Dear Friends,

This is my eleventh post of direct commentary on How Jesus Became God, by Bart Ehrman. Check here for my introductory comments.

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So, how much should an obscure 1st century text called 2 Baruch influence our understanding of what early Christians believed about Jesus?

I say little, if any…but the eminent atheist Bible scholar Dr. Ehrman begs to differ. Let’s dive in!

2nd Baruch

This non-canonical book also known as the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch is believed to have been written around the end of the 1st century AD. It is written from the perspective of Baruch (but not actually by Baruch, as it was written much too late), an associate of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, and deals with questions about God’s goodness in light of the destruction of the temple. Although the destruction of the 1st temple by the Babylonians is discussed, the text was apparently meant to address similar questions in the wake of the destruction of the 2nd temple in 70 AD (1)(2).

So why does Dr. Ehrman care about 2nd Baruch?

Because Ehrman wants to convince us that the earliest Christians did not believe that Jesus was God Himself made flesh (he claims that the very earliest disciples believed that the risen Jesus was flesh-made-God, and that Paul believed Jesus was an angel made flesh).

Ehrman uses 2nd Baruch to build his case because it seems to teach that righteous humans eventually become angels, or something even more glorious. Below is a sample of Ehrman’s comments (49 of 302):

“The righteous will be transformed [per chapter 51 verses 3-10] ‘into the splendor of angels…for they will live in the heights of that world and they will be like the angels and be equal to the stars…And the excellence of the righteous will then be greater than that of the angels'”.

The upshot?

“…if humans could be angels (and angels humans), and if angels could be gods, and if in fact the chief angel could be the Lord himself–then to make Jesus divine, one simply needs to think of him as an angel in human form.” (51 of 302).

See what he did there?

Unsourced

Have you ever heard someone say that the Bible is a translation of a translation, or something to that effect? It’s a false claim, but…I can’t help being reminded of it as I learn more about 2nd Baruch. To wit:

“The Apocalypse of Baruch survives only in a Syriac version translated from Greek; originally the book was composed in Hebrew or Aramaic and is ascribed to Baruch” (1)

So, all we have left of 2nd Baruch is a Syriac version translated from a lost Greek translation of a lost original Hebrew or Aramaic version. That’s literally a translation of a translation.

I bring this up not just because it introduces serious questions about what the original version actually said, but also because the strength of Ehrman’s appeal to 2nd Baruch is at least partially proportional to how influential the text was. And if this text was not popular enough to even survive as a single copy in the original language, much less be to be canonized, then I think it’s fair to question Ehrman’s usage of this text to guide our understanding of early Christianity.

Uncited

The dearth of citations of 2nd Baruch also calls into question how popular this text was (and therefore, again, how much weight it should carry when we’re trying to identify the beliefs of early Christians). As I’ve done with other non-canonical texts that Ehrman has cited, I looked up the earliest known reference to 2nd Baruch…and it was in a work by Cyprian from 250 AD (3)(4).

By contrast, our earliest reference to Paul’s (the writer that, per Ehrman, believed Jesus was just an angel incarnate ) letter to the Philippians is from an early 2nd century letter to the Philippians written by Polycarp (5), (6).

See the difference? More than a hundred years between the earliest extant reference to Paul’s letter to the Philippians and the earliest extant reference to 2nd Baruch.

Paul lived in the 1st century AD. If 2nd Baruch was as representative of 1st century Jewish Christian thought as Ehrman implies, why don’t we have anyone mentioning it until 200 years later?

(Un)precedented

The hermeneutical precedent that Ehrman is trying to construct for the Pauline letters seems very weak to me. He’s appealing to texts for which we have ZERO copies of in the original language (or only very small fragments), and which have very late first citations.

As I said in a previous post, when I finally get to Ehrman’s specific discussion about Philippians, I’m going to demand strong evidence from the Pauline letters themselves…not a hodgepodge of poorly sourced, rarely cited, non-canonical texts.

God bless and thanks for reading!

Links:

1. 2nd Baruch on Britannica
2. 2nd Baruch at Oxford Bibliographies
3. 2nd Baruch on Wikipedia
4. Three Books of Testimonies Against the Jews on Wikisource
5. Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians
6. Wikipedia’s discussion of Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians

God bless,

TFOTF