Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 4, 2023

Can we trust a source such as Papias on the question of whether our Gospel of Matthew was written by the disciple Matthew and that our Gospel of Mark was written by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter?

It is interesting that Papias tells a story that is recorded in our Matthew but tells it so completely differently that it appears he doesn’t know Matthew’s version.  And so when he says Matthew wrote Matthew, is he referring to *our* Matthew, or to some other book?  (Recall, the Gospel he refers to is a collection of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew; the Gospel of Matthew that *we* have is a narrative, not a collection of sayings, and was written in Greek.)  If he *is* referring to our Matthew, why doesn’t he see it as an authoritative account?

Here’s the conflicting story.  It involves the death of Judas.  And it’s quite a story!  Here is my translation of it from my edition, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1; 2004).

But Judas went about in this world as a great model of impiety. He became so bloated in the flesh that he could not pass through a place that was easily wide enough for a wagon – not even his swollen head could fit. They say that his eyelids swelled to such an extent that he could not see the light at all; and a doctor could not see his eyes even with an optical device, so deeply sunken they were in the surrounding flesh.  And his genitalia appeared more disgusting and greater than all formlessness, and he bore through them from his whole body flowing pus and worms, and to his shame shame, he emitted pus and worms that flowed through his entire body.

And they say that after he suffered numerous torments and punishments, he died on his own land, and that land has been, until now, desolate and uninhabited because of the stench. Indeed, even to this day no one can pass by the place without holding their nose. This was how great an outpouring he made from his flesh on the ground.” [Apollinaris of Laodicea]

You gotta love it.  But, well, what does one make of it?  Matthew’s Gospel – the one we have in the New Testament – also describes the death of Judas.  But it is not like this at all.  According to Matthew, Judas hanged himself (Matt. 27:5).  If Papias saw Matthew’s Gospel as an eyewitness authority to the life of Jesus and those around him, why didn’t he accept its version of Judas’s death?

Another alternative is that when Papias describes a Gospel written by Matthew, he isn’t actually referring to the Matthew that we now have.  Recall: Papias says two things about the “Matthew” he is familiar with:  it consists only of sayings of Jesus and it was composed in Hebrew.  Neither is true of our Matthew, which does have sayings of Jesus, but is mainly composed of stories about Jesus.  Moreover, it was not composed in Hebrew but in Greek.[1]

It is possible, of course, that like other early Christian scholars, Papias thought Matthew was originally composed in Hebrew when it was not.  But it is also possible that these later writers thought Matthew was written in Hebrew because they knew about Papias’s comment and thought he was referring to our Gospel.  But he appears not to be:  Matthew is not simply a collection of Jesus’ sayings; and in the only place that Papias’s comments overlap with (our) Matthew’s account (the death of Judas), he doesn’t appear to know (our) Matthew.

If Papias was not talking about our Matthew, was he talking about our Mark?  As Papias’s quotation about Mark that I cited yesterday indicates, he considered “his” Mark to be problematic because of its disorderly arrangement: that’s why he says that the preaching of Peter was not given “in order.”   But that somewhat negative remark in itself is odd, because he doesn’t make the same comment about Matthew, even though the narrative outline of our Matthew is pretty much the same as our Mark – with additional materials added in.

Apart from that, Papias indicates that Mark’s Gospel gives an exhaustive account of everything Peter preached and that it gives it without changing a thing.    The reality is that there is no way that anyone could think that the Gospel of Mark in our Bibles today gives a full account of Peter’s knowledge of Jesus.  Our Gospel of Mark takes about two hours to read.  Are we to think that after spending months (years?) with Jesus, Peter had no more than two hours’ worth of memories?

Of course it may be that Papias is exaggerating for effect.   But even so, since he does not appear to be referring to the book we call Matthew, why should we think that he is referring to the book we call Mark?  And that, therefore (as Papias indicates) Mark’s Gospel is actually a transcription of Peter’s version of what Jesus said and did?

Despite repeated attempts over the centuries by readers to show that Mark’s Gospel is “Peter’s perspective,” the reality is that if you simply read it without any preconceptions, there is nothing about the book that would make you think, “Oh, this is how Peter saw it all.”  Quite the contrary – not only does Peter come off as a bumbling, foot-in-the-mouth, and unfaithful follower of Jesus in Mark (see Mark 8:27-32; 9:5-6; 14:27-31), but there are all sorts of stories – the vast majority – that have nothing to do with Peter or that betray anything like a Petrine voice.

There is, though, a still further and even more compelling reason for doubting that we can trust Papias on the authorship of the Gospels.  It is that that we cannot really trust him on much of anything.  That may sound harsh, but remember that even the early Christians did not appreciate his work very much and the one comment we have about him personally from an educated church father is that he was remarkably unintelligent.

It is striking that some modern authors want to latch on to Papias for his claims that Matthew and Mark wrote Gospels, assuming, as Bauckham does, that he must be historically accurate, when they completely overlook the other things that Papias says, things that even these authors admit are not and cannot be accurate.  If Papias is not reliable about anything else he says, why does anyone think he is reliable about our Gospels of Matthew and Mark?  The reason is obvious.  It is because readers want him to be accurate about Matthew and Mark, even though they know that otherwise you can’t rely on  him for a second.

Does anyone think that Judas really bloated up larger than a house, emitted worms from his genitals, and then burst on his own land, creating a stench that lasted a century?  No, not really.  But it’s one of the two Gospel traditions that Papias narrates.  Here is the only other one.  This is the only saying of Jesus that is preserved from the writing of Papias.  Papias claims that it comes from those who knew the elders who knew what the disciple John the Son of Zebedee said that Jesus taught:

Thus the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, remembered hearing him say how the Lord used to teach about those times, saying:

The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches.  And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in ever cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine.  And when any of the saints grabs hold of a cluster, another will cry out, ‘I am better, take me, bless the lord through me.” (Eusebius, Church History, 3.39.1)

Really?  Jesus taught that?  Does anyone really think so?  No one I know.  Does Papias think Jesus said this?   Yes, he absolutely does.   Here is what Papias himself says about the traditions of Jesus he records in his five-volume book, in Bauckham’s own translation:

I will not hesitate to set down for you along with my interpretations everything I carefully learned from the elders and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth.”

So, can we rest assured about the truth of what Papias says, since he can provide guarantees based on his careful memory?   It doesn’t look like it.  The only traditions about Jesus we have from his pen are clearly not accurate.   Why should we think that what he says about Matthew and Mark are accurate?  My hunch is that the only reason readers have done so is because they would like him to be accurate when he says things they agree with, even when they know he is not accurate when he says things they disagree with.

However one evaluates the overall trustworthiness of Papias, in my view he does not provide us with clear evidence that the books that eventually became the first two Gospels of the New Testament were called Matthew and Mark in his time.

[1] That is obvious If Matthew was based in large part on the Gospel of Mark, as is almost everywhere conceded.  Matthew agrees with the Greek text of Mark verbatim throughout his account.  The only way that would be possible is if he was copying the Greek text into his Greek text.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 2, 2023

I have begun to discuss the evidence provided by the early church father Papias that Mark was actually written by Mark.  He appears to be the first source to say so.  Does he?  And if so, is he right?

Here’s how I begin to discuss these matters in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (edited a bit here).

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Papias is often taken as evidence that at least two of the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, were called by those names already several decades after they were in circulation.

Papias was a Christian author who is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE.  His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. [1] It is much to be regretted that we no longer have this book.   We don’t know exactly why later scribes chose not to copy it, but it is commonly thought that the book was either uninspiring, naïve, or theologically questionable.  Later church fathers who talk about Papias and his book are not overly enthusiastic.  The “father of church history,” the fourth-century Eusebius of Caesarea, indicates that, in his opinion, Papias was “a man of exceedingly small intelligence” (Church History, 3.39).

Our only access to Papias and his views are in quotations of his book in later church fathers, starting with the important author Irenaeus around 185 CE, and including Eusebius himself.  Some of these quotations are fascinating and have been the subject of intense investigation among critical scholars for a very long time.  Of relevance to us here is what he says both about the Gospels and about the connection that he claims to have had to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.

In one of the most famous passages quoted by Eusebius, Papias indicates that instead of reading about Jesus and his disciples in books, he preferred hearing a “living voice.”   He explains that whenever knowledgeable people came to visit his church, he talked with them to ask what they knew.  Specifically he spoke with people who had been “companions” of those whom he calls “elders” who had earlier been associates with the disciples of Jesus.   And so Papias is not himself an eyewitness to Jesus’ life and does not know eyewitnesses.   Writing many years later (as much as a century after Jesus’ death), he indicates that he knew people who knew people who knew people who were with Jesus during his life.  So it’s not like having firsthand information, or anything close to it.  But it’s extremely interesting and enough to make a scholar sit up and take notice.

Richard Bauckham [In his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses] is especially enthusiastic about Papias’s testimony, in part because he believes that Papias encountered these people long before he was writing, possibly as early as 80 CE, that is, during the time when the Gospels themselves were being composed [Papias himself, as you can probably guess, says nothing of the sort].  Bauckham does not ask whether Papias’ memory of encounters he had many decades earlier was accurate.  But as that is our interest here, it will be important to raise the questions ourselves.

Two passages from Papias are especially important, as Bauckham and others have taken them to be solid evidence that the Gospels were already given their names during the first century.  At first glance, one can see why they might think so.  Papias mentions Gospels written both by Mark and by Matthew.   His comments deserve to be quoted here in full.  First on a Gospel written by Mark.:

This is what the elder used to say, “when Mark was the interpreter [Or: translator] of Peter he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds – but not in order.  For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings.  And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them.  For he was intent on just one purpose: not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.”  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

Thus, according to Papias, someone named Mark was Peter’s interpreter or translator (from Aramaic?) and he wrote down what Peter had to say about Jesus’ words and deeds.  He did not, however, produce an orderly composition.  Still, he did record everything he ever heard Peter say and he did so with scrupulous accuracy.  We will see that these claims are highly problematic, but first consider what Papias says also about a Gospel by Matthew:

And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

There are numerous reasons for questioning whether these passages – as quoted by Eusebius — provide us solid evidence that the New Testament Gospels were given their names in the late first or early second century.

First, it is somewhat curious and certainly interesting that Eusebius chose not to include any quotations from Papias about Luke or John.  Why would that be?  Were Papias’s views about these two books not significant?  Were they unusual?  Were they contrary to Eusebius’s own views?  We’ll never know.

Second, it is important to stress that in none of the surviving quotations of Papias does he actually quote either Matthew or Mark.  That is to say, he does not give a teaching of Jesus, or a summary of something he did, and then indicate that he found it in one of these Gospels.  That is unfortunate, because it means that we have no way of knowing for certain that when he refers to a Gospel written by Mark he has in mind the Gospel that we now today call the Gospel of Mark.  In fact there are reasons for doubting it, as I will show in my next post.

[1] See the Introduction and the collection of all the fragments of Papias that I give in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2 pp. 85-118.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 1, 2023

Did Mark write Mark?   A couple of weeks ago I did an eight-lecture course on the Gospel of Mark for my separate (unrelated to the blog) venture, a series of courses on “How Historians Read the Bible” (the courses are available on my website: www.bartehrman.com).  It was a blast.  One of the things I loved about doing it was that I was able to read and reread scholarship on Mark and I learned some things I had long wondered about, and re-learned other things that I used to know.

One of the things I had to think seriously about for the first time in some years was the question of why church fathers in the second century (but when?) began claiming that our second Gospel was written by John Mark, allegedly a secretary for the apostle Peter.  That took me straight back to the question of the reliability of an early Christian writer named Papias (writing around 120 or 130 CE?).

Papias gets used all the time as proof that Mark wrote Mark.  Conservative Christian scholars cite him on the point as “gospel truth.”  But for the past 30 years I’ve found the evidence unconvincing.  I’ve written about the issue briefly on the blog before, but I decided to look up my lengthiest discussion of the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016) and lo and behold, I made some points there that I didn’t remember!

I thought it would be worthwhile to present that discussion here.  It tries to show why Papias’ witness is so problematic for establishing the authorship of both Mark and Matthew, the only two Gospels he mentions in the snippets of his writings we still have.  This will take three posts.

In this one I give the backdrop to the testimony of Papias.

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The Gospel writers are all anonymous.  None of them gives us any concrete information about their identity.  So when did they come to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?   We might begin by considering the earliest references to the books, which occur in a group of authors who were writing, for the most part, immediately after the New Testament period.   These are the so-called “Apostolic Fathers.”  That term is not meant to indicate that these authors themselves were apostles, but that, in scholarly opinion starting hundreds of years ago (though no longer), they were companions of the apostles.   Theirs are among our earliest non-canonical writings.[1]

In the various Apostolic Fathers there are numerous quotations of the Gospels of the New Testament, especially Matthew and Luke.   What is striking about these quotations is that in none of them does any of these authors ascribe a name to the books they are quoting.  Isn’t that a bit odd?   If they wanted to assign “authority” to the quotation, why wouldn’t they indicate who wrote it?

Almost certainly the first apostolic father is the book of 1 Clement, a letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth written around 95 CE (and so, before some of the last books of the New Testament) and traditionally claimed to have been composed by the third bishop of Rome, Clement.   Scholars today widely reject that claim, but for our purposes here it does not much matter.   Just to give an example of how the Gospels are generally treated in the Apostolic Fathers, I quote one passage from 1 Clement:

We should especially remember the words the Lord Jesus spoke when teaching about gentleness and patience.  For he said: “Show mercy, that you may be shown mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven you.  As you do, so it will be done to you; as you give, so it will be given to you; as you judge, so you will be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you; the amount you dispense will be the amount you receive.” (1 Clement 13:1-2)

This is an interesting passage, and fairly typical, because it conflates a number of passages from the Gospels, containing lines from Matthew 5:7; 6:14-15; 7:1-2, 12; Luke 6:31, and 36-38.   But the author does not name the Gospels he has taken the texts from, and certainly doesn’t attribute them to eyewitnesses.  Instead, he simply indicates that this is something that Jesus said.

The same is true of other Apostolic Fathers.   In chapter one of the intriguing book known as the Didache, which contains a set of ethical and practical instructions to the Christian churches, the anonymous writer quotes from Mark 12, Matthew 5 and 7; and Luke 8.  But he never names these Gospels.  Later he cites the Lord’s prayer, virtually as it is found in Matthew 6; again he does not indicate his source.

So too, as a third example, Ignatius of Antioch clearly knows Matthew’s story of the star of Bethlehem (Ignatius, Ephesians 19) and Matthew’s story of Jesus’ baptism which was undergone “in order to fulfill all righteousness” (Smyrneans 1).  But he doesn’t mention that the account was written by Matthew.   Similarly, Polycarp of Smyrna quotes Matthew chapters 5, 7, and 26 and Luke 6, but he never names a Gospel.

This is true of all of our references to the Gospels prior to the end of the second century.   The Gospels are known, read, and cited as authorities.  But they are never named or associated with an eyewitness to the life of Jesus.  There is one possible exception:  the fragmentary references to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark in the writings of the church father, Papias.

[1] For a translation of their writings, with introductions, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2003).  I have used this translation for all my quotations.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman on February 26, 2023.

In my previous posts I discussed a class I once taught at Rutgers University on how the various biblical authors deal with the problem of suffering – the problem of how there can be such horrible suffering in a world that is said to be controlled by an all-loving and all-powerful God (who therefore wants the best for people and is able to provide it).  Many of my students, as I pointed out, think that there’s an easy answer:  we suffer because of “free will.”  If we weren’t free to love and hate, to do good and do harm, we would just be robots or computers, not humans.  If God wanted to create humans, as opposed to machines, necessarily we have to be free to hurt others.  And many people do so, often in horrendous ways.

Does that solve the problem?  Naturally we dealt with that issue in my class.  Here is how I discussed those conversations in my book on suffering, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (Oxford University Press, 2008).

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It was, in fact, fairly easy to show my students some of the problems with this standard modern explanation that suffering comes from free will.  Yes, you can explain the political machinations of the competing political forces in Ethiopia (or in Nazi Germany or in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in the ancient worlds of Israel and Mesopotamia) by claiming that humans had badly handled the freedom given to them.  But how can you explain drought?  When it hits, it is not because someone chose not to make it rain.  Or how do you explain hurricanes that destroy New Orleans?  Or tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands overnight?  Or earthquakes, or mudslides, or malaria, or dysentery?  And so on.

Moreover, the claim that free will stands behind all suffering has always been a bit problematic, at least from a thinking perspective.  Most people who believe in God-given free will also believe in an afterlife.  Presumably people in the afterlife will still have free will (they won’t be robots then either, will they?).  And yet there won’t be suffering (allegedly) then. Why will people know how to exercise free will in heaven if they can’t know how to exercise it on earth?

In fact, if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we could all live happily and peaceably together?  You can’t argue that he wasn’t able to do so, if you want to argue he was all powerful.  Moreover, if God sometimes intervenes in history in order to counteract the free will decisions of others — for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the Exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites) or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch), or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead — if he intervenes sometimes to counteract free will, why does he not do so more of the time?  Or indeed, all of the time.

At the end of the day, one would have to say that the answer is a mystery.  We don’t know why free will works so well in heaven but not on earth.  We don’t know why God doesn’t provide the intelligence we need to exercise free will.  We don’t know why he sometimes contravenes the free exercise of the will and sometimes not.  But the problem is that if in the end the question is resolved by saying it is a mystery, then we no longer have an answer.  We are admitting there is no answer.  The solution of free will, in the end, ultimately leads to the conclusion that we can’t understand, even though we imagine we are giving an answer.

As it turns out, that is one of the common answers asserted by the Bible.  We just don’t know why there is suffering.  But other answers in the Bible are just as common — in fact, even more common.  In my class at Rutgers I wanted to explore all these answers, to see what the Biblical authors thought about such matters, and to evaluate what they had to say.

Based on my experience with the class, I decided at the end of the term that I wanted to write a book about it, a study of suffering and biblical responses to it.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t ready to write the book.  I was just 30 years old at the time, and although I had seen a lot of the world, I recognized that I had not seen nearly enough of it.  A book like this requires years of thought and reflection, and a broader sense of the world and fuller understanding of life.

I’m now twenty years older [OK, with this blog post thirty-five years older!], and I still may not be ready to write the book.  It’s true, I’ve seen a lot more of the world over these years.  I’ve experienced a lot more pain myself, and have seen the pain and misery of others, sometimes close up: broken marriages, failed health, cancer taking away loved ones in the prime of life, suicide, birth defects, children killed in car accidents, homelessness, mental disease — you can make your own list of your past twenty years.  And I’ve read a lot: genocides and ethnic cleansings not only in Nazi Germany but also in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur; terrorist attacks, massive starvation, epidemics ancient and modern, mudslides that kill 30,000 Columbians in one fell swoop, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis.

Still, even with twenty years of additional experience and reflection, I may not be ready to write the book.  But I suppose in another twenty years, with the horrible suffering in store for this world, I may still feel the same way.  So I’ve decided to write it now.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Erhman on February 23, 2023. Click here to read the first article in this series.

In my previous post I began to talk about how thinkers in the Jewish and Christian traditions have wrestled with the problem of suffering.  I indicated that the technical term for this “problem” is “theodicy,” and it is often said to involve the status of three assertions which all are typically thought to be true by those in these two religions, but if true appear to contradict one another.  The assertions are these:

God is all-powerful.

God is all-loving.

There is suffering.

How can all three be true at once?  If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering).  If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer).  And yet people suffer.  How can that be explained?   As I pointed out some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions: either God is not actually all powerful, or he is not all loving, or there is no suffering.

But as I explain in the introduction to my book God’s Problem (Oxford Press, 2008) …

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Most people who wrestle with the problem want to say that all three assertions are true, but that there is some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all.  For example, in the classical view of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, as we will see at length in the next couple of chapters, God is certainly all powerful and all loving; one of the reasons there is suffering is because his people have violated his law or gone against his will, and he is bringing suffering upon them in order to force them to return to him and lead righteous lives.

This kind of explanation works well so long as it is the wicked who are the ones who suffer.  But what about the wicked who prosper while the ones who try to do what is right before God are wracked with interminable pain and unbearable misery?  How does one explain the suffering of the righteous?  For that other explanations need to be used (for example, that it will all be made right in the afterlife – a view not found in the prophets but in other biblical authors) (there are, as I’m suggesting, other explanations as well in the Bible and in popular thinking).

Even though a scholar of the Enlightenment – Leibniz – came up with the term “theodicy,” and even though the deep philosophical problem has been with us only since the Enlightenment, the basic “problem” has been around since time immemorial.  This was recognized by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment themselves.  One of them, the English philosopher David Hume, pointed out that the problem was stated some twenty-five hundred years ago by one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Epicurus:

Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered:

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able?  Then he is impotent.

Is he able but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?  Whence, then, evil?^[i]

As I was teaching my course on biblical views of suffering at Rutgers, over twenty years ago (well… thirty-five now!!), I began to realize that the students seemed remarkably, and somewhat inexplicably, detached from the problem.  It was a good group of students: smart and attentive.  But they were for the most part white, middle-class kids who had not experienced a lot of pain in their lives yet, and I had to do some work in order to help them realize that the problem of suffering was in fact a problem.

This was the time of one of the major Ethiopian famines.  In order to drive home for my students just how disturbing suffering could be, I spent some time with them dealing with the problem of the famine.  It was an enormous problem.  In part because of the political situation, but even more because of a massive drought, there were eight million Ethiopians who were confronted with severe shortages and who, as a result, were starving.  Every day there were pictures in the papers of poor souls, famished, desperate, with no relief in sight.  Eventually one out of every eight died the horrific death of starvation.

That’s some two million people, starved to death, in a world that has far more than enough food to feed all its inhabitants, a world where American farmers are paid to destroy their crops, a world where most of us in this country ingest far more calories than our bodies need or want.  To make my point, I would show pictures of the famine to the students, pictures of emaciated Ethiopian women with famished children on their breasts, desperately sucking to get nourishment that would never come, both mother and children eventually destroyed by the ravages of hunger.

Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point.  Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem.  When the course had started, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved.

The most popular solution they had was one that I would judge most people in our (Western) world today still hold on to.  It has to do with free will.  According to this view, the reason there is so much suffering in the world is that God has given humans free will.  Without the free will to love and obey God, we would simply be robots doing what we were programed to do.  But since we have the free will to love and obey, we also have the free will to hate and disobey, and this is where suffering comes from.  Hitler, the Holocaust, Idi Amin, corrupt governments throughout the world, corrupt humans inside government and outside of it – all of these are explained on the grounds of free will.

As it turns out, this was more or less the answer given by some of the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment, including Leibniz, who argued that humans have to be free in order for this world to be the best world that could come into existence.  For Leibniz, God is all powerful and so was able to create any kind of world he wanted; and since he was all loving he obviously wanted to create the best of all possible worlds.  This world – with freedom of choice given to its creatures – is therefore the best of all possible worlds.

Other philosophers rejected this view – none so famously, vitriolically, and even hilariously as the French philosopher Voltaire, whose classic novel Candide tells the story of a man (Candide) who experiences such senseless and random suffering and misery, in this allegedly “best of all worlds,” that he abandons his Leibnizian upbringing and adopts a more sensible view, that we can’t know the whys and wherefores of what happens in this world, but should simply do our very best to enjoy it while we can.^[ii]  Candide is still a novel very much worth reading – witty, clever, and damning.  If this is the best world possible – just imagine what a worse one would be.

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I will continue my reflections on the matter starting at this point, in the next post.

[i].  David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (the sentiments are those expressed by his fictitious caracter named Philo). Xxx?

[ii]. Voltaire.  Candide: or Optimism.  Tr. Theo Cuffe (New York: Penguin, 2005).