Camp Gagnon - BANNED Bible Books Explained: Enoch, Nephilim, The Watchers & More

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Bible Expert Prof. Jeremy Hultin joins me to discuss banned books of the bible and uncover WHY. Book of Enoch, Nephilim, Giants, The Watchers, Revelation and MORE. He is a true expert of antique noncanonical Jewish and Christian texts. Hultin teaches at the Union Theological Seminary of NYC. Welcome to Camp 🏕️🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/Intro, edited: BrandonS/O to our sponsors Morgan & Morgan, Marek Health & Bluechew!!MAREK 🥼 - Get a...

They were books that were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that were not canonized into what would be considered the Christian Hebrew Bible. Yeah, that's right. The book of Enoch. Enoch is a very minor character in the Bible. The mysterious thing about him is it says Enoch walked with God and he was no more because God took him. So he's one of two people in the Hebrew Bible who don't seem to die in a normal death. You can imagine that if you want to write a work in someone else's name, why not pick a person who was taken alive to heaven and could tell what he's seen. So this is why you have multiple texts penned in the name of Enoch.

Enoch lived before Noah and the flood. So how would his books have survived? Isn't it a matter of telephone? That's an old book. What are the odds? We've got the words and only the words that Enoch said. So what first Enoch's really known for is his story of what went wrong on earth. The more familiar stories, the story of the garden with Adam and Eve.

Enoch doesn't have that story. In Enoch's story, they're called The Watchers, which means watching the sense of being always awake, the vigilant ones, decide that they want to descend and take human women as wives and they procreate with them. Their offspring are the giants and the giants start devouring the earth. That's what elicits the flood. But after the flood, it destroys the giant bodies, but their spirits would continue to roam the earth as evil spirits. I'm curious about the book of Revelation.

There's all sorts of crazy visions and prophecies of end times. Yeah. So when God comes to Earth, it says the people were terrified because they just saw the fire, they heard the voice, they were scared to death. God's a consuming fire. Dr. Holton. Thank you so much for being here, man. Yeah, glad to be here. I really appreciate it.

This is going to be a lot of fun. I have so many questions. I feel like I've been preparing my whole life for this. Good. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I think a really interesting place to start. I'm curious. What, if any, are the major misconceptions that most people have about the Bible?

Yeah, you'll have to remind me some of the things you think, sort of the person on the street thinks about the Bible. Bible, but I would say, I think people who aren't too familiar with it would imagine it's full of spiritual wisdom. And if you just pick up at a random place, you've got a Bible in the desk and start thumbing through, there's just large swaths that are, and then this king reigned, this long, and then they conquered this town, and then this king reigned. And then you get to the New Testament, and you have just letters from person A to person B,

and when it's Paul, it's often pretty fiery. So you wouldn't read it and think, for instance, if Paul says, so-and-so says hello, please greet so-and-so for me, the entire Romans 16 is just that. You wouldn't read that and think, what is God saying to me about the good life, the truth, religion? It sounds very alien, and so I think people are surprised by that. There are purple patches where love is patient, love is kind. You think, ah, now this sounds like what I thought I'd find in the Bible, but that's one chapter of 1st, Corinthians, 3rd. It's not what you find page after page. Yeah, you try to get through Leviticus, and you're like, ooh, this is a lot of legal code.

A lot of jargon. Lots of Exodus has taken up with instructions for how to build the tabernacle in tremendous detail. I mean, it is instruction guide. And yeah, so I think that people are surprised by that. Now, this book that I'm holding my head, the Bible, new American version. This is actually not the one I like. I prefer new international version. That was one I was kind of raised on.

But I'm curious, how did this get into my hand? How did it go from stories around the time of Christ into this translation of this book? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think this is another quite common misconception. To give the misconception first that I've encountered, people say, oh, well, you know, I'm aware that it was one translation upon another upon another. And sometime in the Middle Ages, we got the text that get translated in English. That's really not true. We could dive into this later and complicate what I'm about to say.

But on the whole, that Bible you're holding was made by scholars from the ancient Hebrew. and Greek manuscripts. So I've got a Greek New Testament right here. This is all I've used since I could read Greek and they're translating these Greek texts into English for the New Testament. And they're translating the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. Those texts, what are the oldest ones we have? We have manuscripts of the New Testament back to the second century. So if Jesus lives in the first century, we've got physical manuscripts you can touch and read and translate from a century after that. Oh, wow.

And when it comes to the Hebrew, we actually have the Dead Sea Scrolls, which predate Christ. They're older than Jesus. So until the scrolls were discovered, you had to rely on 10th century, C.E. Hebrew manuscripts. So you said, well, that's written in the year 1000. How do we know how much has changed? Then you discover the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. And for some books, again, we can complicate this, but for some books, large swaths, you'll translate, and it's letter for letter.

the 10th century manuscript, which was all we had before the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the stuff that was pulled out of jars and caves by the Bedouin, same text. Wow. So those were carefully transmitted. Again, there's a little more to say about that. Sure. But so you are reading something, you're reading an English translation from those original languages. Hey, what's up, guys?

Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations. And it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much.

Let's get back to it. Wow. I mean, that I think is actually significant. And I really want to talk with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Arguably one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. So there's a, I guess, the scholars are using a, 10th century version. They had been.

And then they compared it to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And you're suggesting that large swaths of those texts matched up perfectly. But across 900 years, it was pretty accurate. That's right. That seems significant to me. It's very significant. Where I'd want to quickly just add that, for instance, the Isaiah Scroll, when you unroll it, it's 11 meters, 35 feet of vellum, and the entire 16.

six chapters of Isaiah. There will be spellings that are different. The way Hebrew works, you don't always have to write vowels or you don't write vowels. In the period they were writing, they were adding vowels, stuff like that. Little differences, but it's like a British person spelling color, C-O-L-U-R versus you'd say, well, that's the same word. Which bothers me. Or like when they say woused?

You ever see someone say that? I'm not familiar with wows. Instead of saying wild, they'll say like wils. Ah, woused. Whilst we were gone. I live in Australia. I got some of those. grow up.

Some of them rankled. That bothers me. Just be right. I'll take that. I digress. But there's other books where this is a little in the weeds, but it's pretty cool actually. The Hebrew text, let's say written 5th century, 6th century BCE. So we're going back in time before Christ.

Those get translated into Greek in the second century BCE. So a picture, there's someone looking at a Hebrew text translating into Greek. We have those Greek texts. We have an ancient translation. You've got a modern English translation. We have also ancient Greek translations. The text, the Hebrew text continues to evolve. So people do make changes.

And they don't always make the same changes to the Hebrew that they made to the Greek. So someone's looking at the Greek. I can give an example. There's a passage in Deuteronomy, which talks about the children of God. You see what the children of God. The Hebrew now has just angels. and in that case the Hebrew although it originally said almost certainly the Hebrew originally said sons of God in this case the Greek translated that literally Jews were like that sounds too

mythological the idea of God having children let's change it to angels because that's really what's meant anyway but then when you discover the Dead Sea Scrolls here's an update is the Hebrew text of the Dead Sea Scrolls a thousand years older than our previous text has the same reading as what the Greek had so the children change happened sometime between the year zero, let's say, and the year 1000. So the Dead Sea Scroll said angels? No, they keep sons of God. Sons of God. Wow.

They keep what the Greek had. Oh, because they came back. So as people were reading that Greek, they said, I bet the Hebrew, if you look at the Greek and you say, let me imagine retroverting that into Hebrew. I see. But we didn't have a Hebrew manuscript, which actually said that. That was just hypothetical. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is, and dozens of cases, aha, just what we thought

the Hebrew would have said. There really was a Hebrew text that said that. Wow. I mean, this is significant. Again, I did not expect this to be the angle that you would come in with. Again, I told you before I was prejudiced. I'd assumed scholars in academia have, I guess, a critical lens of religion. And by critical, I mean that as like a pejorative, like not like trying to be scrupulous.

But like by actually being like, oh, this is a faulty document and it's all fake and da-da-da-da-da. So for you to be like, well, it's actually pretty accurate and it's not some type of like oral tradition that got telephoned and changed over 10,000 years. that may be a place to like dive into a little more because I think one you're right scholars are critical in both senses hopefully scrupulous and precise but then also but I'd want to make a distinction between having what was originally written and determining if what was originally written is a true story because you could say well we do have a version of the book of Genesis to take one at random that is a lot like an ancient book of Genesis it's not a case of telephone So I think that the telephone version is a misconception. But that doesn't mean that people think, aha, the flood, there was really a universal flood that covered the earth. And Noah survived it in an arc with his, with eight people. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But our version of the flood story is like the version of the flood story they had in the first century. Right. And that's kind of a different discussion of like, you know, what's metaphorical and what is, you know, literal, which I'm really curious about. But this is really interesting, just kind of as like a groundwork. So I'm curious, you've mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I've read a little bit about it, but could you just explain what it is and why it's so significant? Yeah, so in 1947, as the story has it, Bedouin were shepherding their flocks and trying to get a sheep out of a cave, throw a rock in, hear a plunk, the sound of pottery breaking.

And they find pottery jars with scrolls, Hebrew manuscripts, and Aramaic manuscripts. and as they search more, they end up finding 11 different caves with manuscripts, maybe more than that. And there's more in the Judean desert. And those include a variety of texts. So quick overview, there are biblical texts. So there's fragments of all the books of the Hebrew Bible, except there's no copies of the book of Esther.

But there's a couple copies of Genesis and a couple copies of Exodus and so on, right through. Not always complete, sometimes very fragmentary. Some of it looks like corn flakes. and they had to reassemble these. Wow. Yeah. Then there's also texts that aren't biblical texts. They are what get called, well, one is called the community rule, Sarah Kajahad.

And it's clearly instructions for some sort of separatist Jewish community. And another text called the Damascus document, these are a little hard to piece together, but a basic story, which you could then diverge from a disagree with, but a basic story looks like the Damascus document says we, the Jewish people, the children of God were wandering in the wilderness, not going the right way, but then God raised up for us a teacher of righteousness. So they seemed to have had some sort of teacher who they feel like was inspired to interpret the Mosaic Cloud the right way. And you can tell from these, they're called sectarian documents because they're not just biblical texts, they're things only they had. You can tell from those texts that they thought, let's call it

mainstream Judaism in Jerusalem, not that far away, was totally going awry. They were misunderstanding the right way to interpret the books of Moses, the law, the Torah. And so they had separated. They said, we've segregated ourselves in the wilderness to prepare a way for God's coming. You know what they quote. They actually quote Isaiah 40 verse 3. If you know this one, make a way in the wilderness for the Lord, a voice of one crying out in the wilderness. And this is what John the Baptist is, this is what's used in reference to John the Baptist in all four Gospels. So they're using that same verse, but they say the way to make away for the Lord in the wilderness, meaning the desert, is to recommit yourselves to strenuous

study of the law. So you have biblical texts, which are shared by all Jews, then you have these sectarian texts, which is their take on different things. And we even have a letter called 4Q MMT. The names come from which cave it is. So 4Q, Tum, K4, MMT stands for the Hebrew title, Mixat Sehat Torah, a few precepts of the Torah. And it's a letter written to the folks in Jerusalem saying, we want you to know what you're getting wrong. And it goes into, I think what would strike most modern people is fairly minute details. We've got some cups on the desk here.

And it says, you misunderstand that if this vessel, I'm holding a coffee cup in my right hand, if this vessel is ritually unclean, according to things like Leviticus, you mentioned that. and this vessel is clean. If they touch, the impurity passes. Everyone agrees. They say, we want you to know that if I'm to pour from one vessel to the other, the impurity runs up the stream

and renders this vessel. So they're addressing, again, what would strike us is, gosh, that is not the biggest problem facing humanity. But if your goal is to get, if you have a law from God and you're trying to get it right,

you've got to decide this stuff. And they also think they keep the calendar wrong. You guys have misunderstood the calendar, so you're celebrating festivals on the wrong day and there's a few other things they address. Wow. So we have biblical documents, sectarian documents,

and we have copies of other texts that are not in the Bible, but that are more broadly known. So for instance, they have copies of the Book of Jubilee and of First Enoch and those are known from other copies. They weren't the only people who had those. Got it.

So there's a, and, and, and, and, and, And Quran, the settlement was destroyed. And it was an earthquake. I can't remember exactly the details of when it was settled. And there's debate about, so the usual understanding, the most popular understanding, which I think is probably right. But there are some problems is that the people who were there with these texts were the group that we know from other texts called the Aesnesnes. So in the New Testament, you hear about groups of Jews, schools of thought, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, Jesus is arguing with them and so on.

according to the Jewish historian Josephus, late first century historian, he says there's a third major school of thought and that's called the Aesnes. And he describes the Aesnes and he describes their special rituals, their special theology, their special practices. And his description of them matches up pretty well

with those sectarian texts, which say here's our take on topics A, B, and C. Interesting. And then we even have a lot, an author Pliny, who says that out by the Dead Sea, there's a group of people called the Assini. And he says they don't marry, they only take in, but yet they replenish themselves by taking in orphans.

And again, not all these things perfectly line up, but it does seem like the folks who authored the sectarian text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were the Ascines. Could you speculate that the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls were authored by the Aseans or just those specific scripts? Just those specific ones, because, I mean, they didn't author. the book of Leviticus. They've got that that already predated them. They've got a copy.

So do the folks in Jerusalem. So do the Jews in Alexandria, Egypt? So do Jews all over the place? But those copies that were found in those caves? That's a good question. Those are probably theirs. And in fact, they might even be copied there.

I mean, one of the little mysteries of the Desseus Scrolls is that I think usually when you find a tranche of text, you'll be able to identify scribal hands, like handwriting. Like if you copied 15 things and some of your colleagues here did, you'd be able to tell which is which. Right. And it's hard to identify one person doing multiple texts.

And that's unusual. So anyway, they may have written them. Anyway, they may have been the ones who penned those texts. Interesting. But they have roughly the same. If you read the Dead Sea Scrolls version of Genesis, it's got the same things as any other version of Genesis in Hebrew. Interesting. Again, always I'm putting footnote.

Sorry, I'm a scholar. with some minor here and there where it is different. Right. Yeah. Now, you mentioned something called the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. Is that different than the Torah? Yeah.

So the terminology, the Torah would be the first five books of the Bible. Right. It's also the word just for law or instruction. So it could be the concept. So this is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteron. You got it. That's the Torah. Also called the Pentateuch.

So multiple terms are the same thing. Hebrew Bible would be the common term for what Christians would call the Old Testament. and it's the same books as in a Christian Old Testament. And it's just usually you avoid saying Old Testament because it implies it's sort of outdated and post-dated, which is somewhat disrespectful to... It's not outdated if you're Jewish. You have the Bible, which is not going to include stories about Jesus.

So since it's written in Hebrew with a few passages in Daniel, for instance, in Aramaic, it's just called the Hebrew Bible. That makes a lot of sense. Same thing as Old Testament. Got you. Now, there were books that were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that were not canonized into what would be considered the Christian Hebrew Bible. Yeah, that's right. And why were those not canonized?

And had they been known at the time of canonization, do you think they would have been included? Yeah, they were known at the time of canonization. And would you mind even just maybe identifying what some of those books are, like, you know, Enoch and those things? Yeah. two of the most important would be the book of Enoch, which monarchs scholars would call first Enoch, because we also have other books and the book of Jubilee's. But to start with Enoch, Enoch is a very minor character in the Bible. He appears for just a couple of verses in Genesis. And the mysterious thing about him is it says, Enoch walked with God and he was no more because God took him.

So he's one of two people in the Hebrew Bible who don't seem to die in normal death. Elijah? Exactly. Elijah is the other. You can imagine that if you want to write a suit epigraphical work, a work in someone else's name, you think you have some wisdom for the world and you want to give it divine authority. In whose name should you write it? You could pick some chump from the pages of the Bible, but that's not going to be very impressive.

Why not pick a person who was taken alive to heaven and could tell what he's seen in that celestial realms, right? So this is why you have multiple texts penned in the name of Enoch. And he's sort of a mysterious figure in that way. So the book of First Enoch, and I'll get to your canon question about it, purports to be Enoch, who's the seventh person from Adam, his visions of the angels and where the winds are kept and of all sorts of things. It's a long book. It's actually multiple books put together.

So First Enoch's actually written in the probably the beginning parts of it in third century BCE. So before the Dead Sea Scrolls, community is even out there. And it'd be interesting to circle back and talk about some of its main themes. But just for the canon question, they've got copies of that. So, and that copies aren't in any way marked differently. There's no reason to think it was on a lower pedestal than the book Leviticus. We don't really know why, we can speculate why what becomes sort of mainstream Judaism doesn't accept first enoch because it was an influential work Christians do discuss it and why they don't use it

because they still it's actually quoted in the New Testament it's quoted in the epistle of jude and and he says as enoch the seventh from adam prophesied and then he gives a quotation from this book and so this was a kind of a thorn in the side of the later Christians who are trying in the third and fourth centuries to make rules in say, look, we only use the same books that the Jewish people use. Well, can we use First Enoch? No, we found out that

the Jews don't really use that anymore. Well, it's in our New Testament. Jude quotes it. And the quote matches up. The quote matches up. You can find it right there. First Enoch 1-9. Wow. It's a quote right from Enoch. That's crazy. Yeah. So, I mean, this becomes an interesting story

because as the church becomes more institutionalized, so there are things like, it's not really a Pope per se, but there's a bishop of Rome. what would later become the papacy. And there's a structure, there's authority in a way there wasn't at first. And they are increasingly in the fourth and fifth centuries

really frowning upon the continued use of these apocryphal texts. In fact, they're beginning to call them apocryphal. The text doesn't say I'm an apocryphal text. An apocryphal meaning. It really means hidden, but so it's like secondary. There were dissenting voices. And I think they make a pretty good argument.

A guy named Prisciilian, Christian from Spain, said, if Jude, and according to the New Testament, Jude is supposed to be one of Jesus' brothers. Jesus has four brothers named in the New Testament. Jude's one of them. So Jude says, I'm the brother of James. That's Jesus' brother. If Jesus' brothers, like Jude, use the apocrypha, it should be a scandal for us Christians not to continue to use them. So that's a dissenting voice, but you can see it's a good argument. That seems like to me, right?

Oh, so we can't use it when it's on its own, but when someone that we trust says it, then we can include it? You summed up the whole, in a nutshell, the whole problem. And so, in fact, we know from other, Jerome says, 4th century to century Christian, he says, many people object to the use of the epistle of Jude because it quotes Enoch. So it kind of went both ways. The New Testament canon, and by canon just means the list of books you count, you had other Christians saying, you know, what, let's keep this tidy. Let's get rid of Jude. Wow. Because it uses a bad text. So in an effort to be consistent, they said, all right, you're both out. You're both out, exactly. And others said, someone like Augustine kind of coast a middle way.

He says, look, we do use Jude. We don't use Enoch. And to get himself out of this pinch, which he senses, he says, Jude maybe by inspiration. And an earlier Christian says this too, Tritullian says, Jude might have by inspiration landed upon the words of Enoch. But as it were, if you go to your library right now, Augustine says, and you get your book of Enoch, you can't be sure that's what Enoch really wrote because it could have changed so much. So we do think Enoch, the seventh guy from Adam, really did say the words Jude quotes from him, but we don't know what else he said. If that sort of makes sense. All right. I mean, that's at least a little more consistent. It's cogent. It's probably not ultimately.

Suhasa, but it's a cogent argument. Right. And, you know, they were bothered by very, to show that they meant these things literally, Tertullian about the year 200 says, uh, Enoch lived before Noah and the flood. So how would his books have survived? And so he's thinking that concretely. Like if Noah, if Fienach wrote this, how do we still have it? And he comes up with a couple theories.

He says, well, it could have, God could have had it rewritten, sort of re-inspired. Or it could have been passed down since Enoch. as Noah's grandfather, great-grandfather. It could have been sort of family treasure. He doesn't actually say Noah could have taken him on the boat with him, but he's thinking real concretely about, you know, yeah, how do we have something that's that old? In a way, he's bothered by the sort of thing

your opening question touched on. Isn't it a matter of telephone? That's an old book. What are the odds? We've got the words and only the words that Enoch said. There's a lot of room people could have slipped stuff in there that's naughty. So what's in this book? And why is it so controversial?

probably the thing in Enoch that is the most um well start with i think that's maybe not the most exciting to the modern world but probably what got it kicked out of any sort of chance of being canonized in the by jewish people is it like the book of jublies which i mentioned it's also the dead sea insists on a solar calendar so i'll do this quickly and we'll get to the juicy stuff about the fall of the angels, which is what it's most known for. But to enter a foreign land and to worry about what someone else was worried about,

in the Hebrew Bible, you have a kind of a mix of a lunar calendar for things like the festivals. When do we celebrate Passover? When do we celebrate New Year? And it's mixed in the books of Moses. It's partly, so something's supposed to be a spring festival, that implies the motion of the sun and when the seasons are.

And yet it's also supposed to be, let's say, in the third month. But if you have a lunar calendar, when the third month is, is gonna drift through the year. And so you're gonna be celebrating spring festivals in the fall, right? Because the drift, because the lunar year has 354 days,

sole year has 365. Enoch, and even more emphatically, the Book of Jubilee, really insist on a solar year. And because by the first century, C.E., after Christ and the second century C.E. Mainstream Judaism had stuck hard with a hybrid calendar. That was not going to work. And so that was a problem. No. Now, were they ultimately correct? Is the solar calendar more effective for? Well, yeah, it keeps everything on exactly the same day. If you're going to say,

so part of what Enoch is shown, books chapter 72 through 82 is called the astronomical book. And you're all excited. Boy, I've got a visionary. He's gone to heaven. Show me what you got. I want to learn. And he basically like in very tedious fashion counts out. There's three sets of 91 days.

That's 364 days. Everything stays. You know, so if something is on, let's say, day 87, that's always going to be in the middle of the spring, right? And there's never going to be drift through the seasons. Later, rabbinic Judaism solves the problem of drift by intercalating months. So you just periodically add a month to keep things where it. should be roughly. So a spring festival stays a spring festival and so on. Seems like a little

inefficient, but I see the solution. Yeah. So, I mean, it's pretty, is that advanced astronomy for the time? They had very, you'd be surprised how good some of the astronomy was. And to be clear, Enoch's, you want to know a cool detail about where the Bible actually seems to know. So in the Bible, I told you Enoch's just a couple verses. How many years does he live in the Bible? You won't remember this? Answer. 845. 365. Wow. Which doesn't feel. like coincidence, right? What does that make you think? Yeah, you got it. So the Bible says nothing about him having anything to do with calendar, no visions, no nothing, but they seem to be associating him with a solar year. Wow. And that suggests that the traditions that link Enoch to the solar

year predate the story in Genesis where he appears. Does that fuck to that track? Wow. That's, I mean, that's kind of spooky. Yeah. I'll give you another example. So what a person Ginox really known for is his story of what went wrong on earth. All these texts have a problem, which is if you have one God and a good God and there's no real equal adversary to God, but you look around and the world doesn't seem perfect, right? So you've got to come up with an account of like how you got from a good start to messed up current present day. The more familiar story is the story of the garden with Adam and Eve.

Enoch doesn't have that story. In Enoch's story, angelic, they're called the watchers, which means watching in the sense of being always awake, the vigilant ones, decide that they want to descend and take human women as wives, and they procreate with them.

Their offspring are the giants, and the giants start devouring the earth, and that's what, elicits the flood. But after the flood, it destroys the giant bodies, but their spirits, which are these hybrid, really bastard spirits, mixes of two types, continue to roam the earth as evil spirits. So you have a backstory for the present distress, which is a primal fall of these angelic beings. And go ahead, you know, a question. I'll say more about that shows up in the Bible, too. I just want to say that is way sicker. What's up?

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from your cell phone. This is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show after the short disclaimer. So in Genesis 6, we already, Enoch's discussed in the Bible in Genesis 5. That's where you get to live 365 years. Another hint that the Bible knows this same larger Enoch tradition is that the next thing that happens in Genesis 6 is it says, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful

and they took for themselves wives and they begat the giants. That's in Genesis? It's in Genesis 6. It's only four verses about it. Yeah. And then God says, my spirit will not endure with humans forever. And then God makes the human lifespan, which have been very long for Methusel and so on. He says humans are only going to live 120 years from now on.

And just after that, chapter 7, you get the flood. You get the lead up to the flood. Oh, human life was shortened before the flood? That's right. This initial punishment. I see. So these four verses in Genesis come out of nowhere. There's no backstory.

No one's named. And, but if you read the account in Enoch, you're like, this is a condensed version. Yeah. And whereas Enoch names the angels, there were two chief watchers, Azahel and Shemihata. And they make a pact at Mount Hermon. They make an oath, a harem. It's like got puns in the original language. And to descend, that's not in the Genesis story.

So it's like the Genesis is almost like, look, if I'm going to be a hyroman, to tell the tale. I've got to include this because people are expecting it, as it were, but I'm going to just shrink this as much as I can. So what takes dozens of chapters in First Enoch is four verses in Genesis. It's kind of like the Jude example where it's like, oh, there's like a little reference. There's a little reference. And the mainstream ancient Jewish reading is, by the way, when that text says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, what it means when it says sons of God is not angels, it means the nobles, the judges. It means it's just like they claim that they demythologize it.

They take the myth out. It was just talking about a period in ancient history when the nobles, the high and mighty, took common wives and that was bad news or something like that. So they're deliberately reading that in a way that would avoid any hint of mythology. And who's demystifying it? This is rabbinic Judaism, sort of from the second century C. onward. Hmm. It becomes official to say, in fact, they anathematize anyone. Don't not say that means angels.

Don't think it means sons of God. That's mythology. We don't have mythology in the Bible. Wow. What is your take on that interpretation? I don't think it's plausible as like a reading of the text, no. And sorry, the Genesis 6.4 is what says the ones who come down, the offspring of the Nephilim. And Nephilim comes from.

the Hebrew verb, Nafal, which means to fall. They're the fallen ones. These are the giants. So even in the term for the offspring, you have a reference

to fallen as descent. Wow. So there's like little... Now, my initial feeling is hearing about this, I'm like, okay, it's not in the canon. So I'm already like slightly skeptical.

But it sounds so like fantastical. And again, this is coming from someone that has read and believes the Bible. So there's a lot of fantastical things in here. That's true. But because I wasn't raised on it, I hear this and I'm like,

Whoa, whoa, that sounds like Greek mythology. So I'm curious, like, how do you interpret this? Like, it's found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It has some type of, like, historical credence, but it sounds pretty out there. Well, I agree. It sounds out there. I don't know. Because I don't really wrestle with, like, whether I think there was a primal fall of the watchers.

But I, let me say something more about mythology, because this is something that ancient Christians and Jews were, on their toes about. There's another strand of the myth of the fall of the watchers. In one, these are both found in first Enoch. And you can tell he's combined two stories with different motifs. So in one motif, what really goes wrong is this hybridization. Like, it's like, it's just mixing of kinds.

Angels and humans shouldn't have children. If they do, they're going to be giants and they're going to be eating the trees and eating the animals and it'll be gross. That's one. But the other, tell me what myth this sounds like to you. is the watchers descend, and what really sets human history off track is that they teach heavenly knowledge

and technology to humans. So there's like knowledge that humans aren't meant to have. And specifically, they teach them metallurgy, which leads to the creation of weapons, which leads to warfare and all the misery that comes with that. They teach the cutting of roots for like medicine,

which leads to magic and potions. And they teach There's four things. The third, always women at the bad end of this, is they teach cosmetics. And that leads to women beautifying themselves, which leads otherwise chaste and decent men to go astray. So step back for a second,

ignoring what the particular technologies are. Here the idea is that, like, someone took knowledge from the heavenly realm, brought it to earth, and that was forbidden. Right. It sounds like Prometheus, bringing fire to earth in the Greek myth.

and in fact the angels are then bound in Enoch and maybe know that the tragedy, Prometheus bound. So pretty clearly you can go back. There's some sort of pan ancient world myth along those lines that makes a showing in First Enoch in a Jewish text and makes a showing in Greek mythology. Does that sort of make sense? Yeah.

So do you attribute that to being inspired by Greek mythology or was it vice versa or do you think it was just parallel thought? These are compelling stories that persist through Yeah, that's a good question. I think the similarities are too strong in this case for it to just be parallel thought. There's enough motifs that are similar, including like the binding or something. Like there's other ways they could have been punished. That probably, I don't think you can prove it, but that seems like it probably goes back to some originary myth that the Greeks got a version of and in the Near East there was a version of. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that seems, I don't know,

It just is a fantastical book. I mean, it's like so interesting to me. And now, is that book included in the Catholic Bible? It's not. It's not. Okay. Because the only Christians you have it, it's in the Ethiopian Bible. The Christians, Ethiopian Church, has many more books.

They have an expanded Bible, but they do have First Enoch. Interesting. Yeah. Now, what other books were those apocryphal texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that you find are interesting? Is there anything else that's of sort of like that caliber of intrig? they a little bit more sort of technical? I think the other one that at least deserves to be mentioned is called the Book of Jubilees, which also includes its own version of the Fall of the Watchers.

It's written a little after First Enoch. It's from the second century BCE. One thing that's interesting is the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it comes to what was in your Bible, if you could ask them, we don't have a text from them which says, Here's the books we use. So you're looking for clues. But a helpful clue is not only that they would have a copy of something, because you could have a copy of something you don't like, just because you want to polemicize against it. A helpful clue that they really respected the book of Jubilee is they quote it the same way they quote undisputed scripture.

So like they raise a particular question and sometimes very often in the Dead Sea Scrolls they'll say, as it's written in the law of Moses. and they quote something that we have in the first five books, right? But they also quote Jubilees with that same formula as it is written in the book of the divisions of the Jubilees. Does that make sense? In which text is that? They quote the book, the Dead Sea Scrolls are quoting the book of Jubilee as an authority. Like this settles the issue. I see, I see, I see.

So they're quoting it like scripture. And is that in this version of the Bible? And so Jubilees is another book. It's not in, I don't know if it's in the Ethiopian canon. We do have copies in Ethiopian. maybe that's but it has a very limited existence after that I see but I'm sorry

the reference to jubilees is that found in the Bible it's found in the Dead Sea Scrolls I see okay it's the Dead Sea Scrolls you don't have you don't have very many Christians quoting Jubilee as an authority in that way there are a couple they get some chronological data from it

is it significant in any other way other than it's reference. Probably for a historian. Like not for, there's nothing maybe as cool as the fall of watchers. I mean, that's great. It is really interesting

for the history of Judaism because you can see the ideas it's wrestling with. Jews are a relatively small people group in the ancient world in the midst of what is a Hellenistic world at the time Jubilee is written. That is to say,

since Alexander the Great conquers, massive amount of territory. Greek becomes the lingua franca. And Greek ways gain real prestige. And there's Greek cities everywhere. So Jubilees kind of doubles down. We're not weird. You all are weird.

A lot of other Jewish texts, this is interesting for just cultural struggle. Other Jewish texts try to reinterpret Judaism so that it would make sense to the Greeks, if you will, right? Hey, when we say this, what we really mean, when Moses says this food law, it's not because Moses,

is worried about which animals are clean and unclean. That's a weird idea to you. Moses was teaching us a moral lesson about courage and decency. Well, that shows you're trying to explain your book to someone else. There's a conformity as sort of a dilution. Exactly. The book of Jubilee, by contrast, says Adam was created circumcised. So we're not weird because we have this habit that Jews were the only people who practice circumcision.

But they were aware this sets us apart. we're not weird you're weird you're a defective humans normal humans the first original human was created circumcised oh they went on offense immediately go on offense yeah we're not weird because we rest every seventh day on the Sabbath God rests on the Sabbath the angels rest on the Sabbath you're weird you're weird for working why are you working exactly

so that's an interesting feature of the book of Jewelese that's clever yeah now we're talking about this idea of canonization right we have these books that are found somewhere included in the Hebrew Bible aka the Christian Bible, Old Testament, and some are not included. Who is canonizing this? And when we say, like, they, I'm sure there are many they's throughout time.

So can you just kind of take me on like a little bit of a chronology of to say, it first got canonized here, it got canonized here, and maybe even from like the time of Christ. Like once Christ dies, are people writing stuff down immediately? And just, this is going to be hard to kind of timeline. But could you just give me like general major times where the Bible is forming? Yeah.

it actually is a little hard to summarize. I'm sorry for that. But by the time of Jesus, most Jews, all the Jews we know about, would have accepted as scriptural, some sort of divinely given books, the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, and the prophets. And so that's going to be true. It doesn't seem like there was, there was beginning to be agreement in some quarters around all the books of the old Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And we can come back and look more at that. How that happened is relatively unclear. It looks like some things were almost sanctified by age of use. Like in the second century BC, 200 years before Jesus, there's a book called Ben Sira, which is in a Catholic Bible, which already says the law and the prophets and the

writings. So he seems to have the idea of like these are any names who he means by the prophets. And he talks about the 12 minor prophets and so on. So he already about the second century BC, two core pieces of the Old Testament, at least for some Jews, were already kind of set in stone. There was more flex. He also, the writings, well, which writings? That's pretty nebulous. And there was more latitude there. All right. The Christians more or less, because the first Christians or Jews take over that Bible. So what do we find them quoting and using, for their Old Testament, so to speak, they're using the same books the Jews are, for the most part.

What about for the New Testament books? Well, by 30 or 40 years after Jesus' death, we get the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew, Luke and John, the four Gospels in the New Testament. we also get other gospels and other sayings of Jesus. And let me get you, the highlights and we'll circle back to fill out some details. By the time of an early Christian named Irenaeus about 180 and Hippolytus about the same time, they're speaking of there being four gospels that the church uses. They don't really have a story for why they use those for and only those four.

They know their other gospels. and they know they don't usually like them. But we only have little hints about why most Christians came to mainly prefer those four Gospels. And they have like stories about who was Mark and who was Matthew. But those stories don't know. And why did they write? Those stories don't always perfectly line up. So they're sort of working backward.

We know we use these, but why? By the second, by the end of the second century, if you were to sort of travel around the Roman Empire and take polls, like almost as it were like an anthropologist, go to church and just see what books do they use. You would find in most places also Paul's letters. We should definitely come back and say more about that. Depending on where you went,

you'd find the book revelation used or you'd find it not used, depending on where you went. So a little like the way that there's widespread agreement, there's really no branch of Judaism that doesn't use, the five books of Moses and the prophets. There aren't very many branches of Christianity that don't use the four gospels. They might use other stuff. And most of them use Paul's letters. There's more disagreement about the book Revelation. Other Christians use the Apocalypse of Peter. That had a level of popularity in some places on par with the book Revelation.

Some Christians in the second century are using the gospel of Peter. And a bishop hears about that and he goes in checks. And he says, oh, that's fine. doesn't bother me. And then he says, wait, actually, there's a couple things in there I don't like. But his first reaction isn't pull his hair out and say, good God, the gospel of what? He's like, yeah, that's fine. So there's mostly four gospels, but there's not like a real hardened sense that there can't be anything else. Interesting. So around second century, you have like collections of Christians across the Roman Empire that are generally using the gospels and sometimes pulling in, sometimes pulling in other texts. That's right. And some of these other texts are

kind of disputed but they're not I guess core tendons to like who Christ is or his teaching That's actually true So even when they argue The ones that get debated Should you use 2nd Peter They generally said no

Until a late date that's in our Bibles Should you use the book of Hebrews The church was split East and West But there's I think those are great books But there's nothing in them Where you're like well we can't even work with you If you use that and we don't

I see I don't want to trivialize it, but you would say, well, it doesn't make that much difference. So they live with the differences for a while, and it's in that later fourth and fifth centuries, even later some places, where they sort of say, you know what, we need to iron this out. And then you start to get lists. And they say, we do use these. We don't use those. This is like an internal memo, basically, an approved. It's a good way to say.

Hey, guys, this is what we're doing. Yep. Interesting. And you get compromises at that time. I mean, I'll give you an illustration. Some of this we will want to circle back to maybe because it's a pretty dense story. But the question maybe you should be already asking is

why did they choose these? I think to some considerable degree, they just start getting used, shared, continually used, and by the time they're asking that question, they've already got many of the books, we've been using it. I'm not going to change what grandpa told me to read. But now I need a story.

a story. So they say, ah, well, it should only be things by apostles. But the epistle to Hebrews doesn't say who it's by. It's anonymous. And the ones you could read Greek said, the Greek's different than Paul. So it's not by Paul. Paul's stuff would count. Well, once they decide, we want to all be using across the empire the same thing, they basically make a compromise and say, let's just shoehorn Hebrews in as a Pauline letter, even though we kind of know it's not a Pauline letter. And at this point we've decided we're only using apostolic letters. So it gets shoehorned in. And we actually have a canon list in a Bible.

Tell me if you see what's fishy about this. They say we use four Gospels. We use 13 letters of Paul. Okay. By the same author, Hebrews. How else might you have worded that if you thought Hebrews was by Paul? I mean, the 14 letters of Paul. You got it.

So that's like evidence. It's a little bit of an admission like, hey, We know this is Fugazi, but we can't prove that it is or isn't him, so we're going to say it is. And we don't have another category to put it in, and we want to keep it because we like it at this point. And do you know why they liked it? It seems like a big stretch. They're like kind of manipulating Paul's letters, like they're sort of violating their own principles to keep in this book that, in my opinion, I know nothing about it. And I did.

Hebrews is a great book. I'm glad it's there. But no disrespect to Hebrews. I understand. Shout out to y'all. Okay. I do really think it had been, to use the phrase I used before, it had been sanctified by years of use in one half the empire.

And that's important. And at that point, if you're trying to all get on the same page, you probably are like, you're not going to say you need to quit using this, but you collectively, or maybe on the other side you say, look, we're only supposed to be, the reason we don't use this, other thing is because we say it's non-apostolic. It's not by an apostle. So if that's the criterion we're officially voicing now, how are we going to get this in? Let's just say, and it's, it sounds a little like Paul. I mean, it's not crazy to say it's Pauline. In fact, people,

before this happened, origin says, well, it could be by Paul, but the language sounds different, but then again, it could have been translated. He could have dictated in one language and was translated to another. That's why it sounds a little different. So there were already ways of kind of trying to deal with it. seems to be a cohesion across the Roman Empire and a desire to have all of these local clusters of Christians to be operating with the same books. Now that's going to beg the question to whom is divinely inspired to decide who everyone should be listening to. Like obviously now we would look towards a pope. Is there some type of early papacy that people are kind of,

you know, capitulating to? Sort of. And remember, I'm Catholic. Yeah, I know. I'll be nice. Come on. It was Peter, right? Yeah. The first pope. The, there is, well, what I want to say before I answer, because I have this trouble with my students is they. I'm not a pain you're in right now. I'm saying.

I'm wincing because it's hard to get this right. The myth that's hard to kill is the idea that like a council of the learned clerics got together and said, here's going to be our list. and that was kind of foisted upon the faithful everywhere. There were church councils where bishops, leaders of different churches, got together to hammer out doctrine. And they really wrestled over really that word doctrine. Like how do we understand the, if Jesus is God and human, how does that work? That's what they fought about. The big church councils, they don't take up the question of the extent of the Bible of what books are in it.

That just wasn't a pressing issue. So in a weird way, in some ways, you said you're Catholic, post-Reformation, post-Luther, with this idea of Sola Scriptura, only scripture, everything rests on that. Then all of a sudden, for the modern, I'm saying modern, including a few hundred years ago, it becomes very important to have exactly the right books. I don't want to say there was no interest in having the right books. We do get these lists like I described, but that wasn't a major preoccupation. So let me come back to your good question about what was church leadership like

But just keep in mind my little caveat is that like church leadership isn't really what sets the biblical canon They almost endorse it they stamp it but it's a fact given to them like yeah okay fine yes this and again they have to fuss around the edges No to the apocalypse of Peter but yes to whatever but that's it doesn't get created in the fourth or fifth century at these big Gatherings of church leaders there are bishops which is just a modern word from episcopas said kind of slurred together bishop as bishop as bishop is just that word and episcopas means overseer at first it's not a technical term it just means like if you had a group of friends and you wanted someone to be in charge the manager the coach but by the second third fourth century that becomes increasingly

um an official clerical position where there's rights and rituals to make someone a bishop and criteria. So it becomes what we know today as like a bishop and a cardinal are different things than just an average leader. That's only emerging really in the third century. And with any sort of sociological institution that is emerging, it's not going to have authority in everyone's eyes, right? Make up some word and say, Jeremy, I'm a such and such. If it's a word I've never heard, I'm like, good for you. I don't care. It means nothing. And then you try to tell me, I'm going to tell you how you should live because I'm a such and such. I've never heard of that. You just made that up. So that's kind of important to keep in mind is that you can just declare yourself to be the bishop of Rome.

And someone else can say, yeah, you're an idiot. I don't care. That doesn't really have much sway. It increasingly does have sway. Right. It could mean I can exclude you from communion. And that would mean something. But otherwise, if you really, if I just don't like you, I think you're crazy, I'll just start my own church.

And there just be rival bishops, you know, I'm the bishop. but anyway to try to keep the story of the rise of that sort of ecclesiastical authority relatively simple the idea that major cities have a bishop in the second third and fourth century grows and Rome is important although it's not the only important city but it is important early on and in some ways that stands to reason because it's the capital city but there's other major cities where the bishop of that city would have a lot of say and just back and forth between them. There's negotiations.

Is it possible the bishop is just the smartest dude in the area that's like the most learned? It's usually not though. Because kind of a separate channel of authority is intellectualism. It's this very city by city. But like I mentioned origin before, he's like the most learned guy in the ancient church. And he gets in trouble with the bishops, but he just keeps doing his thing. He's running study groups. So that's like a different way of being.

authoritative. Think, think today. You brought me here. I'm not ordained. I'm a Christian, but I'm not in any way ordained, right? I have no authority within ecclesiastical church circles. But you could have said the only way to get an answer about these things is to get a bishop or a cardinal or a priest at least. That says something about what strikes you as authoritative. I'm going to get answers from someone who studied this. But someone else could say, oh, I'm only going to get right answers from someone who has church appropriated. approval. Someone else could, again, pick a different sort of authority. They say, I'm only going to get answers from a holy man, a saint, someone who fasts and is like super enlightened. That lives and practices. Exactly. So those are different forms of authority and different people are going to subscribe to different ones. And I think a decent way to tell the story of the early church is there's going to be the bishops were aware of this. I can say this from my bishop's chair, but there's going to be certain intellectuals who keep going over there to that scholar

because he's very clever and he makes great sermons and writes great books of theology and they really think he's right and I'm wrong. Is that threatening to the... Very much, very much. Are they trying to kill these people?

Not trying to kill them, but they're trying to, I guess, channel authority. In some ways, the bigger threat than intellectuals was ascetic holy men. So if someone's living, in the desert, there's pillar saints called stylites. It's just the word for a

pillar. This is a little later, but there's various forms of asceticism, but the person who can climb up a pillar and barely eat and leave his body exposed to the elements and just suffer, and he's fighting demons in the desert, that person is a gateway to heaven.

And some bishop in a comfortable robe in the church in the city, look, what am I going to get there? If I need a demon cast out, if I need a healing, if I need a reward of revelation, so there's an example, that was a threat. That's interesting. To more

routinized ecclesiastical authorities. Because it's like a tangible visible, almost like manifestation. That's right. Of someone, like a John the Baptist type character. They're very much like that. Like, oh, he's, this person is women too, but this person

has kind of defeated the powers of the flesh. So they're a conduit for the divine. They're self-flagellating. They're able to endure anything. God must have inspire them in some way. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I can see how that would be more threatening. And this is one, so baby, let's make a monastery and get these holy brothers off their pillar and into a place where I can keep an eye on them and give them instructions

about, that's, that's, that's, I'm simplified, that's not even quite accurate. But you can see those sorts of moves are the ways to, not say, not to say, oh, I condemn such ascetical practices. But it needs to be controlled. I want to, it makes me anxious because people listen to him, not to me. Wow. That's interesting. So there is already like an early power struggle. For sure. Around the fourth, fifth century, you have the preliminary kind of canon coming down from different local bishops that then I'm assuming that power slowly aggregates over time. Yeah. And then is known, I guess, as like the Catholic church. Yep. By which century roughly? Well, they use that term. Catholic means universal in Greek. So that would be a way of saying the

church universal, meaning what they're trying to emphasize is we're all part of the same thing. So that word gets used early. In some ways, you might not have the Roman Catholic Church until this schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church. I see. Before that, you'd say we're all just one church. In the 11th century, when there's splits over doctrinal issues, maybe caused by other things, now all of a sudden, oh, this is the Western Roman Catholic Church, and over here, there's

the Eastern Orthodox Church. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, if you ask my mom, she would say the church started with Peter immediately, and that's when the Catholic Church has begun. And there's an unbroken line of popes from then until now. A story not unlike that exists early on. They just wouldn't always emphasize Rome.

What they would say is, the apostles appointed the bishops of each major city, but we get lists of bishops from relatively, what are the earliest lists? Second century? Certainly by the third where they say following Peter in Rome

was Clement and following him in Rome was this and they have lists for and Jerusalem James Jesus' brother was the first bishop and after he died they elected the next bishop

and they have that list of names so that basic idea is fairly early just wouldn't persuade everyone I'm going to take that as a word take it, take it tell your mom Catholicism 1 everyone else zero.

Take that Protestant. I want to know about the Bible as a historical record. And there's a bunch of different things I want to talk about. One, just as maybe like a fun one to start with. Alexander the Great.

He's just messing people up. This dude's out here just chopping off heads, uniting the whole known world. Is he referenced in the Bible? Well, sort of. In the book of Daniel. But just barely

and obliquely. by name. That seems significant to me. You have this guy that's... It is. A lot of the biblical books, so he's from 33 to 33, his 10 years of going all the way east to Afghanistan. Most the books in the Old Testament are written before that.

Now, the book of Daniel, which ostensibly is written before that, Daniel claims to be living at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. but Daniel describes a sequence of world rulers and he says it'll be the, well, he doesn't give names, but he says there'll be one people, then another people, then another people. It's pretty clear who he's talking about because it's like, okay, that's the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, like Alexander the Great. And then this ruler, after he's destroyed, his kingdom will split. And that's what happened after Alexander the Great died. His kingdom was split into four different realms, kingdoms, his generals took over. So, I guess a traditional reading is that Daniel, as a prophet, foresaw the future and predicted the sequence of kingdoms.

He doesn't use names, but it matches up well enough that that would be very impressive. Kind of cool. The flip side would be the normal way to read this in scholarly circles is Daniel got that all really right because Daniel was writing in the second century after Alexander the Great. Daniel's looking backward, the actual author of Daniel. And so, of course, he gets it right. And that Daniel was actually living in, yeah. Does that make sense? That makes sense.

So it's either a prophecy, which is sick. Yeah. Or it's a retroactive explanation of a ruler that once was. Yeah. Which then would be some type of historical record, which gives some credence to the historical efficacy of the Bible. Yeah. So I'll take either one. Yeah.

I'm like, all right, that's pretty cool. Yeah. I'm curious as far as like, you know, there's been a lot of different debates about this, but like, did Christ exist? Right. Definitely. No question. Yeah, I mean, you can find people in every generation who's, like since the modern period of someone who's going to try to argue no, but it doesn't really work.

And in fact, there's a good Bible scholar named Bart Aramon who is himself an atheist, and he got so frustrated with going to atheist groups and they'd say, Jesus didn't exist, right? Just come out and say it. He's like, that's ridiculous. That's ignorant. He got so frustrated with that. he wrote a book for fellow atheists demonstrating Jesus existed.

Like, you guys, we got to quit saying that. This is embarrassing. This isn't helping our side. I see. So that's nothing about faith. In fact, he would like to, I'm not trying to put words in Bart's mouth, but like, undermine faith. He views it as a mistake. And yet, he's like, well, that's just a fact.

Right. In order to confront this thing. Exactly. We're going to have a good argument. We should get this stuff right. That makes sense. Yeah. And it's, it can be hard to explain why.

But so to say Jesus existed is not to say that he turned water to wine and to say that he rose in the third day. but he like a lot of other people in first century Palestine there were other figures who were wonder workers healers charismatic teachers rebel leaders etc and he's he's one of those and there's various ways to be if you want to get into that there's various ways to sort of demonstrate that but almost the clearest is

how many things the Christians the followers of Jesus because you say oh well they could be be making stuff up. They just want to invent this. The problem is they have all sorts of things about him that they are clearly uncomfortable reporting. So if they were working from whole cloth and they could just go from scratch, they would have written a different story. They would have invented a different guy. So you mentioned John the Baptist earlier. All the four gospels emphasize Jesus and as a follower of John and a recipient of John's baptism. This clearly makes them very uncomfortable. John's the bigger figure. John the Baptist is the more well-known guy.

He's also reported in the pages of Josephus. And after all, Jesus goes out, John's baptizing people in the wilderness. Jesus goes out to get baptized by him. He's the littler. And you can tell, because all four gospels deal with this uncomfortable fact in slightly different ways, that they don't love this. And furthermore, followers of John continue as of John the Baptist, continue. as a distinct group. So in the gospel of John, John the Baptist sees Jesus and says, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. I have testified, he is greater than I, blah, blah, blah, I protest too much. But you read in the pages of Acts that the Christians are still meeting people who are followers of John the Baptist. In other words, all of John the Baptist

followers didn't up and follow Jesus. They remained a distinct group of John followers. Interesting. Even though he kind of gave his blessing to Christ. The better way to say it, here I'm being critical, is that he never said, behold, the Lamb of God, it takes away the sins of the world. The reason I'm saying that is, if he had really said that, and you're a follower of John, why would you still follow John? Exactly. You say, John, I trust you. I will now follow the guy you told me to follow. It's much easier to explain why they continue to be followers of John if he never made any such great demonstration of, like, faith in Jesus. Is it possible that people are just kind of comfortable following who they're following? And they're still

like hey you know like just because 50 cents says Eminem is the new guy I still like 50 cent more you know what I mean like is that possible or is it is do you find that unlikely well I guess I wouldn't rest everything on the fact that John still has followers you might just have some old people I understand

80 years old you're like I'm not switching up I'm fine I grant you the point it's kind of stretch but but I think there's just any number of things in the gospels that almost immediately become sort of difficult for the Christians. They didn't invent it.

They inherited it. They're recording their memories of Jesus. They're embellishing those in various ways. And there's contradictions in the Gospels. But again, it's almost the contradictions that show. If you were inventing from whole cloth, you'd get your story straight, right? Yeah. But if several people are writing about someone from 30 or 40 years ago, you're going to get sort of differences of the story.

And it's a lot easier to explain. Furthermore, Paul predates the written gospel. So we have a guy named Paul, whose letters we have, who's out preaching about Jesus, and he's meeting people whose names we know from the pages of the Gospels, like Peter, like James, Jesus' brother,

and they're having disagreements and fights. It's already a really messy business, like lots of movements are. Well, that's before the gospels are even written. So you have to push back. If you wanted to imagine an invention, you have to push it back. We have Paul's earliest letters

are from the 40s. Jesus is active in the 30s, dies in 30 or 33. You have to push back this invention to within a few years. It's just sort of easier to imagine. There's no real reason to doubt he exists. Yeah, that makes sense.

I guess I also take a little umbrage with that line, like behold the name of God who takes with the sins of the world. If I'm, as a Catholic, I hear that every Sunday at Mass. Right, right. And the idea that that could be fallacious or not divinely inspired is troublesome.

Well, I think, yeah. But the Gospel of John. No, no, no, I take your point. I wrestle with this. But I think there's probably a better way to think of the Gospel of John. If you want to read the Bible critically, there's no reason to do what I'm about to say. If you want to read the Bible in a Christian way, in a sort of faith-infused way,

I think there's ways to think about the Gospel of John, creating a true portrait of Jesus without getting every conversation. like a tape recorder sort of transparency. I think John already has lots of differences from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those are usually called the synoptic gospels because they tell a synoptic means like seen the same way, same main events. And John goes his own way. And Jesus sounds different. There's different stories. There's only a few points, not that many points actually of comparison where he has the same sort of,

oh yeah, I know about that story from Matthew or from Mark. but I think if you sort of step back let me use an analogy which again I would not if a critic wanted to disagree with this I couldn't blame him or her but you could imagine an abstract painter doing a portrait

right and there'd be something a little petty about having Picasso to a portrait and saying well that's not what she looks like right well that's not the mode I'm painting it like step back this is actually excellent and you might say ah that captures her dynamism

and this and that, that's actually a brilliant. And you might have another painting, which is quite straightforward. And actually, yes, there's the freckle on her cheek. Hyper realistic. Hyper realistic. And it wouldn't be that hard to imagine saying, huh, actually, I think both of those

capture something about the person in question, you know? I would read the Gospel of John as more like the abstract painter. Where it's like, step back, take all the sayings together, take all the stories together. It's really artificial.

I don't, I'll give me, What are examples? But I don't really mean artificial negatively. I mean it's deliberate. So Jesus will be, the disciples are asking Jesus, where are you going? Where are you going?

And he says, in the same conversation, none of you asks me where I'm going. You're like, okay. But clearly there, John is asking you to hear those words, oh, you're not asking the right, you're not asking it in the right way.

It's not a mistake on John's part. when we talked about chronology earlier, John has Jesus' death on a different day than the synoptic gospels do. This could look like a mistake. He has Jesus die at the time the Passover lambs are slaughtered. The other gospels, you'll remember this, Jesus eats the last supper with the disciples,

that is the Passover meal, which means John hasn't died a day too late or a day different. Because they would be eating the lambs that were slaughtered for Passover. Exactly. So he couldn't have died during the Passover. Exactly. But step back, let John be it in John's symbolic universe. What was the verse we just quoted?

How does it open? Chapter 1, verse 29. Behold the Lamb of God, it takes away the sins of the world. When should John have Jesus die? As the lambs die. Nice finish. Nice. He's only had to move it one day.

And furthermore, let's see if we're on to something. Are we kind of detecting your techniques, John? He's already had Jesus stand up in chapter 8. at a ritual, a Jewish ritual where water is drawn, and he says, come to me all who are thirsty. He's had Jesus in various ways take, not take over, but he's almost trying to say Jesus is the true meaning of various events in the sacred calendar in the year.

So why not finish with him being the Passover lamb? And so to do that, he doesn't say, he doesn't say it again. and he just has him die at the right time and expects you to pick up on it. And from a poetic angle, it's nicer. Yeah. And he's almost, I mean, after all, is he making a different point in the end of the day? Not exactly because in the synoptic gospels, what does he say at the last supper? This is my body given for you.

So the point is still, my death is sort of a sacrifice for you. So it's still kind of connecting his death with the idea of a sacrifice that benefits. But John's just done it in a different idiom. Interesting. Now, there might be Christians listening to this that are saying, like, well, the word is divinely inspired by God. And the fact that there's discrepancies and sort of contradictions, is it a fair sort of rationalization to say that God has divinely inspired different people with different aptitudes for writing and different sort of artistic styles that will then manifest his word in different ways? I guess I think you have to say that. If you, again, you don't have to.

You can just take a view that, like, the Bible just got contradictions and errors like other humanly written books. Let me go back to the world I'm more comfortable with the ancient, some ancient interpreters. I mentioned origin before. The first readers were acutely aware of these contradictions in the Gospels. So that's not new. That's not a result of modern and language. enlightenment thought or something. And one thing they did, actually, this is important to say is some of them just said,

we got to get rid of the books that disagree because they can't all be from God. You know, so they have different dates, different chronologies, that's the problem. We've got to get rid of one. It can't all be right. A second option, guy named Tatian, around the year 170, took all four gospels and maybe another gospel or two and harmonized them. In other words, imagine taking out your scissors and paste. And it's just like, well, in the Gospel of John, Jesus does the thing where he goes into the, it's usually called the cleansing of the temple.

It goes into the temple, it says, you know, and drives out the sellers and the money changers, right? In the Synoptic Gospels, that happens, that that immediately precedes him getting arrested. So in the Gospel of John, it's one of the first things he does. It's in Chapter 2. And the Snoptic Gospels is one of the last things right before he gets arrested. they immediately notice this is a problem and we don't think he did it twice someone like origin so one thing you just get rid of john or you get rid of the synoptics solve the problem two origin says the gospel writers

were always trying to tell the truth spiritually and materially and by materially he means what we would say just literally just get the facts right but where it wasn't possible to tell the truth in both modes, they prioritize getting the spiritual truth. So he's already proposing, in a sense, a reading, an interpretive strategy, that he can get them to come out agreeing. So he would just say, John must be making a spiritual point by bringing that event forward.

What's the lesson about the nature of God's dwelling on earth? I don't remember what his lesson is about that difference. But I bring that up to say that this isn't a new problem. It was faced by the first readers. They were very close readers. They were acutely aware of all these discrepancies. That's interesting. And they had various ways of trying to solve them.

And critics were aware. It's like critics of Christianity would just put these contradictions in their face. Explain this. Yeah, exactly. Explain that. Are there, before we move on, are there any other major contradictions within like the Gospels. I actually just want to make a point also

that I think when people will point at the Bible and say, look, their Bible is full of contradictions. An initial thing that I was taught in high school apologetics is like, well, there's a bunch of different books and some of these books are Old Testament law and some are New Testament law in Christ is then abolishing the Old Testament or some of the laws in the Old Testament. So therefore they are going to contradict

because it's a bunch of separate books in a larger story. So contradictions are not inherently wrong. Problematic. But when you're talking about the same story and there's contradictions, that's, you know, this is what we're discussing

here. So I'm curious, are there any other major contradictions within like the Gospels or any other similar stories that are worth mentioning? Yeah, there are. To just gesture toward a example from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the book of

First and Second Kings, the book of first and second chronicles, tell are different tellings of roughly the same. They overlap. They tell the same story. Then King David, then Solomon, then blah, blah, blah. They have all sorts of discrepancies in detail. I mean, they still tell broadly,

recognizably the same story. But if it's how many years did this one reign, they disagree on things like that. So you can decide on all these. That may not be a big deal or may be a big deal. It kind of almost depends on your view of scripture. In the Gospels, again, yeah, there's myriad little details.

but you asked for big ones and I'll give you a one that's important, I think. Where does the risen Jesus appear to his followers? In Luke, the disciples are told to wait in Jerusalem. That's where the appearances happen. And they stay in Jerusalem. They wait until Pentecost because Axe picks up the story. Luke Axe are together and the book of Acts picks up the story.

So they never leave Jerusalem. They're told not to. and they don't. In the gospel of Mark, in the gospel of Matthew, the women at the empty tomb are told to tell the disciples to go to Galilee. There you will see him.

And so they go back north to Galilee, and we don't get an appearance in Mark, but in Matthew, that's where he appears to them. So those are different places on the map. Those are several hours away by car, and that's a substantive thing. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a typo. It's not a typo.

It's not being persniquity. I mean, you can give other, again, you really can give lots and lots of, but sometimes the examples feel so almost petty. Like, who cares was this or that? But there's a big one. Like, well, wait, where were you when you saw the risen Jesus? Because this whole thing, that's pretty central to the... Yeah, I probably wouldn't forget that.

Yeah. How do you square those? What is your... I don't remember if I have an answer for this. Still pending. That's great. When we do the next episode, we can revisit it. I don't actually know of it. It's funny.

I mean, there are... My answers will be splotchy because they're... There's things I think about all the time and there's things I don't. I haven't thought about that in years. If you'd ask me in college, I would have had an answer. Sure.

Fresh out of you said, apologetics class in high school. I didn't have that, but I would have been able, but I don't remember what the answer is. I don't know. That's okay. Yeah.

I'm curious about, this is one thing that's always fascinated me. Are there anything's historically in the Bible that line up with sort of independent other historical texts that would give credence? And I'm also wondering if there's like,

sort of like cosmic things that line up. So like there's little things in the Bible where like the earth stood still for a day. Yeah. And obviously the plagues and a great flood. And probably some other stuff. I'm curious if any of those things, there's some type of like geological record

or some type of like other secular historical text that would verify it. Well, when you, let me come to that second, like the big cosmic things. Like, in the book of Jeremiah or in the book of Second Kings, they narrate the Babylonians coming and taking the leaders of Judea, Jerusalem,

captive to Babylon. And there are records there of who was taken, records from Babylon, that basically Second Kings and Jeremiah are naming the right leaders of Babylon and the right time and even, I don't remember the details, but one of the records even mentions the King's mother who was prominent in the story. So, like, that really happened.

I mean, I'm not trying to claim here that like every detail from Second Kings and Jeremiah is exactly right. In fact, they slightly disagree with each other. But that story. No, that's all straightforward history. Yeah, that really happened. And in fact, that goes back further.

I mean, they talk about in the 8th century in 722, the Assyrians conquered the northern part Israel and that that really happened and there's records of that and it's like those are real things um that's that's history again not all perfect and exactly what the bible says is how it happened but um and i actually to go back to your very first question common misconceptions i think people imagine let's say intelligent people especially if you're more secular if you're not religious you feel like you've been told, oh, the Bible is just full of myths and legends. And it's a little surprising to learn that just like if you were reading ancient chronicles from the Greeks, if you're reading Thucydides, if you're reading something from Babylon, there's real history there.

There really were kings and empires. The Bible has more or less accurate history of that. And so like secular scholars could use the Bible. They do. as some type of cross-reference forward trying to outline historical events. Absolutely. They do.

Yeah, you don't put it this way. You don't need any morsel of faith. Like you could just leave that out of the picture entirely. I'm just using this with suspicion. Like I approach, but I approach the Cidides with suspicion. Right. He's an ancient Greek historian. I don't, actually, I think he got this sea battle wrong.

It didn't happen like that because the archaeology doesn't match up. But he's basically telling a story about a war that really took place. and likewise with the Bible there's going to be sections where yeah I'm not surprised to find a signet ring with a seal with a name of someone who was a sixth century

person in Judea right? That makes sense. So you almost have to take it on a case-by-case basis like sometimes it gets it right sometimes it doesn't or at least it's not clear that it does. You go back to something more cosmic

like the flood I don't think there's like geological reason to think there was a universal flood. Is there a biblical support for that idea that the entire earth flooded? The Noah story does make it sound pretty universal. Okay. It's on top of all the mountains.

And, no, I guess there'd be a way to read it to get it to come out as true history. You could just say, like, well, it was only concerned with the territory it's describing. I'm not really sure what the apologetics would be to get that to come out, right? I mean, the Greeks had a similar myth of a universal flood, or maybe it was almost universal. The name of the Noah figure in the Greek story is Ducalion. And so again, I don't know if they're sort of borrowing the... Maybe not one from the other, but like picture them both going back to a common source.

Well, it seems like every ancient culture has sort of a flood myth. It may be true, and I just don't know enough. By saying flood myth, actually, that's dismissive. I think flood story. Yeah. Like, I mean, certainly there were floods that had happened. So, yeah, I guess, again, to say the whole world flooded, I agree is like, that's not the interpretation I like. Yeah.

I like the interpretation of like the known world or that there was a great flood that, you know, befell them. As far as like animals on an arc, those stories, he taught all the animals of the time on an arc and yada, yada. Is there a way to interpret that or have you heard people interpreting that in ways that are more favorable or more metaphorical? This is another one I haven't thought about in a while Because I think by sort of Swimming in ancient stories long enough I periodically forget to touch ground and ask Like how does that map on to our real known history

If I could leave the flood for a second And come to like another kind of quasi-mythological story at least I don't want to offend anyone But like the creation of Adam right God makes an Adam out of the Adamah And breathes into him so on Paul says a lot about Jesus as the second Adam and I think it's a really cool feature of Paul's theology

like it's so interesting it's generally like people don't realize how central it is to Paul's whole thought that Jesus is like recapitulating what Adam did but fixing what Adam got wrong but I was going on and on about this and trying to show my graduate students all the puzzling verses in Paul

that in my opinion they cease to be a puzzle if you think of this as one of the master keys that Paul is constantly thinking of Jesus as the second Adam. So I was really jazzed about this. And I was like, man, you can, this is such rich theology.

And a student raised his hand and he's like, but I don't believe in Adam. And I was like, and I was sort of taken it back. I was like, oh, I guess I don't either. But I hadn't thought about that in a long time because like once you're just in, I was like, I'm just going to live in the story. And like, you can let the story take over pretty far.

And I'm not, I didn't disparage his comment. I thought it was a fair comment, you know? Like, oh, yeah, shoot. So how does that? this touch ground because I really, um, but in fairness though, like Paul, whether or not he believes in Adam, he understands Adam as a story. Yeah. And is mapping that story to this Christ figure. Absolutely. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you need to get your labs done. Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you're 35. You feel your testosterone starting to

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out Merrick Health. If you're interested, listeners of this program will be getting 10% off at Checkout if they use the code Gagnon, G-A-G-N-O-N-O-N- at Merick Health. Again, that's Merick Health, M-A-R-E-K, health, H-E-A-L-T-H-E-H-T-H-C-H-E-L-T-H-T-H-N-S-E-H-N-E-H-T-T-E-H-N-L-P-E-N-H-E-R-T-E-E-K-E-R-E-K-E-E-E-T-C-N-E-E-H-R-E-E-L-E-E-R-E-E-E-H-E-E-R-E-L-E-E-E-L-E-I-K-G-E-R-T-E-E-L-E-E-H-0-R-E-E-L-R-E-L-E-R-E-E-E-E-E-M-E-E-E don't know if you necessarily need to believe in a literal Adam in order to appreciate and respect the theological sort of metaphor that's being. I have conversations with friends all the time with like more theological friends and we'll just be parsing through the Genesis story and be like, but wait, you know, the humans were, well, like Adam was created. There's not man and woman until Eve is taken out. And then you have male and female. So like the first Adam seems to have arguably

both the male and female in this one thing. And we'll be going on and on about it, but never sort of, there's plenty of richness there. There's a rich vein to mine without stepping back and being like, wait, wait, wait, do I think there was a primal creature? An original creature?

Like, I don't know how to square that, but I don't really worry about scoring that, to be honest. Right. It's, yeah. And here's a case where, like, the ancients are not as different from us always as we might imagine. One of the earliest critics of Christianity, whose records we have, is a guy named Kelsus,

who about the year 170 wrote a tract against the Christians. The Christian era is becoming big enough now that he's really annoyed. And he's like, this is a stupid religion. I need to write a book to fix this. And sorry to come back to my guy, Origin again, but he writes a response. That's how we have Kelsus's work. So he quotes big sections in response. And Kelsis is like, this creation story is like for children.

Like what nurse, this is like what a nurse tells our little, you know, children to like get them to behave. It's like, so God made a little mud clay thing and breathed into its nose. And origin is really annoyed because he's like, obviously, that's not like the literal story of where humans came from. But it captures the main elements we care about. That we have a kinship to this realm, the soil, that we also have a spark of something deviant. got breathed into the earthling's nose, right? So that like we're a hybrid creature with a bit of the divine and a bit of the earth. And so from Origen's point, like, why are you getting hung up on the number of days of creation,

which was already a problem then, by the way. Like Orgyns already like, no, come on, there weren't seven literal days. And he's not saying that because he's aware of the modern geological record, right? Like, he thinks it's a non-literal story for other reasons altogether. not because there's fossils or not because he knows about Darwinism. That's not his problem. He just thinks on the face of it, that's a perverse way to read the text. As if I said to you, once upon a time there was a king and I go on, right?

And then you say, like, was he king of France or Germany? It'd be wrongheaded, right? Right. But now you didn't recognize the type of story I was telling. So it's wrongheaded to ask, well, was the king in the 1850s or the 1750s? But you would still maybe, if you were taking me seriously, pay attention to all the details of my story. What did the king have?

But you get an ear for which details are going to matter. Right. This is a moralistic story. The king had three children. The middle one, blah, blah, blah. And you might even argue with someone else about the right interpretation of the story, not because you were trying to get at

where and when did this king live. You know, it's a fable. But even fables need to be interpreted rigorously to get the point correctly. I see. That's how origin is reading Genesis, which I take some, comfort from because as a Christian, not a scholar, but as a Christian I take comfort from because he's not

he's not doing it for the reasons that a modern fundamentalist might do it. Aha, Darwin made our life harder or the discovery of the antiquity, the fact that the earth is five billion years old, made our lives harder. How do I square that with Genesis and whatever? That he was already like, that's not the right way to read this in the first place. That's just what he felt from a literary perspective as he looked at the book. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Now, are there other things where that sort of like metaphorical interpretation is more difficult to square? Because like for something like, you know, creation, I'm completely happy with being like, look, I understand and respect human evolution. Like I think maybe at a point in human evolution, like God divinely

inspired us with consciousness. Like, I have no problem with that. I don't need to believe in seven literal days. But are there other things that are maybe like more concrete, for example like even just age? Like we have this sort of understanding that humans can only live to a certain period. But then we hear about Methuselah, we live to 800. And it's like, okay, that seems a little

harder to, oh, like are we just accepting like the metaphor of his age? Like, do those things trouble you? Well, they don't really trouble me if I'm just being honest. But I don't think it's wrong for it to trouble someone. I understand that sentiment and I don't really have a solution for someone who

feels troubled by it. But if I'm just like, if I just examine my own emotions, it doesn't bother me. What about the firmament? This is something people love to talk about. Really? Oh, yeah. Do you haven't heard about this? No.

Oh, dude, there's all awesome videos on TikTok where it's like, Elon must rock it. Hit the firmament. What do they think the firmament means? Hit what? Dude, if you've ever read the Bible. Okay. The Hebrew words, the rakia. Oh, see, this is what I would love to know.

Basically, from my understanding, again, as someone that watches conspiracy videos on YouTube. Okay, I don't. So you're going to have me out of my depth here, but go ahead. See, I'm a scholar. I actually in my own right. Yeah. There's a, I guess there's this idea that, like, if you look at the way Genesis is written about the way God created the world, there's the earth. Yeah.

And then there's water above us. Yes. And then there's a sort of the shell that God then is sort of watching us through. Yeah. And there's like angels on the outside of the firmament or something to that effect. And people will kind of interpret that literally and say, okay, I believe the Bible holy. I believe it is divinely inspired. And I'm going to choose to believe this literally.

So therefore, these other things are, you know, red herrings or just outright misinformation. Right. That these rockets are not actually going to space. Oh, gotcha. So then you're looking at videos of rockets going to space being like, was that an explosion? Because it just hit the firmament? No, it was actually exiting the atmosphere.

But one is way more fun than the other one. So I'm curious, as far as your interpretation, like the firmament and why these things are included, is there something in the original translation that we can look at? Is there something as far as, like, other creation stories that we can kind of draw from? Like, how would scholars interpret this? Oof.

I mean, honestly, I think most Bible scholars would just say, that whole pursuit of trying to get a literal reading of Genesis to map on to the world as we know it is just destined to fail. It's not going to work. So that's what most people would say. And I don't think the word helps in this case. The word Rakea, I think, does imply something, yes, solid firmament is a good word.

And I think the Greek translation is stereoma, which also means something solid. So they are imagining, just what you said. well, yeah, there's waters above and there's waters below and God carves out a little space to be dry and in fact, in the flood, it's often missed. The waters come from below and from the top. Like, it's like God opens the vents

and water comes back in because you're surrounded by water. Which I was taught in school after the flood because of this like sort of aquatic transition, the atmosphere changed, which is why people don't live as long. This is why animals are smaller. Yeah, amazing. I was taught that.

I don't want to be in any way disrespectful toward that effort but I don't share that impulse I don't know what else to say and so I'm also not well versed in it

like I never heard the thing about rocket sitting something if you really pressed me I am yeah gosh I guess I'd say yeah I guess I'd say I want to sort of

I want to try to figure out what is that creation account in Genesis trying to answer? What's it trying to address? And because we have things like rockets and satellites, we have the ability to ask a set of really good, interesting questions that are probably not what the original author was most preoccupied by. And so I don't know that you can line them up

and get them to be in communication in a very productive way. So then I guess that would beg the question, why are these things included in this, like, mystical way? Like, what would be the benefit in the time? Like, Adam and Eve, I don't believe, was the way humans were created, but I do believe is that... You see what the story is saying.

I do believe that there's a moral and sort of, like, an important metaphorical understanding of, like, human beings desire to know all things. Yeah, right, exactly. And even, like, consumption and, like, the fact that there's a responsibility, I think all the ethics of it are useful. And so I can understand why there is this sort of, for life of a better word,

liberal interpretation of, you know, evolution to map this sort of flowery story. But I'm curious, like, as far as something like firmament, it seems completely irrelevant why that would be included. So I look at that. I suspect, honestly, my not very, it may not be helpful, but I think the author looks up and the sky's blue,

water's blue, and you assume there's something shielding that water above and rain comes from above. So it's like it's a it's a worldview that's different from ours and probably incompatible in some in terms of its physics. It's incompatible. Makes a lot of sense though. Actually just even you putting it that way, I go, huh, yeah. But that he's just describing the world around him as he sees it. Yeah. And you're saying, but it's like you shouldn't miss to step back and say, the creation of the world is an act of volition by God. It's not an accident. It doesn't preexist. The materials God works with aren't recalcitizens. they're not resisting God's hands, as it were. Like, I wouldn't get lost in all the details. I'd make sure to note at the end of the days, and God saw it was good.

Because again, if you think about the world you live in, it's not always clear that all the different elements are good. Or I'll give you another example. Here's a way I think of reading Genesis. I've seen it in conversation with its world. And you're going to have to bring on a good Hebrew Bible scholar to really give better answers to some of the details in Genesis. The light,

Gus has let there be light, Genesis 1-3, and there was light. But the sun and the moon, the luminaries, aren't created. And that seems like in a world around you where people worship the sun, you're actually making a statement. You're kind of religiously polemicizing. Oh, no, no. Light was a matter of God just willing there to be light.

The stars, the sun, didn't come till later. they're helpful they're great they help mark out time they're cool and god loved them god said it was very good it was good right but you're actually saying something in the like language of the time that's not a god in fact it's not even the source of our light the light comes from god by god's will well that's that's a very interesting comment for its time and place about the relationship of one of the most impressive things you look up and see vis-a-vis the invisible creator. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't know that I could give an example like that for, I would also say, I mean, when you compare the creation stories in Genesis to some of the other ones from the ancient or east, sometimes the,

the humans are just there to serve the gods, and they're just sort of a nuisance, and the gods don't have much interest in them or hostile to them. And so I think the creation account in Genesis, for better or worse, I think modern day ecological scholars would be like it's too human centric. But if we just put that very legitimate concern aside for one second, it contrasts with the other ancient Near Eastern creation myths and having humans be almost one of the pinnacles of God's creation, not an accident, not a nuisance, but like where is God's image? It's in humans.

That's mysterious and it's not quite clear how. But that dignifies, you know, we're meager little things. We don't live very long. We struggle. We're ignorant. We get sick. It's kind of remarkable that someone would tell the story that us little things are actually one of the highlights of this story. I guess you could just say this egotism.

And you could point to negative effects of people being anthropocentric and saying like we're the be on end all of creation. But that is unique amongst creation story. It stands out. It's like, so you almost like he's, the author is using some of the similar elements of other creations. stories and saying, no, where you zigged, I zagged. I have a different set of things I want to get across. And in fact, by the end of Genesis 3, I'm trying to highlight what I think is like noble about it.

You've acknowledged that something's gone wrong, but you've made clear the source of the wrongness isn't inherent in creation. So let me contrast it with, in some ways, the view. like popular and later Greek philosophy and theology, that like matter itself, materiality is resistant to the will of the divine so that the only way for to have salvation is really to escape materialities,

for your immaterial soul to get back to the realm of immaterial God where it came. You could contrast the Genesis account with that. It's not Pollyanna. It doesn't say, oh, everything's hunky dory. It's like, no, they're kicked out of the garden. Something's lost. Something's not how it should be.

But it's not lost because, like, the whole project was a disaster to begin with because there's stuff. So that's that, I think that's actually holding pretty big ideas and interesting tension. You know, like, it is a good project. It's started by God. That gives you some hope. There's going to be a happy ending, some resolution to this project. called creation, but we're not kidding ourselves that things aren't how they were supposed to be. I don't know if I'm saying it very well, but...

That's interesting. Yeah, I think it's actually important to try to look at it amongst other creation stories of the time. And that oftentimes people will look at it and be like, okay, well, Adam and Eve were there and then like they were banging their own kids. Like, how does that work? All that sort of stuff. And you're like, well, you're kind of missing the point here because the beauty of this story has to kind of be contrasted with other stories of the time. And all the stories at the time are that humans are pests. Yeah.

And all of a sudden you hear a story where it's like, the world is awesome. Animals are great. Take care of them. Yeah. Like, you know, love each other

and, you know, some things went wrong along the way. And now women, you got to have babies and that's going to suck. But, you know, it's all pretty good and humans are all decent.

And that is pretty beautiful when contrasted with, you know, what's happening at the time. Yeah, and it's interesting that they didn't tell a story which said,

you know, so the, the consequence for the consequences are divided by gender there in Genesis 316 and 17, but that for that you're going to have to get food out of the earth by the sweat of your brow. Okay. That's the phenomenon we know. It's it's hard to farm. It's hard to get enough food, especially before some of the technological advances.

There's really like years of want. It's also pretty recent in human history, like just agrarian societies, which is a unique feature, but I digress. So it would have been in some ways natural to think like, oh, it's always been like this. So it's interesting to come up with a story where like, oh, it once wasn't like that. This is not the only creation account that imagines there was a golden age. There was a time when it wasn't like that. But that's an interesting feature. Yeah.

The childbirth example is one that's interesting to me, though, because you look at Adam's punishment, which is like, hey, you got a farm now. And to me, I can almost square that as like, oh, like before we were hunter-gatherers, we'd find bananas on a tree. And, you know, that's pretty cool. like we're doing all right but it's hard for me to believe that women ever had un-painful but then I wonder

is that like a metaphor for like consciousness like when we were like pre-conscious or when we were you know like homo erectus or whatever like did we not have the same relationship with pain because we're instinctual I don't know now I'm getting way too deep into whatever the hell I'm doing

but right I don't know I don't have the term for it I mean you are trying to square the biblical account with yeah the origins of human. I mean, you could go further with this, right? I remember Carl Sagan saying once an unlikely source, but he said, so what is it humans do to get in trouble? It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So it's an increase in knowledge. Concomitant with an increase in knowledge, women's birth becomes painful. What is it that's painful for human women? It's our heads. That was his observation. Oh, how clever. There's a certain fit that it is the,

But I don't think that's not what's going on in the ancient text because they didn't often usually think of the brain as what the source of knowledge anyway. But that's so clever, though. It's so clever that I mentioned it, even though I don't agree with it. But yeah, it is clever. Because if you look at like the record of,

I guess, it's accepted as human evolution, is like we start eating, like, food that's easier to break down. Our guts are able to get smaller. Our brains are able to get bigger. Our heads actually get bigger. Like, we go from quadrupeds to bipeds. And so our pelvis shrink and like our sacrums, actually insert into the pelvis so that childbirth is harder to do.

We become, I think it's called secondary aphasial instead of precocial. So we're not born knowing things. We're born still sort of in like this external utero. Uh-huh. Which, I don't know, like, even just mapping that, I'm like, oh, that's really clever. I don't know if any, I don't know if that is what they meant, but it's so cool. No, I don't think it is, but it is cool. Yeah.

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. I want to tell you a story. Okay. Where my little nephew came to visit us. and they live in Florida and they came and they went to the Natural History Museum

and I was asking him I was like Oliver how was the Natural History Museum he was like it was awesome I saw dinosaurs I was like oh that's so cool dinosaurs are awesome and uh

in the conversation and my mom was like but Oliver did you really see dinosaurs and he was like no I saw the plaster molds of the dinosaur remains and I was like oh yeah but those are

probably dinosaurs my mom was like I don't know if I believe dinosaurs. Interesting. And I was like, excuse me? And she goes, but dragons. And I was like, hold on a second.

This is awesome. My mom thinks Game of Thrones is a documentary. Okay? So I was like, what do you mean? She's like, well, there's dragons in the Bible. Leviathan? Beats me. I was hoping you're going to be able to solve this for me.

She claims that there's dragons in the Bible. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess Psalm 74 talks about God smiting the seven heads of Leviathan. so that's some sort of prime ancient sea creature like a monster and image of lawlessness we're pulling up the records here now we are getting into it dragons in the Bible

I should have had this protected or I should have had this already pulled up but okay let's let's see so Isaiah 271 on the day that the Lord with his cruel and great strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent. Older translations might say dragon there.

Actually, I can think about the dragon passages. Leviathan, the twisting serpent. He will kill the dragon that is in the sea. So that's Isaiah 27. In Psalm 74, I was happily right. It's you crushed the heads, plural of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. So what do they mean by dragon there, you think? Just a large creature? Yeah, like serpent would be another way to translate it. Tanin, which is like the word for giant sea creatures.

The Greek has dracon. But the Greek word dracon doesn't mean dragon. It means serpent, lizard. Can I read you Psalm 188? Yeah. Okay, hang on. Actually, I'm going to give you more, I'm going to give you more context here. So tell me if this is enough.

In my distress, I'm going to start at verse 6. In my distress, I called to the Lord. I cried to my God for help from His. temple, he heard my voice, my cry came before him into his ears. The earth trembled and quaked and the foundations of the mountains shook and they trembled because he was angry. Smoke rose from his nostrils, consuming

fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it. He parted the heavens that came down, dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the share of him and flew, he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness is covering his canopy around him, the dark rain clouds of the sky. Without reading more of this or really knowing what the hell I'm reading here.

What is that about? Man. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Well, it's a description of some sort of, the technical term would be a theophony of God coming and all the manifestations when God comes to Earth. I mean, for that matter,

when God gives the law on Mount Sinai, it says the people were terrified because they just saw the fire, they heard the voice, they were scared to death, they asked Moses, you go, you go, like we're, mm-mm. Like, that's a lot of action. They were also afraid of God. For sure.

God's a consuming fire. It's Deuteronomy 424. This is a fleshing out of that consuming fire. Lots of times when there's descriptions of God's presence, God's coming. The mountains melt like wax. God lands and the mountain parts between his feet, that sort of thing. I don't know exactly what you're asking. So I'm curious with those types of accounts of God, are those, like, I mean, they're kind

describing God as a dragon here. It seems like he's breathing fire and flying around. I see. So I'm curious, like, was there, like, what was the reason that they were writing about God in such a ferocious way? Yeah, that's a legitimate question. I don't know if I know how to, like, get a grip on that question. Like, why would they describe that God as a ferocious fire?

Or even, like, in Revelation, when they talk about Christ returning, he's, like, got swords and shit and his eyes are on fire. These are crazy accounts of like, they seem like highly contrastable with the God and Christ that we sort of love in the West. Okay, I feel on firma ground if you're asking, like, I don't know why these particular pyrotechnics for the description of God.

I don't really know how to answer, except I guess if you're limited by language and imagination and you describe the presence of God, I'm really just guessing here, but like with some of the strongest physical phenomena you can name, fire, like lava, melting, fierceness, like a storm. Like you're grasping for like,

I want the strongest things I can name. These are some, I don't know. Confined by language. I guess. But a slightly different question, which I guess I think about more often, would be God is a consuming fire. God is a jealous God.

God is fierce and punitive. punishes sins from one generation to the next, that sits side by side, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, that sits side by side with God is merciful and forgiving. That certainly bothers me more. It seems more like I can get my, I react to it because it matters more. Like whether God is fire and smoke when God comes or something else, I don't know. It's too abstract for me to get my mind around, to be honest. Sure. Yeah, how do you square that?

like the jealousy of God. This is something that was always brought up in, like, Bible studies. Like, you know, I would have pastors say, like, God is a jealous God. And people would be like, well, isn't jealousy bad? And they'd be like, well, it's the different kind of jealousy. I think you could argue it's bad. But if you wanted to take, share the Bible's perspective, if you chose to do that, you'd say that, you could put me in the role of apologists, which is not really my normal role.

That's fair. No, but I'll play along. I'll play along. I guess I'm wondering from like a textual perspective, like, is there, a definitional version of that word. Okay, so a wee bit there, jealous if it means like, I'm jealous of so and so because, you know, he has the house I wish I had.

It probably wouldn't be that. It would be jealous in the sense of, I want all your attention on me. Usually that connects with like God wanting no other gods. So I think it's that kind of jealousy, not being envious of something. I think we use those words kind of synonymously. But being like, no, no, no, all your focus right here.

don't go worship. All sorts of other gods are named in the Hebrew Bible and that the Israelites are constantly tempted to worship other gods and they're always getting in trouble for it. And God's like, I'm a jealous God. If you do that, I'm not going to put up with it. But it's not jealous in the sense of like, why are you giving ball all the attention?

It's like, hey, I require all of your focus. Don't look at these other gods. I think so. And again, because we don't have maybe a critic in the room, I want to invoke and like acknowledge the fairness someone could just say, well, I don't know, it sounds like the character there is just jealous. Like a bossy boyfriend who's like, hey, baby, I saw you talking to someone else at the bar and I'm bothered. So someone could just read that negatively and they'd have a right to.

You can see how the words line up. Yeah. He wants all the attention to come out of the seat of the critic there, just to make sure they get heard. Just put it in a positive framework. Why would this sort of jealousy ever be a good thing? I think you could say that, like, well, if they're really, really is, Jeremiah will say, sort of lamenting over the people, you build cisterns that don't hold water. This isn't working for you. You can worship other gods. It's just bad for you.

If there's really only one God, God is actually being loving by being jealous. That's merciful. It would be bad for you to worship a non-God. So that like God's will and what's best for you are going to line up. That's interesting. In that idea. I mean, this, this, you've really got me way out of my comfort. That's okay. I don't mind talking about it. I just am not an expert. I don't not a theologian, but I think a point that gets made

in I think Jewish Christian and Islamic theology is that since we were talking about creation earlier, they didn't exactly believe in creation ex nihilo from nothing but once by the second century and so on they do. They affirm that

as a point of reflective thought. One of the points they want to make out of that is therefore that God doesn't create out of any need in God and that this is supposed to be kind of good news because that means God wasn't creating you to like get the adoration it was that like I have God has no needs so it's this superfluous extra outpouring which is good news in the sense that like God doesn't your worship of God is good for you not for God what's up guys we're going to take a break for the

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I would constantly get into, you know, sort of spirited conversations with my friends. no pun intended about sort of faith in works versus faith alone. And obviously we have Martin Luther that creates a big schism in front of the doesn't know

I guess my understanding of church history is you have this Catholic church and then Martin Luther comes along and creates this reformed Protestant church and this Lutheran church and my friends that are Protestant put a lot more sort of emphasis

on you know what is it Solofides. This is faith alone. You're saved by faith alone that nothing that you do really matters and that Christ's sacrifice was enough and that by believing in Christ and accepting as your Savior,

you are then justified into entering into the kingdom of heaven. Whereas Catholics believe that. But there's a kind of a catch where it's like we're still ultimately responsible for our decisions and that in order to live our faith we must do things like what's found in James.

Like you are saved by faith and deeds. So I'm curious, is there anything in the translation that would have, help me understand the discrepancy here? Well, yeah, in a lot of ways, I don't think that needs to come down to the translation. I think the rough and right answer is the Catholics are right,

and I say that as a Protestant. What do you want? That's my camera. Just everyone I went to school with. You know who you are, okay? You heard it here first. This is the only guy that matters. Okay.

I think, gosh, you not really want to be on a big podcast riffing on Protestant theology as a Protestant. But yeah, let me just say, let me just give you passages where this actually doesn't come down in an English Bible. We'll make it just as clear. Jesus makes it clear. Everyone will be judged by their works. Everyone will be paid back according to their deeds.

Matthew 1627. He says, I'm returning quickly and I will pay everyone back according to the deeds at the end of the book of Revelation. It's all through the New Testament. It's even in the champion of grace, namely Paul, who says, for instance, in 2 Corinthians 510, we all must stand before the judgment seat of Christ to receive back what we've done in the body,

whether good or bad. Even Paul speaks about the necessity. Well, that's how judgment works. It's based on your conduct, on your deeds. It is also true that Paul speaks pretty strongly about, I think more precisely, would be to say, saved by grace, that is God's graciousness. And in that sense, it's like it has its origin in God, not in us.

And there you could kind of bring the Lutherans in. But Luther himself, who was willing to sort of speak multiple things, I can't get the quote exactly right, but he says something along the lines of, show me a Christian with no good deeds. He has no faith at all. Like that's not faith. Right.

I think if you're going to try to like bring these together in some way, which again, you've got me playing apologists, but I'll just do it. I'll just do it. My students are going to be like, Jeremy, you're so Christian, you're so religious. But listen, I can do this. I'm being playfully inflammatory here. I like the inflammatory because it helps clarify the debate. I've tried this.

See if this kind of harmonizes the two views and shows why Paul himself could speak, could say both things. I think you could imagine someone saying, so Paul wants to insist on grace, meaning something not deserved. And yet say the final judgment will be based on what you do. How do you hold those together?

Maybe it can't be held together, but here would be a try. Let's say you say to a group of people, anyone who merely believes the next thing I say, I'll give them 100 bucks. Just believe it. And the next thing you say is,

there's a fire in the basement right now. And half the people run out of the room. And you only then give those people who ran out of the room a hundred bucks. And the other people complain and say, I believed what you said. And you say, no, you didn't. There's an easy litmus test for whether you meaningfully believed what I said. If you believed there was a fire in the basement, you run out of the room. I gave $100 to all the people who believed what I said.

And the way I could tell who believed what I said was they fled the room. Like that's what meaningful belief looks like That's interesting Yeah Now correct me if I'm wrong One of the earlier books that you've written It's probably like 15 years ago Is related to like foul language

Amongst like the early church Yeah What exactly is that about? I saw just like that title And it was like profanity Yeah So when you're a graduate student In biblical studies

You're trying to pick something To write a dissertation on You gotta write a couple hundred pages And the Bible is the most studied, picked over things. So there are like multiple, multiple books on single words or single verses.

So like you want to write on a, just pick a verse at random, you go to the library, there'll be 15 books about that verse. So how are you going to find something fresh to say? And I noticed there's a passage in Colossians and a passage in Ephesians which forbid foul language.

And I was like curious, like, what would it mean in the ancient world to forbid foul language? Like who was using it? Why would you be against it? what was it? Does that make sense?

And to my amazement, there really wasn't any sort of like literary, very, very little about what it was and why one might be against it. And my sort of entree into Christianity was in a church where, although it was kind of a fundamentalist church in most ways, but it was a little countercultural.

And we did use felt language. People would pray and say, you know, God, I just want to fucking praise you for this, blah, blah, blah. You can take that out of the podcast. No, no. I'm not trying to be blasphemous. but that was, we would literally talk that way.

Partly it almost was an identity marker. We're really conservative Christians, but not like churchy. I'm saying that self-critically. That was our attitude. And so that also had it on my mind. In fact, I think it was a friend at seminary said to me, man, why do you swear so much? And I was like, well, who cares? And he's like, well, there are two passages in the Bible about this.

And I was like, ah, you're right. I should look at it. This is fun. Because I've had the same debate where I'll use profanity. So I'm curious, before you kind of split. I literally went home and said, so I was at seminary, and I went back to my old church, and I asked one of the leaders,

we didn't call them ministers, but it was one of the leaders there. I was like, yeah, what do we say about those verses? And you know what he said? He's like, come on, Jimmy, don't be a fucking fundamentalist, which was a funny response. That's funny. Okay, I'll take your point.

To some considerable degree, in Greek and Latin, they had what linguists will call primary obscenities like we do. so for like especially certain body parts or functions they have decent words or medical terms and then indecent words right and the indecent words are not so different from like the range of what we have and so like certain one word would just land a different way just like it is for us and kind of what i tried to do i wasn't again in biblical studies for the most part in academic biblical studies you're not trying to get at how ought to I to live, you're trying to like give a thick cultural history of like, what would it have meant at this time to take this ethical stance? What would you be forbidding? And who would you be like or unlike if you forbade that? So in the ancient world, all sorts of moralists also said, it was usually kind of class-based.

So I think in some ways the Christians were trying to be a little proper. Like if you imagine a social, a society maybe with more obvious social stratification than we have, maybe like it was saying like let's be more like the upper crust and speak decently. I think some of that is what they're appealing to. That's interesting. Which I don't love and I think

that kind of cuts against other biblical sentiments where God was very delighted to choose the lowly. But among the things that were sort of interesting that I didn't know before I started working on it was that one of the most prestigious philosophical schools in the ancient world were called the Stoics. So there's the Platonists. You've heard of Plato.

So the academic, their school is the academics, and the stoics and the Ebychurians, but the stoics in particular had actually advocated for the use of foul language. They had a linguistic theory that, in their view, the obscene word was the real original word. And other words were just euphemisms. You're avoiding just being direct.

And they said, there's no shame in things. Like, they're all good in themselves. And so there should be no. shame in using the right word for a thing. So there's like Seneca or like Epictadis? They're older, yes, Seneca and Epictetus. By that point, the Stoics, I think in some ways, succumbing to the same broader

cultural instincts as the Christians, they actually changed their position and said, ah, let's speak decently. But the older Stoics had at least advocated. It's hard to tell how much it was a thought experiment. But they're like, yeah, there's nothing wrong with any body part. They're all good. There's nothing wrong with any function. They're all natural.

And if the goal of the wise person is to live according to nature, then we should use natural words for natural things. And it's actually kind of a defect of culture that anyone would feel shame or timidity about anything. Interesting. So they had actually brought the use of language into philosophy. Other than that, I mean, Greeks just had, it's kind of cool. There were actually religious festivals where you had to use obscene language for the delight of the gods. would make them laugh, pagan religious festivals,

the Thesmaphorea. And there were, there was, I mean, there was, there was ancient, ancient comedy, like Aristophanes, a good translation

will be chuck full of primary obscenities because he is using the words that aren't used anywhere else in ancient Greek, and they're only reserved for comedy or for references to things like the Thesmaferia, these festivals. Interesting. And for graffiti.

I mean, one of the first things you find in graffiti is all sorts of, bad words. This is so fascinating. I'm curious about the book of Revelation. Yeah. It's a fascinating book. There's all sorts of crazy visions and prophecies of end times and people, especially now, really love to reference it and be like, it's happening. Look, Revelation said it. Yeah. And one of the things we were just talking about is the reference of 666, the mark of the beast. Yeah. What is the original sort of text say about that and how it relates to ancient numerology and how can

people today sort of like look at it with that framework. Yeah. So there was, they were already confused about what exactly 666 was. Because I can think of the first interpreters who try to, they, let me come out it this way. And I'm following the work here of a guy named Richard Bachim was a very great scholar. In the ancient world, you would often convert the new letters to their numerical value. So if your name was Aaron, you can.

spell it out and say A is one, A again is one, R is whatever number R is in the alphabet, I don't know, but, you know. And this was not just like, this was even popular. Like there were, there's a graffiti, I think, from Pompeii, the girl who I love, her number is, whatever, 745. We don't know whose name that was, but presumably someone could be like, oh, that was for me, you know, my name, that's the value of the number of my name. That's cute. And Jews and Christians do plenty of this. I can think of an example in an apocryphal book called the Similian oracles. They say one day the son of God will come and his number is 888.

And if you do the name Jesus in Greek, you get the value 888. So this is sort of common fair. Usually to do this sort of gamutria is the term for it. To do it right, or to do it as best. the best way possible, you want to combine some sort of significance. So the example Bacom gives of this is there was a rumor that Nero had killed his mother. Maybe he did kill his mother. I don't remember. But one of the proofs is that if you write in Greek, Nero killed his own mother and you do the value for those letters, you can get it to match the value of the name Nero. And so

this would then not only be a simple bit of arithmetic to see what the name Nero came to, but you could prove something. Aha, there's a deal. deeper truth. He did kill his own mother. Do you follow? And this is not one of this, from my knowledge, not one of the ancient meanings of Nero, but the book Revelation is in many ways a transparent polemic against the imperial power of Rome. And so, for instance, this, the whore of Babylon is sitting on seven hills drunk on the blood of the saints. But Rome, you can look at coins that Rome has seven hills. And so this is supposed to be the goddess Roma,

and she's drunk on the blood of the saints because she's killing believers or something like that, right? And in fact, it goes through all of Rome's wealth. This is one of the main themes of the book. And we could leave that to one side or maybe come back to it because I think it actually has relevance for today of a book that should be relevant, but not for the reasons that usually is relevant.

But if you... the word for beast, and this gets a little too complicated, and that might mean it's wrong. But if you do the word for beast, Therion, and if you put that in Hebrew letters, you can get 666. And if you do Nero Caesar, you can get 666. And so Richard Bacham's argument is that you have to have the mark of the beast, meaning, and if you recall from the verse, is that you won't be able to trade. You won't be able to engage in commerce, which is, again, one of the major polemics. of the book is against the all-powerful dollar essentially. And he doesn't want Christians involved in this economy.

And that you'll have to get the mark of the beast in order to be able to participate. And he's connecting the name to Nero. And that is the mark of the beast that what it would be proving along the lines of Nero killed his own mother is that you can get the numerical value of beast to be the value of Nero. So you're almost saying something about Nero, right? You're not just saying, I counted the letters in his name. I've shown he is this demonic power. So don't take, almost saying, hey, fellow Christians, don't take a high view of the peace Rome seems to promise

and the stability and the fact that the coffers are full and we're all making money. In fact, that's not an innocent game. That's like on the backs of thousands. and I want you out of it. But the people of the time have known that? Well, that's a good question.

It's the right question to ask. And I know Iernaeus and Hippolytus in the late second century both take a stab at Nero and they come up with various names of who they think it might be. I think they say at one point

it might mean Latin, like the Roman people altogether symbolically or something else. I can't remember all the different proposals that come up with. They don't propose Nero. So this is a strike against

this otherwise elegant proposal is that it doesn't seem like ancient ancient Christians were aware of that they don't say so but one of the pluses in favor of this hypothesis is that we have different Greek manuscripts right and some Greek manuscripts have the number of the beast is 616 and in fact there's two ways to spell Nero like we say Nero in English in other languages and Greek it was usually spelled Neroen with an N on the end, and the value of that N in Greek is 50. So in other words, you have 666 and 616 would be two variant numbers,

both of which fit for the two ways you say the word Nero. Oh, interesting. So it could be that you could argue that textual variant, 616, is evidence that the person who made that quote-unquote mistake was almost doing the math and saying like, Nero, no, that's only 616, but I know that's the name I'm supposed to be representing.

That's interesting. So they're trying to talk about the demonic rulers of the time. That's right. They're using coded language, and that has Hebrew Bible precedent. The passages which come to be regarded as about Satan, who's not really a character in the Hebrew Bible. It's Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, and both of those passages speak of human rulers

in really grandiloquent language. You were like the morning star. you were so great and yet you've fallen and now you're just nothing blah blah blah so they're taunting a human ruler of pomp and circumstance and naming his downfall that later gets applied to the devil as like an angel who's fallen but that that story isn't really in the bible the point being there was already a prophetic precedent for looking at a human ruler and almost seeing the human ruler with a double lens you're doing what you're doing but you're like a puppet of other forces, and God's going to judge both.

Oh, that's so interesting. Psalm 82 does the same thing. It says, God takes his stand in the counsel of the gods, plural. And God says, though you are gods, you will die like mortals. And it's clear then in the rest of the Psalm what that's about. You are supposed to, these are some sort of angelic powers set over the different nations. So you're the God of this nation. or the angel, whatever, the tutelary deity,

but you haven't done justice for the orphan and the widow. Like that nation is messed up. It has no justice. And I'm holding you accountable. So there's like an older Hebrew Bible example of the same basic thought that God will judge human rulers for their failure to execute justice, even though they're not even supposed to be necessarily like, people who know God who look they could be pagans it doesn't matter god says i've installed you for

these purposes oh that's so interesting so i think that's one of the things revelation is trying to get at now to me i understood revelation to be like sort of prophetic and a lot of people sort of are looking to it to to understand what's happening in the world today is it reasonable to sort of just say like oh they were talking about their own time i think that's exactly the latter part is exactly right Like I would say it's relevance to our time for Christians who want to apply it. The relevance wouldn't be that it was like a soothsayer saying in so many years X will happen so that we're on the lookout. I don't know. Back when I was in college, people were always trying to figure out the president's name.

You know, is he the beast or is Mikkel Gorbachev the beast or something like that? I think that's misguided because I think he's trying to look at his. own world. Well, actually, the text makes clear. I'm talking about things that are happening right now. And the revelation part, the apocalypse of it, is in unveiling. So it might look to you, people, like Rome greases the wheels of commerce and industry. And that's good.

You're a shipbuilder and you can be prosperous because they've cleared the Mediterranean pirates. He's then saying, let me lay bare for you at what cost this was done. There's blood on the hands. I want you to have nothing to do with it. Come out from them. Be separate. So in that sense, what it's revealing is about what's happening right then,

making a moral judgment, a prophetic judgment against it. But I would say that doesn't seem that hard to think of, for people who wanted to say this is authoritative for me or my religious community, to think of, oh, think about the world today, or is there an empire which helps makes commerce possible? I'm sorry, I'm drawing a blank. It's nothing. It's not relevant today. Interesting.

So you're not banishing it to the past just because it was about the time it was written. I think it has actually quite obvious things to say. Oh, that's interesting. That's a cool interpretation. It's sort of just a truism about humanity. Yeah. That there will be exploitation. Something like that.

It is sort of an obligation of Christ's followers to not sort of, I guess, indulge in exploitation. Yep. That's quite interesting. Is there anything else in Revelation that you find like stands out as far as things like the Antichrist or the, you know, the return of the Messiah that you feel like is, you know, maybe misinterpreted or maybe broadly misunderstood based off the original text? I don't know that it's misunderstood, but, I mean, I think there are themes because Christianity can so often, has so often been. aligned with power and has been coercive and has been the sorts of all sorts of grief. I think it is helpful to look at images like it's early on. It's in chapter five, I think. It does depict Christ as a victor, but it's, it wants to insist that this victory is paradoxical.

So at one point, I might have to look this up. yeah he hears the roar of a lion but when he looks what he sees is the land that is slain and so he's using victory language the strong animal the lion but i think he's almost narrating his own awakening that oh victory is actually about this meekness the real victor is the land that is slain and so if he wants people to hold on to the testimony of christ he's sort of saying it's not going to come with strength it's going to come with testimony to the truth that also feels like a timely thing

and like would have been a corrective over the years in many ways for the imperial church when the church was aligned with power when it has been and has sought to course it's like nah as if this book would have a word for that right that no no no that's not the Messiah who you should be following

you're thinking of the lion you should be thinking of the land that was slain that's what I saw when I looked that's interesting yeah I guess that is the broader truism that strength is found in humility. Yeah. And sort of piety and, yeah.

And not necessarily a course of power. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I think, yeah. That's a cool way to interpret that. Yeah. That'd be a message I'd want revived from the book of Revelation,

other than just is this country Gog or Magog or that sort of thing. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. Is there anything else with Revelation that you want to touch on that you think is... It's a terrific book. It's... very precisely written. It, of all the, I mean, it's, it's mind, the Old Testament for passage after passage about Babylon or about the powers that encircled and tormented Israel.

It's drawn on each of them for us, for, to use that language to deploy toward Rome, its contemporary world power. So I don't know what the, I don't know if that's that. interesting a point, but you can see that it wasn't drawn up haphazardly. It's like, it's almost like the result of years of study, even though it's a vision, even though he says I was in the spirit and I saw this and that. That's interesting. He's channeling all sorts of precise textual references. Yeah.

Now, in fairness, this is a completely separate question. Go for it. But this will be an olive branch to my Protestant brothers that are listening. It's generous of you. Yeah, right? you've made a few references to Christ's brothers. Yes. Now within Catholic doctrine, it's, again, my mother would say, Christ had no brothers.

Mary sort of... Ever virgin. Ever virgin. And possess this sort of, you know, this immaculate, like, there was a sacredness to her. And that she was never defiled, quote, unquote. So Jesus had no direct brothers. And I guess Catholics will do a couple different things. well, they'll say, well, these are not brothers from Mary, these are brothers from Joseph,

or they'll say the word for brother that's used in the original text is like Kinos or something to that effect. It's Adelphos. Adelphos. And does that mean direct brother? Does that mean like close friend or compatriot? I'm curious the original translation, how you interpret that to meaning Christ's actual brothers. Yeah, two or three things. the word brother is really the only way to translate it,

but except that I think you called me brother when I walked in. Of course. And I'm not your brother. Right. So it had the same flexibility in Greek that English does, where you could call someone Paul's word for all fellow believers is brothers and sisters. And other groups, Paul's not the only one to do that. Jews called each other brother and different mystery religions among the Greeks and Romans did the same thing.

So yes, it's linguistically possible. These are not his full brothers. There were basically three ancient views of this. But the oldest one, this might make your mom happy also, is found in the protevangelium of James, which is a text from the second century, which tells the story of the birth of Mary. And she is born in a sacred way.

her birth is already the result of a miraculous intervention of God in her parents and she's raised in the temple until she's 12 and when really she's about to go to puberty they have to get her out of the test she's fed by angels and so on it's very miraculous for Mary and then they want to they need to do something with her it's not really explained why this is the solution but the solution is to find a widower someone from Israel who can marry her they essentially draw lots and it is Joseph who is an aged widower that is his wife is dead.

He's already got children who is compelled to marry Mary, which means that Jesus' brothers, as named in the Gospels, are, according to that version, are Joseph's children from a prior marriage. And so in that text, you could both, so that was the word stepbrother? No, yeah, stepbrothers, not half-brothers. So it doesn't just mean friends or cousins. It means brothers, the same way we would say, but they're not the children of Mary.

So that's already a second century explanation of who his brothers are. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And in that text, although it doesn't insist that like Mary never had children, it probably was of that view. This gets a little graphic,

because in that text, Mary has the baby in a cave. And when Mary has Jesus, the baby is not from Joseph, so it's a miraculous birth, just like in the Gospels. She has Jesus in the cave, and a midwife goes to examine her and conclude she's still a virgin. A virgin has had a child. And in fact, the midwife is punished for her lack of faith because her hand catches on fire.

and she's told to hold the baby Jesus and it cures her hand. But that's interesting because there you have a text that's already not only concerned to demonstrate that his, quote, brothers from the gospels are not from Mary. It's some concern to show that, they're Joseph's children,

but that somehow the delivery of Jesus didn't change Mary from being, quote unquote, a virgin. Interesting. Yeah, I've heard this metaphor before that I forget exactly what it is, but that Christ passed through Mary in the way that he passed through the walls to Thomas, that there was no friction, so to speak.

The text seems to have something like that in mind. And which text is that? It's called the Pro-Evangelium of James. So James, Jesus' brother, is ostensibly the author. He names himself right at the end of the text. It's also called the Revelation of Mary. The question would be, why so early, are they concerned with Mary's ongoing virginity?

And later retellings of that story also insist, she remains a virgin. Yeah, why is it so important to people of that time? I have a theory on this to go back to the Genesis story we spoke about earlier that I'm not sure. On the one hand, that story is concerned with Mary's purity. It emphasizes it in all sorts of ways. In fact, at one point, Joseph and Mary, when Mary's pregnant, the other people accuse them and say,

what have you done, Joseph? And he's like, I swear I didn't touch her. And they are both forced to undergo a trial of, it's a trial from Numbers chapter 5. It's called the soda ritual. And they have to drink this special potion to see if they're telling the truth, then they're cleared.

So it's kind of like a trial by ordeal. And God clears them. The text is really is interested in her sexual purity, I guess. But I'm not sure that her giving birth is part of that same motif. Here's my theory. I think the text is working with the same idea we've mentioned once before about Paul thinking of Jesus

as the second Adam, who sets things right that Adam got wrong. And if you think about working backwards through the story of Genesis, if the result of Adam and Eve's transgression was partly that Eve, that women would give birth and pain, the point of this story is that she gave birth effortlessly without pain. Without original sin.

I guess so. And that like the curse is being reversed. That salvation is starting to break into the world. That this is being, we're back to paradise. So that if this isn't too subtle, I think you'll see my point. What the midwife is almost like an expert midwife is examining her and saying, wait, this is not like a normal body of a woman who's just given birth. I've seen birth before.

That didn't happen. The point wouldn't really be her virginity, although that's the word used. The point would be she suffered no pain. Like the bodily normal things that would happen in giving birth didn't happen. That's so interesting. So it'd be making a theological point. Yeah, it's bound by the language of the time to say virginity, which we kind of associate with sexuality and fornication.

The point would be she didn't have the pain because. What was lost for Adam and Eve is now regained. They can have birth without pain. Wow. Yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah. I've heard people say that Christ married Mary Magdalene.

Is that support in the text? No. But a couple of texts, I mean, Mary Magdalene is important in the Gospels. In Luke in particular. And in the gospel of John, that's who he meets in the garden. He says Mary, she spins around and recognizes him Rabuni, you know, like he says her name. hears him. And in other texts just after the New Testament, the gospel of Mary and the gospel of Philip emphasized the importance of Mary Magdalene as Jesus' disciple. And it's the gospel of Philip,

I think, which says, maybe both of them emphasized that she was, he used to kiss her more than us. So the fact that it says more than us probably means it's not really like romantic. It's just that, oh, he was really close to her. And Peter, in the gospel of Mary, Peter becomes jealousness. Like, do the Lord really reveal things to her that he didn't reveal to us? And the answer is,

and then another disciple Levi says, Peter, you're always so hot-headed. Like, yes, he did. The Lord loved her. You know that. So what's the surprise if she knows things that we don't? Like, he told some things to each of us individually.

She knows things we don't. So there's a tradition remembered that Jesus had female disciples and that this one was close enough to him I don't think the gospel of Mary really goes back to Mary Magdalene, but I think they picked a good character of someone Jesus was known to be close to and thought, if we're going to have extra revelation, let's imagine he said it to her.

And, yeah, if that makes... That's quite interesting. Okay, another random thing. Yeah. When Christ is being crucified, he screams out to the Lord, Father, why have you forsaken me? Is there a scholarly understanding of what that means, as far as the original text is concerned?

Well, it's the words from Psalm 22. It's the first line of Psalm 22, which is at least part of the story. It's sort of an interesting detail in the gospel because there aren't that many times where they quote Jesus' words in the original language. So it says, he said, Eloy Lama Sabakhani, which is translated,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? They don't always do that, right? they don't always say what it sounded like, which is kind of cool. Like they're seizing upon these words. They then wrestled with what did it mean that he said this. They're sort of a little trouble

by the prospect of God abandoning Christ. I can tell you what some of the early interpreters said. They said, for instance, that in some sense, God had to turn God's back on Christ in order to make, the crucifixion possible that yeah there was some sort of alienation and I think that roughly corresponds to hints at least in the in the story that Jesus is deeply troubled his

soul is troubled under death and that sort of idea that he's really grieved at this he's going to have to drink a cup and I guess it's about dying but it seems like there's going to be some sort of rupture between the intimacy he's enjoyed with God all along I might be I might be reading too much to that. But that is something they say about why did God abandon Christ on the cross? That's so interesting. I wonder if there's other things with the crucifixion. One thing that sticks out is like he was lanced by a Roman

and like water poured out. Is there a symbolic nature of that? I mean, I've heard people draw that to like baptism and things like that. Like is there something within the text that points to other parts of the Bible? Yeah, it probably points to too many things because water is such a rich symbol.

And if you think in the Gospel of John, he's already spoken about. We'll give you living waters. Believers will have waters bubbling up within them. So I think it points to any number of things about maybe baptism as well. Interesting.

Yeah. Okay, another rapid fire question. Go ahead. Now I'm just, I'm abusing you. There's a moment in the Old Testament, I believe, with the pharaohs of Egypt, where there's a passage that suggests that God hardened the pharaohs

Pharaoh's heart. Yeah. Just one Pharaoh, yeah. I always kind of took an issue with that because I'm like, well, look, you know, we all have possibility for redemption. We all can be saved, right? Like, this is kind of how it was raised. And then I'm reading this passage where it's like, God kind of condemned to this person.

Yeah. And his heart was not able to come to God, at least in that time. So I'm curious, is the translation of that? That's a good translation. And it's a real theological problem. If you About half of those passages Because of course there's repeated

That story drags on for a while Where Moses says to Pharaoh Set my people free Let us go to worship God And Sometimes Pharaoh says yes Then he changes his mind

And half the time It says Pharaoh hardened his heart So it's Pharaoh's responsibility And half the time it says God hardened Pharaoh's heart The latter one Is at least part of the text And it gets

gets to the age old conundrum of, is God punishing people for things God has done to them? You almost get into questions of Calvinism here. You mentioned Luther earlier, but that's the sort of thing where Calvin would just bite down hard on that problem and say, yes, God can both harden a person and then punish them for being resistant to God's will. A lot of people react to that negatively and say that doesn't make any sense. and so in that case let me put it this way the core of the problem isn't resolved

by recourse to the original language the problem's right there in the original language so I guess you could argue well God wouldn't have hardened Pharaoh's heart unless there'd already been some initial hardening or something but it doesn't say that it's just the problem's right there that's interesting yeah okay

and the last thing that we had discussed during the break is hell okay yeah we'll finish on an easy problem Yeah, I know, I know. But I'm curious, like, is there, like, the, is there a disconnect between the biblical description of hell in the ancient text and how we sort of know it in the West and, like, pop culture? Yeah, that's a good question. In the Hebrew Bible, you don't get any sort of well-developed notion of hell at all.

I've heard from my Jewish friends. I don't really believe in hell. Exactly. For good reason. There aren't any passages that would make them believe that. there is She'ol, which is the realm of the dead. The Greek translates that Hades, which is just where the dead are when they're dead.

But it's not a place of punishment. It's not where the devil is. It's not where there's fire and pitchforks. There's maybe a couple passages about kind of the very last verses of Isaiah talk about the worm will not die and the fire will not be quenched as some sort of image of torment. But anyway, there's nothing, there's no well-developed idea.

The idea of post-mortem punishment does develop among Jews prior to the time of Jesus. And by the time of Jesus, lots of Jews, as well as pagans, believe the idea that, like, you'll be punished for your sins in the afterlife in hell and Hades in the realm of the dead. And Christians, for the most part, subscribe to that. Well, when they talk about it, they subscribe to it. I guess there's a few things worth saying. one is that where was Jesus on Saturday?

Where was Jesus? I'll ask you. Where was Jesus between his crucifixion and his resurrection? He decided to hell. That's right. So that's in the creed. It's in the New Testament.

It's in First Peter. The question is what he was doing. And whenever there's these gaps in the text, early Christians fill them. Like, I'll tell you what he was doing. And in some versions, he's preaching or he's bringing Abraham. and Isaac and Jacob and other sort of like heroes of the Bible up because they've been dead.

They've been in Shiole. So they're not really in hell per se. They're just in the underworld, the realm of the dead. So they're not being punished because they're good guys, but they're being brought up to be with God. In Clement of Alexandria, Jesus is actually giving everyone who lived before him the message, his own gospel, so that they have a chance to accept it or not. So that's an expansion. It's not quite said in the New Testament, but that's Clementine of Alexandria's idea in about the year 180.

And as people, this is called the dissensus, the descent of Christ to Hades. There are some versions of the telling of that story beyond the New Testament that imply he just empties it. Everyone's coming with me. Death is defeated. So the term for that image is universalism, the idea that God reconciles everyone to God. And so that any such punishment as there was was reformatory or temporary, but that so if 1 Corinthians 15 says in the end, God is all in all, that seems to imply that everything is restored back to God.

And that if some were left alienated from God, separated from God, that would actually be a defeat for God. Like that means God hasn't fixed what God started in creation, right? and that theological logic leads people to think, well, then one way or another, if Christ is defeating death, as Prince Corinthians says, also, God has to get everyone back to God. Wow. So that's a universalist division that some early Christians had. That's really interesting. And the Apocalypse of Peter, since we're talking some about non-canonical texts in this discussion, is the earliest tour of hell.

This is a text. The Apocalypse of Peter is fairly early. mostly non-canonical, but it's in some Bible lists. So it was like right about made it into the New Testament. And it's a tour of hell, the beginning of a long stream of these that lead to more famous works like Dante's Inferno. Like, oh, here's so-and-so, here's so-and-so. So for most of the text, it's pretty grim, to be honest. Jesus is on the right here are people who lent money at interest.

There's an interesting one. Shame on them. They're getting punished. Here are the adulterers. They're being punished. Here's different sinners, right? So it almost feels like it has, what's the word, schadenfreude, almost.

Like, yeah, good, they got it, they got it, they got it. But then somewhat surprisingly, at the end of the book, the beginning of the book, Peter's weeping when he sees the first glimpse of this. And he's like, Jesus, it would be better if they'd never been created. Like, this is awful. And at the end of the book, Jesus says,

whatever my elect ask, I will give them, I will take these out of torment. and give them a baptism in the Akaruzian Lake so that they can have an inheritance with the saints. Akerozian Lake is a reference to Greek mythology of like one of the rivers of the underworld. So he's almost saying like, wait, if this really grieves Peter and others who are getting this tour, Jesus says to them, if you ask me, I'll remove them and I'll give them a baptism and it'll be okay. which is, again, a pretty remarkable vision that mercy should win in the end.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I always kind of disregarded non-canonical texts as sort of, I don't know, like, at best, unhelpful and at worst, like, you know, malignant to the gospels and to God's word. And the way you're describing is actually, it's interesting to me.

It seems like it can actually be useful. Like, again, this is. outside of your purview, but in sort of like framing what it means to like be a Christian and like creating a world. I think it's definitely useful. I mean, after all, these are also like thoughtful explorations. Well, useful in multiple ways. On the one hand, like to take that example from the apocalypse of Peter,

I think it's a kind of beautiful example of that text of wrestling with how to balance the idea of God's justice. Like in some sense, wickedness should have consequences. And it's trying to hold that, and it's trying to hold the idea that God is a merciful God and Christ came to illustrate mercy. And how are we going to hold this together? And it may not do it perfectly, but it's trying to say, yes, there'll be punishment, but in the end mercy should triumph. So that's a version of that. But there's an example, like, I'm glad to have gotten to hear that early voice.

Like, that's someone wrestling with a perennial philosophical and theological challenge. And, you know, I think in other ways, it's interesting to see how non-canonical texts filling gaps. Like you mentioned, I think during the break, what about Jesus as a child? In the Gospels, we see him born. We get one little story in Luke chapter two about him being a precocious child at the temple. And that's it. And then he's sort of a middle-aged, you know, young person doing his thing. But again, those nature abhors a vacuum.

Like the Christians like, wait, what was he like as a child? Like, and one of the stories is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It's maybe not the most sophisticated text, but it's delightful to see them imagining a little God boy. What would he be like? And they imagine he bumps into a kid on the playground and the kid falls dead. And the parents come and complain to Joseph and Marion. Like, you've got to do something about your child. And another day they sent him to school.

and the teacher tries to teach them the alphabet and Jesus says, you tell me the meaning of the alpha and I'll tell you the meaning of the beta and teachers like Joseph, take him back, I'm not doing this. So they're almost wrestling with what would it be like to be, you know,

an eight-year-old but be semi-divine. Is the story written as like a document of text like, oh, this is what did happen or are they kind of projecting like, oh, here's what it was like? They claim they always write these claiming they're the truth I don't think that

had a... Well, those stories do get repeated into the Middle Ages but I don't actually know how to answer someone probably knows quite how widely they were believed they don't always reflect very well on Jesus

again, you know, like knocking his friend over and having to die he does get better as things go he... I'll tell you two other stories that are kind of edifying from, I think kind of cool ones. I don't know if they're edifying or not. In that story, his father Joseph's a carpenter.

His father Joseph is doing his woodwork and makes the mistake everyone has ever held a saw is made. He cuts a board too short. Like, that's ruined. And Jesus takes the board and stretches it out. And Joseph's like, nice, well done boy. So like his magic, for lack of a better world, is useful. But only in a sort of minor domestic way. He's not doing, he's not bringing salvation in the world.

He's almost can't wield his powers in a way. But that makes me think of a story from the gospel of Philip, which I think is poignant. It says that Joseph the carpenter planted a garden to grow the wood to make the cross that his son died on. And so it's almost imagine like the web of forces beyond us that Joseph's just doing his carpentry. And yet he makes the very cross upon which his own child dies. It's kind of beautiful poetry. It's beautiful poetry. It's just speculation.

or whatever. It's, I don't know if anyone, no one takes that seriously as history, but you could read that as, yeah, a reflection on mundane,

secular work and how it ties into broader stories we can't control. Yeah. And there are even medieval drawings of Joseph in his workshop. I've seen one painting of this, at least,

where the tools, his tools or his beams or something like that are hanging up, but they're casting a shadow, in the shape of a cross. Oh, wow, that's beautiful. Which is like playing out the same idea.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm always fascinated by those types of, like, again, these are collections of books that are sort of passed along over hundreds of years written over different, you know, disparate time periods. And yet there's some sort of, and maybe this is a reader's interpretation, but some type of connectivity, like one that I always find interesting is like, the sort of interesting parody between like the Virgin Mary and the Ark of the Covenant.

and I'm sure you've heard versions of this, but, you know, like inside the Ark of the Covenant, or was it manna, the rod of Joan? Aaron, which is like a sign of like the priesthood. And then a third thing that I forget. The tablets of the Covenant. Yes, the law. And then within Mary is symbolically the same things.

Christians were so good at, and Jews before them, at identifying these sorts of typologies. And it's almost super saturating. even relatively straightforward narratives with like multiple layers of meaning. Yeah, I mean, it's like Christopher Nolan. Maybe that's an understatement. And I think the reason

I mean, it just made me think of another reason I think the Apocrypha and some of these non-canonical texts as well as the canonical text where we're studying is it was only in the post-reformation period that they sort of ceased to circulate. And therefore, if you want to, for instance, understand medieval art,

or medieval stories or theology or older ones, they were reading the Pro-Evangelium of James. They were reading these stories and taking them on board. They didn't consider them the same as the Bible, but they were in the stained glass, they were in the art and so on. So we're almost cut off. We look at those paintings or stained glass,

and like, what's that about? Well, that's because we stopped reading what they had been reading for a long time. Yeah, I mean, even, I don't know. This is why, again, I had issues. choose with like sola scripture this lutheran idea of like hey the scripture is the only thing that this is it's by this alone because then you have things like the trinity where they don't really sort of present themselves in the scripture it's any type of significant way but yet it is so

fundamental to all branches of christianity yeah and i look at that as to say like you know it's some of these other things whether you want to call it the church or even just a personal scholarship of these other books that can inform one's belief. Yeah. You know, within reason. I'm sure, you know, someone going rogue

can also have negative consequences, but I find it helpful for me at least. Yeah, and I think when people look at Luther, he held on to all sorts of beliefs and practices that aren't, at least not in any straightforward way, in Scripture. So even as he was saying,

I'm going to get rid of things that aren't just in Scripture. Yeah, I guess like the divinity of Mary is something that... Or the immaculate conception of marriage. Sure, that's a better way to put it. It's something he's subscribed to that kind of sort of lost touch with, I guess, like more modern branches of reformed Christianity.

So I don't know. I find it very interesting. And I always kind of wrote those texts off. And I'm going to kind of look back at them with a different eye. And furthermore, I'm really, really grateful that you took time to be here today and answer all my dumb questions. I was, again, I have to apologize for being

prejudicial that I expected you to come here and just kind of dunk on Christianity or sort of dispel these things as like fun, you know, myths that we shouldn't really have, you know, give credence to. And in a way, I don't know if this is your intention, maybe this will come to you with the chagrin, but I almost feel like emboldened. And I almost feel maybe disappointed to myself that I kind of like fell susceptible to like the world being like, ah, the Bible, you know, It's a bunch of stories. And I'm like, you know, maybe I should look back into this. You should look back into it.

Come take a class. Yeah, it is hard to make an overarching, for me to make an overarching comment. Like, no, these are not just stories. I think some of them, I think the Bible contains things that in the end of the day are probably pretty hard or maybe impossible to reconcile with science or straight history. but it also includes things that are like any other ancient history straightforward history and you almost have to decide

I guess if I was going to say something I felt comfortable with it'd be you have to go case by case text by text and say so what about this story? What about this story? And decide what sort of genre is it is it meant to be more parabolic more of a fable

because there are definitely texts in the Bible that are like that but then there are texts that I think probably are underestimated as containing ballot history. Yeah, and I do tell my friends that are non-religious, like either Christ is, you know, the son of God and the savior of humanity and, you know,

an idea that I tend to gravitate towards, or it is just one of the most compelling stories ever written of a man who likely existed that we should all try to emulate in some way. Maybe that's controversial. You don't have to comment on that. That's not very controversial, but like maybe I'll be the critic you expect.

now. I mean, I do almost feel like I wear I don't want to say I wear two hats. I can I find myself in the habit of trying to see things through a couple of different lenses. So like I'm interested, I'm Christian, I'm committed to this. So I want to think of what is a constructive theological lens, a way to like revere Jesus as the son of God. But then I also want to be rigorously fair to someone who doesn't find that compelling. And I

think about these ancient critics of Christianity and I can really see things through their eyes and say, boy, Kelsus, you were right. Like this story just sounds, Kelsey just says, you know what, there's tons of holy men wandering around Palestine at the time. I'm not impressed with your story. What are you people? This is a newfangled religion. I'm going to stick with good old platonic faith.

I can see it through his eyes as well. That's reasonable. I guess I feel like you can hold those things both at the same time, or at least maybe that's an ideal to strive for. Yeah, I don't think that's unreasonable. I think you can be, I think having some type of moral framework is helpful. And I think that it's useful regardless if it's, you know, stoicism or some type of platonic ideal or if it's Christianity or Islam or Judaism.

I think there's a reason that these texts have persisted for, you know, centuries. I agree with you 100%. Because ultimately, I think the fruits of them, because they persisted, even just through like a social Darwinism, the reasons these are. things have been selected is because they are ultimately good for humanity across all religions that are ancient and the ones that were destructive and you know death cults yeah the reason that those kind of die off is because those people are no longer here so and I think they're also just texts one thing that amazes me is I've been teaching this for 20 some years

since I got my PhD and I never feel bored like every time I get to reteach something I find new things. I'm surprised by new things. Students point out something I hadn't noticed. Or in the meantime, you've lived life and read other books and just had other experiences. And then you come to a familiar text and you hear different notes played in it. And you're like, why did I know? I didn't notice it before because I was a different person the last time I encountered it. Interesting. So. Yeah. And now you get to know about the wheel within a wheel. Look it up. I wish I had known about is Ezekiel's vision of the Merikava of the chariot. He was seeing. It was actually aliens. aliens. There you go. That's my gift to you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this

so much. This was really, really interesting. And if I can convince you, I would love to do this again another time. Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Thanks so much.