Was Jesus a False Prophet?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historical scholars for over a century have maintained that Jesus predicted that the end of history as we know it was to come in his own generation. Conservative Christians -- laypeople and scholars alike -- have insisted that this is a complete mis-portrayal of Jesus. And many people -- possibly most? -- believe that if Jesus really did preach this message, not only was he obviously wrong but also Christianity cannot possibly be true. A Jesus who was *demonstrably* mistaken about a central element of his preaching could not be a prophet of God, let alone the Savior of the world.
In this episode we consider the issue and its implication: did Jesus proclaim the imminent end of the world? If so, can Christian faith even be possible, let alone reasonable?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:06.8 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:12.9 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:20.6 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. |
| 0:22.4 | Let's begin. |
| 0:25.0 | Welcome back everybody to misquoting Jesus. |
| 0:28.0 | Today we are going to be talking about Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, |
| 0:31.9 | which we spoke about, I think, two weeks ago |
| 0:34.2 | because last week was your interview with the Ukrainian gentleman, |
| 0:37.9 | which I'm sure everybody enjoyed very much because it was fascinating. |
| 0:42.2 | We should kind of talk about how you are. |
| 0:44.1 | We haven't spoken for a couple of weeks. |
| 0:47.5 | Yeah, I'm doing well. |
| 0:48.7 | I'm doing well. |
| 0:49.6 | We're barreling now to the end of the semester. |
| 0:53.2 | And it's always the best of time and |
| 0:55.3 | worse of times for professors because you're not only trying to get to the end, but you're |
| 0:59.5 | thinking about all this grading you've got to do. And so every colleague I know in the universe, |
| 1:06.1 | even the ones who really, really love teaching do not like the grading. But the grading is really important because if you take it seriously, it's a way of trying |
| 1:15.4 | to guide students into how to develop their intellectual skills, their communication skills, |
| 1:21.5 | and so it's important to take what they hand in seriously. |
| 1:26.1 | But in this particular case, for me, this semester, I'm teaching this class on Jesus in scholarship and film. And one of their final writing assignments is, so just to explain this, they're reading a bunch of gospels from outside the New Testament and inside the New Testament. They're seeing a bunch of films about Jesus and we're analyzing all these. But their final writing assignment is they have to write their own gospel. And it's to be |
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