Scholar Bart Ehrman, 'Lost Christianities'

DATE July 9, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Elaine Pagels on her book "Beyond Belief: The Secret
Gospel of Thomas"
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily
News, filling in for Terry Gross.

Our guest Elaine Pagels is one of the leading scholars of early Christianity.
She's a professor of religion at Princeton University. Her book "The Gnostic
Gospels," which won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Award,
focused on the secret writings from the early centuries of Christianity. They
contained sayings, rituals and dialogues attributed to Jesus and his
disciples. These writings were suppressed by the church and kept out of the
canon. In 1945 they were discovered buried in Egypt, along with other texts
from the early Christian era. Terry spoke to Elaine Pagels last year. Her
book, "Beyond Belief," on one of the early texts, the Gospel of Thomas, has
just been released in paperback. Thomas is the apostle who was described as
Doubting Thomas in the Gospel of John. Pagels thinks that the Gospel of
Thomas actually preceded John's. She believes the Gospel of John was written
in opposition to Thomas and that the followers of Thomas and John were rivals.

Professor ELAINE PAGELS (Author, "Beyond Belief"): John is a kind of
polemical picture of Thomas in which he appears as somebody who has no faith,
who doubts everything, who understands nothing and who basically has no
authority as an apostle. The Gospels of Luke and Matthew also mention Thomas,
but there he's just one of the disciples. So when you see that in the Gospel
of John he's not only mentioned, he becomes a full-fledged character and he
becomes a totally negative character, you begin to realize that whoever wrote
the Gospel of John was writing a polemic against that teacher and his
teachings.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Let's talk about some of the things that are revelatory about the Gospel of
Thomas. He describes every person as having some light of God within them,
that God isn't just within Jesus; it's within everyone. How does he express
that?

Prof. PAGELS: What's remarkable about the Gospel of Thomas is that when it
asks the question, `Who is Jesus?' it suggests, as also does the Gospel of
John, that he's a manifestation of the divine light that came into being in
the beginning of time. And the Good News, or the Gospel, is that so are you,
right? That everyone comes from that same divine light. According to the
Gospel of Thomas, Jesus teaches his disciples and says, `If they say to you,
"Who are you?" say, "We come from the light, the place where the light came
into being." And if they say, you know, "Who is your father?" say, "We are
children of the light," children of the living Father.' So this is a
teaching, a Gospel, about all beings, all humans coming from that divine
light.

GROSS: And let me quote something else from the Gospel of Thomas that you
quote in your book. "The kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you
come to know yourselves, then you will be known and you will see that it is
you who are the children of the living Father. But if you will not know
yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty." What
does that mean to you?

Prof. PAGELS: This Gospel interprets the kingdom of God, which is the topic
of Jesus' preaching, according to Matthew and Luke, and interprets that as a
way of coming to know God and to know yourself in relation to God, know
yourself as coming from that divine source. It also suggests, however, that
the divine energy, which is the source of all life, isn't just in human beings
but is actually in the whole universe. It's not just inside of you, but it's
outside of you.

GROSS: Is that kind of similar to Jewish mysticism, to Hebrew mysticism?

Prof. PAGELS: It's strikingly similar to Jewish mysticism. In fact, you
know, so much of what we think of as kabalistic tradition, which comes into
literature about a thousand years after this, is based on an image of all
being coming from the divine source, which is usually depicted in Jewish
mysticism, as you rightly say, as light, as the divine light, and is the being
which brings everything into being. And so this text looks interestingly like
a kind of very early form of Jewish mysticism. But it's hard to track that
because we have almost nothing written like it that early.

GROSS: Now you also say that the Gospel of Thomas rebukes those who try to
find God by just trying to follow Jesus. What does he say about that?

Prof. PAGELS: Well, this text claims to be the secret teaching of Jesus, not
the public teaching. The public teaching of Matthew and Mark and Luke is
about following the injunctions of Jesus, you know, believing in Jesus and so
forth. And this text claims to be for people who have gone to a different
level. And so the Gospel of Thomas never speaks about believing in Jesus
except in one place where the disciples don't understand. And they say to
Jesus, `Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.' It's as though
they're sort of desperate to say, `Tell us something and we'll believe it.'
But here the emphasis is not on belief at all. It's as though after you first
come to this movement with belief, you have to let go of that and find some
kind of deeper understanding.

GROSS: And that deeper understanding gets back to the sense of that light
being within everybody and everything.

Prof. PAGELS: Yes. So that in this text, there's a kind of irony. Very
often when the disciples keep asking Jesus questions and he keeps throwing the
questions back to them--for example, there's a saying in which the disciples
say, `Well, tell us what to do,' you know, `What diet shall we observe? Shall
we give to charity? How shall we pray?' Now if you read Matthew and Luke,
Jesus tells them. He says, `When you pray, say, "Our Father in heaven,"' I
mean, he gives them an actual prayer, you know, the one called the Lord's
Prayer. And he says, `When you fast, do this. When you give alms, do it this
way.'

In this text, he simply turns to them the question and says, `Do not tell lies
and do not do what you hate, for everything is known before your Father in
heaven.' So you think, `Well, who knows when you're lying? Who knows what
you hate? You're the only person. You're the expert.' So you have to ask
yourself that question. And then the questions about what do you do flow from
what you understand about yourself.

GROSS: Now you've come to think that the Gospel of John was written in
response to the Gospel of Thomas. What are some of the points that John makes
in his Gospel that contradict what Thomas says?

Prof. PAGELS: What's fascinating is that the Gospel of John in the New
Testament and the Gospel of Thomas have so much in common. They both talk
about Jesus as the divine light, you know, the one who reveals the divine
light that was in the beginning. But it's very interesting when you start to
compare them in detail because the Gospel of Thomas will have Jesus say, `You,
too, are from the light. You, too, come from that source in God originally.'
The Gospel of John, by contrast, has Jesus say, `I come from above, you come
from below. I am not of this world, you are from this world,' you know. And
he goes on to say in chapter eight, `I am the light of the world. Whoever
follows me will not die in sins. But if you do not follow me, you will die in
your sins.' And that whole idea in the Gospel of John, so familiar to
Christians, that, you know, you're going to die in sin if you don't believe in
Jesus, is completely absent from this text.

GROSS: Is it fair to say that the Gospel of John is now considered the most
important of the Gospels?

Prof. PAGELS: That's a really interesting question, Terry, because I don't
know if most people would say it's the most important. but it certainly I
think has become the lens through which people read them all. For example,
Matthew, Mark and Luke don't suggest that Jesus was actually a divine person,
although we usually read them as if they did say that. I think the reason
people usually read them as if they said that is that they read them through
the lens of the Gospel of John, which basically says that Jesus is God in
person. And that's very radical. That's one thing I learned in this study
is that that message about Jesus being God in person is quite particular to
the Gospel of John. And it's written as a sort of counter to the teaching of
Thomas that, in fact, well, yes, Jesus is the Son of God, but you, too, are
also the child of God when you come to recognize who you really are.

GROSS: OK. Well, it's very interesting, you know, that the Gospel of John,
which says that Jesus, you know, was God, that Christ died for our sins, that
those who don't believe in Jesus will be condemned to eternal death...

Prof. PAGELS: Yes.

GROSS: ...that is the Gospel that has lived; whereas the Gospel of Thomas,
the more mystical Gospel in which that sense of God, that illumination is in
everybody and everything, that Gospel was censored. It was ordered to be
destroyed. What was so offensive to the powers of the time? I mean, what was
offensive and who was it offensive to?

Prof. PAGELS: It's hard to know, you know, who might have actually censored
this text because it happened very early and before we have any records of
that. But it seems that this teaching that sort of everyone can find the
light within is not a very good basis for founding a kind of a church which
rests on the premise that, you know, you must believe in Jesus, you must
follow the church, this is the only true way. The teaching about, you know,
light found in everyone, for example, is something you find in the Society of
Friends founded by George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. And it's not very
good for institution building. And that may have a great deal to do with why
that kind of egalitarian message, if you like, is not included in the New
Testament as we know it, because that collection was born out of struggle and
persecution and strife as this movement was trying to survive in a very
dangerous world.

DAVIES: Princeton religion Professor Elaine Pagels, author of the book
"Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas," speaking with Terry Gross.
We'll hear more of their interview after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: Let's get back to Terry's interview with Elaine Pagels, author of the
book "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas."

Now you credit Irenaeus--Am I saying his name right?

Prof. PAGELS: Yes. Irenaeus.

GROSS: ...who was the bishop of Lyon at the end of the second century, with
promoting John as the true Gospel and excluding Thomas and other early
Gospels. Who was he and how did he get this power to decide what the true
Gospels were?

Prof. PAGELS: Well, it's fascinating. He really had very little power. He
was the leader of a persecuted Christian group in what is now France, and he
was simply trying to consolidate the group of Christians that he knew. But
what he did was he was the first one, as far as we know, to say that John had
to be connected with the other Gospels, it had to be the way we read them all,
you know? And then he goes on to say, `And not only do you have to read the
Gospel of John, you have to read it my way.' And his way meant that Jesus is
actually God. And that, you know, later in a completely unexpected turn of
events when the Roman Empire itself became Christian, the emperor was
converted to this new movement, that became the group of Gospels that Emperor
Constantine called the legitimate and holy Catholic church. It was that group
of churches that were very well-organized, that were founded on certain
beliefs and certain kinds of structure that became orthodox Christianity as we
know it.

Irenaeus in his own time wasn't powerful, but his idea, so to speak, was the
wave of the future, which was used when this movement became not only
legitimate but actually dominant in the Roman Empire.

GROSS: You say it was Athanasius--Am I saying his name right?...

Prof. PAGELS: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: ...in the year 367, who was the bishop of Alexandria, who ordered all
the secret Gospels to be burned, and he named the books that are now in the
New Testament as being the only correct Gospels. Who was he and what gave him
that power?

Prof. PAGELS: What's quite remarkable is that, you know, we think of the New
Testament collection as coming out of the beginning of the movement, but
actually it's nearly four centuries before we find a collection which is
declared canonical. That only happened when you had powerful bishops--in
fact, bishops backed by military and police power--when you finally had a
Christian empire. And Athanasius did that as he was trying to consolidate all
the Christian groups over Egypt. There were very diverse groups and diverse
authorities and diverse teachers, and he wanted to make sure they were all
consolidated under his leadership as the single bishop who was most powerful
in Egypt. And this collection, he thought, would work for that purpose, so he
basically said, `These are the springs of salvation. These 27 books are the
right ones. All those other books, get rid of them. They're secret. They're
apocryphal. They teach terrible blasphemy.'

GROSS: Are you suggesting that perhaps one of the reasons why leaders of the
church chose the Gospel of John over the Gospel of Thomas is that the Gospel
of John taught to be followers of the leader Jesus? And if you're a leader of
the church, if other people are followers, it gives you more power. Are you
suggesting that?

Prof. PAGELS: I think that's certainly part of it. It also--the Gospel of
John has a very simple message, as you just quoted it. I mean, think how many
Christians--you see on billboards John 3:16: `God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son. Whoever believes on him has everlasting life, and whoever
doesn't believe in him is condemned forever.' So it's a very clear message.
You know, `This is the way to be saved. We have it. You can join it, but you
must join this church. And in doing so, you become one of God's children.
Anybody outside is eternally damned.' That's a very clear, concise message,
and it has proven powerful from the beginning to now.

GROSS: I'm sure that some people listening now consider what you're saying to
be a bit sacrilegious because you're challenging some of the basic assumptions
of a lot of people within the Christian church, and you're saying that these
challenges are based on history; they're based on scholarship. But that's
going to sound sacrilegious.

Prof. PAGELS: Well, it is startling. I mean, for many people, particularly
in this country, thinking about religion is kind of counterintuitive. It's
almost something you're not supposed to do. So, yes, saying that the creed
that most Christians accept, many Christians accept, the Nicene Creed or the
New Testament list of books, was actually constructed at some time, was built
up, was decided upon, you know, there were books left in and books left out,
and there were huge arguments about what should be believed and what shouldn't
be believed. When you look at the history of it, it doesn't look at all like
some obvious grand scheme, you know. It looks like a struggling process of
building a movement and an institution. So I guess anyone who begins to look
beyond the surface of it will find that trouble. If you look at it as a
historian at all, that's what you see.

GROSS: You know, you were talking about beliefs. I know if somebody says to
you `Are you a Christian?' and you say `What does that mean?' they'll ask you
if you believe certain things. And one of the things they might ask you if
you believe is `Do you believe in the virgin birth?' Where does that
originate?

Prof. PAGELS: It's a fascinating question about the virgin birth. If you
look at the earliest account of Jesus--that's the Gospel of Mark, this gospel
says nothing about the birth of Jesus. It begins with his baptism. In
chapter six, however, Jesus is called the son of Mary, the son of Miriam. And
what that suggests in a culture in which children are named for their fathers
is that he may not have had a father for whom to be named. We know that he
was accused of being illegitimate by his opponents, and his followers defended
his legitimacy, of course; not only that but his royal lineage. The Gospel of
Matthew traces him to the house of David and all the way back to King David.
And the Gospel of Luke actually traces him back to Adam, which is quite
remarkable. But both of them seem to have a concern about the irregularity of
the birth of Jesus.

So we really don't know much about the birth of Jesus. What we know
historically, as my colleague Raymond Brown, who is a Roman Catholic scholar
who studied this, is that he was probably born too early to be legitimate, and
his detractors said that he was illegitimate, and his admirers said that it
was a miracle. What I think Matthew and Luke did was go back to the Book of
Isaiah, which they believed had prophesied many things about the coming of
Jesus. And when they came to the verse in chapter seven that said, `Behold, a
young woman shall conceive and bear a son and call his name Immanuel,' which
means God with us, they were reading not in Hebrew, which would have said what
I just said, but they were reading, apparently, in Greek.

And the Greek reads, `Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.' And I
would imagine that if Matthew and Luke were distressed by allegations that
Jesus was illegitimate, and with their own convictions that he was, after all,
the divinely appointed son of God, they would have said, `Aha, this explains
it.' There was a prophecy that a virgin would conceive and bear a son, and
that must have been what happened. And so each of them constructed an account
of how that might have happened.

GROSS: What would be your interpretation of that Greek text with the word
`virgin'?

Prof. PAGELS: Well, the word, the Greek text, is a translation of the Hebrew
in which the word, the Hebrew `almah,' young woman, is translated `parthenos,'
which is an all right translation, but it means sort of unmarried woman, you
know, presumed to be virgin. And so it's that discrepancy in the text that I
think opens up the possibility that Mary conceived in some miraculous way.

GROSS: What a huge discrepancy that ends up being.

Prof. PAGELS: Well, it's remarkable, and it was actually noted in the second
century by people who thought that the whole idea was based on a
mistranslation. But it becomes very important for the history of
Christianity. However, I don't just, you know, want to debunk this as a
historian by any means because I think that the power of Christianity has to
do with its enormous symbolic appeal to a deep sense of truth, which goes far
beyond the literal.

GROSS: Do you think as more and more historical work is done on the Gospel of
Thomas, and as it maybe becomes more familiar to Christians, that it might
become a more accepted part of the Christian tradition?

Prof. PAGELS: Seems to me that the people who read the Gospel of Thomas often
intuitively love it, and I would be very surprised if it didn't become more
part of the tradition. I really wish that I could have included the whole of
the Gospel of Thomas in this book because it's a marvelous, succinct, short
collection of sayings which are enormously powerful.

GROSS: Would you like to leave us with a few more lines from it?

Prof. PAGELS: Yes. The lines that I love right now are the ones in which
Jesus says, `I am the light that is before all things. I am all things. All
things come forth from me. Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the
rock and you will find me there.'

GROSS: Well, Elaine Pagels, thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. PAGELS: Well, thank you.

DAVIES: Elaine Pagels is the author of "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of
Thomas," now out in paperback. She's a professor of religion at Princeton
University.

I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits)

DAVIES: Coming up, ancient forms of Christianity that were reformed or
suppressed. We'll talk with religion scholar Bart Ehrman. Also, a review of
the new film "Anchorman." It opens across the country today.

(Soundbite of music)

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Interview: Bart Ehrman discusses neglected and recently
rediscovered ancient Christian writings
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Daily News filling in
for Terry Gross.

Christianity in its many modern forms is based on the 27 books of the New
Testament. But we get conflicting views of Christ's life and teachings from
the recently rediscovered ancient Gospels that were excluded from the canon.

Bart Ehrman is a scholar of neglected and recently rediscovered ancient
Christian writings. He has two recent books. "Lost Scriptures" is a
collection of writings from books that didn't make it into the New Testament.
Some of the translations are his own. In the book "Lost Christianities,"
Ehrman explores what these non-canonical writings reveal about the various
forms of Christian faith and practice in the second and third centuries.
Ehrman chairs the religious studies department at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Terry spoke to him in December.

TERRY GROSS, host:

Many of the non-canonical works that you've collected and written about in
your two new books belong to three different schools of thought. Let's talk
about what those three different schools are. Let's start with the Ebionites.
Who were they?

Professor BART EHRMAN (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Author):
The Ebionites were Jewish Christians. They started out as Jews who followed
Jewish customs. They were born Jewish, probably followed Jewish customs such
as circumcision, observance of the Sabbath, kosher food laws and such. But
these Jews had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They accepted
Jesus as the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in
fulfillment of the Jewish law, and so they understood that to follow Jesus, a
person needs to be Jewish.

That meant that the Gentiles, the non-Jews, converting to the faith, according
to the Ebionites, had to become Jewish. The men had to be circumcised, and
men and women had to keep kosher and observe Sabbath and such. And so they
were a Jewish group within early Christianity.

GROSS: So they didn't see Christianity as a break from their Jewish faith,
just as a new development within it.

Prof. EHRMAN: Yeah, they saw Christianity as the fulfillment of the
expectations of Judaism, and they maintained since Jesus was the Jewish
Messiah sent from the Jewish God, that obviously this is still a Jewish
religion. And so they retained the Old Testament as their Scriptures and had
other scriptures that did not eventually make it into the canon, but other
gospels, for example, that they said were inspired and authoritative that
emphasized the Jewishness of Christianity.

GROSS: Now what about the Marcionites?

Prof. EHRMAN: The Marcionites stand at the other end of the spectrum
theologically from the Ebionites. The Marcionites followed a teacher from the
second century named Marcion, who was a famous theologian, philosopher who had
as his hero the apostle Paul. Paul had said that a person is made right with
God apart from the Jewish law, and Marcion pushed this to an extreme, saying
that there's a difference between the law on the one hand and the gospel on
the other hand; that the law is given by God in the Old Testament, it's a
harsh law that nobody can follow, and so there's a penalty for not following
the law, which is death.

This harsh, vengeful God of the Old Testament is contrasted with the God of
Jesus, who is understood to be loving and merciful, who's come to save people
from their sins rather than to condemn them for their sins. Marcion concluded
therefore that there are, in fact, two different Gods. There's the God of the
Old Testament and the God of Jesus and Paul. And so he wasn't a monotheist.
He believed in two Gods, and he rejected all things Jewish as coming from this
other God, the wrathful God of the Old Testament.

GROSS: Do you think that there's anything from that basic premise that
survived into the canon?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, the hero of Marcion, of course, is the apostle Paul, as
I said, and Paul's writings form a central component within the New Testament.
Now Paul has more books attributed to him than any other author of the New
Testament. And I think, in fact, that this Marcionite view continues on in
some churches unknowingly today, where people continue to talk about there
being a difference between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New
Testament God of love. That was the original view propounded by Marcion.

GROSS: One of the groups that some of these writings fall under is the
Gnostics. Who are the Gnostics?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, the Gnostics are a little bit hard to describe because
there are a number of early Christian sects that scholars have lumped together
under that term, `Gnostic.' The term `Gnostic' comes from a Greek word,
`gnosis,' spelled with a G, G-N-O-S-I-S, gnosis, which means `knowledge.'
These people are called Gnostics because despite the differences among them,
they all emphasized that knowledge is the way to salvation.

The basic Gnostic system appears to have maintained that this world we live
in, this material world, is not the creation of the one true God, but in fact
is a cosmic disaster that happened and that people are trapped spirits,
spirits that have been entrapped here in human bodies and need to escape this
evil material world. And the way they escape this evil material world is by
acquiring the proper knowledge, the gnosis, necessary for salvation. In these
Gnostic religions, for many of them Christ is the one who comes from heaven to
reveal this knowledge that can set people free from bondage to their bodies.

GROSS: Let's talk about some of these early books and what some of their
different interpretations are. Let's start with the divinity of Jesus. What
do the different sects of Christianity that these books are from say about the
divinity of Jesus? Is he the Son of God? Is he divine himself? Is he merely
a man?

Prof. EHRMAN: This was one of the hottest debated points in early
Christianity. Today, of course, Christians tend to say that Jesus is both
divine and human, both God and man. But in early Christianity, there were
wide-ranging debates over who exactly Jesus was. This group called the
Ebionites, this group of Jewish Christians, maintained that Jesus was
completely human and only human; that he was born to the sexual union of
Joseph and Mary, that he was like the rest of us, only he was more righteous.
And since he was more righteous than the rest of us, God chose him to be his
son and appointed a task to him, to be the one who would die for the sins of
others. So in that system, Jesus is completely human and not at all divine.

Contrast that with the Marcionite Christians, who maintained that Jesus was
completely divine. He was one who came from the good God to save people from
the wrathful God of the Old Testament, and he didn't belong to the God of the
Old Testament who created this world. Since he didn't belong to the God who
created this world, he couldn't be part of the creation itself, which means
for the Marcionites he was never born. In fact, the Marcionites maintain that
he descended from heaven as a full-grown human in the appearance of human
flesh so that he was, in fact, a phantasm, fully divine and only seeming to be
human.

GROSS: What about the Gnostic texts?

Prof. EHRMAN: The Gnostics have a particularly interesting understanding of
it because they understand that there's something divine and human about
Jesus, and so what they maintain is that Jesus Christ is two things: That
Jesus is a man like other humans, who was born into this world, who was a
righteous man, and the Christ is a divine being that comes down from heaven to
inhabit the body of Jesus, so that the Christ is different from Jesus. The
Christ is a divine being inhabiting Jesus' body during his ministry. That's
why he doesn't start doing any miracles until after his baptism for these
people, because that's when the divine Christ came into him.

And then at the end of his life, since the divine element cannot suffer, since
it's divine, Jesus at the end cries out, `My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?'; literally, `My God, my God, why have you left me behind?' It's
because the divine element at that point, according to the Gnostics, had left
Jesus and returned to its heavenly abode. So for them, Jesus Christ was two
things. There's a separation between the Jesus and the Christ.

GROSS: How do the early sects of Christianity explain the birth of Jesus?
Are there other virgin birth stories in the other early sects?

Prof. EHRMAN: Some of the early sects maintain that Jesus was born of a
virgin, and even in what I would call proto-Orthodox circles, in other words,
the circles that held to the views that eventually became Orthodox, even in
these proto-Orthodox circles, there are traditions about Jesus' miraculous
birth that are somewhat different from the traditions we find in the New
Testament.

There's a very interesting early text called the proto-Gospel of James which
is allegedly written by Jesus' own brother, James, in which there's an account
of Mary giving birth, and when she gives birth, Joseph, narrating it in the
first person, actually sees time stand still. He sees the sheep aren't moving
in the field and birds aren't flying through the air and humans are frozen in
space, just as the Son of God is being born.

Joseph goes off then to find a midwife in order to assist with the delivery.
But when the midwife arrives, the child's already been miraculously born. The
midwife doesn't believe it, however, and decides that she needs to give a
physical inspection of Mary, a postpartum physical inspection, to see if, in
fact, she really was a virgin. And she gives her a postpartum inspection, and
it turns out not to have been a good thing because then her hand starts
burning off in judgment for disbelieving that the virgin has given birth.
Jesus, then, the infant Jesus, ends up healing her hand, so it all works out
well in the end.

This has to do with the idea that Mary continued to be a virgin even after
Jesus, as is a doctrine, for example, in the Roman Catholic Church that Mary
was a perpetual virgin.

GROSS: And what about Jesus' death and resurrection? How do the early sects
that you were describing describe his death, and do they believe in his
resurrection?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, you know, that's a really good question. These different
groups had different understandings of the death and the resurrection. There
were some groups, of course, who said that Jesus' death is what brings about
the salvation of the world. That would be the proto-Orthodox view. There
were other people who said that Jesus died, but his death had nothing to do
with the salvation of the world. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, these 114
sayings of Jesus that appear to be Gnostic in their orientation--they think
that they way to have eternal life is by understanding Jesus' secret
teachings. His death has no role to play in salvation.

There were some Gnostic groups that maintained that when Jesus died, it was
just the man Jesus who died, that the Christ had left him to die alone on the
cross so that the divine element didn't suffer at all. There are other
Christians who maintain that since Jesus was fully divine and not really
human, that he didn't have a flesh-and-blood body, so that he didn't die at
all, that it was just an appearance to deceive the enemies of Jesus, the
demons and the devil. But in fact, Jesus himself never actually died.

DAVIES: Bart Ehrman speaking with Terry Gross. He's the author of "Lost
Scriptures," books that did not make it into the New Testament and of "Lost
Christianties: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew."

More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: Let's get back to Terry's interview with Bart Ehrman, a scholar of
early Christianity and the ancient text that didn't make it into the New
Testament. He said the 27 books that did make it into the canon were chosen
by the second half of the fourth century.

GROSS: Were the texts that didn't make it into the canon suppressed?

Prof. EHRMAN: Yeah. Well, once it was decided which books were to be
included, there was also a decision that the heretical books had to be
destroyed and taken away. That's why we often don't have the original
writings of many of these early Christian sects, because they were destroyed
on the order of some of the bishops.

We do have discussions in early church writings about how to decide which
books to include, and the early Christians seemed to follow four major
criteria for judgment. First, a book had to be ancient if it were going to be
included. Secondly, related to the idea of it having to be ancient, a book
had to be written by an apostle or a companion of the apostles.

Now some of the books were anonymous, which created problems. Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John, for example, don't claim to be written by people named Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John. That's the titles they have, but whoever gave them these
titles was trying to say that, `This is the Gospel according to Matthew.'

What happened is Christians in the early second century started saying, `These
anonymous books actually are connected with apostles.' And so they attached
names of apostles or companions of the apostles to these anonymous books so
they could be accepted, because books had to be not only ancient, but also
apostolic.

The third thing is that books had to have widespread usage throughout the
world of Christendom in order to be accepted into the canon. And fourth, and
finally, books had to be orthodox; meaning they had to agree with the correct
understanding of the faith to be included. So that a book like the Gospel of
Peter or the Gospel of Thomas ended up be excluded precisely because these
books were understood not to represent the Orthodox faith.

GROSS: The group that you describe as proto-Orthodox in early Christianity is
the group that's closest to what is in the New Testament. Who was this group?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, it's a somewhat amorphous group in that we know of some
people who belonged, but it's probably a fairly large group with many
differences among them. We call them the proto-Orthodox because they
represent the points of view that eventually became dominant in early
Christianity, that eventually became Orthodox. But these people were living
before this victory that they won, and so we call them proto-Orthodox.

These are people like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome and Tertullian
and names that many students of early Christianity would be familiar with,
although they're not household names any longer. These were people who
insisted on certain theological points of view. They insisted that there's
only one God--there is not two or 12 or 30; that Jesus is his son, who's both
human and divine. He's not just human, he's not just divine; he's both.
These are people who developed the idea of the Trinity, that God is in three
persons. There's only one God, but this God is manifest in three persons.
And they're the Christians who decided how the churches would be run. They
insisted that there would be bishops over churches and eventually that there
would be bishops over bishops, and eventually that there'd be one bishop over
all, the bishop of Rome, who eventually then becomes the pope.

So these are the people who insisted on points of view that became dominant in
Christianity and that determined the shape of Christianity for the ages to
come down to our own day.

GROSS: How did you become interested in the early non-canonical texts?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, when I was in graduate school, two things were happening
that sparked my interest. One was I became increasingly interested in the
diversity of the New Testament itself. I had started out as an evangelical
Christian, thinking that the text of Scripture was completely inspired and
without any error. But as I started working on these texts, reading them in
the original Greek language, studying them intensely, I started finding
wide-ranging differences among these books. And soon, I started seeing
contradictions in the texts, and I started seeing that these different authors
had different perspectives, including perspectives that were at odds with each
other within the pages of the New Testament.

At the same time I was finding that, I became interested in other books not
found in the New Testament. I started studying the Gospel of Thomas, the
Gospel of Peter, books that are called the Apostolic Fathers, such as the
Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabus. And I began to realize that
Christianity outside the canon was even more diverse than the Christianity
within the canon. And so these two elements of my study are what really
sparked the interest that culminated in these two books that I've written.

GROSS: In your own studies, when you realized that there was such diversity
of reporting among the different early texts about Christ, did that become a
crisis of faith for you?

Prof. EHRMAN: Yeah. For me personally, it did lead to a crisis of faith,
because unlike a lot of my friends who were studying the same material, my
friends didn't have the kind of evangelical belief in the inerrancy of the
Bible that I had. Their faith was rooted in something else other than a
particular doctrine about the Bible.

But since my faith had been rooted in evangelical teachings about the Bible,
once I started realizing that there were discrepancies in the Bible that I
simply couldn't resolve without having to do a lot of very fancy footwork, I
decided that the Bible wasn't the inerrant rule of faith and practice that I
had assumed. And for me, this led to a real crisis, an emotional crisis of
faith.

But it's interesting that my friends at the time--I happened to be at
seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary. My friends at the time learned
everything I learned and would agree with most of the things that I think and
continue to be solid believers. But it's because their faith wasn't built on
some understanding of the inerrancy of the Bible.

GROSS: Can you speak at all about how you resolved that crisis of faith, or
how your understanding of Jesus Christ has changed?

Prof. EHRMAN: Well, I think what I've come to is a realization that
Christianity, above all, is a historical religion that makes historical claims
about a historical person, about Jesus of Nazareth. So it seems to me that
whatever a person happens to believe theologically that Christians are
obligated to consider their religion historically. And that historical
knowledge can threaten faith, and it may threaten to change a person's faith.
But it's not a bad thing, because this is a historical religion and historical
knowledge can deepen the understanding of this religion precisely because it's
such a historical faith.

GROSS: Well, Bart Ehrman, thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. EHRMAN: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

DAVIES: Bart Ehrman, speaking with Terry Gross last December. He has two
recent books, "Lost Christianities" and "Lost Scriptures." Ehrman chairs the
religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.

Coming up, we turn to the movies. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Will Ferrell's new movie "Anchorman"
DAVE DAVIES, host:

Will Ferrell stars in the new comedy "Anchorman," about a local TV news show
set in the '70s. Ferrell co-wrote the script with director and former
"Saturday Night Live" head writer Adam McKay. Christina Applegate co-stars as
a rival reporter eyeing an anchor spot. David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

Watching "Anchorman," I flash back to a time when I was a kid. I was in a
restaurant and who sits down at the next table but the local station's
anchorman and anchorwoman. Today we'd call them anchorpersons, but this was
the '70s. It must've been between the 6 and 11:00 news so they had traces of
caramel pancake makeup. But it was the guy's hair I couldn't take my eyes
off. It was so dark and wavy and confident, like his voice, which had such
resonance you could hear it all over the restaurant, whether you wanted to or
not. No mere mortal was in our midst. Even if all he did was read other
people's words off a TelePrompTer, the TV camera invested this boob with the
kind of authority that made him seem more real than any of us.

"Anchorman" comes on as a satire of that era, before a prologue tells us there
was cable and you were stuck with three local stations and PBS. Will Ferrell,
who co-wrote the movie with the director, Adam McKay, plays Ron Burgundy, one
of those helmet-hair guys and a swaggering San Diego demigod The film shows
everyone from infants to mean hairy bikers watching him in awe. So do we,
although for different reasons. He has thick eyebrows and a dark caterpillar
mustache that doesn't quite make it up to the bottom of his nose, giving it a
glue-on look. And when he struts around shirtless, fancying himself quite the
babe magnet, the lack of visible musculature is breathtaking. His attempt at
seducing Christina Applegate as the station's new hire, Veronica Corningstone,
is the first of the movie's many gross-outs.

(Soundbite of "Anchorman")

Mr. WILL FERRELL: (As Ron Burgundy) ...1,001, 1,002--augh!

Ms. CHRISTINA APPLEGATE: (As Veronica Corningstone) Mr. Burgundy?

Mr. FERRELL: (As Ron Burgundy) 1,003...

Ms. APPLEGATE: (As Veronica Corningstone) Helen said that you needed to see
me?

Mr. FERRELL: (As Ron Burgundy) Oh, Ms. Corningstone, I wasn't expecting
company. Augh! Just doing my workout. Tuesday's is arms and back.

Ms. APPLEGATE: (As Veronica Corningstone) Well, you asked me to come by,
sir.

Mr. FERRELL: (As Ron Burgundy) Oh, did I?

Ms. APPLEGATE: (As Veronica Corningstone) Yeah.

Mr. FERRELL: (As Ron Burgundy) Augh! Oh, that's a deep burn. Ooh, so deep,
augh! Oh, I can barely lift my right arm 'cause I did so many. I don't know
if you heard me counting. I did over 1,000. Whoa. You have your ubulus(ph)
muscle that connects to the upper dorsomus(ph). It's boring but it's part of
my life. I'm just going to grab this shirt, if you don't mind. Just watch
out for the guns. They'll get ya.

Ms. APPLEGATE: (As Veronica Corningstone) You are pathetic. This has to be
the feeblest pick-up attempt that I have ever encountered. You know, I
expected it from the rest of them, Mr. Burgundy, but not from you.

EDELSTEIN: "Anchorman" is about Ron's seduction of Veronica and about their
ferocious rivalry when she, a female, ends up as his co-anchor and about the
way that this becomes empowering to all the subservient women at the station.
No, scratch that; it's not about any of those tired old romantic feminist
cliches. What it's really about is pushing the comedy envelope. Here's how
that works. They take a narrative structure that is extremely conventional.
Beat by beat, it could be that awful Robert Redford-Michelle Pfeiffer picture
"Up Close and Personal." Now Ferrell and McKay take those scenes and don't
just add jokes; they add jokes so broad the scenes go past dumb, past unreal
and into some stratosphere of camp that throws you totally out of the movie.
Men discussing love break unselfconsciously into a dainty pop tune, then snap
back into brusk male conversation.

Burgundy and his sports guy and weatherman and investigative reporter cross
paths with rival anchor teams like street gangs. They trade insults about
toilets and their mothers. And in one spectacular sequence, packed with star
cameos, they go at it with guns and knives and medieval instruments.

You're not laughing at anchormen, you're laughing at formula movie rituals
blown sky-high. Ferrell wasn't one of those natural clowns who have rubbery
features or a plastic body. His timing isn't the sharpest. He's not a
virtuoso, but he gets huge laughs because he's not afraid to take a joke to
the next level, the way the Marx brothers always did. "Anchorman" has a free
associational quality, and something else, an atmosphere of fooling around and
taking chances. And this grab-bag approach has amazing cumulative power, so
that the clunkers don't matter. They're finally just relaxed and happy,
enjoying the gifted ensemble and waiting to get smacked with the next
outlandish gag.

This is an ugly-looking movie. And the lighting does no favors for Christina
Applegate. Its preoccupations are smutty and infantile. Its targets,
obvious. Yet it strides above its crudeness like a colossus. It's smart
people telling dumb jokes with a brilliant sense of irony. "Anchorman" gives
you permission to laugh like an idiot.

DAVIES: David Edelstein is film critic for Slate.

(Credits)

DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.