they are going to accept this ideology of violence, or not."  He continues, "Jesus is against it, and John of Patmos is for it."

Interesting stuff.  I have never been a fan of the book and its vengeful and wrathful tones with gruesome torture of all non-Christians and many Christians.  That is the underlying message that Bart sees in all of the imagery.  It's hard to see anything else from those words, honestly.  How else could/should it be interpreted if we are to accept it as revealed truth?  Because the way Bart sees it goes against what we believe about God and what will happen to non-Christians, etc. 

Has the Book of revelation inspired more good in the world, or has it inspired more evil and confusion within fundamentalist and racist groups? 

 

Edited May 10, 2023 by pogi

[Hamilton Porter]

1 hour ago, pogi said:

That is the underlying message that Bart sees in all of the imagery.  It's hard to see anything else from those words, honestly.  How else could/should it be interpreted if we are to accept it as revealed truth?

Latter-day Saints will tell you either, (1) it's not translated correctly, or (2) they read it some other way.

 

[InCognitus]

3 hours ago, pogi said:

Sounds like Bart is not a big fan of the book of Revelation and questions the reasons for its acceptance into the canon in the first place. 

I can see why he would take that position based on some of the stories he told at the beginning of that interview alone.  People freak out about it and misinterpret it, BADLY.

3 hours ago, pogi said:

He states that  "people have to choose if they are going to accept this ideology of violence, or not." 

I get the concerns about the violence, and I also get the understanding that it is mostly about the state of things in John's time, up to a point.  But the ending is quite different, with New Jerusalem, the tree of life, etc., and so are the promises made to those who "overcome", since the book of Revelation contains some of the clearest depictions of human deification.  So there is some good in it too.  So it's a mixed bag.  Consequently, I think it's in our canon for a good reason.

[Nevo]

5 hours ago, pogi said:

Bart states, "If we cut him some slack" John gives hope that God will triumph in the end.  But "the imagery he uses to get there is not good.  It's a book that I think runs contrary to the actual message of Jesus himself."

Bart Ehrman wrote a book on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, so I was a bit surprised to hear him say this.

In my Come, Follow Me reading last week, I came across the following statements of Jesus (translation is David Bentley Hart's):

• "That slave who has known his lord's will, and has not made preparations or acted according to his will, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who has not known, but has done things worthy of a thrashing, will be beaten with few blows." (Luke 12:47–48)
• "I came to fling fire upon the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled." (Luke 12:49)
• "Do you think that I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division" (Luke 12:51)

This side of Jesus tends to be supressed in Sunday School lessons, but it's all over the scriptures.

[Saint Bonaventure]

5 hours ago, pogi said:

Sounds like Bart is not a big fan of the book of Revelation and questions the reasons for its acceptance into the canon in the first place.   Bart states, "If we cut him some slack" John gives hope that God will triumph in the end.  But "the imagery he uses to get there is not good.  It's a book that I think runs contrary to the actual message of Jesus himself."    Dan seemed to be in agreement with him on his points.  

Some other interesting points that Bart brings up that go against what we are taught in our church:

"John was talking about stuff in his own time.  He was not predicting stuff that would happen in thousands of years."

He states that  "people have to choose if they are going to accept this ideology of violence, or not."  He continues, "Jesus is against it, and John of Patmos is for it."

Interesting stuff.  I have never been a fan of the book and its vengeful and wrathful tones with gruesome torture of all non-Christians and many Christians.  That is the underlying message that Bart sees in all of the imagery.  It's hard to see anything else from those words, honestly.  How else could/should it be interpreted if we are to accept it as revealed truth?  Because the way Bart sees it goes against what we believe about God and what will happen to non-Christians, etc. 

Has the Book of revelation inspired more good in the world, or has it inspired more evil and confusion within fundamentalist and racist groups? 

 

Fundamentalist approaches get attention, but one of the oldest interpretive traditions is to consider Revelation liturgically, as a Mass. This tradition is significant to the Catholic and Orthodox churches. I think it is incredibly rich, spiritually, and this richness contributed to St. Augustine's arguments on behalf of its inclusion in the canon.

St. Augustine also pushed for the inclusion of the Letter to the Hebrews.

[Hamilton Porter]

58 minutes ago, Nevo said:

translation is David Bentley Hart's):

Is that translation good? I see educated Mormons with that on their shelves.

[Nevo]

18 minutes ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Is that translation good? I see educated Mormons with that on their shelves.

I like it. I was already a fan of Hart's writing, so I figured it would be good. The translation is a bit idiosyncratic but well-judged, I think. And the introduction, notes, and postscript are fantastic. I had the first edition, but ended up getting the second edition as well, just to have his latest thoughts on the text.

Here's an excerpt from the preface to the second edition:

Quote

In revisiting this translation, I soon discovered that I was once again experiencing many of the same things that had made writing the first version so strangely disturbing for me. Once more, I found myself in a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which—contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries—the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist.

It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation. And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand—just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days—and yet also always beyond reach.

And yet, as strange as that world now seems to us, what would have seemed far stranger to the people of that time was the extraordinary claim that the God who reigned on high, over this entire order of light and darkness, with all its radiant hierarchies of spirits and powers and its abysmal mysteries of demonic malice, had appeared in the form of a slave and died as a criminal, only then to be raised and revealed as the Lord of all things.

Whether one believes it or not, the very announcement of such a conviction in that world, in that age, was as singular an anomaly within the normal course of things, and within the ordinary frame of human history and culture, as there has ever been. I doubt any of us has every understood it nearly as well as we imagine. (x-xi)

 

[Saint Bonaventure]

11 hours ago, Nevo said:

Bart Ehrman wrote a book on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, so I was a bit surprised to hear him say this.

In my Come, Follow Me reading last week, I came across the following statements of Jesus (translation is David Bentley Hart's):

• "That slave who has known his lord's will, and has not made preparations or acted according to his will, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who has not known, but has done things worthy of a thrashing, will be beaten with few blows." (Luke 12:47–48)
• "I came to fling fire upon the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled." (Luke 12:49)
• "Do you think that I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division" (Luke 12:51)

This side of Jesus tends to be supressed in Sunday School lessons, but it's all over the scriptures.

Throwaway statements in interviews sometimes aren't fully considered by the person making them. That's true for Dr. Ehrman (and for any of us).

Consider this note on Luke 12:49 from the Sacra Pagina Commentary. It might be useful in a Sunday School discussion:

Quote

 

throw fire on the earth: The term translated “earth” (gē) could as easily be “land” here and in verse 51. The image recalls the prophet Elijah who drew down fire from the Lord against the prophets of Baal (1 Kgs 18:36–40) and also on the soldiers of King Ahaziah (2 Kgs 1:10, 12, 14). Jesus’ disciples wanted to exercise this sort of retaliation on the Samaritans (9:54) but he did not allow it. If the prophetic background governs the saying (found only in Luke and in a different form in Gospel of Thomas, 10), then Jesus desires the eschatological judgment that was promised by John: the tree not bearing fruit is to be thrown in the fire (3:9), the chaff is thrown into unquenchable fire (3:16). Fire as the instrument of judgment recurs in 17:29. On the other hand, Luke also associates it with the gift of the Spirit (3:16; Acts 2:3).

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, ed. Daniel J. Harrington, vol. 3, Sacra Pagina Series (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), 207.

 

 

[Stargazer]

On 5/9/2023 at 1:20 PM, DispensatorMysteriorum said:

Dan and I were in the MTC at the same time, and then at BYU at the same time. He probably has no idea who I am, but I remember him. Here's what I remember: he actually exemplifies the gospel of Jesus Christ in how he treats others and how he carries himself. 

He needs to see to his deportment, then. He's apt to accuse people he doesn't really know of being racist with no evidence whatsoever. Just because they disagree with him politically.

[Hamilton Porter]

1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

He needs to see to his deportment, then. He's apt to accuse people he doesn't really know of being racist with no evidence whatsoever. Just because they disagree with him politically.

Blake Ostler threatened to sue me for implying Trump supporters were racist.

Edited May 11, 2023 by Hamilton Porter
+ing

[Eschaton]

14 hours ago, Nevo said:

Bart Ehrman wrote a book on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, so I was a bit surprised to hear him say this.

In my Come, Follow Me reading last week, I came across the following statements of Jesus (translation is David Bentley Hart's):

• "That slave who has known his lord's will, and has not made preparations or acted according to his will, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who has not known, but has done things worthy of a thrashing, will be beaten with few blows." (Luke 12:47–48)
• "I came to fling fire upon the earth, and how I wish it was already kindled." (Luke 12:49)
• "Do you think that I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division" (Luke 12:51)

This side of Jesus tends to be supressed in Sunday School lessons, but it's all over the scriptures.

I'm not sure what his view on those particular passages would be, but Ehrman has said before that perhaps 20% of the sayings attributed to Jesus might plausibly go back to Jesus himself. 

Luke is interesting, it has the most concern for the poor, and in fact says that being poor is defacto moral and being rich is defacto immoral. It assigns rewards and punishments in the coming kingdom based on economic status. But there is also that divisive material you mention. 

Edited May 11, 2023 by Eschaton

[DispensatorMysteriorum]

4 hours ago, Stargazer said:

He needs to see to his deportment, then. He's apt to accuse people he doesn't really know of being racist with no evidence whatsoever. Just because they disagree with him politically.

I can't speak to that as I haven't seen it. But, if he's done that, then I agree with your assessment. 

The reality is that we are all complicated people. We can be both Christlike in profound ways in some areas and not at all in others. 

[Hamilton Porter]

15 hours ago, Saint Bonaventure said:

Fundamentalist approaches get attention, but one of the oldest interpretive traditions is to consider Revelation liturgically, as a Mass. This tradition is significant to the Catholic and Orthodox churches. I think it is incredibly rich, spiritually, and this richness contributed to St. Augustine's arguments on behalf of its inclusion in the canon.

St. Augustine also pushed for the inclusion of the Letter to the Hebrews.

Thanks for your perspective. You really enrich this forum. Part of LDS temple ceremony is Revelations-derived. I wonder why Syriac Christians didn't include Revelations in their canon.

Dan is most concerned with Christian nationalists. I don't know if you're American or not, but the FBI named white nationalists as largest terrorist threat facing our nation. They think they are a persecuted group, so something the Revelations would be really nuclear if it falls into their hands. 

[Saint Bonaventure]

7 hours ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Thanks for your perspective. You really enrich this forum. Part of LDS temple ceremony is Revelations-derived. I wonder why Syriac Christians didn't include Revelations in their canon.

In the East, there were more questions about its authorship, and so it was read less frequently and with less confidence. St. John Chrysostom, who was possibly the greatest homilist in Christianity after Jesus Christ, questioned the Book of Revelation. He was very influential. 

Perhaps there is a book in the Latter-day Saint canon that is considered, even if unofficially, a little less credible? Or that is cited, expounded upon, or even read less frequently than are other canonical books?

7 hours ago, Hamilton Porter said:

Dan is most concerned with Christian nationalists. I don't know if you're American or not, but the FBI named white nationalists as largest terrorist threat facing our nation. They think they are a persecuted group, so something the Revelations would be really nuclear if it falls into their hands. 

 

[Hamilton Porter]

13 minutes ago, Saint Bonaventure said:

Perhaps there is a book in the Latter-day Saint canon that is considered, even if unofficially, a little less credible? Or that is cited, expounded upon, or even read less frequently than are other canonical books?

Yeah songs of Solomon. Joseph Smith said it wasn't inspired. Great book though, I love it, even if it's irrelevant to my devotion.

[InCognitus]

1 hour ago, Saint Bonaventure said:

In the East, there were more questions about its authorship, and so it was read less frequently and with less confidence. St. John Chrysostom, who was possibly the greatest homilist in Christianity after Jesus Christ, questioned the Book of Revelation. He was very influential. 

Just imagine Handel's Messiah without the book of Revelation.  "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever."
(Revelation 11:15)  "Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah" (etc.)

[Stargazer]

On 5/11/2023 at 2:41 PM, Hamilton Porter said:

Blake Ostler threatened to sue me for implying Trump supporters were racist.

Did he now?! Interesting! And a little over the top. Simple insult shouldn't be taken to the courts, as a general rule.

As for Dan, he accused me of being a racist merely because I failed to call Trump a racist. In a Facebook rant-fest on his timeline, where my sole contribution in the thread was to fact-check one of his fellow ranters on an unrelated topic, he went unhinged because my fact-check failed to call Trump a racist along with the rest of the mob. Then he followed me to my own timeline uninvited, where he again accused me of being a racist. After my real-life friends tore him a new one for his deranged ranting, he first reduced the charge to "racist enabler" and then gave up and went away.

Nevermind. We're not Facebook friends any longer, as he un-friended me. It's just as well. He wouldn't want to be associated with racists. Even imaginary ones.

[Stargazer]

22 hours ago, DispensatorMysteriorum said:

I can't speak to that as I haven't seen it. But, if he's done that, then I agree with your assessment. 

My experience is personal, and didn't merely witness it, I was the target.

22 hours ago, DispensatorMysteriorum said:

The reality is that we are all complicated people. We can be both Christlike in profound ways in some areas and not at all in others. 

That is true. I try to remember that. But one loses some degree of trust in any person with such extreme views. 

[Hamilton Porter]

This is funny.

https://youtu.be/XTEDqGosHmE

[Stargazer]

19 hours ago, Hamilton Porter said:

This is funny.

https://youtu.be/XTEDqGosHmE

Wow, yes. Dan took him to task.