Jesus in History with Helen Bond

Helen Bond The author sort of keeps the beginning and the end of something and sort of loses the bit in the middle. And you can sort of see the way he works with his source material there, and- Just reads the introduction and the conclusion- You get bored, yeah ...

Dan McClellan and just ignores the... Yeah. Exactly.

Helen Bond And oh, I can't be bothered with that bit in the middle.

Dan McClellan We don't do that with the books that- ... guests on the show have sent us. Just to be clear.

Dan Beecher Dan, Dan, Dan. Shush. That has never, ever happened. We read everything very thoroughly.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are wonderful. The weather here in Salt Lake gets springtime and then winter, and then it doesn't know what it's doing, and that's always fun. You never know what you're going to be going out into.

Dan McClellan It's very similar to where I grew up in Colorado, where you could have all four seasons in one day.

Dan Beecher Yes, indeed.

Dan McClellan And it is enraging. Yeah, exactly.

Dan Beecher But better yet, we have a guest that is going to answer some of the main questions that we get asked all the time, or answer. She's going to address some of the main questions. Why don't you introduce our guest? Absolutely.

Dan McClellan Today we're very happy to welcome to the show Professor Helen Bond, who is professor of Christian Origins at Edinburgh University and also currently the president of the British New Testament Society, that august and venerable institution. And also, one half of the Biblical Time Machine podcast. Dave Roos is the other co-host. And they do things very similar to what we do here. So, we're bringing in a little competition to spice it up today. And Helen, you mentioned that you all release your episodes every Monday just like us, right? Yes.

Helen Bond I didn't realize you were Monday, too. But yes, every Monday there's a new one on Apple or Spotify, and I think we do have similar content, but we're very much about the history. So, very much kind of getting in our time machine and going back to the past and- Awesome ... yeah, interviewing people about their work, and yeah.

Dan Beecher Smelling- That's a lot of fun ...

Helen Bond feeling the first century and further back, too.

Dan McClellan Well, when I first got the email from Dave- Mm-hmm ... I remember seeing the cover image for your podcast, and I was like, "Hey, I see that all the time on Twitter." So, I recognized that, and I was like, "I don't know who Dave Roos is, but," but I- Dave's a most excellent person. He- Yeah ...

Helen Bond I mean, he's just amazing. He's really, really clever, and he's got a background in religion and journalism and stuff. So, yeah, no, he's the kind of the power engine of the whole thing. I'm just there for the ride.

Dan Beecher See, now that was Dan's mistake. Dan should've gotten a clever co-host- ... to do his show. Oh. Yeah.

Dan McClellan What I did was take the first one that came by, so. Oh, next set of interviews, yeah. But yeah. Well, next time. Next time. Yeah, when it's time to re-up. But Helen, you've done an awful lot of work with the historical Jesus- Mm-hmm ... which I think is a term that probably not a lot of people are familiar with. We get, Dan and I on the show, and then I on my other social media channels, get asked all the time about what we know about Jesus, but I don't think a lot of people know there's a whole field of research out there- Mm-hmm ... on this. Can you tell us a little bit about what historical Jesus means, what this refers to? Yeah.

Helen Bond No, that's a good point, that scholars get so used to sort of talking about these things, that they don't always think these are not sort of publicly accessible terms. So, I suppose scholars make a distinction between the historical Jesus, who was the man who walked the Galilean Hills in the 30s CE, and was executed on a Roman cross, and the Christ of faith, as he's known in the churches, as he already is in the gospels, really. They're already interpretations through the lens of Easter and several decades of trying to work out what it means to be a Christ follower. So yeah, the historical Jesus just really means the Jesus who existed in history as a real man in the 30s. Yeah. So that the whole sort of field of historical Jesus research is really trying to get back to that historical man.

Dan Beecher One of the things-- Oh, sorry, Dan.

Dan McClellan No, go ahead.

Dan Beecher But I did want to say that one of the things that we see in our comments sections and that we see in sort of the world of public debate about the Bible, there's some question as to whether there was a historical Jesus. And in terms of what scholars believe, it's probably not an even match. There's half the scholars on one side believe one thing, and half the scholars believe another thing. Can you give a sense of how much of the scholarly world questions the historicity of the person of Jesus?

Helen Bond Very, very little. And you're exactly right. And I think, actually, scholars tend to just dismiss the whole question about did Jesus exist? They just think it's silly. It's not a question. It's not worth engaging with. Whereas, as you say, loads of people on social media are questioning it. But I would say In terms of scholars, probably less than 5%, 1%, 2%, something like that. They'd be considered very much a fringe view. Because from a scholar's point of view, there's actually very good reasons to think that Jesus existed. So it's never really questioned.

Dan Beecher So what you're saying is that Richard Carrier makes up 1% of- Well, exactly.

Helen Bond I'm thinking him and Thomas Brodie. There's a handful of people. So I wouldn't say that there's no scholars. There are. And I can sort of understand how people get to that stage where they start to think, what can we say about the historical Jesus? And there are probably people who feel like that, but just don't publish anything. So there are scholars, but it's very much the minority.

Dan McClellan Now, when I get asked about how we know what we think we know about the historical Jesus, I think a lot of people assume that there must be some kind of archeological evidence of some kind, something direct. But the reality is that for the most part, we're taking these texts, the gospels, and a smattering of references from non-Christian literature that's coming in the 90s and the 110s CE, and basically trying to reconstruct what circumstances most likely led to these beliefs being the way they are. What would you say we can reconstruct based on these texts that we have in the New Testament and a few other references about the historical Jesus? What do you think we can be confident about regarding the life of a historical Jesus?

Helen Bond I think we can be confident that he existed, that he was some kind of prophetic figure in the early part of the first century in Judea. Paul's letters are very, very early. Mm-hmm. And I know Paul doesn't say a great deal about the historical Jesus, but he says a few things, and he clearly knew people connected with the movement. And I would imagine that although the gospels are heavily theological, they see things through sort of the resurrection and their views about who Jesus was. But still, I think there's a sort of basis of historical fact there. I think they're all ancient biographies, and biographies tend to have a general sort of layer of fact, even if it's embellished in many ways. So I think he was a Jewish prophetic figure. I think he probably was an eschatological prophet, as people say. A prophet announcing the end of the world. Mm-hmm. I think he thought God was going to intervene very soon and restore Israel in some way. And I think that's why he had 12 disciples, 12 male disciples, and they're representing the 12 tribes of Israel. Everything we know about his sort of journeys suggest he's sort of rewalking the land as it was in the great days of David and Solomon. And I think he did expect some kind of intervention by God in the imminent future. But then he made his way to Jerusalem. Maybe he'd been there many times before. Mm-hmm. And something about this particular visit meant that he ended up on a Roman cross. And that, as far as the Romans were concerned, was the end of him. So I think we can piece together a reasonable amount about him. And also, of course, although historians can't really say anything about the resurrection as such, they can certainly see the effects of it and see that Jesus's followers certainly believed that he'd been raised from the dead by God.

Dan McClellan And this is one of the main things that we have referred to in other writers. For instance, Josephus. Mm. We have Suetonius and Tacitus and Pliny the Younger referring to this band of Christians that is making trouble in and around Judea and Rome. I'm curious, I get a lot of questions about the letters that are in red in the Bible, things that Jesus has said. I've been asked, in fact, just yesterday, someone reached out and asked me what relationship do we think they have to Jesus's actual words? Mm. And I go, "Well, first of all, they're in Greek." Yeah. There would've been a translation there, so we can't really talk about a verbatim representation. Mm-hmm. But what would scholars say are things that we find in the gospels that have the best chance of going back to, if not Jesus's own words, at least a memory about something that Jesus said? Or is there anything in there that we think goes all the way back? Probably.

Helen Bond But as you say, at the very basic level, it's been all changed out of Aramaic, that Jesus would've spoken, to Greek. And there's also a literary dependency between the gospels. So Mark wrote first- Mm-hmm ... and then Matthew and Luke copied Mark, and probably John copied Mark as well. So these are not four independent attestations of these words. They're all connected in some way. So it used to be really common in sort of the 50s, 60s, to try to get back to the actual words of Jesus. And I think Jeremias ended up with something like 21 bits and pieces. And people sometimes say things like these Aramaic phrases like Abba and some of the other bits and pieces in the gospels, particularly Mark's gospel- Yeah. May- "Mamma sabacthani" and things like that. Yeah, exactly. They may go back to sort of- You know, real memories. But, equally you could say, well, the gospel writers knew Aramaic and they just sort of gave it a little bit of local color. So I think, people realized after a while, we're just going round and round in circles here. We actually have no way of knowing which of these Greek words Jesus spoke. Mm-hmm. Another approach was to try to say which of these doesn't fit well with a Jewish context, and then we can be sure that it's coming from Jesus. But again, the big problem with that is that Jesus was a Jew, and his followers were Jews for several decades, maybe even centuries, some of them. So again, where do we go with that? There are many, many different types of historical Jesus scholars, but I think the main sort of thrust nowadays is to look at the events and to get a general picture, sort of the gist as Dale Allison called it. Mm-hmm. These are memories. They've been worked over, but if you can just get the gist of what it was that Jesus said and his kind of message, then I think we're probably as solid as we can get. So to some extent, this sort of counter-cultural, deny yourself, be like a servant, be like a slave, put yourself last. Mm-hmm. That seems to be the kind of message that Jesus promoted. But in terms of the specifics, even the parables, again, there's probably some layer there that goes back to Jesus, but they've probably been shaped and changed as they made their way out of a rural context to urban contexts, and changed into Greek, and all of these things. So, I think when you ask about specifics, it becomes very difficult. Yeah.

Dan Beecher It does seem like the task that your field has put to itself is a really tricky one because- ... you've got a book that contradicts itself. You've got Matthew and Luke telling very different birth stories. So frankly, it does feel like if we're going to talk about history, a layperson like myself wonders how useful is the Bible itself at all? Yeah.

Helen Bond I wouldn't throw the whole baby out just because of the birth stories. You've picked up on probably the most variable bit there, and probably neither Matthew nor Luke had very much idea at all about Jesus' birth and the events around it. But what they both want to do is to say he had this amazing birth that echoed many of the things in the Hebrew Bible, and that sort of gave us to see right from the start that he was going to be a great man later on. So, this is just like a lot of other biographies. Stories about Augustus himself tell sort of wild and wonderful legends about his mother being in the temple of Apollo and stuff like that. So that just comes with the biographical territory. Mm-hmm. I think once you move into the rest of Jesus' life, even comparing, say, Mark with John, which is really quite different, we still got that sense of somebody who's originally from Nazareth, a Galilean ministry, spending time in Jerusalem, ending up dying in Jerusalem, and of course, all the miracle stories, and the healings, whatever you make of those. Even hostile sources, the Mishnah and possibly the reconstructed bit about Jesus in Josephus. Again, they talk about him doing these amazing things, and whether it's magic, sorcery, whatever it is, you can sort of piece together some kind of picture that's actually quite coherent with the prophets in the Hebrew tradition. So it's that kind of person that Jesus probably was.

Dan McClellan So does it make sense to you that Jesus would've had some kind of training, some kind of schooling in the Jewish literary tradition? Or is he coming at it from more of the apocalyptic kind of social side of things?

Helen Bond Yeah, I don't think he would've had much training. There weren't schools or anything like that at the time. He would've heard the stories of Israel in the synagogue. Maybe he came from a pious family that sort of talked about them, thought about them very deeply. He spent time with John the Baptist, too, so that might be- Mm-hmm ... maybe he was already that way inclined. But John the Baptist definitely seems to be in that apocalyptic tradition of sort of get yourself ready, the end's nigh. Yeah. It's coming just around the corner. So, that's sort of the tradition that Jesus seems to be in. So I think that's probably where he hones some of his skills and maybe where he picked up some of his abilities to preach, because he must- Yeah ... have been a really engaging and charismatic preacher. And we know of lots of other characters like Jesus in the first century, too. So, nobody's saying he's unique here. He's a bit like John the Baptist. He's a bit like these other prophetic characters that come along in the Roman period, and most of them do get executed. That's just what happens to- That seems to be- ... prophets ...

Dan McClellan their lot.

Dan Beecher I mean, it does seem like you can claim a bit of uniqueness considering the longevity of his particular strain of prophecy.

Helen Bond Yeah, I think that's right. With benefit of hindsight, you can see that. Yeah. And followers of John the Baptist also carried on for a long time after him. And in the early days, I think there was a point at which Christianity had to sort of say, "Not John the Baptist. He's not the Messiah. It's our guy who's the Messiah." So, there's a bit of sort of competition there.

Dan McClellan And then you had to write in that John was okay with this the whole time. The gospel where John says, "I must decrease, and he must increase." Yeah. Exactly.

Helen Bond And yes, that's exactly it. The way that John the Baptist is remembered in these gospels is pointing to Jesus and saying, "He is going to be the major one." We don't know whether he actually said that or not. Yeah.

Dan McClellan I mean, quite possibly not, but- He's probably been rolling in his grave for a very long time. Now, you mentioned earlier one of the things that seems to go back to a historical Jesus is perhaps this kind of deny yourself approach, a more ascetic approach to Judaism. Now, there is a philosophical dimension of asceticism that we see very early in Christianity, and we see it in Paul. And something that comes up a lot in the social relevance of a lot of these stories is the sexual ethic of the Bible. And Paul is very famously a celibate. And we have in Matthew 19 this story from Jesus where just kind of out of nowhere, we suddenly get this little, "Hey, by the way," you get the eunuch statement, "Some are born eunuchs, some are made eunuchs, some make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." Does that kind of sexual asceticism, do you think that is a part of what Jesus may have preached, or do you think that is something that kind of resonates with that deny yourself attitude, but might be a later kind of philosophical intrusion?

Helen Bond I think it probably does go back to Jesus, but I don't think he was obsessed by it. I don't think he was going around saying, "Make sure you're single. Don't touch a woman." And the same with Paul, actually. I think what's the big deal to both of them is that the end of the world is coming really soon. Yeah. "Repent. Get yourself ready. It's coming. It's coming." And in that situation, you're not going to marry, settle down, have kids. You're not thinking about the next generation because there's not going to be a next generation. And I think that's the context that you have to read these things in. Same with Paul. I don't actually think Paul's got a problem with sex and having a partner and things like that. I mean, it's just that it's irrelevant because- Yeah ... the end of the world's coming. And I think that's the thing with Jesus, too. Make yourself a eunuch. Just stay off the opposite sex because other things are happening. I mean, years later, of course, when the end of the world doesn't come and the second coming hasn't come, people are reading Jesus's words about self-denial and make yourself a eunuch, and they're interpreting them in more ascetic ways. But I don't think very much about Jesus really was ascetic. Mm-hmm. He talks about denying yourself, but it's all in this sort of whole thing about power and glory, and he's saying, "Don't try to push yourself up and be arrogant," and the Roman male, the alpha male, don't be like that. Just be self-effacing, compassionate, look after other people, put other people first.

Dan Beecher I feel like you've just contradicted an entire side of Christian social media right now. Alpha male is what much of social media is demanding is what Jesus wanted everyone to be.

Helen Bond Like that is- Well, it's not in the versions I'm reading. I don't think- Yeah ... I mean, why would an alpha male say, "Deny yourself, be a servant, make yourself last?" I mean, I think there are elements in Jesus, of course, that could be an alpha male. He's the son of God, after all.

Dan Beecher That's precisely- That's pretty alpha ...

Helen Bond but it's because he's the ultimate alpha that he can say, "Don't be like that."

Dan McClellan And I think- He's the alpha and omega male. Yeah, I was going to say. Exactly. But yeah, and that's something that I talk about all the time, is that when we look back at Jesus, we're looking through 2,000 years of tradition and renegotiation of that tradition. Exactly. And a lot of times we're looking at it through history. A lot of Christian nationalists will prop up the Byzantine Empire, will prop up the Crusades, will prop up these things that they attribute with the creation of what we call the Western world. But none of that has anything to do with the actual texts that are talking about Jesus. That is how Christianity has appropriated the power structures that have developed. But I think it's important to... One of the things that the historical Jesus approach tries to do is kind of divest ourselves of these interpretive lenses and see what's left when we get down to the bottom of that. And there's so much contradiction as well because the same Christian nationalists who are more concerned with the way Christianity was later appropriated are also like, "But Paul says women have to dress modestly." Oh. And so they will pick and choose what texts take priority over history and- Christians have always done that.

Helen Bond I mean, I guess everybody does that with their sacred texts, whatever texts they are.

Dan McClellan I have a question. Well, Dan briefly mentioned the nativity stories. And I've been fascinated for a while now by the theory that I think more likely Luke, but perhaps maybe even Matthew, that these stories were not originally a part of the gospels. What do you think the odds are that- Yeah.

Helen Bond Well, it's really- ...

Dan McClellan these chapters are later additions?

Helen Bond It's really funny that you should say that because I've been thinking about that a lot lately, too. So, I do think that Matthew's is original to Matthew. I think Matthew wrote that. He was using Mark, too, and he adds this birth story to his account. But I think that Luke wrote, I think he starts in chapter three, where he has the genealogy and that complicated dating. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then I think- During the reign of so and so in the region of so and so and all of these. Yeah.

Helen Bond All of these things. That doesn't help at all because we still can't date it. But they all have their obscure, in the year of this consul and that high priest, and whatever. Mm-hmm. So I think he started there, but quite soon after, I think he got a look at Matthew and thought, "Oh, I like what he's doing there." But I'm not very sure. So I think he liked the idea of having birth stories, but I also think that he didn't like Matthew's birth stories. Mm-hmm. So I think he rewrote Matthew's birth stories. People always say, "Oh, he gives the female version," because it's kind of with Mary in the center. But I think Matthew is a bit vague, actually, on whether Mary really is a virgin. The whole thing is a little bit uncertain. But I think Luke really kind of nails it. He has- Yeah ... Gabriel appearing to Mary, and, "Oh, how can this be since I don't know a man?" And it's very, very clear from Luke. So I think he makes certain things more explicit, and that's part of the reason why I think that Luke came second. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's definitely a more developed one. You've got- Yeah ... the Magnificat. You've got- Yeah ... a lot more of this praise and development, and that's interesting. So you think it's not outside the realm of possibility that when Matthew quotes the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7, that the idea is not necessarily an actual biological virgin, but maybe he's just quoting the text and saying she's a young woman who has conceived. But it's Luke who really nails it down that she has not had sex yet. Yeah.

Helen Bond I think so.

Dan McClellan Which makes it more miraculous.

Helen Bond In my reading of it. Because I do think- Yeah ... there's an ambiguity there because you'd know better than me, the Hebrew Bible stuff there in Isaiah 7, it doesn't necessarily mean a virgin. Right. It could just mean a young woman, probably a young woman at court who's maybe already pregnant by the time she has a baby. Or maybe it's a recent wife of the king before she has a baby and stuff, this threat will have gone. So it's not very clear. In Matthew, she's found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Well- Yeah ... children are always of the Holy Spirit in the Hebrew Bible, even when it's a barren woman, and it doesn't mean that there's been no male involved. So I think Matthew is ambiguous, but Luke is absolutely clear. There's no doubt for Luke. And Luke then does this sort of comparing thing in Luke 1 and 2 between something happens in the life of John the Baptist, and, oh, isn't that amazing? His parents were barren. Oh, great stuff. But then something- Yeah ... happens in the life of Jesus, and whoa. It's amazing. His mother is a virgin. So he's got this sort of comparison going on between the two as well. Which again, maybe as we were saying earlier, that John the Baptist and his following were still a bit of a big deal in John's day, and he has to kind of well, yeah, give John his due, but he's not our man. He's nothing like as special as Jesus. Yeah.

Dan McClellan He's the forerunner, the preparer- Yeah. Exactly ... of the way, so to speak. Exactly. I haven't read anything on this, of the scholarship yet. I've got stuff set up that I hope to get to soon. But I'm hearing more and more people talk about a second-century date for Luke. Hmm. Do you buy this at all? Have you read this? What are your thoughts on this? Yeah.

Helen Bond It's strange, isn't it? I think there's this sort of urge amongst New Testament scholars to sort of put it all into the first century, and that also makes things neat. If we can say- Mm ... everything in the New Testament, everything that's canonical comes from the first century, and- Yeah ... then the other stuff is second century.

Dan McClellan So I understand- You can kind of compartmentalize it and say- Exactly ... it's there because it's early. It's early. Everything else is after. Yeah. Exactly.

Helen Bond And once you start saying things are maybe second century, then you have some awkward things about what about non-canonical stuff that may well be earlier? Why is that- Yeah ... not in the canon? And things get messy. But how do we know, given that these texts are not dated? How do we choose between 95 and 105 CE? But I do think Luke shows quite a lot of development, and say his attitude to women, the fact that he's very keen on women sort of early on, but he does tend to limit their role in Acts, and that does make me think a little bit about the pastoral epistles, which again may well be early second century. Mm-hmm. I also think that Luke may well know Josephus's Antiquities. Steve Mason and his work has sort of persuaded me on that.

Dan McClellan So, he talks about Luke's knowledge of Josephus? Yeah. Okay.

Helen Bond So if the Antiquities comes from around about 95 or so, again, maybe they're both writing in Rome. Again, we don't know where Luke is writing, but that might tip things over into early second century. But, how do we know? But I think it seems reasonable enough.

Dan McClellan Now, one of the texts that comes up a lot on social media, I think there are a lot of people who would've loved for Gnosticism to have won out in early Christianity. But, the Gospel of Thomas comes up an awful lot. And my understanding of this, is that, well, one, this is a sayings gospel. It's just a collection of logia, of sayings, utterances. And so there's no narrative framework that can help us kind of gain any purchase on much of a dating. But, do you think that there are sayings in the Gospel of Thomas that could predate and be independent of the canonical gospels? Or do you think this is mostly coming from later and is mostly copying what the sayings of Jesus from the gospels? Hmm.

Helen Bond I think it's mainly later. Where we can compare things in the Gospel of Thomas with the canonical gospels. Mark Goodacre has pointed out this strange thing that Thomas does, the author sort of keeps the beginning and the end of something and sort of loses the bit in the middle. And you can sort of see the way he works with his source material there.

Dan McClellan And- Just it reads the introduction and the conclusion and just ignores it. Yeah. He gets bored. Yeah, exactly.

Helen Bond Oh, I can't be bothered with that bit in the middle.

Dan McClellan We don't do that with the books that guests on the show have sent us. Dan. Just to be clear. Shh. I know.

Dan Beecher That has never ever happened. We read everything very thoroughly.

Helen Bond It's that kind of thing, isn't it? It's like almost, yeah, you know the middle bit, so I'll just pick it up in the end. And I do think that Thomas knows probably all of the canonical gospels. So, if he's working like that with the stuff there, what's he doing with the extra stuff? Where is it coming from? It's not impossible that there's something there that does go back to something at some point said by Jesus, and then transmitted down the decades. But, I wouldn't want to put money on it, and I wouldn't want to put money on which bits. I just think you have to be a bit realistic about these things, and I'm not going to spend decades of my life trying to work out which bits could possibly have an earlier version to them. I wouldn't exclude it, but I think by and large, it's coming from the second century.

Dan McClellan And what do you think about the sources that were available to the gospel authors? We know Mark is working from different sources, and Mark is one of the sources that Matthew and Luke, and probably John are using. But we've got to reconstruct anything that's coming before that. Where are scholars on what kind of sources are being used by the gospel authors? Yeah.

Helen Bond Mark is fascinating from that point of view, I think, because people always talk with great confidence. Oh, Mark had all these sources, oral sources especially, and that this whole sort of form critical idea that there were little bits of tradition floating around that people knew, and that somehow sort of Mark is capturing them and writing them down. And everything that's been done by scholars in the last few decades has underlined just how carefully crafted and presented Mark's gospel is. Narrative critics have shown that all these themes and irony, and it's a really clever piece of work. So there is no chance that he's just grabbing bits of oral tradition. Mm-hmm. And I'm sure he does have sources. I'm sure he has written sources. I'm sure he has oral sources. I'm sure he tried to find out stuff, and he's probably got conflicting stories. He's probably got six different stories about the death of Jesus, and he's choosing which one to use. But in all of this, I think the main thing is Mark's creative shaping. So, he's got stories behind him, but he's working it all out in the way he wants it worked out. So all of those little paragraphs that Mark's gospel is made up of, it's Mark who puts his material into those little paragraphs. Yeah. And that was a normal thing at the time. They're called creia. The grammar books of the time tell people to write in these little sort of self-contained anecdotes. So, yeah, I think no doubt there is stuff behind there, but all we can really do is get back as far as Mark. Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so Papias was probably underestimating Mark a little bit if- Completely. Yeah. If he was referring to what we have as the Gospel of Mark at all. Yeah, exactly.

Helen Bond He says he's got no structure. And the problem is we just have Papias out of context because we only have Papias as he's mentioned by- Eusebius' ... by Eusebius. Yeah. Yeah. So if we had the wider context of what he was talking about, maybe he was comparing Mark with John, and then the obvious question is, why does Mark have Galilee, journey to Jerusalem. And John has Galilee, Jerusalem. So maybe that's what he was talking about when he said Mark didn't have any structure. Yeah. We just don't know what it was that Papias was talking about. And also, these very highly educated elites of second, third century, they were a little bit dismissive of the abilities of the gospel writers. Mark is a perfectly good biographer. He's kind of middlebrow. He's not a Tacitus or a Plutarch or anything like that, but he's good. And his works have survived the test of time. 2,000 years later, we're still investigating them. So, I think he's a pretty good author. Yeah. But some of these elites of the second, third century, they were a little bit snooty.

Dan McClellan We don't know anything about that. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Thank goodness there's no more snootiness in scholarship.

Helen Bond It's been banned.

Dan McClellan Now, you brought up Luke as the gospel that kind of centers women more frequently- Mm ... than the other gospel. And I think this is one of the apologetic ways to try to harmonize the genealogies of Matthew and Lucas to treat one of them as coming through Mary and one of them as coming through Joseph. Seems to me that both the genealogies are literary creations. Yeah. Yeah. Don't go back to anything that probably has any historical value. But we get a lot of listeners and a lot of our audience on social media is very interested to hear more about women in early Christianity- Oh, right. ... and their role. Because we have, for instance, one that comes up an awful lot.

Helen Bond We have Junia- Oh, yes ... mentioned in Romans 16:7.

Dan McClellan We have Phoebe. We have others. We have Mary Magdalene, and we spoke with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer about- Oh, yes ... Mary Magdalene and the idea that this is not where she's from. This is an honorific title that is being given to her. And you just published, I believe, a book with, it was Joan Taylor, right? Joan Taylor. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Helen Bond About- "Women Remembered: Jesus's Female Disciples." Just plug that one. Yeah. Absolutely.

Dan McClellan I think I saw that on the shelf at SBL in San Antonio. That was just within the last year or two that it came out, wasn't it?

Helen Bond No, it wouldn't be at SBL because it's published by Hodder or Hachette, and I don't think they have a place there. Did I see a- But I'm glad you saw it somewhere.

Dan McClellan There must've been an ad for it because it has kind of like- Oh, maybe. Yeah ... shards of things on the cover. Yes.

Helen Bond It's a really nice cover actually.

Dan McClellan Maybe it was just an ad I saw for it. Yeah. That's why I went and looked because it struck me how nice the cover was. Yeah. Can you talk about Jesus' women disciples? What do people need to know about this that has been maybe obscured a little bit over the centuries and the millennia?

Helen Bond Yeah, definitely obscured. Well, it's very clear, even from the gospels. The gospels, of course, are androcentric texts. They're shining the light on the men and what the men are getting up to. But even looking and peering for the little clues in the gospels, it's clear that women were a much bigger part of Jesus' movement. So, for example, Mark waits until the very end, chapter 15, Jesus is on the cross, and suddenly he says, "Oh, and there are a few women there." They'd followed him from Galilee. And you think, "What now you're telling us?" All of this time, I've been thinking Jesus and the 12 men, and suddenly you find that there were women there all the time. So, that mental picture has to change, and women plural. And we're given the names of a few of them, Mary Magdalene and others. Even something like "The Chosen," I don't know if you've seen "The Chosen," but they have Jesus and the 12 disciples and one woman, so Mary Magdalene fits in there. Yeah. But it's clear that it wasn't just one woman. There were a group of women, and they followed Jesus, and of course, that would make a lot of sense because when Jesus is sending these disciples out to preach and to heal and do basically the work that he's doing, of course you need women because in that sort of gendered society of the first century, you're going to need women to take the message to other women, to go into homes and to sit with the women, to go down to the river while they're washing their clothes. Just that way in to the women is a lot easier if you're female yourself than if you're a big, brash guy like Peter. No females are going to invite Peter into their homes. You've got to have women to do that. So, I think women were an integral part of Jesus' message from the very start. In fact, I'd go even further and say that a lot of Jesus' message, we've been talking about that message about don't be the big alpha male, deny yourself, be like a servant, put yourself last. A lot of that, the Greek word for that, diakoneo, to minister, is also the word that's used of cooking and putting food on the table. Mm-hmm. And so it's a word associated with women. It's the word that's associated with women's work. So, I think Jesus is kind of almost saying, "Don't be like the alpha men. Be like the women." And so he's sort of putting them and their experience right at the center of this gospel.

Dan Beecher Why do you think then that women didn't make it into the stories the way that it seems like they should have? If the picture that you're painting is right, which makes total sense that it would be, why do you think that they were excluded from the narrative?

Helen Bond Well, they're not entirely excluded from the narrative. So, one really good test case is Romans 16, where Paul writes to the church at Rome, and he has a whole list of women that he's saying... Sorry, he writes to the church, and he's got a whole list of people that he sends greetings to. And that's just a snapshot of people that Paul knows in the Roman church, and a third of them are women. And they're given titles like deacons and apostles and leaders of house churches. And it's also fairly clear that Paul is sending this letter, the most important letter he's ever going to write, by the hand of a woman, Phoebe, and she's the one who's taken the letter there. Probably she's going to read it out. Probably she's going to explain it to people who don't understand it, and there's probably a lot of people who don't understand it. So, Paul is really putting a lot of trust in this woman. So these references are there, but I think that there's a double problem here. One is that these texts are written in a patriarchal society. The authors, probably male themselves, just tend to focus on what the men were doing. So, particularly once you get to Acts, it's the movement of the church to Rome, and you're focusing on Peter and then Paul. And these texts are not written to be a social history of Christianity. They're written to persuade people to become Christians or to strengthen their Christian faith. So, I think it's inevitable that women drop out a bit. But then I think you get the double problem that, by the late first century, early second century, the second coming hasn't come, and this is what sort of gave women this sort of liberation, the fact that they were thinking that the end of the world was coming and that social orders as they were known didn't matter that much. But once you start to realize that there's going to be a church for a long time, the church has to start sort of adapting to society and just embracing those Roman norms because otherwise people are going to think badly of it, maybe even persecute it. So, I think by the time you get to Acts and by the time you get to the pastoral epistles, you get this sort of pushing down of women and make sure that women conform, make sure that women are silent and passive and don't wear sort of flamboyant clothes and make sure you've got respectable women. Because this was a big Roman thing, that women out of control is a bad thing. Any kind of cult or philosophy that encouraged women in leadership roles or women not to know their place in society was frowned on. So, I think you've got that. On one hand, the fact that the gospels were written by men who weren't thinking about the women, but on the other hand, this sort of real need actually to, in the later texts, to downgrade the women. And that all conspires to meaning that in the end, we don't get many women mentioned in the New Testament.

Dan McClellan And I think we spoke a bit about this with Candida Moss recently. We have an episode upcoming regarding her new book.

Helen Bond Oh, yes. And there's a- She's coming on our podcast too, should I just say.

Dan McClellan Oh, is she? Okay. Excellent. Yeah.

Helen Bond Well, we recorded it with her, too.

Dan McClellan We talked a bit about, and for those who have the video, you can see the cover of her book. We talked about the characterization of Christianity as a movement of slaves and women. Mm. Which would fit into that idea that this is probably mainly made up of folks who are excited about the fact that the standard social roles are kind of being broken down- Exactly ... at least to the degree that they can without undermining their safety and their integrity within the broader Roman society. So Paul says, "There's no Greek or Jew, there's no male nor female. It's no more slave or free, but all are one." And Jesus obviously is an attractive thing. But when the first person says, "It kind of seems like Jesus isn't coming right away," they have to start making plans for, "Well, I should've kept my bank account. We shouldn't have sold the farm," and all that kind of stuff. And it seems like then you get the apologist saying, "Well, let's turn this gospel into something that's palatable for the Greco-Roman intelligentsia, something that we can make fit into society." But we also have, and I can't remember if Candida has written about this, but there was an article a bit ago about, I believe either some inscriptions or mosaics that were discovered in the last decade or so that indicate there were women holding titles indicating some kind of ecclesiastical authority or role within early Christianity later than we suspected, maybe into the fourth or even the fifth centuries CE. What do we have from early Christianity that indicates women held important roles within the ecclesiastical structure? Or are we limited to just a few mosaics or titles scribbled in the ground here and there? Yeah.

Helen Bond I mean, there were... are bits and pieces from all over. So there's some really beautiful pictures in the catacombs in Naples that have, in fact, two women. One of them, Caerulla, her name is. She has certain kind of iconography that suggests that she is a bishop. And this is- Oh, really? ... the 6th century in Naples. Not that far from Rome, where they're not envisaging having women bishops by any means. So I think one of the things is that it took a very long time for Christianity to be homogenized. People are doing their own thing in different places, and probably there will be women in leadership roles all over the place, and particularly within sort of slightly deviant groups. We know about- Mm-hmm ... Montanists who had women within their leadership structure.

Dan McClellan Just for the benefit of our listeners who may not know about this, could you just give a one or two-sentence explanation of who the Montanists were?

Helen Bond Well, they're a 2nd century phenomenon. They're very sort of charismatic, and again, that's possibly one of the reasons why they're more open to women's leadership. And people like Perpetua, the famous martyr, she may well have been a Montanist. And we have people like Perpetua who were early martyrs. So we do have these women who are quite prominent in certain groups. And the thing is, like I say, there's no homogeneity to this at all. There's just different groups, different ways of being a follower of Christ in this early period. And in some of them, it probably happened quite quickly that the men sort of asserted their leadership roles. In others, there were maybe more charismatic ones. Women were enabled to be leaders much longer.