Loading...I recently did an interview with Glenn Siepert for his program “The What If Project,” on my book Armageddon, What the Bible Really Says about the End. His new book, “Emerging From the Rubble: Thirty Stories About Grief, Broken Dreams, Shattered Relationships, and Finding the Courage to Keep Going,” just came out, as well.
Glenn asks very good questions, and we got into some unusually interesting topics. I hope you enjoy it!
*****************************
Great interview! Thanks Bart and Glenn.
Dr. Ehrman, great interview, I look forward to reading the book. Forgive me if I misunderstood your explanation about Paul’s belief of ” meeting Jesus in the air” with respect to whether it was symbolic or literal. If in fact it was literal, where do you suppose he got that idea from ? Did it originate with him ?
It’s hard to say: Paul’s our first Christian author and so we don’t know what others were saying before him, except when he gives us some indication.
I hadn’t heard this bit before about the rapture supposedly appearing in the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephraim, which I was familiar with because, along with the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios, it’s an important source for understanding early Christian responses to the Arab conquests of the seventh century. That someone could take that one phrase about the dead being luckier than the living as a proof text for a pre-tribulation rapture is, well, some rather creative exegesis. On the whole, the sermon is a fairly orthodox presentation of the Last Days: empires will rise and fall, Gog and Magog will be unleashed, but then the Antichrist will seize power and everything will be horrible, even for believers, but eventually Christ will return, condemn the Antichrist and his followers to hell, and the dead Christians will be raised up along with the living saints to rule with him forever.
Actually, when you read Pseudo Ephraim he’s not talking about the rapture AT ALL. It may seem that way when you take a sentence of his out of context, but when you read the entire discussion it’s crystal clear and beyond debate he’s talking about something else. Look it up and see.
John of Patmos was a flat-Earther. (as were all the writers of the books of the Bible) Why isn’t this brought up more often?
My sense is that a lot of people bring it up (at least they do with me!). It’s interesting because in the educated circles of the Roman world it had been known for a very long time that the earthy was a sphere. Greek thinkers had even calculated its circumferene. (Which passages in Revelation are you thinking of as showing that earth is flat?)
some China-born engineer in the “church” I grew up, in Sunday School taught us 4th graders that the world was round written in the prophetic books
poe AI
The ancient Israelites and the surrounding cultures had a cosmology that depicted the Earth as a flat disc or a flat plane.
The idea that the Earth is a sphere became more widely accepted in ancient Greece around the 6th century BCE, well after the composition of the Prophetic books. It was Greek philosophers like Pythagoras and later Aristotle who proposed and provided evidence for a spherical Earth.
The earth” (Isaiah 40:22). The Hebrew word used here for “circle” is “khug,” which can also be translated as “vault” or “sphere.” However, it’s important to note that this verse is often interpreted as referring to the Earth as a flat disc, with God above it like a dome or vault.
Similarly, in the book of Daniel, there is a vision of a tree that could be seen “to the ends of the earth” (Daniel 4:11). This phrase suggests a flat Earth understanding, with specific boundaries or edges.
Hello, Dr. Erman. I would greatly appreciate your insights. I apologize for the message being off-topic. Does Mark 9:2 relate to the topic that Jesus discusses in Mark 9:1, where he supposedly reveals the kingdom to Peter, James, and John? Some theologians interpret it this way, suggesting that 9:1 transitions from an unfulfilled apocalyptic prophecy to something fulfilled in 9:2. Alternatively, could this have been added later to resolve the contradiction in 9:1? In this scenario, theologians eliminate the idea of an unfulfilled apocalyptic prophecy and argue that Jesus was specifically referring to disclosing the kingdom to his disciples during their lifetime. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts here. I apologize once again for not finding a suitable topic to ask a question about.
:There are lots of interpretations, of course; I’ve long found most persuasive the one maintains that Mark has taken an account of the transfiguration and placed it right fter what is 9:1 in order to show that in some sense this was a fulfillment of Jesus’ prediction.