Danny Jones Podcast - #363 - Explosive Bible Debate: Exiled Language Expert vs Ancient Religion PhD | Ammon Hillman & Luke Gorton

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Watch this episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Ammon Hillman is a Ph.D. classicist specializing in Ancient Greek, Roman medicine & pharmacy. Dr. Hillman was investigated by the Vatican for demon possession while teaching as a professor of Classical Languages. Dr. Luke Gorton is also a Ph.D. classicist specializing in religions of the ancient Mediterranean, Greek mythology & ancient magic. On this episode, Hillman & Gorton debate ancient greek literature regarding Jesus Christ's shameful act in the 'Greater Questions of Mary', the ORIGINAL language of the old testament & the origins of the word "Christ". SPONSORS https://kalshi.com/r/DANNY - Click the link or download the Kalshi App & use code DANNY to sign up & trade today. https://meetfabric.com/danny - Join thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes. https://amentara.com/go/DJ - Use the code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://rag-bone.com - Use code DANNY & get 20% off sitewide. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Ammon Hillman:  @ladybabylon666 Luke Gorton:  @drlukegorton FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The study of dead languages 05:08 - Ancient magic 10:30 - Ammon's expulsion from academia 12:43 - how Ammon's dissertation was censored 18:06 - Why Ammon abandoned Christianity 20:54 - Classicists vs. linguists vs. bible scholars 26:58 - Archeologists & linguists working with classicists 30:49 - The problem with bible scholars 36:29 - Biggest misconceptions about the bible 39:18 -When the gospels were written 46:50 - How much ancient literature has disappeared 49:18 - The Greek Magical Papyri 52:47 - Why Greek was the dominant ancient language 01:01:53 - The greater questions of Mary 01:07:15 - Jesus' shameful act 01:10:59 - The d*ck analogy 01:15:47 - Scholiast's definition of αἰσχρότης 01:24:20 - Translation evidence of eating Jesus' semen 01:29:19 - Who was Jesus & did he exist? 01:35:58 - Paul's letter to the Corinthians 01:41:13 - How Paul survived a poisonous viper bite 01:47:47 - Ancient use of drugged wines 01:50:13 - Original language of the Septuagint 01:54:06 - Greek translations that lose their meaning 01:58:42 - Oldest pieces of Hebrew literature 02:04:17 - Why ancient Hebrew texts don't exist 02:14:13 - Luke's theory on the Septuagint authorship 02:16:29 - The language Jesus spoke 02:23:39 - Greek vs. Aramaic quotes from Jesus 02:30:08 - Back formation of language 02:34:20 - The problem with Ammon's methodology 02:39:11 - The "sounds like" linguistics principle 02:45:02 - Origin of the word "Christ" 02:53:57 - Different forms of the Greek word "Christ" 02:58:46 - Analogy for "Christ" as "anointed one" 03:08:52 - When Jews adopted the Greek language 03:16:01 - True origin of the Greek word "cristos" 03:21:42 - "Jewish" Greek vs. traditional Greek 03:26:33 - The magi (three wise men) 03:29:03 - Discriminating between historical texts 03:35:23 - The Isaiah Scroll & the Masoretic Text similarities Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, gentlemen. First of all, just to start this whole thing off, I want to have both of you guys introduce yourselves and your academic backgrounds. Luke, we'll start with you. Yeah, my name is Dr. Luke Gordon. I have been fascinated by the ancient world, by ancient languages for most of my life at this point. I was very fortunate to take Latin in eighth and ninth grade. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I had. did so. Everyone had always told me, you know, languages are hard, Latin is hard, like, where are you taking that? And then I took it and it just clicked. I just loved this stuff. I had no idea that I was going to love it this much, but I did. I ended up taking Spanish later in high school. And of course, as many of Spanish is descended from Latin. It's one of the Romance languages. And that got me hooked on connections between languages. How are languages related to each other? How do languages evolve from, you know, an older language to a younger language.

or whatever. I went to college. I majored in Spanish. I also majored in religion, especially early Christianity, Second Temple Judaism, Mediterranean religions. That's when I first took Greek was in college. I took three years of Greek in college. And I didn't think I could love anything more than Latin, but I did. I found that Greek was just the most amazing language that, of course, at this point, I don't take in three languages, Latin, Spanish, and then Greek, but it was the most amazing language that I had ever been fortunate enough to take. And I still feel that way today. Now that I've taken many, many other ancient languages, especially when I went on to grad school,

I decided to do my master's degree in linguistics, specifically historical linguistics, which is, again, the study of how languages are connected to each other. It's really the study of old dead languages. That's essentially what historical linguistics is. So as part of that program, I learned the general principles of linguistics. which I think are very important, and I'm sure those will come up more in our discussion. But I also learned, I was also able to take many other old dead languages. I took three semesters of Sanskrit, which is essentially the Latin of India.

You know, it's what all the, it's what the Rig Veda and the ancient Hindu texts are written in, which is super cool stuff. I took Aveston, which is the ancient language of Iran. And, you know, there's various ancient religious texts that are written in that as well. I was able to take old Irish. I was able to take Gothic, which is the oldest Germanic language. I also took Hebrew, which of course, we'll get into that as well. And I was able to take a little bit of old Egyptian, which is what the hieroglyphs are writing. Essentially, they're writing this old Egyptian language.

Acadian, which is the old Babylonian or Assyrian language, Hittite, which is a language from what we today call Turkey, and several other ancient languages as well. So I was able to really fill out my ancient language portfolio, if you want to call it that. But my heart always remained with Greek and Latin. And between Greek and Latin, my heart is more on the Greek side. I love Latin. I tell all my students this. And my students at the University of New Mexico, they're classicists for the most part, at least in the upper level Latin and Greek language classes that I get to teach.

And within classics, as Amun knows, there are different opinions about Latin versus Greek. There's people who like Latin better. There's people who like Greek better. And sometimes it's just a vibe thing. You know, you take these two languages. And if you're a classicist, you have to take both of them. It's kind of part of the job description. But some people vibe more with Latin.

Some people vibe more with Greek. I was always on the Greek side. I love Latin, but Greek is really where my heart is. It's a fascinating, wonderful language. And honestly, I wish everybody could learn it, all of you. You know, and I could probably hope you with that. And so you have a Ph.D. in classics? That's correct.

And what about linguistics? My master's degree is in linguistics. Got it. So yeah, let me finish the story. So I kind of interrupted myself because I'm so excited about ancient languages. So I did my master's degree in linguistics and then I was deciding what to go on for my PhD. And I could have gone on and stayed with linguistics and some people said I should have, but I decided that I wanted to specifically focus on the ancient Mediterranean world, which is essentially what classics is.

And I know that you and Amund have had some discussions about what this word called classics is, because a lot of people don't. know like they hear classics and they think Shakespeare, like we're Shakespeare scholars, which we're not. I had no idea what that word meant before I met almond. Yeah, I think a lot of people are in that boat. Yeah. So that's a, that's a PR issue that I think in classics, we have to kind of deal with. I don't know how we're going to deal with it. And then only Greek experts wear sunglasses. That's correct. Inside the cathedrals. Yeah, that's the rule that we just made. Okay. So yeah, are we taking these off? Are you keeping them on? I'm just... No, I feel good. So, um, so let's do, um,

Let's treat this as a brand new podcast and assume a lot of the viewers here have never been exposed to you, Amin. Why don't you give a brief summary of your background and what, you know, your experience with academia and what you're doing now? Okay. I'm also a PhD in classics. I went the whole way through bachelor's, masters and PhD in classics. My field of expertise was medicine. I had the privilege of studying with John Scarborough, who's the authority. And during this time, I was exposed to texts that are pharmacological, stuff that we don't translate. And, oh, God, all of a sudden, a world of evidence came forward, just bubbling out of the service. So I spent a ton of time getting those degrees in a master's in bacteriology

because I wanted to keep my both feet, you know, one foot on this side of the fence and, you know, the humanities and science divide. And that's what turned on John Scarborough, right? And by the way, John Scarborough worked with a professor, Graff, who you're associated with. And this is all ancient magic. So, Fritz Groff was ancient, he's specialized in ancient magic. Yeah, so I worked with two professors during my Ph.D. program in Ohio State, who are two of the preeminent scholars in the field in the field. Both of whom are amazing professors and scholars who have been in the field for a long time, who have published an incredible amount of stuff, who have done a lot of translations of these ancient magical texts.

Wow. And they've made some of the most authoritative translations that are available to the English. English-speaking market. I was able to work with both of them. Sarah Isles-Johnston, she's done a lot of work on ancient witches and witchcraft. She used to tell us, because I had classes with both of them, so I know them both personally. I remember she told us once in one class that she gets phone calls from random people online, or just random people who are trying to become witches because she knows all the ancient texts. She's translated a lot of them. So she has some notoriety in that sense. That's amazing.

So they knew John Scarborough and him were close. They worked together. So we found like a little cosmic connection between you two. That's fun. Yes. It's not a big field. Yeah. Translating the PGM and whatnot, the Greek magical papyri.

And all of that information that's in there. That's all locked into the pharmacology. So you were a professor at one point? Yes. At University of Madison. Yes. Wisconsin, Madison. Yes, at the extended university.

So I used to teach medical terms. I taught a class on that too. And that's a pretty common class we class this teach for the, I assume it was a class that had a lot of biology majors. Oh, it was all science people. Yeah, because they want to learn the terms because they're all Greek in Latin, but mostly Greek. And then for context, people that don't know, you were eventually ejected by the university. Then I went to.

There were some controversy with a play you were doing about Medea, right? Yeah, I was then after that, I went to the, to St. Mary's University in Minnesota and was classics there and taught Greek to all the seminarians. And after two years, we started getting calls back about how good the priests were doing in their Greek. You know, it was a big deal. So, I mean, you know as well as I know that biblical studies is not the sharpest when it comes to Greek. I would love it if they focused on it more. it would help them.

Yeah, if they read something outside of the New Testament maybe and didn't just interlinear translate, right? Yeah. And from what I understand, a lot of seminaries are moving away from language instruction altogether. Right. And again, I'm not like in the seminary field. This is what I hear from people I know who are, which I think is a crime. Like you have to, you have to be able to read any of these texts in the original language,

which of course, if you're a New Testament scholar, I think you absolutely, absolutely need to be able to work with the Greek. Working with the New Testament is a good start, but like you said, the New Testament is part of a wider linguistic world. It's not an island unto itself, which I think, you know, a lot of times we have these false barriers within academia, which are very frustrating for interdisciplinary scholars, and I think we both are. So, you know, people who work on the New Testament kind of have their own little academic bubble, and then people like us who are classicists who work on the wider Greek world that might be interested in stuff in the New Testament. We have our own bubble, And a lot of times it's difficult for us to talk to each other across those lines because we work in different buildings and we work in different departments and sometimes we don't even know each other.

And sometimes they don't want to talk to us. And sometimes some of us, not us, but some of us, classicists might not want to talk to them, which is unfortunate. I want to be trying to build bridges. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm here is to try to build bridges and talk to people and talk to a wider audience because I think that's our mission. And I think a lot of academics are closeted in their own little silos, in their own little fields. And they're like, well, we know stuff. And it doesn't really matter if we tell other people or not or talk to other people who are different than us. Right. Who might disagree with us.

And I don't see it that way. I think that we should be reaching out. I think we should be talking to people who are different than us who maybe disagree with us. And there can be productive disagreement. Yes. So to answer your question that ties in, I was at St. Mary's at a seminary teacher. right and we did a play we produced the medea of Seneca's Medea not Erippides sure and I was decommissioned I was let go for what opening

portals or something opening portals accused of demon possession and opening portals there was an inquiry bishop had to oversee it a Catholic college. Yes. Okay. Right. Okay. He gets it though, right.

You see me as a classicist, right? In the middle of this. And in the beginning of the play, I marched down an eight foot phallus, right? Now, is that typical? Which was normal for Roman times. Do you see, do you see what happened? Offensive to a modern audience, normal for Roman times, which is one of the things, you know, as we're trying to explain the ancient world to people.

If you're in a Catholic school, that might be frowned upon. Correct. But they contracted with me to do it as historically accurate as possible. So everybody in the chorus had a dildo. Right? Right. You can see how this would lead to problems. It's a cultural disconnect is what it is, right?

It is, right? I cannot teach this, even though it's the reality. And the disconnect is in many ways between the modern world and the ancient world. Ancient world was a very different place. They had very different morals, customs standards. Back then, you know, fallacies were not considered lewd. Right. They weren't considered problematic to just be out in public.

And today, whether it's a Catholic college or not, I mean, if you go walking down the street out here, it's still going to be. One of the things that blew my mind the first time I talked to Amman, he showed me about the god Priapus. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who walked around with this gigantic erection.

That was his whole thing. Yeah. He wasn't famous for anything else. That wasn't a pun, by the way. Yeah. So that's what he was known for. Yeah. So you should also lay out for folks who haven't heard what happened to you when you were doing your dissertation.

Oh, right. So I'm writing this dissertation about, it's Roman pharmacy. And one of the meeting, the long story short, I defended. And afterwards, the meeting was just long. The professors were taking forever. It was like, oh, God, what's going on? And the head professor pulled me aside. The head of the department pulled me aside and said, what makes you think that the Romans would use drugs?

So they didn't bring this up with you before your defense. Correct. That's odd. Interesting, isn't it? It's normal for, you know, we go through this whole process when we write a dissertation. It's a years-long process. We're working with an advisor and at least two committee members, and they send us critiques. And it's normal throughout the process for them to tell us to take stuff.

out during the process leading up to the defense. I got told to take stuff out multiple times, and then I had to, because that's just how it works. You know, you bowed to the powers that be, so they, you know, knight you or whatever. So we all had to do that, but what you're describing is a little odd because it sounds like what happened with you is after you defended, they told you to take something out. Right. That's less normal. I had to make some changes to my dissertation after I defended, and they voted thumbs up as long as I made the changes.

They were typical changes, though, right? Not anything drastic. I was told you have to go delete any references to recreational drug use. So what's this? Take out the chapter on recreational and sacramental drug use. Take that out and don't mention any of these recreational drugs throughout the, it was clearly just censorship. It was not.

And we know that for a fact now because the press came in and invaded. And the department said, oh, no, he never had a child. on recreational drugs. Interesting. So they went and looked it up. It was already deposited, right? They went and looked it up in the library, and it did. Right?

Oh, I'm sorry, it's backwards. It was removed. It was removed in the deposit. No, no, no. Which way did it go? Usually it's not deposited until you have your final, final version. It sounds like for your final, final version, they made you take it out. Is that right?

Right. It was taken out. And when they went to, oh, that's what it was. When they went to them, they said to Patricia Rosenmeyer, They said, is there a problem here? And is it true what he's saying, that you made him take out a chapter on recreational drugs? You know what I mean?

And she said, no, huh? We had no problem with that. So they went and looked it up in the deposit, right? And they were like, there is no chapter on recreational drugs. And there's no reference. They can see that it was basically Epstein filed, right? Redacted. Wow.

Right? And the press blew that up and went back to the department. and department after that point said, we have no more comment. Right. So it was obvious that my advisor did not communicate with the other members of the department about the existence of the recreational drugs, right? Was it your advisor who asked you to take it out? And they got tripped up.

No, it was the head of the department. And the head of the department was not on your committee. The head of the department said you will not get your degree warrant signed until you have removed all references to record. recreational drugs. Why do you think they had a problem with it? Because as she said, quote, the Romans just wouldn't do such a thing.

What were her sources? Nothing. Right, exactly. You see, where were you, Luke? If you'd have been there, this wouldn't happen, right? That's a shame. It is. And that's sort of what led you in the path that you've been,

that you've taken. I took the information that was redacted. And I put it into the form of a book and published it with St. Martin's Press. And that was a fantastic experience because it allowed people to then see in a broader audience that, oh, God, they use drugs in the ancient world and using them for all sorts of things. Ever sit around feeling super confident how a game is going to end? Or if we're going to finally see UFO disclosure this year? Well, that's exactly why I use Kalshi.

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I had to, you know, until about 21, I was Christian, evangelical. I taught in the, as I was getting my undergraduate and classics, I taught in the mission. know, preached in a mission, I should say. Yeah. So I had a particular interest in that. And classics, Luke, just liberated my fucking mind. And I was reading Aristotle and got it suddenly talking about nature, you know, and metaphysics, the purpose and everything. And I went out that night and got laid. You know what I mean? And just forsook my... So Aristotle got you laid? Yeah, exactly. See? It works. You were holding it off till marriage.

Right. And so I just laid aside Christianity. But then I came back later, Luke, and looked at this stuff. I started using the text and looking at him. And my God, there is so much drug use, especially all the Christ thing. You know. So the first time Amin was on the podcast, it just completely blew my mind. I discovered that I'm absolutely fascinated with this stuff.

But I simply lack the personal expertise to make an, informed assessment on anything that he is saying. He's obviously taken a lot of arrows from people on the internet, poison arrows, if you will. And that's why you're here. So you are the first accredited, high-level Greek expert classicist and linguist that has ever, who actually specializes in some of the same stuff. You specialize in math. ancient magic and ancient religions and then like sex and gender in ancient religions. Is that right? That's right. So at UNM, I teach a class called magic and ancient religion, which is exactly what it sounds like. We read parts of the PGM, as you would imagine. I'm on. I teach a class called sex and gender in ancient religion. Actually, both of those are going on in spring. So everyone can come feel free to register and hang out or just come hang out. I don't know. I'm gone.

Yeah, yeah. They're both, I mean, they're both fascinating topics. I tell everyone I get to teach some of the coolest stuff in the world, honestly, at UNM. The students regularly, you know, love these classes and feel like they get a lot out of them. So, first of all, I would like to stay kind of high level on this podcast for the first half of it and then before we really dive into the weeds, because I feel like that's going to lose a lot of folks. But Luke, in your view, what is the difference between? classic classicists, um, linguists and like, uh, Bible scholars. Okay, this is a great question because, you know, I was just talking maybe 10 minutes ago that, that oftentimes those of us in academia are kind of in our silos and you've just discussed three different silos, none of which talk to each other very often, which is really too bad. Um, I am a, I am a trained classicist. I'm a trained Bible theologian, but I've read a lot of the Bible in the original languages, um, and can comment on it from, you.

from what I hope is a neutral, textual, historical, linguistic perspective. I'm not trying to grind any acts. You didn't come at this from a religious background. I'm not trying to, yeah, that's not my goal. So I'm, as an academic, I'm trying to read these texts and understand them again, historically, linguistically, textually all these things.

Scientifically. Scientifically, sure, yeah. I, you know, I don't have an agenda either way on that. So like, I'm not, I'm not trying to say something specific about the Bible from a religious perspective. I'm also not trying to attack it from like an anti-religious perspective, right? So I want to make that clear as well. Right.

Like I'm actually trying to read what's in there, read what the words say, right? And what the words mean both within their own biblical context and within the wider cultural context. Okay, so back to your question. Classics is the study of, it's a huge, huge, insanely huge field. It's the study of everything that happened in the ancient world of the Mediterranean. and Near East, which is basically what we were today called the Middle East. So everything we would take all the Middle East is pretty much ancient and near East. There was no major cultural divide between Europe and the Middle East back then.

Like there has been for the past 1,400 years when it's been like a Christianity versus Islam thing. Right. Europe being mostly Christian, North Africa and the Middle East being mostly Islam. But that's new. And by new, of course, I mean from our ancient standards, it's new. It's 1,500 years old. That distinction postdates the era that we are talking about when we're doing classics. So I think that's one thing we have to remember didn't exist.

There wasn't this giant cultural gap between, say, Greece and Syria, like there might be today, right? Because of the different religions that historically and here in those two places today. So classics is the study of everything from what's now Spain to what's now Iran, that entire area, that entire geographic area. And then all the way up to Germany, all the way down to Sudan, up the Nile River. Wow. You know, there are peripheral locations like England and Arabia and India, honestly. Like, there's connections with India, of course, because we know that people were going back and forth. Alexander the Great marched all the way from Greece to India.

Drugs, yeah. Yeah. Sure. And drugs, ideas, words, concepts, all of these things are flowing back and forth in that corridor. So Classics is the study of everything that happened in that whole area up until about the year 500 of our era. Okay. Can I say something? 500 AD? A.D. Okay.

That's classics. Big picture. If you want to state it differently, if I may. Yep, yep. Stated simply for people, right? Like me. The evidence is, the evidence that we have for that is going to be in Greek and Latin. Most of it. So a classical philologist. That's why you got to know Greek and Latin. Is supposed to be a master of Greek and Latin.

Because all of the evidence, for anything you can determine from the civilization in it's going to all be in Greek and Latin. I mean, if you don't like that, go be an archaeologist. And they have important things to say too because they're digging up important evidence as well. And some of that evidence has Greek and Latin written on it. Right. Yeah.

So they, there are allies. That's another silly wall that often does. Well, here's a really interesting. anecdote I'll bring up is the guy who peer reviewed your book in the Brynmar classical review. I had him on the podcast. He's a forensic pathologist who did the only peer review on his book to cut the chemical muse. I had him in here. He was a great guy.

He did all kinds of amazing work on like the remains of Picasso, Napoleon, Hitler, all these huge figures. and I asked him what his ancient Greek, what his level was for translating these ancient languages and Greek and all this stuff. And he says like little to none. And I said, well, I'm like, you did this. I asked him like, you did a pretty extraordinary criticism of this book, The Chemical Muse about, which the premise of his book was that drugs were ubiquitous in antiquity because plague and famine and hand to ham combat were happening all the times people were constantly

trying to use remedies to cure these this pain and his his review was basically saying no this is wrong this is like painting the world as being a world of drug addicts and he's like I'm like what Greek do you know and what have you read have you read the sources and he's like no this is not my area of expertise that was his answer and um I thought that blew my mind I was like how do you do a peer review something based on classical Greek when it's not your expertise. Like, wouldn't you, instead of wanting to do peer review to just dismiss shit, wouldn't you want to like actually engage with the person who wrote it and try to collaborate on ideas? That anyways, that was something that really kind of like warped my, like blew my perspective out of the water.

It was a hack job. Yeah. Right? It was a hack job. It was meant to take down the book. That's all. Yes. Unfortunately, the guy hadn't been exposed to the sources.

Right. He doesn't know what he's doing. He just... Right. But, you know, it does make me wonder, though, how much do forensic pathologists or archaeologists actually do, like, communicate and swap notes with classicists and linguists? Not much.

Like I said, there are these walls. Yeah. And if there's walls between classicists and linguists, which are closely allied fields, then you imagine there's even higher walls between classicists and forensic pathologists. And oftentimes there's a sense of superiority that each group has within their own field. Like, we know enough. We don't really need to talk to other people. And that's even true with classicists and linguists a lot of times. As someone who is a hybrid scholar, because I am a classicist and a linguist, and I have a graduate degree in both of those, I have a fairly unusual perspective on that.

Because obviously, I don't think linguistics is worthless and I don't think classics is worthless. I think they're both very valuable and have a lot to communicate to each other. But I'm unusual in the sense that I have, I have degrees in both fields and expertise in both fields. And most of my classics friends, even, you know, when I was going through the PhD in classics, I would try to talk to them about Greek linguistics. Yeah. Because we're learning Greek. Right.

And Greek linguistics, maybe this will help loop back around to your question a few minutes ago. What is linguistics? Right. Linguistics is the scientific study of language. So how do languages work? How are they structured? how do they evolve, all of this kind of stuff. How do humans communicate with each other via language?

So linguistics is kind of an overview that applies to what we're doing right now. We're using language right now, the English language of the 21st century in the United States, that particular dialect to communicate with each other. So if you get a degree in linguistics, like I did, just a two-year degree, just a master's, your mind will be blown, honestly, because you learn about stuff that you know, but you don't know you know because you're speaking a language. So you you suddenly find out that you're doing all these things with your with your teeth and your tongue and your mouth to make these sounds that you've never thought about before. But we're all doing it very competently right now.

Right. But but but until you learn linguistics, you don't you don't think about it. So linguistics is is a subject that blows people's minds every time it's it's, they're exposed to it. Anyways, so linguistics can apply to modern English. It can apply to any language, but but I'm particularly interested in it when it comes to ancient languages with, you know, Greek and Latin and the other ancient languages. So as a linguist studying ancient Greek, I have a richer perspective on it than someone who's not a linguist studying ancient Greek in the sense that I can appreciate the sounds that they're making. And of course, they don't have, they don't have tape recorders. You know, we have to try to reconstruct them based on the writing system. So then we have to understand the alphabet and the letters and the words they're using, right?

So that's what linguistics is. That's how it kind of does a Venn diagram with classics. Most linguists are not classicists. Most classicists are not linguists. Interesting, right. They can't really appreciate what's at the center of that Venn diagram when you kind of cross-pollinate both fields, which is too bad. Every classist in a degree program gets forced to do accomplice a master's of linguistics,

just to be exposed. I wish that were true. That's not true in my experience. It's in Ohio State at least, none of, nobody had to do it. They'd make you take a semester. No. We had to take two. I'm glad to hear that.

Yeah, we had to take two. And that's where I first encountered Noam Chomsky. Sure. And he's a fascinating figure, of course, with his own theories, you know. He didn't know that. He was a linguist. Yeah. That's how he got his start.

I know he's kind of into other stuff now. How old is he? He's old. He's old. There was a picture of him that just came out in the Epstein files on the jet with Epstein. Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting.

Find that picture. back to Christ thing, I guess. Oh, my God. Okay. So it's a third thing. Yeah. Just a circle background. Bible scholars. So Bible scholars are exactly what they sound like. They're specifically focusing on and specializing in the biblical texts, but the world of the Bible in general. But oftentimes, you know, there's all sorts of different Bible scholars and theologians. Some of them are secular. Some of them are not. Look at that. There is. Yeah. Linguists. If you told me that was AI, I wouldn't even know. Yikes.

Well, that's it. Yeah. And that's already what 15 years ago and he looks about 100, right? Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, this reminds me, you know, the quote from Herodotus. This is the great thing about classics. There's all these fascinating ancient quotes that are just full of all this wisdom.

There's this quote from Herodotus and it's this aphorism from the ancient Greek world that you shouldn't judge the happiness. And by that they mean the fortunateness of a person's life until they're dead because you don't know what's going to happen to them. So like you think that, oh, like this person's the luckiest person in the world. whatever, but then something bad happens to them before they die. Sorry, you're not fortunate after that. That just brought that to mind. Yes, right. I don't know what. Epstein Island. Go to Epstein Island. Bible scholars. Now, Bible scholars, please, be honest.

The Greek, not so good. Well, they're all over the place, right? There's no consistent standard, okay? So even today, if you go to a seminary, some of them will make you learn Greek, which they all should, and some of them are moving away from it. So it depends on what denominations seminary you go to today. Some of the more rigorous ones will make you learn Greek, which again is good. And some of them might not. And then some individuals are more personally dedicated to it than others, right? So there are individual Bible scholars whose Greek has become very good because maybe they went to a good seminary that actually did force them to do it. Yeah, like the one that I taught it. Yeah, that's great. They wanted you to teach

people Greek, which is awesome. Yeah. It's better than the alternative of not teaching. people Greek, right? And then some individuals have taken this farther on their own and have become quite good at it. But like we were talking about, they're probably going to be mostly focused on the biblical texts with less of a relationship to the outside Greek world that these Bible texts are occurring in. Just like any text that we have in English today, whether it's religious or whatever, it's not existing in a vacuum, right? Those words exist. outside of that religious text. Right.

They have a context, which is literally context, which means the weaving together, the text that's with it, right? They have a context outside of whatever it is. And so I always tell people, if you wanna understand the Bible better, you gotta understand the context. The Bible was not written in a vacuum.

It was written in a culture. That culture had norms and rules and standards like we were talking about earlier that are not always remotely similar to ours. So people who are understanding the Bible or trying to understand the Bible today do themselves a massive disservice if they don't learn about the culture that the Bible arose in. If you really wanted to understand the Bible, you would read all the Greek from 200 years before until 200 years after. Yeah, because that's the context, right? Because it's going to give you a rich understanding of what those words mean.

And remember, those words are our evidence. Sure. Yeah. As philologists. So this is another word that's worth studying talking about. Philoogist comes from two Greek words, philo, which means love and loge, which means word. Anything logi, logos, logic, whatever, comes from this logos Greek word, which is a very complicated word, by the way. So as philologists, what we are is we are lovers of the word and the words, right? It's like, what do these words mean? We're really trying to dig deep into these words. And that's what a philologist does. Right. Yeah.

So it does. And one of the things I learned from Amin is that the Bible scholars typically like to stay in that vacuum of the Bible and ignore all the peripheral stuff that was happening. You know, again, I'm not a Bible scholar. I can't speak for them. I think some of them do too much. He doesn't want to fire any shots. That's okay. I'm honestly not here to.

You can fire all the shots you want. Let me do it. Let me be bad. That's fine. So, and again, I think from what I, from my knowledge of Bible scholars, and I've been, I've known a few here in there, even though it's not my field per se. They are all over the place. Some of them are very meticulous and do genuinely want to reach out.

And some of them really are just in their lane. So that's been my experience. I've personally never thought about health insurance because A, I'm not old. And B, I don't feel like going through the complicated, expensive process. Then Fabric said, that's not a problem. And now I'm insured at an incredible rate. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you and me, all online, on your schedule, right from your couch.

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about the Bible. Oh, man. I think a lot of it comes down to what we were just talking about, these cultural gaps, right? So a random person who might, you know, go to church every once in a while, considers themselves a Christian, probably has never read the Bible, like almost at all, right?

I think the vast majority of Christians have either never read the Bible or maybe cracked it to a few verses here and there. and when you do that, you are missing the context. And if you crack it to a few verses here and there, you're actually missing the intra-biblical context. So you can't just pull a verse out of context and say, this is what it means.

I mean, you can. If you're trying to make some spiritual argument for your life, that's whatever. But if you're trying to make an academic argument about what a verse meant, you have to get your methodology straight. I think one of the big things that I learned in grad school is methodology matters. What is methodology? It's the way that we get from point A to point B. So how do we arrive at what we think we know? How are we going to get there? So there are there are sloppy ways of doing methodology. There are more careful ways of doing methodology. The scientific method is a classic form of methodology in scientific fields, right? Where you can't if you're doing science, you can't just throw a bunch of data up in the air and see how it falls. Like you have to organize it in a specific way and then go through that data in a specific way.

So that's really, that's important methodology. So pulling a verse out of context is bad methodology because when you do that, you're not being careful to take a look at what's around that verse in the same book in the Bible. Right. Like so that's the first piece of context is what does this book of the Bible say? Not just in this one verse that I like that speaks to me or whatever. But what does the whole chapter say? What does the whole book say? Why was this book written in the first place?

who was it written by? And then you kind of just go out from there because there's these concentric circles of context. The chapter, the book, the whole Hebrew Bible, or New Testament, or whatever it is. And then the culture that those works arose in. And then the other people who may have, you know, agreed or disagreed with what's being written.

Their voices are sometimes found hidden in the Bible because sometimes a lot of the Bible is arguments between people. You know, like they're arguing about the nature of God or they're arguing about who Jesus really was or things like that, right? So those arguments are oftentimes hidden in the Bible, and we do the Bible a disservice if we try to bury those arguments instead of bringing them to light and trying to understand what the original authors were living through,

like what that cultural context was. What is your view on, I know there's different, there's varying opinions, but when would the gospels were written? Yeah. So, you know, I tend to take a pretty standard view on this. but I'm open to other ideas. I don't think anybody knows for sure. But the standard opinion,

and you know, I'm interested here what Amman thinks, but the standard opinion is that Mark is the earliest gospel. There are a couple of reasons for thinking this. It's the weirdest gospel. It's got some... Mark 14.

Yeah, well, yeah, I'm sure we're going to get into that. It's got some unexplained... Only verse I've ever read to the Bible, by the way. There you go. So you need some context. You need some context. Yeah, it's the only one you need. So, so, yeah, I'm sure we'll get to the context later.

I just spent five minutes on a soapbox about context. So, yeah, Mark is probably the earliest gospel. Again, we'll never know this for sure, but we're trying to build theories based on the data, which is what we do. By the way, those of us who work with the ancient world, we always live in a state of uncertainty because we have a fairly limited amount of data about everything that happened in the ancient world. And so when we're trying to seek understanding, which is literally our job and our training,

training, we have to have a certain amount of humility. And you're going to hear me probably say this several times today that, I don't know, Amin might say something and I might say, well, I'm not sure about that, but I can't disprove it either. It might be right. I don't know. Like, let's just, I'm going to be humble about it. And I'm going to say that maybe we don't have enough evidence either way to decide this and

let's just, you know, look at the evidence we have. So I think there's that. I'm going to, instead, I'm going to resort to John Scarborough's training it. I'm just going to look at the primaries. That's exactly right. To me, it's all that matters. If you ask me the same question of when Mark was dated or when the New Testament, I would answer from the perspective of reading it and say, what other texts have I read that are using similar vocabulary and style? And from that, you can put it straight first to second, late first, second centuries. And it's meshing perfectly with the apocryphal. It's using these, these, these texts. texts are using the same vocabulary. It's gorgeous. So I would put it, look, these are second,

these are second century text. You think that's the consensus or what? The consensus, and again, again, I'm humble about this. Again, I hate it when people always fall back on consensus for everything because that's what most people in my experience have done when I ask for shit, you know? Sure. Yeah. The consensus is it was probably written in the 60s, like around 65.

Oh, okay. Which is last half of the first century, of course. The consensus, for whatever that's worth, is that it was written in the years leading up to the Jewish revolt against the Romans, which took place between 66 and 70, which is a watershed event in Jewish and Roman relations, as you can imagine. So that would have been Mark. That would have Mark. And then again, we're talking to the consensus here is that Matthew and Luke were a little bit later. Again, the consensus is that Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source because they have a lot of the same material, the three of them, Mark, Matthew. Matthew and Luke are called the synoptic gospels.

Which comes from two Greek words that mean to see together, sin optic. So they see, they have a lot of the same material. The consensus is that Matthew and Luke already have Mark in front of them. So Mark has already been written by the time Matthew and Luke are writing their gospels, which can help explain why they have so much similar material. Luke, right in his prolog, says, I wasn't there, but I've done my research and I'm using sources. So Luke tells us right up front that he is reading earlier material and talking to eyewitnesses because Luke wasn't there. He didn't see Jesus. So Luke tells us right up front

he has earlier sources, and it seems like Mark was probably one of them. John is kind of off in his own world, doing his own thing. He has a lot of different material from the other three gospels. Most people date John as the latest one, maybe in the 90s, but some people would put it later. Matthew and Luke may be being in the 70s or 80s. But again, I think these are all estimates. What Amman said about looking at the text is always good. but then of course what's our methodology how like how are we looking at the text what kind of connections are we making it's it's useful to do what you said i absolutely agree it's useful to do what you said but it doesn't necessarily uh it's not necessarily slam dunk either because because you can

copy style right so like for instance i can read a bunch of shakespeare which we know was written you know over 400 years ago and i could write a shakespearean play in shakespearean style right now if i if i if i you know bathe my mind if you're a weirdo right well i am a I am a weirdo. I am a weirdo, yeah. You guys are two weirdos wearing sunglasses. No comment. No, I haven't. No, I haven't, but I could. I could, and that's the point, right? So you're right that we can look at similar styles and similar vocab, but that can be counterfeited. Sure. By me, I could write a lost Shakespeare play tomorrow and I could make it look pretty realistic. One of the best tools, when you're looking at just the language is the use of quotes.

So you know that Paul, for example, quotes Medea ultimately through up. Paul has a lot of classical quotes. Yeah. He seems to be a classically trained individual. Those influences can be. The Apostle Paul. Apostle Paul. Okay.

Those influences can be read in the language. Because, for example, just the dialect-wise, you can tell that somebody's been reading the Ionian physicians by the. dialect that they're referring to, if they're using technical terms. So ancient Greek is so gorgeous in so many ways. One of the ways is that you can trace the influences of the person who's writing that text through the language that they're using. And so that's how, for example, you can see people reading Nekander. I know we talked about Nacander a little just mentioned them. Right? He's, he is one of the most famous ancient writers. People are quoting him all over the place, Necander, Necander, Necander. What we have, you probably never heard of Nicanor. The hell is Nacander, right? But he's a priest of Apollo who is writing poetry that is wholly medical. It is pharmacologically holy medicinal.

right it's polypharmacy so it's a whole bunch of you know if you get this problem if you're bitten by this animal give this antidote which is a combination of these eight different plants and in a form of a song that would be transmitted by a priest who is a priest of visionary experience these are pre he's a priest of apollo clarus right so these sources are sitting there all surrounding the Bible, these sources, and nobody reads. It's hard enough to get a classicist to read Nicanor. Have you ever read Phyluminous? He writes on antidotes and he writes about different...

Yeah, no, I haven't. No, right? You don't know what the fuck is he, right? By the way, people, this is something special about Greek. There is so much material. It's a big language. There is so much material. How much, in antiquity, how much Greek was there compared to Latin or Hebrew?

It's hard to answer that question for sure because we've lost most of all of it. Like most of the Greek, most of the Latin, most of the Hebrew is gone. And almost all of the Persian is gone. And almost all the Egyptian is gone. Like what we have of old Egyptian is what they inscribe, you know, in hieroglyphs that survived for thousands of years. But there was other stuff written on papyrus that is just gone. So this is something that I always impress upon my classes. that we are dealing with a lack of data.

We are dealing with a serious lack of data when we are trying to understand the ancient world. Yeah. Because they just wrote so much stuff. We know they wrote so much stuff in all of those languages. Right. And almost all that's gone. Well, wait.

And despite that, what we have remaining... It's still awesome. From libraries. Sure. From east to west. When they, archaeologists open up a new library, Rome. We're in Rome, right?

What would you thank? would be written in these... Latin. Dwelling Romans, right? Frigan Latin, right? Because they're Romans? No, it's majority Greek with some Latin. The amount that we have that survives

is so much that I've been doing Greek for 35 plus years. You've been doing Greek for what? Yeah, over 20. Over 20. And between the two of us, we should both know all the authors then if there's not, you know. But we never will because there's just all right.

There's so much. I mean, if we read Greek for the rest of our lives and all of our waking hours, you know, we might make a dent, right? Well, now that Herculaneum is coming out. I don't know. Yeah. So what we have left from the ancient world, you know, because again, another thing I remind my classes is they didn't have the printing press up until, you know,

five, six hundred years ago. So everything that has survived has survived because somebody cared enough to keep it and to copy it, right? So like things that were, almost all of this stuff was on, was written on perishable material, papyrus, vellum, you know, a very humid climate too, right? Often. So, so more stuff survives in a place like Egypt, which is not humid at all. It's a dry, dry desert. Even near Alexandria?

So out in the desert. So there were a lot of our interesting finds like the PGM from Egypt have been found in ancient trash dumps that were out in the desert. OxiRank is. Yeah, so they would dump their trash out in the desert. And sometimes that trash included manuscripts that had writing on it, such as this document that's really interesting, the papyrus grigai maga guy, which is Latin for the Greek magical papyrus, as you might guess.

And there's one copy, one copy that was thrown out. And that's the only reason we even have that book today. It wasn't handed down. The people who were in charge of handing these texts down didn't hand it down. It was probably supposed to be a semi-secret document in the first place. Really? But at some point, this one copy got thrown out, and it's such a dry climate that it, you know, it didn't biodegrade.

Some bugs ate holes in it, so we have some gaps. Classists translated it. Yeah. And they found purple in it, right? And Scarborough was one of them. And Scarborough told me, this is the crappiest translation in existence, because it is so completely difficult to step from that big. base level of reading to the higher magical reading. And what are these words actually mean? Are they using code here?

They are. Well, they are. They come out right on and say they're using code. Yeah, right. Backwards. So wait, wait, wait. Hold on for, so the Greek magical papyri is what you're discussing right now. And it's written in Greek. Yes. It was, we found it was written in Greek. With magic. Magic words that have codes that don't look like Greek. It might be from something else. Things that they're doing directions for the text is in Greek. This is how you do the ceremony. and this is the god you invoke and this is the sub these are the drugs that you use okay yeah and do we know or is there an idea of when those were written again I think the consensus is maybe second to fourth century of our era but it's probably based in older material right mm-hmm right and it it from the hymns the invocations it's heavily heavily orphic and it has elements I I date the orific stuff earlier I'm of that of that of that group just because the orphic hymns are so packed with technical terminology that matches with everything else contemporary in an early time. So I'm talking sixth, fifth century

BC is what I'd like to push. The ideas they're in the PGM. Not necessarily the text coming out, no, but the language itself, the language itself. So yeah, I mean, it's got, it's, second century is a nice place in Otto Domini, it's a good place to put it, right? But you've got to realize when you're looking at it, you're not dealing with just the second century. You're dealing with hundreds of years before it. Yeah, and there's a lot of cross-cultural fusion

that shows up in the PGM. So it's written in Greek, but there's a lot of cultural ideas from other cultures because the ancient Mediterranean world was a very diverse place. As I was talking about earlier today, we kind of think of these two major cultural traditions in the area of the Mediterranean,

Christianity to the north and Islam to the south. But back then, neither of those religions existed yet, right? And so there was just a fantastic diversity of local religions all over the Mediterranean basin, local languages, local cultures, local gods, local ways of worship, local ways of doing magic. And so what you get in the PGM is a lot of that material is kind of being brought together into one document. And you can see because they're writing in Greek and the reason they're writing in Greek is because just like English today, it was the cosmopolitan global language of the world. the day. So if you wanted your message to get out or just to be understood by as many people

as possible, you'd write in Greek. Just like today, if you're on the internet, you're going to write in English to get the widest audience possible. Like we're recording this podcast in English, and obviously we're native English speakers, but we might be doing it in English anyways, even if we weren't. Right. There's also a level of superiority to Greek, though. Well, the Greeks thought so. To the Greek. Yeah. And the Romans. They called everyone else barbarians. You're right. The Romans agreed. Lucretius is writing in Latin. He says, I'm sorry I have to write in Latin. Yeah. I'm because because it restricts me with what I can explain to you. If I could, I'd be doing this in Greek, but, you know, hey.

That's true. So the Romans looked up to the Greeks, like a big brother. It was kind of a big brother, little brother relationship is kind of how I describe it, which is interesting because the Romans militarily conquered the Greeks. The way that the Roman Empire expanded is they conquered Greece. They conquered Egypt, which was Greek speaking by then as a, well, not the upper crust, like not the regular people, but the upper crust was Greek speaking as a result of Alexander of the great conquest of the whole what we today called Middle East and over to India, right?

The Romans militarily conquered all that and they had the military power if they'd wanted to to impose Latin. They never did that. And the reason is that, as I was just saying, they- Greece better. They looked up to the Greeks. They looked up to Greek culture. They knew that the Greeks had been working on science and medicine and all this stuff. And they were colonized for fuck's sake by the Greeks. I mean, there was- Sure. And instead of coming up with their own mythology, they tied in all of their own mythology to the existing Greek mythology, right? The Aeneid is basically just a fanfic. The Aeneid is basically just a fanfic on Greek mythology, right? So they're tying in their own Roman origin story to this pre-existing Greek mythological narrative in the Iliad and the Odyssey going all the way back to Homer. So yeah, the Romans 100% look up to the Greeks even though they own them. Like they comfort them, right? They're still like, wow, this is a really cool language as a really cool culture. The Greeks are the first grammarian's grammar, right? It's a Greek word for for freaks sake. This tech that they are exploiting this beautiful, beautiful mother Greek is

driving all the science, everything. So, you know, it's no wonder the drug using Marcus Aurelius is writing in Greek. Why would he choose Latin? It's inferior. He's the Roman emperor, but he's writing and speaking Greek. Wow. The mushroom you've seen before, the one with the bright red cap and the white spots, straight out of Mario and your favorite Christmas fairy tales. It's not psilocybin and it's not psychedelic. It's Aminita miscaria. It's legal and it's provided stress relief I've never experienced before. I never would have touched Ammonita if it weren't for Amantara. You see sketchy gas station products all the time and they do a lot of harm, which damages your perception of the real thing. Amantara is the complete opposite.

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Go to amantara.com slash go slash DJ and use the code DJ 22 for 22% off your first order. That's A M-E-N-T-A-R-A dot com slash go slash DJ and use code DJ 22 for 22% off. It's linked down below. Now back to the show. Now I do want to go another step further. You know, there's always a bigger fish, right? So the Romans looked up to the Greeks because they understood accurately that the Greeks had been doing science and knowledge and writing for longer than they had. But the Greeks weren't the end of that line. So the Greeks in turn looked up to cultures to the east and south of them because the Greeks understood that other cultures to the east and south of them had been doing things longer than they had. And those cultures are several different cultures.

The Egyptians are one big group. So the Greeks always looked up to the Egyptians. They understood going all the way back to Homer. they understood that the Egyptians were doing drug stuff long before they, the Greeks had been doing it. And we're good at it. And part of its climate, right? So even in Homer, you know, the characters talk about how Egypt is a magical drug land, essentially. And the reason they think that, not inaccurately, is that Egypt has a warmer climate.

Yeah. So you can grow more tropical plants in Egypt. What's that word I asked you about the other day, chem, chemet? Oh, yeah. Isn't Egypt known as like land of chemit? That's the older name for Egypt. That's the older name. That's their Egyptian name for Egypt.

Which means chemicals or alchemy or something? I'm not sure. Dark soil originally. Yeah, it doesn't mean dark soil. I think you're right. Which is where you can grow a lot of plants. Right. Which create drugs.

Right. Yeah. Awesome. The Greeks called Egypt. Iguptos and that's where our name Egypt comes from. But that was never their native name. So the Greeks looked up to these cultures to their east and south. Egypt was one of the big ones.

And the Greeks accurately understood. that Egyptian culture and Egyptian knowledge, whether drug or otherwise, went back a lot further than the Greeks did. So the Greeks kind of looked up to the Egyptians as a big brother in the same way that the Romans looked up to the Greeks as a big brother. Other cultures of that area, of course, were the Babylonians, the Sumerians go way back. The Assyrians were a little bit later, but they're still very old compared to the Greeks. The Phoenicians, who lived on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, basically what's now the country of Lebanon. The Phoenicians were well known for building boats and sailing all over the Mediterranean. When they did so, they brought trade goods with them.

The reason they were sailing is to try to make a profit mostly. They were trading in dough. They were trading in all sorts of things. All sorts of things, right? Opium. We have the vases. Did you see that? Which one?

The little opium vases. I don't think so. Are you talking about the cup of boats? A ship. Whole bunch of little opium. Have you seen? They're shaped like the opium head capsule. Have you seen the University of Tampa a couple, maybe a year or two ago?

Steve, you could pull it up. They did an analysis of this Egyptian vase, small little like a cup or a mug of the God best. And they did this analysis and they found all kinds of crazy shit in it. Like what was it? Vaginal fluid? Like sick stuff. Blood. They identified vaginal proteins.

Find that article. That was pretty wild. Yeah, ejaculate, because we were talking about ejaculate being used, and there it is in this jug that's in Tampa. And it seems like that had something to do with some sort of magical drug rituals or something like that, right? That's not my bailiwick. Here it is, right here. Tampa Museum of Art once held psychotropic drugs, human blood, and bodily fluids research reveals. The object was probably used in rituals by cult worshippers of the deity Bess, one of the most popular figures in ancient Egyptian pantheon.

talks about vaginal. Yeah, scroll down where it says the, where it says the, there you go, look right here. By analyzing proteins and metabolites using genetic techniques and synchrotron, whatever that word is, radiation-based furrier transformed infrared microspectroscopy. A lot of words. The authors found that the mug contained residues of the psychotropic substances. These included Pergamum Harmala, also known as Harmala, also known as Harman. Harmel or Syrian Rue, nymphia no colliei, blue water lily, and a plant of the Cleom genus.

They also found evidence of human blood, bodily fluids such as oral or vaginal mucus and breast milk. Yeah. Fun stuff. Fantastic. The polypharmacy of using. This was University of Tampa right on the street. Using the human body as a means of making drugs. Look, there's one right there.

That's what they're doing. Well, they were very creative. Yeah. And they didn't have a lot of boundaries. Right. Right. They didn't have the cultural boundaries that we had today. No, they didn't.

Right. In many cases, now, they had boundaries. Every culture has boundaries. Right. The question is, what were their boundaries and how did they differ from ours? Why do you think Jesus offers Mary his semen in the greater questions of Mary? I don't know about that text. Can you bring it up?

Oh, God, yes. Yeah, find the greater questions of Mary. That's not a biblical text. Number seven. That one was taken out. I don't think it was ever in there in the first. That was probably written way after the Bible, I think. Exactly. Yeah.

There's a lot of later mythology about Jesus. And that's one of the methodological questions. Right. We know that people were saying and writing things about Jesus that were very diverse. Even early Christians. Like some of this stuff came from people who didn't like Jesus and weren't Christian. But some of this stuff comes from people who were Christian, like who did worship Jesus. But there's a lot of diversity, a ton of diversity.

So the question is, you know, What group do these texts come from and what kind of historical accuracy would we assign? Find the context for us, Steve. One before that. This is Amund's slide, but find like the definitions of the greater questions of Mary so we can give the audience context of who wrote it when it was written and all that kind of stuff. It is epiphanious. Okay. And he is writing about the heresies and Christianity.

Do we want the English or the Greek? Yeah. So the heresy. like a Google explanation of it. Okay, good, it's good. Yeah. So as I was just saying, there was a ton of diversity in early Christianity. And you might think that something like this that sounds off the wall was coming from someone outside of the faith, but it might not have been.

It might not have been right. Because there was no orthodoxy yet. Right. Right. And it's being established. Early Christians are arguing with each other about who Jesus was, why he's important. And why we have to eat his semen. Well, that's what apparently some people thought.

These guys. I don't think that was ever orthodox. You don't think that was orthodox. You don't think that was normal. It was one of the things. It was one of the many things that somebody said at something. The ophites from the beginning were doing it. So there was Simon Boggson.

Crazy diversity. Crazy diversity. And in the book of Jude, it says, hey, stop doing all that sexy sex. Okay. Early Christian writings, uh, epiphanius writes the following about the Gnostics. And this is our only source for the contents. they published certain questions of Mary.

So what year was this published, Ahmed? It wasn't well, or written, rather. Epiphanius is fourth, right? Okay, so fourth century. Yeah. Right, confirm my friggin dates. I think that's right. He's right after Julian, right after Julian dies.

The fourth century is really important to Christianity because that's exactly when orthodoxy is being formed. Right? Because Constantine conversed to Christianity in 313. Yes. And for the first time, there's a top-down power structure where somebody at the top can say, and Constantine did say this, guys, get your act together. What do we believe? Like, what is this religion anyways?

Who was Jesus? What's the official story on him? Right. And so then you get a guy like this who's cataloging some of the diverse and maybe unusual stories about Jesus. Right. If that's with a way we can refer to it, exactly. That's perfect. And remember, this is epiphanism.

We're talking about after Julian tried to read. restore the pay. Yeah, 360s, yeah. Yeah. This is the hard thing to me about trying to figure out, I think, and I also think that that's kind of like coming at it from the wrong perspective, trying to figure out exactly what was going on because you're never going to do that. All you can really do is just sort of read it and then take it for face value.

You can't really, because my question was like how many people in antiquity that are writing stuff like this had an axe to grind against someone else? Most of them. Like how do we know this wasn't? the ancient National Enquirer. You know what I mean? Something like that. And yeah, this guy is reporting on this thing that he's calling a heresy.

He doesn't agree with it. The guy who's writing this doesn't think that's true. Uh-huh. Right? No, he's saying, no, he's reporting that there's another guy. He's not saying it's not true. He's saying, this is what they do. Uh-huh.

The people who eat the semen. Uh-huh. Right? This is how they justify it. Jesus said, eat my blood and flesh. That blood is his hyma, his excrement. Ha, his semen. Well, Heim and semen are two different words, right?

Originally, Heim, no, originally Heim is what, an essence? It's a bodily essence, right? A little blood. Right? Yeah, blood. Okay. Not just bought, it's not just blood. Now, I mean, let me tell you this, this will help you.

The ancient Greek physicians, and you know this, thought that semen was a highly concocted form of blood. Whoa. They did. That's what they thought. They thought that it highly concocted. So what they thought is that your blood go, if you produce semen, your blood goes through your brain and it picks up thought and air bubbles and spiritual essence, which is why it's white, by the way.

And that's where it comes from. It's a question of essence. You and I can sit and debate about the earliest references to hyma. Can this be. So here's what I'm saying. But in what he, what the Christian author here is saying is this is what these people. sure he's reporting he's reporting he's he's reporting it and and he's orthodox so he doesn't agree with this section i think he is christian okay he is a christian yeah and in this section he's talking

about ice kurgia which is philatio philatio and he says right up here watch he says right let me just translate and now luke is of course here to just to make sure that i don't you know pull any wool over anybody's eyes. Not taking us into the back alley. Yeah, I'm not taking you guys into the back alley, right? He says, these people aren't ashamed to say that he himself, Jesus, revealed to her this ice corgiya, this terrible, shameful act, right? And in the questions of Mary that are called the greater, you know,

because he says there's also, in the parentheses, he says there's also these lesser questions of Mary, right, that have been created, right? he says they assert that he showed her this by taking her up into the hills, praying and positioning her at the level, throwing her down to the level of his groin. Where are you getting groin from? And began pleuras. That means side.

That means side. Right. Right. But it's in the region of the side. Right. The Ekbalo. The. Echbolo is telling you positionally.

We're talking about position. By his side. Okay, so her head's by his side. Which is vague. Not necessarily growing. Okay. She's on her fucking knees for some reason. Why?

Does it say that where? Let's keep, okay, let's keep going and see if maybe, as we translate it, clears it up. Okay. And they said that he began Oxamon to do what to her? To incantamignusti. Now, mignumee is. Involving the fluids once again. Oftentimes it means sex.

And it's sexual. But mignami means to mix the fluids. And what do we do with the compound form, the Kata and the in? When you put Kata, it has a sense of consumption, somebody consuming. This thing is being consumed. And it can also mean wasted, positionally down. can also be wasted like you used it up and the in positionally within this is prefer us referencing philatio the act of sex that is that exchange of fluids that life giving fluid because

what does jesus say what is the word that's highlighted there i scrogia the shameful act what does that mean the shameful act. It's fallatio here. Do you agree that means fallatio? It does not mean philatio. It literally means, so ice gross means shameful, as you said correctly. Org means act, work deed, something like that. So ice grugia means some kind of shameful act.

Now the question is what kind of shameful act? Now, Amman, you're taking a step further and putting your own interpretation of this word. No, no, no, why am I doing that? Well, you are, which is fine. No, no, because of my experience. No, I'm not. Well, yes, I'm doing it. You're interpreting it.

But I'm doing that because of my experience with the Greek. I have a lot of experience I'm telling you that's not necessarily what that means. Because ice, do you know what an ice crotes is? We talked about this, yeah. What is it? Look it up, Steve. Look up ice crotes.

It's a person who performs fallatio. Not necessarily. Okay. Is it a person who performs fallatio or not? Not necessarily. It's not really a good answer. Can it be more than that? Can it be other things?

Can it be, is it possible that is that also somebody who performs filatio as well as other things. Okay, let me talk about this a little bit because I think it would help to kind of make an analogy so that we're all sort of on the same pace. Methodologically, all right? So let's say that there's a scholar in 2000 years because I like to do these thought experience about, let's say somebody studying classical English in 2000 years. And I think we are living in the era that will someday be called classical English because we're a global language. We've spread to every corner of the world. Everyone's speaking English. There's so much English literature being created. It's Diverse though, right? So the English that spoken in the United States is not the same as the English spoken in Britain or Australia or some place like India, right?

It was colonized by the British. So let's say that there's a scholar in the future who notices that there's this particular word in 21st century American English. And I don't know if you're going to have to bleep this or not, but I'm just, you know, making a scholarly point here. that is the word dick. Okay. All right. And those of us who live in and speak 24th, essentially English, we understand that this word today primarily refers to male genitalia. Right.

Or it can be someone being an asshole. Exactly. Okay. So this one word, it refers to male genitalia, but then we can use it colloquially to say, like stop being a dick. Right. And when I say that, I'm not literally saying that you were male genitalia. Right.

I'm making a reference, right? And we understand that, okay? Now, there's also another use of this word that's older. And so from my understanding, this use of the word Dick as male janitalia is pretty recent, actually. Is this idioms? Is this kind of like what idioms are? So every language has idioms and semantic references, right? So this use of the word that we kind of take for granted in English today is pretty recent.

Up until fairly recently, Dick was used as a name for Richard, right? As we all know. As we all know, right? So we had a president named Dick Nixon. We just had a vice president who just died named Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney. Right. And there's lots of other dicks in the world who are just guys named Richard, right? Okay. So we understand because we speak English that there are multiple meanings of the word dick and they don't all mean male genitalia. Right. Right. So we understand that Dick Nixon was not calling himself that because he was making trying to say he's the penis guy. Right? He's not. He's not. He's not. It's It's a totally different thing. And it actually predates our meaning of the word dick. Now let's say that there's a scholar of classical English at some university in 2000 years who

correctly notices that this word dick in 21st century classical English, as I'm calling it, oftentimes occurs in dirty contexts, okay? It refers to male genitalia and then he has a hundred, a thousand, a million different examples of that, right? And so he hits you over the head and says, look, this word clearly means male genitalia. And he's right. Right. But oftentimes it does mean male genitalia.

But then let's say he takes a leap and he says, well, you know what this means about Dick Nixon, right? That means that Dick Nixon was calling himself that because he was a child mother. Like he just was obsessed with male genitalia. And I mean,

like, why else would he use that as his first name? Like, like how dirty would he have to be to use Dick as his first name, right? And so this person, 2,000 years down the road has this theory

that Dick Nixon was, I don't know, maybe he was gay. Maybe he, who knows? Like, you can come up with some theory like that. Now, those of us who speak English today know that that makes no sense and isn't true at all, right? Because we know that there are different contexts in which this word can exist and it has different meanings in different contexts. Right.

And that's methodologically sound as we have to pay attention to the text. So I want to, I want to consistently come back to that word. Because what I'm calling this is pulling a Dick Nixon. Okay. So from now on, when I say pulling a Dick Nixon, and I think I'm going to have to say it multiple times. What I'm referring to is pointing out a word that could be dirty or could be in a certain thing. Yes.

But then, but it might not. It might mean something else. It could mean fallatio here, right? Is it possible it means fallatio in that context? Okay. So since it means dirty deeds. I see it. Oh, by the way, can we bring that up?

Yeah, show that. So this is actually methodologically. Yeah. So this was from your short. You sent this to me a few weeks ago, but since you brought it up, let's bring up now. Steve, L.J. Yeah, LHJ. LHJ, okay.

Ice Gruegia, right? Yeah. No, no, no. Ice crotes. Okay. Yeah. Honestly, can we bring up, can we? Wait, you said it may be.

Let's take a leak. So you look it up. I'm gonna go peeve. Steve, are you ready? Go to the definition. Yes. Let's go to the definition. All right.

We are back. And Steve just pulled up the definition of, what's this word again? Now this is ice crotes. Is crotes. And all, All of this is using the beautiful, glorious Greek root, alpha, Yota, Sigma, he, right? That Ro is hanging on there, can come off or not, but the ice-scron is that which is just awful, ugly, deformed, oh, look, it's in the tan, eh, the iscrote.

So you see the main definition of the least deformingia. Ice-crucgia is the working of this shameful thing. Committing, committing ice-grotes, right? Exactly. It's filthy conduct. And you notice, it's a euphemism for fallatio, right? But why is it, so I'm curious, why is it, so they're associating filthy conduct with fallatio? Yeah, because these are Victorians, right? Okay, so this is something now, now for the listeners, the three of us have had a text discussion, or a text thread for the past few months.

Yes. Amon sent this to the thread a few weeks ago. and I pointed out at the time that that semicolon is very important. Right after Ephesians 5-4, there is a semicolon. Amon, what does that semicolon mean to you? You surprise me. You surprise me. As a Greek reader, it means nothing to me.

Well, that's a problem. It means something very important. It's an and as an English reader. And it's a euphemism. As you see from the scolias, on Aristophanesonis, frogs. Sorry, Aristophanes, frogs. Frogs, 1308. Yep, we agree with that.

And then they refer to you the general term ice crociune, right? Which Cici's is going to talk about. Sure. Sure. Right. Zizzi is Byzantine. All right. To you, what is that colon mean?

It's separating two different things that are pretty different here, okay? So specifically, it's separating two places in which this word, ice crotase, has been used by two different authors, two different times and places. Uh-huh. Before the semicolon, what we see is filthy. conduct, epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 4. Okay. And in, in that use, and we can go look at that if you want, but I don't think this is particularly controversial. The author of Ephesians is simply saying, don't engage in ice grotes, right? He doesn't define it.

I think I'm, because I think he's being vague. Yeah. I don't think he's, I don't think he necessarily has one particular dirty thing in mind when he says that. Assel Giam. I don't think he does. The Assychea, the impiety with the pharmaecae. It could be sexual. Okay, so I think when he has dirty things in mind in Ephesians, sexual stuff is part of it, all right? But he's not narrowing down the sexual stuff. Do you agree with that?

He doesn't just mean one particular sexual thing in Ephesians? No, he does because he calls it, a dolomatria. It is the act itself of engaging in these dirty, dirty mysteries where they are eating Let me go back to the semicolon, all right? Okay. So then the next use of this is centuries later. I'm actually not sure what century, the Scolius to Aristophanes frogs is. I want to say like 11th or 12th century.

It's over a thousand years after Aristophanes. Yes. Or so it's Byzantine. It's Byzantine, right? So hundreds, maybe over a thousand years later, a scolius, and let me tell everyone, a Scolius says, Amon and I both know. A scolius is somebody who is a commentator.

on an older work. Okay, so like, for instance, today, you can buy a Shakespeare annotated volume because sometimes we don't know what Shakespeare means because it's been 400 years. Right. And so somebody will put notes in and say, this is what Shakespeare meant when he said this or whatever.

Okay. That's what a Scolius is doing. He's a later writer who is a commentator on an earlier work. Usually grammarians. All sorts of nerdy people, as you can imagine, are scolius, right? Linguists, ain't you? Yeah, sure. Oh, yeah, sure.

So this is a much later commentator on this classical Greek play. So Aristophanes, you know, fifth century, late fifth century, early fourth century, BC, okay? So there is the use of this word, Iscrotase, in this play by Aristophanes. In the play by Aristophanes, the author doesn't explain what he means by escrotase. But this later commentator from literally, literally a millennium and a half after Erastafnees wrote this. He says, I think it means fallatio. Okay. So that doesn't mean he's wrong, but that doesn't mean he's right. That's his, that's the opinion of someone from a millennium and a half later. That's important to know. That's some some later rant, literally random dude who never

was part of that culture at all. Right. Speaks and reads Greek, but from a much later period. I don't know. I think he thinks. That's his opinion. I think you're under emphasizing. Is that not Do you agree with them? I think Luke, you're under-emphasizing. What do you disagree with about what I said? The scolias are so separated from these traditions. They're grammarians. John Citzi's, the guy on the end there, he's a Byzantine guy.

And he is right up there in preserving, I mean, he preserves stuff that we don't even have. He talks about in the Odyssey, what's going on when Circe goes back to visit Homer. and you're like, what? We didn't know that. Tradition was there. How the hell? Huh? It's the first time we see it.

He preserves that from things he's read himself. That's sometimes true. That could be true. Like he has a commentary. That guy who's there talking about the ice crossune, which is the older form that they would have been using. He is saying, oh, this source is telling us X, Y, and Z. And we don't have any other record of that. He's the one who's saying, look, this is.

euphemistically, right? Yeah, he's saying it's a euphemism for a fletio. Now, I'm not, to be clear, I'm not saying he's definitely wrong because he's writing 1500 years later. And I 100% agree that these scoliases are in a tradition where they are very well read. They're not dummies,

just like if you hire someone to write a commentary on Shakespeare, hopefully they've read all of Shakespeare and everything else from the period to even know what they're talking about, right? So I am not trying to discount that these scolias don't know anything. Otherwise, we wouldn't cite them in a dictionary. However, we have to cite them with a pretty large grain of salt.

So we can't just say that's definitely right. Because this is 1,500 years later that somebody is coming along and saying, I, Mr. Scolius from the Byzantine period, think that the use of this word in Aristophanes play, the frogs means fallatio, right? That's its opinion. It's a learned opinion, okay? I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying we do have to take it with a grain of salt.

Sure. 1500 years. Okay. Yeah. So also, I want to make this point. he's only talking about the use of the word in Aristophanes frogs. He's not talking about it anywhere else. Okay, he's not talking about the use of the word in Ephesians.

He had no comment about the use of the word in Ephesians. He's not talking about the use of the word in what we were discussing before we changed. Yeah, that's the Victorians who were putting them next to each other and putting the semifoyle. That's a Bible. No, no, no, no, it's not. No, it's not. The reason that the semicolon is there, it's very simple. It's dividing two different times that this word was used.

You agreed. It was used in Ephesiansiansians. it was using the frogs. Right. Two different times. And that's all the semifol is. And I would say it's used the same. I would say it's used the same.

And that semicolon is an and. You can have that opinion, but it's just your opinion. Right. And I might have a different opinion. You might have a different opinion. We can both argue for it. Correct. And it's good.

That's what university is for. Yes. We argue for our particular. You think the leaders of the museum didn't fight with each other and all the underlings and they stormed off and they started new museums. Exactly. Of course they did. Exactly.

Now, can we have the text now? I'm just trying to start a new religion here today. That's all I'm here for. To finish the text. So I want to go back to, yeah, we were debating. Actually, what led us to this is what the word ice gruegia means. And so what Amun has done is he's pointed out that hundreds and hundreds of years later, one guy had an opinion that this meant fallatio in a different text.

Not even here. Not even in this text. This was in an Aristophani's play. Aristophani's play, which is not what we're dealing with here. So this is where methodology comes into play. No pun intended. On the one hand, Amin is doing linguistic work here, which is important and valuable because he's saying,

look, here's another time where somebody said that this word used in a different place, but still the same language, even if it's 1,500 years apart or whatever, means this particular thing. However, it doesn't remotely prove in any way that that's what it means here. Are we pulling a Dick Nixon by saying that this means fallacious? Okay.

And it's up to you. You're the one who has to kind of build your case. Answer that by just translating. I don't want to have any ideas about it. I just want to translate it, right? So what does it then say? After he entered into this act, this sexual act with her, what really happened?

Dathan, he's really emphasizing, that he took the metam, lavanta, the apporoyan. He took the off-runnings. Right? What is that? His own, his own off-runnings. It could be. His effluessence, his effluessence, right?

Yeah, I'm sure. It's vague, though. Right. It could be, except we know also. Could be blood. Also, contextually, though, he's been talking about semeneders. So, right? Context matters.

Right. But then you got a bill a case. Pramatophage is right. He's been talking about it. So it's a little bit of a cheat, but he's been talking about it already. Who has? The author of this, Epiphanius. Epiphanius.

And he says he, he showed her that we do this in order to, that we live, right? How are we going to live if we don't do this? And then it says, look, and it says Mary Tarak Thetis, she was taken aback and falls down Hamartaray all the way. Deeply troubled. That's what Tarak Thais is. She's not happy about this. Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah. She's like, what? It's like she's stunned fundamentally. What the hell? She falls all the way Hamai to the ground. And he picks her up and he, he, he, he, says to her why? Why are you

so freaking unfaithful? You faithless bitch? Right? Oli Gau. P-stick. That's the almond translation. Right? I added the bitch part. Right? I had the bitch part. Now tell me something. Where is the where is the off-runnings?

What is he doing? He's making her eat something like the opites that Epiphanius has already talked about her eating the semen. It goes on. This passage goes on to explain what the people who were eating the semen believed about why he was doing this. And they used a half a dozen verses from the New Testament. So they're quoting when Jesus says X, he means this. When Jesus said, eat my flesh and blood, this is the offering. When he said,

I'm going somewhere and I'm going to return from the origin. The origin is his seaman. I'm going somewhere. I'm ascending to the place. It was his semen. That's how they explain it. There's all sorts of, there's a half a dozen justifications.

This is how Epiphanius explains it. Yeah, of why these people were doing what they did. And it's through Epiphanius's. So do you believe that this is Epiphanius' theory on what was happening in the Bible? He's quoting somebody that he calls a hair. heresy that believes this. Oh, I see. Epiphanius is talking about people who are doing it, saying, this is not good. Right? This is one of the heresies. And in this one, they justify the eating, this ice cruegia. They justify it by saying Jesus specifically showed Mary how to do

this and said, look, we have to do this to live. And they go on to quote, which is to me most important. They're going on to quote Jesus when he is saying things. Like, Eat my flesh. And that's right here. It's what he means. It's following it. It's below where I... Okay.

What is your take on this, Lou? Okay. I think context, as we've been talking about, I'm going to have both agree on this. Context is paramount, right? So this is from a late document, but for Christian historical standards. 400.

400. So this is 400 years after, you know, 300 plus years after Jesus, right? So, and it's from a guy who is trying to catalog all the weird things that people think about Jesus. But this guy doesn't think they're true. not that we would necessarily care what this guy thinks either way, but I don't think he thinks it's true.

Even if he did think it's true doesn't make it true, right? Lots of people are wrong about a lot of things. Except for that Dathan. Except for that Dathan, which is, it's like he's saying, Hey, what is Dathan? You literally, you have to snap your mind out of it and realize now that really what I'm telling you is... Okay, wait.

So you think this, the Ebofanius secretly thinks this is true and he's trying to, like... No, no, no. telling this reader, you know, don't be shocked here. Okay. This is really the way that they're doing. Okay. So yeah, what I want to do is back up here and ask ourselves why this matters. Okay. To Jesus, right? So, so we're trying to get back to Jesus here as historical scholars, like not doing biblical theology of like what Jesus means from a theological perspective. But we're trying to understand as historians, because classes are historians, right? So who was this guy,

Jesus who walked the earth? Right. And, and most of the first, Most of us really, you know, there's a minority, mostly on the internet, the things that Jesus made up. And there never really was a guy named Jesus. But almost everybody in the academy that I've ever met would say that there really was a historical Jesus who did walk the earth. Amund, you think there was a historical Jesus who walked the earth. My favorite part about the wintertime is I still get to wear my favorite rag and bone denim. I've been wearing their clothes for a while, but their infused denim is on a whole other level. I'm almost 40. My style's changed. My body's changed and I'm not trying to squeeze into some stiff cardboard feeling jeans anymore. When I put on their infused denim for the first time, it quite literally ruined all my other jeans for me. The fit is perfect. They're structured without being too tight. I can skateboard in them. They're super comfortable and they're broken in on day one. They move with you. They keep their shape and they develop character the longer you wear them. And no matter what your style is, slim, straight, relaxed, athletic, there's a cut that fits you, perfect.

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I read texts that talk about them all the time. That's my only, I don't, all of the, all of the all of the myth, you know, is this person a myth? Is this per, does it fucking matter? The Greek is what matters. That's what our evidence is. Of course it matters. Of course it matters because they wrote a lot of made-up stuff about everything. Not just about Jesus, about Zeus, about, I mean, you know, so just because something is written

in a historical text and we do want to be responsible linguists and philologians and try to dive down into the text, which is what we've been talking about here, right? And try to get a good idea of what it means. The next question to ask is, so what? So like, okay, maybe we're trying to see

what this text means. Does this word specifically mean this or something else? Those are wonderful debates to have. but then the next step is, you know, like did Jesus really exist? Okay? And it sounds like, Amin, you're kind of not taking a position on that, which is fine. No, I don't take any positions. This text says Jesus was making Mary blow him. And he tried to make the apostles do the same thing after this.

And they didn't. And it says they didn't follow him after that point. Okay. So do you believe that really happens? I don't have to believe anything. That's a text I'm talking about. No, no, no. Okay.

We're having a disconnect here. It's science. It's not, this is science. No, it's a text. I don't have to believe, it's not science is a text. I don't have to believe in chlorine. I know Clarene.

Text lie. I don't know if you know this is sometimes text lie. Actually, usually text lie. Yeah, no, you can be, this guy could be lying out his butt. Epaphed the church bishop, he can be lying out of his backs. Plato's the biggest fucking liar on the planet.

He's quoting people, so he's not lying. Plato is the biggest liar on the planet. Oh, sure. Plato admits to it right up front. So no, that's a part of the text, but I'm still going to tell you what Plato wrote. Sure. I 100% agree.

that, but then I don't agree that it's not worthwhile or that we can just wave our hands and say, well, so what? Like, did this really happen? And what you're saying right now is that, that you don't know, you don't necessarily believe this happened. It doesn't matter. Or it doesn't matter to you because you're more text-based, which I respect text-based. It matters to somebody, somebody wrote this down and that's our evidence. So let me tell you how I see this. Again, it's a fourth-century text from a Christian guy who is trying to explain what some, what he calls heretical Christians belief. Okay.

This is not coming from outside the church. This is coming from inside the church. And he's saying, these are some Christians with what we would today kindly call diverse beliefs, but that sounds too positive for what he's trying to do here, I think. He's saying these are weirdos. Yeah. These are heretics.

These are people who don't know who Jesus is, but they think they know who Jesus is. And they tell stories. Okay. They tell stories about Jesus doing some weird stuff with Mary, all right? that most other Christians, including this guy, Phaphanius, are not going to believe. And so, you know, we can kind of back away from that. Now, this is where biblical theologians would say, well, we know what Jesus did and he did

this and he didn't do that. But as a historian, I'm actually still interested, not from a biblical theologian perspective, but I'm still interested in trying to get back to the historical Jesus. And I do believe there was really a historical Jesus who really did walk the earth. And we can talk more about him. So that's the question that remains. So, you know, on your YouTube channel, you bring up text like this, but then I think you leave the question hanging as to like whether this is true or not. Yeah, because I'm only there to present evidence, the court.

Let the viewer figure out whether or not they think it's true. Okay. When I'm a pure, pure classicist, I only want the philology. That's all I want. Classicists are also interested in what really happened. Yeah. Aren't we? We are, but the actual surgery.

a surgeon. Sure, the surgeon has morals to them. What matters? That surgery, that technique. You know it's an art, and you have to do it right. And that's all I'm saying. When you go to the Bible and you see terms that are related and you see episodes that are related and Paul's saying throughout your book, your magic books, and in Judy saying, don't do this, I'll sell gaia, this stuff, this idolatry that involves the pharmacia, don't do it. That's sexual stuff. Paul's like, stop fucking your family members, right? In Alexandria, in Alexandria, what are they persecuting Christians for?

Incest, right? They go to their ceremonies, they put out the lights, everybody disrobes, and they screw. Why? Because these fluids are life. They're life. This is the salvation. Right? This is what Epiphanius is trying to say, hey, this is, you know, within Christianity. This is a movement. And just like Jude said, don't do this stuff. Okay. So, so, yeah, in First Corinthians, which is a very early letter, everyone agrees. Paul wrote it in the 50s probably. It's one of our earliest Christian documents because it's earlier than the gospels. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Paul has to call out some of the people in the Christian community at Corinth. One of them is, sleeping with his stepmother.

And he says, don't do that. Like, what are you sleeping with your stepmom for, bro? That's my translation. Which the Romans hated. Incest to the Romans was like, no, God. That's not technically incest. Don't be doing this. There were people in the Christian community.

Family member. And this actually goes to show the crazy diversity within the very early Christian community. Some Christians were at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as their attitudes towards sex. So some Christians heard Paul's message of a resurrection and that we're going to get new bodies. Okay, that's one of Paul's central messages,

it seems like, that we can reconstruct from his letters. He's going around telling people Jesus is coming back soon and we're going to have our bodies transformed. He says this in 1st Corinthians 15. And so some Christians, like apparently some of them at Corinth, took this to mean that we can do whatever we want with our bodies, because we're getting new ones anyway, so who cares? That seems to have been their attitude.

And so some of those Christians, this is not people outside the church, but some of those Christians were sleeping with their stepmother. They were sleeping with prostitutes. They were doing whatever they wanted sexually, right? Because they actually internalized Paul's message in a way that he didn't necessarily intend. And the way we know that he didn't intend it that way

is because then he wrote the letter of First Corinthians to tell them not to do that. Among other things. Like in First Corinthians, it's a fascinating, piece of literature from from the mid first century BC that offers a pretty important window into into early Christian thing at least from Paul now again we always have to remember there's diversity and that's one of the things i'm trying to hammer home with this text right is that just because we have one Christian text that said some Christians were doing it this way doesn't mean that

anyone else was necessarily right so we can't we have to be careful with methodological slippage yes which means we can't just wave at a text and say oh yeah that's that proves everything doesn't necessarily prove much at all okay back to Paul back to Paul so he he's So he's writing specifically to this one community, these Christians at Corinth that he had just recently converted from paganism. The recent converts from paganism to the Jesus movement. And and as- Paganism, explain what paganism. Yeah.

So I'm using this loosely. And of course, that's a later term, as I'm probably knows. Like polytheism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were worshipping the Greco-Roman god. So paganism comes from a Latin word that means rural. So it comes from a later period when Christians had taken over the cities. ideologically speaking, not militarily, but ideologically speaking, but then there were still

people out in the countryside doing things in the conservative way. As is the case today, oftentimes in places like the United States, cities are what is deemed more quote unquote progressive and rural areas are more likely to be conservative. It's honestly kind of always been that way. It's derogatory. It's kind of like hillbilly. It was derogatory because it was used by Christians to refer to, yeah, hillbillies. Pagan means hillbillies. Pagan means hillbilly. you know, rural bumpkin or something like that. Obviously, I'm not using it in a derogatory sense. Polytheism is fine, though.

So Paul had just converted a handful. We don't know how many, 100, not that many people in the Greek bustling metropolis of Corinth to the Jesus movement. He rolled into town, told them the message of Jesus as he saw it, and then converted this handful of people. And then he left because he had to go to the next city and make more converts.

That was his whole career, going from city to city, trying to make converts. Right. And he felt the urgency that Jesus was coming back soon. And getting thrown in jail a lot. He gets thrown in jail. He gets thrown in jail.

What did he do to the pithia? Oh my God. That whole city was mad. Yeah. Well, the time that he cast the demon, according to Acts, cast a demon out of. She kept saying, you're doing the Christos thing. So, yeah, we'll get there.

I'm sure. I assume. Okay. So Paul writes to this community of Corinth, and he says, yeah. So you guys need to, not be sleeping with your stepmother. Just because I said you're getting new bodies doesn't mean it doesn't matter what you do in this body.

Now there were Christians on the other end of the spectrum who apparently thought that you should never have sex with anyone ever, even your own spouse. Never. Never. And there was a monastic movement. It wasn't called that yet. But there was a, there was a,

that's what creates those sicko priests. There was a self, there's a strain of self-control already within Greek philosophy that Amman probably knows about. Where Greek philosophers were already saying, maybe you should control yourself and like focus on higher spiritual realities. Right. Meditate.

Maybe sex isn't the best way to use your, your finite earthly existence. Right. So Christians didn't make this up. Jews didn't make this up. This is Greek philosophers where I was saying this, they weren't always living it, but they were saying it a lot of times. And so Paul also disagrees with them. So he also thinks sex has a time and place.

You should never have sex. And that's basically, that's the middle ground that Paul is trying to drive in, in the letter of 1st Corinthians. And that's where this stuff comes up, essentially. So again... Why do you think he didn't suffer the ill effects of being bitten by a poisonous viper when he got shipwrecked and all the locals were like, oh, God, that dude's going to die. Watch him.

That's an interpretive question. So we have the story in Acts 27 or Acts 28, where he has a shipwreck. He's being taken to Rome to stand trial before the emperor. And so they put him on a ship. load him from the eastern Mediterranean, sail him all the way to Rome. They have a shipwreck on Malta, which is an island in the Mediterranean to the south of Italy. You know, he's not supposed to be there, but the locals kind of take him and the other shipwreck victims in. And then they're sitting around a fire.

It's winter, apparently. And this snake comes out of the fire and latches onto his hand. And all the locals look at him like, he's going to die because he just got bit by this viper. And apparently it's a poisonous, right? Paul, yeah. Apparently it's a poisonous one. and he like just looks and like shakes it off into the fire like nothing happened and keeps going on with his preaching and all the all the natives just look at him stare at him wait for him to die he doesn't die it's like nothing happened and then they start worship of him as a god and then he has to be like no guys i'm not god i'm just god i'm just god's representative and so the text and again this is an interpretive question right as we were just saying we have the text that's what the text says the text doesn't give us an explicit explanation for why paul doesn't die except that i think i think that you know, the author of the text, which is probably Luke,

wants us to believe that God is protecting him, right? That doesn't mean that you can't come along, like Amin, I think, and say he's got some kind of concoction of anti-venom in his body or something. If we have other contemporary texts like Philuminous, or we're talking about, hey, this is the theriac that is used. You can counter the viper with this and that, but you have to Christed. It has to be Christed.

Those texts are additional evidence that there's something going on there with Paul's viper. But I don't have to believe in miracles because I have the reason of the word. And that word clearly is reflecting a real scientific anthropological reality that Paul is walking around with viper venom, which is not typical, which is not atypical, excuse me, it's not atypical. So you think he's like the guy in the Princess Bride? So he's using his knowledge of Galen's Theriac, which allegedly Galen was using as like a performance-enhancing drug to keep himself safe from being poisoned by venoms,

by snake venom. And he's connecting that to this biblical writing of Paul getting bit by a snake. All of that is written in Galen in a work on the Theriac to Pisso. And he talks about the Theriac that Marcus Aurelius is on with its compound drugs. The concept of using antidotes through the viper venom specifically traces in the Bacic text as well. It's the same. All these priests like Necander, that's what they're talking about.

They're talking about the use of these venom's and toxins in order to induce that open-eyed spiritual experience. vision. It is a process that is biochemical. And as an investigator of the Greek, it looks to me like Paul is on that list, and that's why the Pythia calls him out for it. She knows that he's got to be Christing. She knows what Christing is.

We're going to get into the Christing stuff. I want to make sure we stay on track, though, and not make this thing go all over the place. I want to keep it kind of like segmented. So does that make sense? to you how he's connecting this theriac, the idea of the theriac and these, first of all, I'm sure you know about, or are you familiar with Galen's Theriac and Nero's physician, talking about this. Marcus Aurelius, yeah. Also, Nero's physician talked about the Theriac, right?

A concoction of like seven different viper venoms, viper flesh, and all kinds of stuff that allegedly Marcus O'Rez was using and drinking daily. It had an opium in it as well to keep himself safe from people who were trying to kill him with poisons. I have little doubt that there were people doing drugs. Regardless of what your advisor said.

Well, this wasn't necessarily like a drug to get you high. This was more of like a medicinal concoction. Sure. That's fine. That's fine. Again, I think Amin and I both agree we want to be faithful to the texts and be careful with the texts.

Right. So Galen is writing quite. a bit later. Neero's obviously closer to Paul's time, much closer to Paul's time. So we can- He's executed under Neerre, isn't he? Yeah, at least traditionally, right? It's actually-N-Rositions. Our sources aren't great for that. Paul was executed under Nero? Yeah, yeah. Traditionally. Like our sources are not not great for that. But that was the early rumor. Very early rumor. It's definitely not a later creation by any stretch. It's not in the Bible. So my perspective on this is that we can hypothesize.

I think it's interesting to hypothesize. I don't see any evidence in the Bible for that. I don't see any evidence in the biblical text of Acts where this, this, you know, viper bites Paul that makes me think he's definitely on some kind of concoction. Sure, sure. I get that. I get that.

Like, it's not in there. Right. But it doesn't say he's not. But do you think it's reasonable how he's making the connection from Galen's Theariac to Paul not dying from being bit by a viper? I think he could write an article on it. Is that it too much of a stretch? I think he could write an article on it.

more. I'm done with it. It'd be fun. It'd be fun because I, the community can decide if it's too much of the stress. Now, the community is wrong sometimes. Yes. Right. I think we can all agree on that. Yes. Sometimes the community is too conservative. I don't mean that politically. I mean, like, they just cling to older ideas, right? I don't know. I'm not a drug expert, honestly. Like, like, you know, I haven't read Galen, so I can't really comment. I've read parts of Galen. See, and that's why I respect you. I've read parts of Galen. He hasn't read Galen. He doesn't know. Yeah, as we were talking about earlier, I'm here to call balls and strikes. And most of what we talked about has been within my area of expertise.

I have no problem saying, you've read more Galen than me. Yeah. Okay. Now I'm interested. Maybe like some of these sources and I'll take a look at them and then we can do this thing with them. You know, a good connection is your wine too. Yeah. You didn't know.

He wrote about wine. Yeah. I know more about wine than any other drugs. It's connected because diascortes and others, physicians write about the use of wine. a base for the drugs, man. A lot of times they put drugs in the wine. All sorts of wines that are drugged wines. So it's like the Lucidian Mysteries, right?

This is not anything to do with cult. This is just people enjoying drugged wines. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's for health. Yes, it's for health purposes. And they're all, oh, God, the descriptions of them are lengthy and the stuff, the amount of ingredients they're putting in. Oh, it's fantastic.

And there's always a medical connection. It's always like, oh, this one cures your dropsy, right? your inflammation will be reduced with this wine, which has these three herbs that are attic herbs from so on so. Okay. Fantastic. But you did wine. Sure.

History of wine and stuff. And of course, wine was the most common drug in antiquity. Yeah. Like, everybody drank it, even kids. Really? Although we do have to understand that the Greek specifically mixed wine quite heavily with water. So their traditional concoction of wine was two parts water to one part wine. in other words, it was only one-third wine

and it was two-thirds water that they were drinking. What this did, and of course, we know this now, they didn't know this, is that it killed the bacteria, or at least a lot of the bacteria in the water. They had very dirty water sources. The wine did. The wine did by mixing the water and the wine. Wow.

And so they just realized. They didn't get in plague, just be drunk all the time. Well, they didn't want to do that either, though. So they realized with trial and error that if you mixed one-third part wine with two-thirds part water, you were healthier. Oh, really? You were healthier because it would kill a lot of the bacteria in the water where if you just drank straight water, you get sick all the time. Right.

Because their water sources were terrible. Wow. But when you drank this water mixed with wine, you wouldn't get sick near as much. But you also wouldn't get drunk unless you drank a lot. Because if it's two parts water to one part wine, it's going to take quite a bit for you to even get buzz, right? Which is why they would give to kids. So it was a health drink for everybody of any age. An opium.

I gave a shit ton of opium to kids. E rakes, two things. The recommendation is always opium. I don't know about that. I have nothing to say about that. Diarrhea opium. Yeah. It's way, way over prescribed.

Way, way overuse. It's like common. Very common. Okay, before we get into the Christing stuff, I want to talk about the idea that Amin brings forward about the Septuagint. And Amman believes the Septuagint was originally written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew. And he's the only person with a pulse in the cosmos on the in the cosmos that believes this to be truth. And other people I've had on here, experts, I've asked the same thing.

And they all say that the Greek and this obtuagint was one guy Gadbarnais said it was Jewish Greek. So people say it's coinet Greek. It is Jewish. Yeah. It's Jewish. Wait, wait. Are you going to say it's Jewish Greek? Well, don't you make your case.

And then I'll like, almond, almond, almond. Amen. Amen. Make your case. Lay it out for folks. who aren't familiar with this, the people that may not even know what this obtuagint is. Sure.

So I'm not actually the first person to say this, nor am I the only person. There was a Jewish scholar, Yehuda, Dr. Yehuda, who wrote a book called Hebrew is Greek. And in it, he takes the trilateral roots that you find in the Hebrew, and then he shows you the Greek from which that term was derived.

So, and he says, shows you through the use of colloquialisms, euphemisms that the Hebrew is actually being constructed around the Greek. And he wrote his book Hebrew is Greek in the 80s, I think it was, 70s, 80s, something like that. And of course, you can imagine it did a dive because if that's the case, everything that we know about biblical scholarship is wrong, completely wrong. There is a rabbi who came forward right do you have oh there it is do you have and there he's talking about the spartans in the greek um that the jews are actually from sparta and and crete anyway um can you steve did you get the video clip the short clip that i sent you last night yeah yeah i got it

yeah this is rabbi right tavia right let's see here what he says i'll be quiet Okay. The key is that Christians are appealing to a Septuagint, a Greek translation. A translation can never be superior to the original. In any Western court, the law of best evidence states that an original document in its original language is always superior to any translation. So this is a specious argument. But he is exactly right.

A translation cannot be superior. To be clear, he is saying the Septuagin is a translation. Right, he's saying the Septuagin is a translation. Right. So the Septuagin should be a step down from the Hebrew original. Because in the translation process, you lose information. You never gain information. You never get a more technical.

technical document from a translation because the translation is not adding. You can always add stuff anytime you translate anything. Well, you can, but you're not translating. You're then embellishing. A lot of the subtergient is an embellishment of the original Hebrew. You're embellishing. Yeah, so what I'm saying is exactly what you're saying. It doesn't happen, does happen with the subduition.

Okay, go on. So his premise is this. Superior form is the original. Who decides superior form? I'll show you right now. Let's look at an actual text. Hit it, Steve, with the Greek text there. This is from Genesis 1, 2.

This is from Genesis 1, 2. Is it this one? The one with the... Yep, there you go. The whole verse is in the middle, and the earth was Aoratos and Akataskewostos. The earth was King Jamesi without form and void. Kaiskotos in the darkness was upon the deep,

they'll say, the abyss. And the spirit of God hovered there over the waters. Now look at the two words that the earth is in the beginning. The earth was a oratos in Greek and Akatoskewastos. If you look up those words, just because you want to know what they are. Next slide, Steve, if you look at them up, you're going to see, right? Here we go. Look at the, just tell me really quick.

Akatoskewastos, not properly prepared. And after that, they give a reference to a pharmacon, right? This word is used for synthetic drugs, right? These are unworked principles. Ah, Kataskewastos. Look at Kataskewastos, but below it. That's without the alpha privative on the front. So the alpha privative just negativizes the word.

So what is something that is Kataskewastos? It's artificial. It's created or artificial. Okay. So the earth is Akatskewastos, not prepared, not created, not yet synthesized. Look at the bottom. Aoratos.

What else is the earth? It's unseen or invisible. I want you to drop down to the second line. And look at To a oraton. What is it when you take the substantive of this adjective? It's an unseen world. And right after that, you get ex-Uranu. Do you understand me? This is a part of Greek physics that you're looking at this word, aoratos.

Gaia and Uranos are part of it. Are you ready? Give me the next one. Wait, let me finish. Give me the next, after that. Here's the verb, because everything comes from the verb. What does the Hebrew version? Okay, let's see.

Is this superior or inferior? Look at the Hebrew version, an empty place. This is Tohu for Aoratos. Does this does the trip was the translator on dope if this went from Hebrew and this means an emptiness It how did it get to a oratos? You couldn't have somebody's on dope or Hebrew is less sophisticated Clearly look at the next word for Akatskevostos Bo who are you kidding they just took toe and made it into a bow and what do they got here again? Emptiness

This Hebrew is not a really original. It is being constructed from the Greek. It is a terrible, terrible attempt to make a native translation out of a language that is so far sophisticated. Greek has 1.5 million word forms. Hebrew has 7,000 unique words. It can't compete. Okay, I'll stop there. You respond now. Okay. Thank you. So again, let's examine our priors here. In other words, what are we sort of assuming? You're assuming as you go through this,

number one, that you can make a judgment as to which language is more superior, which is very debatable. But let's just say, for the sake of argument that you're right, that somehow Greek is more superior than either, which no linguists would. Technically superior.

That it's more advanced, that it's more descriptive, has a bigger vocabulary. Greek has the philosophical tradition by this point, right? And so the translator, who must be fluent in both Hebrew and Greek to do this translation is probably a Jewish person who knows Greek because nothing else really makes sense. And this is a person probably in Alexandria, which is a center of Greek philosophical learning. Right?

And this Jewish guy who knows Greek, and maybe Greek is even his native language. Of course it is. Because he's in a Jewish colonial context, just like a Jew in the United States today would have English as their native language. It doesn't make them any less Jewish. Doesn't mean that they haven't been to synagogue and learned fever. I get it. So this guy is familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition. And so when he's translating these words, he is embellishing them. He's absolutely embellishing them. He's taking the Hebrew. And by the way, Tohu wabohu, we don't even know to this day exactly what this means. Okay.

Like there have been so many books written on just these few words. And it's unclear. Okay. Outside of the Septu— outside of the Torah, how much Hebrew literature from the third century uses this word bohu or tohu and bohu. Very rare. Yeah, because there's no Hebrew literature outside. Of course there is. Of course there is. Of course there is.

Of course there is. Yeah. So, okay. What Hebrew literature is there outside? Let's say that your theory is right that the Greeks or Jewish, you know, Greek speaking Jews or whatever in Alexandria, which is probably where this is being written, the Septuagint, are inventing this language. You think they're inventing it in our?

Alexandria in the third second century BC? Definitely. Okay. So if that were true, there should be no Hebrew before that. There should be no literature at all. There should be nothing. Amon, you have a problem because there is Hebrew before that. What is the Hebrew?

The archaeological evidence. We have a lot of archaeological evidence. Some scribblings. No, it's not. You have no work. You have no. You go to and look at, they talk about the amulets. You go and look at these things.

It looks like it could be an Aleph. It must be. It must be Hebrew or no, it's proto-Hebrew. You have no works. Like Danny said, you have no works in Hebrew. Let's see what you have to say about it. We have the priestly blessing, which is in the book of numbers, attested from an archaeological dig dated to the 7th century BC, Amman.

That's 500 years before the Septuagian. You have the text? You have a text for this? That Hebrew radically predates. You have the text. You have the text in an archaeological dig. It was an archaeological dig. Written on the entire book of numbers.

No, I said, I said three verses, the priestly blessing in numbers. Let's look at this. Let's look this up. Look up. Let's see it. Hold on. That's fantastic. Ketef.

Kethe F-I-N-O-M. Two words. Two words. Ketef, space. H-I. Yeah, there is. Ketefonomous girls. Yeah.

Yeah. Go to all? This is the silver. It's written on silver. Oh, wow. And it's written in paleo Hebrew. There it is. priestly blessing from number six. Do they think it's in Paleo-Heb?

It is in Paleo-Hebrew? Two tiny... Well, I mean, it's a theory because it's true. No, no, no. What is Paleo-Heb? Explain to the people what Paleo-Hebors. And what are your documents that are in Paleo-Hebore? Right here. Here's one of them. One of thousands. One of thousands. One of thousands. From a silver plate. One of thousands. Okay. So there is Paleo-Hebrew. Everyone agrees that Paleo-Hebrew is an alphabet that was used in in pre-exylic time. So leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC. They used a different alphabet than they used later.

And this is what it looks like. That's paleo-Hebra. That's silver? That's silver. And can you zoom in a little bit more, Steve? Yeah. So Tohu Wobohu is in there? No, of course not.

That's not the verse. It's a pretty simple blessing. So that scribbling is Hebrew. That's Hebrew. Yeah. And it's something that's in the Bible. It's something in the Hebrew Bible that already is found in an archaeological dig from earlier than 600 BC.

So it predates the Septuagint by hundreds of years. They're already writing Hebrew. They're already writing stuff that's in the Bible. They're already inscribing it and on scrolls, maybe keeping it with them, maybe as an amulet. And what is paleo-Hebrew? Paleo-Hebrew is this alphabet we're looking at here. This is an alphabet.

That's an alphabet. Okay. And it's Alephbet, Gimledon, Heav. Yeah, it's an abjad. It's the exact alphabet of the... It's an abjad. It's a different script. It's a different script, but it's the exact same alphabet.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're sure it's completely been identified as Hebrew. It's very clear. I see a Hebrew rendition. I see a Hebrew rendition. I see a Hebrew rendition. On the right. They are certain. Wait, and they base that on what? It's just from this one? There's thousands of these. This is just the most famous one. But there's no, is there a translation of this from antiquity? I mean, how do we know? It's an archaeological. They didn't put English translations in the archaeological.

What's saying is how do we know that that's the line from the text that we have? Because it's the exact same word from several hundred years later. Oh, you think it was planted? No, no, no. Is this like an alien theory? They do the same thing with Phoenician. Right? Which is even older.

They do the exact same thing about guessing what the letters are. And that's why when they find an inscription, they guess that it's either Hebrew or proto-Hebrew. At the time that this is being written, what's the date on the silver? 700? Yeah, 7th century BC. It was found... 600s BC. 600s BC. How many... That's the consensus. How much, how much literature is there being generated that is from this Proto-Hebrew? What other cultures are referring to Proto-Hebrew? It's none. There's several cultures around them that refer to Israel and refer to specific kings of Israel that are in the Bible. They think they found the name Israel in an inscription. I read that. I read that. I read that. Anybody debates that, except you apparently.

What is the Israel, where's it come from? You're a language. It's a Semitic, yeah. Where does the word Israel come from? Yeah, well, it's a Semitic word. It looks like a verb, but it's a name, of course. So, Semitic names are often compounds of a verb and a noun. And the L at the end is God, almost certainly.

Right? The Yasser part looks like a third singular, masculine, Semitic verb. There's debate about which verb it would come from, but it might mean God rules, or he struggles with God or God struggles with somebody. Okay. That's the traditional etymology. Okay.

What literature do we have in it that you just gained that insight from? Where is the evidence? Yeah. So here's, I think, the methodological problem. You're saying that if a culture got destroyed

and the pre-exylic Israelite and Judean kingdom got destroyed, well, no, the people, the kingdoms got destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BC and then the Babylonians in 586 BC. They had an apocalypse,

essentially. Those nations, those ethnicities had an apocalypse where these foreign empires rolled in and destroyed them. They just leveled their cities to the ground. Jerusalem was leveled to the ground in 586 BC. They burned Jerusalem to the ground in 586 BC. And so what happened when Jerusalem specifically was burned at the ground in 56 BC, guess where all the texts went? Burned, gone. They got burned. In the library. That's why we had the silver is what we have to live. The silver survived. And this was, I think, yeah, it was buried and it was outside of Jerusalem. So it would have been caught in the fire. It was in a library? They would have had libraries that got burned, just like the library of L'Ambandah.

They almost certainly did. Full of Hebrew. Libraries. Almost certainly. Almost certainly. Almost certainly. Almost certainly or they did. It got burned.

It got burned. That's a big difference. Yeah. Okay. Amman, let's back up and talk about methodology again because I want to, I want to make sure we, I just want to know if they had Hebrew libraries. I want to keep our eye.

Where this language was preserved. I want to keep our eye on the ball. Yeah. We've already said two hours ago at this point that we don't know much about the ancient world. So what we're dealing with usually is probabilities. I like to think this. I think this from like the perspective of a Vegas gambler. We don't know, you know, if you're gambling on something in Vegas, you don't know for sure what's going to happen or whatever.

But you have probabilities, okay? You can say, well, it's most likely or it's less likely. And so I'm going to put money on things that are more likely. And so we have probability. So you're asking me for a hundred percent probability of something that happened 3,000 years ago. Evidence. And we really, it's right up on the screen. No, it's not.

This is evidence. That's somebody's interpretation of what that is. That is not the evidence. Wait, wait. What I'm telling to you is if this is... If this language is being used at the time, if this language is being used at the time, what other surrounding peoples and cultures record it?

I just told you there's multiple ones. But the problem is that those same empires that rolled in and destroyed Jerusalem, destroyed those other cultures too. Why isn't there a Greek record? So, Amon, are you saying... The Greeks weren't doing anything over there. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

Are you saying that the Hebrew... Hebrew writing on the right is not accurate to what's on the silver? How do we know that it's accurate? I'm questioning the evidence of the people who made this translation or interpretation of what it is. Because what other documents are they using? Do they have, that's why I ask that they have libraries? You can't do this with Greek. There's no guesswork about what it is.

There's no. Proto Hebrew versus, no. Greeks had different alphabets. No. At this time that you say this thing is exist. there's Greek works all over the place. Society is run by that Greek work. You know what? The Greece avoided getting burned to the ground by the Persians, which almost happened in 480. Okay. So if the Greeks had not managed to fight off those two Persian invasions, we'd probably be in the same position

with Greek literature where it would have all got burned to the ground and then we'd be in this position where all we would, all the Greek we would have is digging up stuff in archeological things. I hate to guess. We'd be in a difficult position. We always have to guess. But when the Christians. Anything we do is. guessing for the ancient world. We don't know anything for sure. I hate to guess, but when the, when Greek lost, it began to lose its glory as the Oracle shut down and as the 4th century lurched over its loss of its pagan origin, the language was affected and you see that. But the whole, in the influence of the Byzantine Greek,

the problem is throughout the years, the years. use of the Greek, we've got Greek grammarians. We've got Greek scientists who are working on the language, right? What I am saying here is at the time that the Greeks are doing that and noting these other histories and these other societies around them and forming anthropologies and explanations of history of the cultures around them, nobody ever encounters anything like this. only reference that we have to anything Semitic is the Phoenician. And we know the connection to the Phoenician, that Greeks even argued themselves that the Phoenician was not responsible for Greek. There's Greeks to say it was and Greeks to say it wasn't for the alphabet, right? So this

is theoretical. There's no contemporary documentation of any of this. This could be somebody sitting in the desert copying out BS. And then planting it in the ground for an archaeological dig to be dated to 600 BC. Do you realize how you're getting into like alien theories here? No, I'm not saying it's planted. That's why I hate ideas. If we stick with the text, what I'm saying is this thing, you've got here, just showed up in a vacuum. It showed up out of the ground.

Where does this paleo-hebrew come from? Did they build buildings? to the, if they got to this level of writing, they must have structures, they must have history in archaeology. Where is it for this? This is the archaeology. It's not this thing. No, this thing is not the archaeology. It's coming from the archaeologists who found it in the ground when they were doing an archaeology. Everything has to start somewhere, right? Yeah. Right. But when you find, let me tell you what I'm talking about, when you find, when you're doing a Greek site, for example, and you find Greek writing, the Greek writing builds for you.

exactly what's going on. You see those columns. You see this type of architecture. You see what they're using you. The mathematics, they're in these Greek texts. This is in isolation. It's got no relatives. That's how archaeology works.

It's just sitting there by itself. They didn't find anything with this way. They didn't find anything with this that was a building dedicated to some guy with using this in his name, using this alphabet. There's so much stuff in this alphabet. much stuff in this alphabet. They just found that. It's widespread. It's widespread. This alphabet is very common. Right, but it wasn't in a building with a dude's name on it that was using the same. There's a lot of stuff with dudes names on them in this alphabet that has been found in archaeological digs. From these to the 10th century PC. There are cities. Yeah, it's widespread. As they're like, there are cities. In Israel. And they have libraries. They had cities. Yeah, Jerusalem is a city. And there's libraries in Jerusalem. They were burned to the grounds. There's library. By the Babylonians. Okay. So was Herculaneum. We still have the, we still have a shit ton of it.

And then they built a bunch of stuff on top of it. I don't know if you know about Jerusalem. That's no evidence. You're not giving me any evidence. I just don't think you're willing to look at the evidence. This is in complete isolation. You don't like the evidence so you're discounting it. That's all that's happening here.

It's not, the thing that really bothers me is that there is no Hebrew literature. When you talk outside the Torah, there is no Hebrew documentation. There are no Hebrew doctors. There's no Hebrew architecture. There's no Hebrew geometry. There's no Hebrew anything. Because it got burned to the ground. Everything.

So you're saying they should have just done a better job of not getting burned to the ground. You're saying everything got lost of any Hebrew writer at any time. The only remnants were there was a small group of captives after the city got burned to the ground and lots of people got slaughtered and taken into slavery by the Babylonians. No, that's not how life works. Of course, that's how life works. There's a, oh, hold on. Hold on a finish.

There's a small group of people who were taking. into captivity by the Babylonians to Babylon, and they could only carry anything they could carry. They carried their most sacred text, and that's all that survived that conflagration. That's civilizational conflagration. That's all they kept. That doesn't mean they didn't have more. In fact, they almost certainly had more. It's gone.

And they're the only culture that that happened to. Of course they're not the only culture that happened. You have language. The language will survive. It did survive. You just don't want to see it. It survived in the Torah. It survived in the Hebrew Bible.

And it survived in the grounds. That's all you've got. Okay, you just made a statement that is false, and that is this is the only culture that's happened to. Of course it's not the only culture that's happened to. Let's talk about the Persians. Yeah. Let's talk about the Persians.

The Persian Empire was far mightier, far more scientifically advanced than the Hebrews. So we have classical Persian? We have inscriptions, we have the Behistune inscription. And then we have a few things from Herodotus where he's transliterating words from Persians. So we have contemporaries. No, no.

No. We have contemporaries talking about the language. We have Arrata's talking about them. That's exactly what I'm talking about. We have no Herodotus. who can say, there is Paleo-Hebore. Yes, we've got the Persian. He's after that period.

He's got the Phoenian. All of these like, well, I'm saying, and a dude like Herodotus. We've got nobody for this. You're wrong about that too. You're wrong about that too. The Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle has been discovered in Babylon. So Nebuchadnezzar is the most powerful king of Babylon.

He, from 605 to 562 BC, he was the guy who came over and burned Jerusalem to the ground with his armies. This is historians generally accept this. We have found his chronicles. So most kings would write a chronicle of the things that were ongoing during their reign that they thought was important enough to be kept for future generations. We found his chronicle from 605 to 594 BC. Unfortunately, it cuts off in 594 because we just haven't found the rest or maybe it got shattered or loss or something.

In his chronicle, he talks about Jerusalem and the Jews. In his chronicle that has been found from that time period. So when Amin says there's no other records, he's wrong about that because King Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful king in the world at that time talks about them. It's in the Chronicle. And he says, I'm going over there to talk about them. There it is, right there. Confirming biblical accounts of his conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BC, the deposition of King

Joaquin, and the installation of Zetakia. That's all there. Contemporary. That is a contemporary document, Amit. It justifies a text perfectly. So the people, so your belief is that the people who are running the subterigent were Jewish Greek speakers who were living in Alexandria in a Greek milieu. And they were taking.

taking the Hebrew, translating it into Greek, and embellishing and adding stuff to it. Yeah, so there's a whole, there's not just one translator who does all of this work. Sure. It's,

it's different Jews, translating different books at different times. Right. And I can say this because I've worked with this stuff. I've gotten my hands dirty with this stuff. It's incredible stuff. I've written articles on it. You can look them up.

I did my master's thesis on the Septuagint. Oh, fantastic. So it's very linguistic. This is perfect. That's why I said. You're perfect. It's wonderful. Hit me with the evidence.

So they, they, there's different translators who are translating different books at different times. What seems to have happened is. And what year was it translated? We don't know for sure, but probably third to first century BC. Probably the early stuff is third. The only way you can really date something is by people who quote it. What's the earliest we get people reading this text, right? That's really what you can quote.

You can look at the letter of Aristéas, which people in a. antiquity said was a forgery that talks about the translation. People said that was a forgery. That doesn't matter who's quoting it. And when are they quoting it? Jesus is quoting it. Right? The New Testament is quoting the Septuagint in Greek. In Greek. It never quotes it in Hebrew, which has always bothered me. If the Hebrew is the superior original, and that's what the people, the rabbis are promoting, why the hell doesn't Jesus quote Hebrew? Why don't you think Jesus was quoting it in Hebrew?

Well, Jesus was probably quoting it in Aramaic. Probably. No, that's linguistically. Let's go back to methodology. Probably. Is it probably in Greek? No, it either isn't Greek or it is. Amon, you're trying to pull a fast one here.

All we have is probably. So when I say probably I'm being responsible, when Amon doesn't say probably he's being irresponsible with the data. I want to be clear about that. So I'm a responsible scholar. I hope you are too. Let's try to work toward that. Obviously not.

You know, hey, look, I'm dealing with you. and we're talking about stuff. Right. I'm not calling you names. Other people can do that. Jesus quotes Hebrew. Well, here's the thing. As you know, Jesus didn't write anything down.

Right. So all the stories we have about Jesus or somebody talking about him at a later date. Right. But when they're writing about him, they're writing about him in Greek because that was the colonial cosmopolitan language

and they want their message to get out. Okay. All right. So Jesus was not a Greek guy. He's a Jewish guy. You agree at that, right? Amen. I guess you already said you don't know who Jesus was.

Greek is not an ethnicity. It's a lot. It's a language. Jesus was a dude who spoke Greek fluently. And he was in Egypt. So he probably studied in Alexandria. And he would have been studying Greek, not Hebrew. The question is, why does Jesus or anybody in the New Testament never quote Hebrew?

Quotes Aramaic several times. In fact, the only times in the New Testament in the Gospels, of course, when Jesus is directly quoted at least a handful. At least a handful. least a handful, and a couple of those are ones that we think, right? That we think may be Aramaic. No, they are. It's pretty clear if you know Aramaic that he's Aramaic.

It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear. It's, it is. No, it's science. It's science. Look, it's science. It either is clearly Aramaic or it's not. Okay, you want me to say it this way? It is clearly Aramaicthone.

It's clearly Aramaicthon. That's when they say. Yeah, let's talk about that. That's when we put this up. Yeah. Mark 27. Sorry, Mark 15, I believe is when Jesus gets quoted saying. Eloy, Eloy La Ma Sabakhani.

Can we, can we put that up? Mark 15. Oh, it's Aramaic. I believe that's Mark 15. Aramaic, Aramaic, right? Yeah, because it is. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about it.

I love this. Yeah. So I have not studied Aramaic, but it's closely related to Hebrew. So just because I've studied Hebrew, I can understand the Aramaic. Because they're like Spanish and Portuguese. They're not that different.

And so if you study one, you can make heads and tails of the other. Okay. So I can tell you what this Aramaic, it is, and I will break it down for you linguistically. Okay, scroll down. Scroll down.

We don't, yeah, we, okay, this is the Greek, but can we get in English? I think it's going to be more helpful if we get a translation. Actually, the Greek, one chapter over. If you look at the Sabak Thot and the Greek, that you have to see the Greek. Hold on, let's focus on this. Scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. It's toward the, it's when he's on the cross and he cries out his final word. Yeah, a little more, a little more.

There it is, there it is. They even put it in italics, okay? Eloy, Eloy Lamah Sabakthani. Okay, they put it in italics. So Jesus is being directly quoted as saying this. And then they have to translate it because that's not Greek. My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?

So Mark is writing in Greek, but he's quoting Jesus saying something Aramaic and he's interrupting his Greek to say something Aramaic. To say something Aramaic. Because Jesus is saying his final words in Aramaic because that was his native language. So let's break down this Aramaic linguistically. El is God, just like Hebrew. All right. El-Eloi, Eloy. The E at the end in both Hebrew and Aramaic is a first,

person possess a pronoun that means my. So Eloy is my God, which you can see it's translated correctly. They're my God, my God. That's the Eloy, alloy, alloy part. In Hebrew, right? In Hebrew and Arabic. He's speaking Arabic. He's speaking Arama.

Okay. So in Aramaic and Lima. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Le Ma is actually two words that are usually written as one, whether in Hebrew or Aramaic. Like Lama in Hebrew, right? Why? Exactly. Yeah, there you go.

Yeah, yeah. So Leh, Le means four and Ma means what. Yes. So when you say four, what you're asking why. Does that make sense? So la ma is why, but it means literally for what? Got it. Ma. Sabakhani, I think this is the most important word here. Clearly, this is your verb. As you can see from the translation, they're translating this, have you forsaken me? Those are the words that we have left in the English there. And that's being translated from the Greek.

I mean, the Greek says, my God, my God, why have you were saking me in the translation, which is in the parentheses there, right? Okay. So Aramaic has this verb. Now there's trilateral consensual, consensual roots in the Semitic languages, not just Hebrew, not just Aramaic. the Babylonian languages, Phoenician, all the Semitic languages operate on what we call trilateral consonantal roots, which means it's three consonants. And you put vowels in the middle of the consonants

to sort of inflect the term, okay? So there's three consonants here, S, B, and the C, H is being, it's a kai there in Greek. Because in the original Semitic, this is actually a gutteral sound, kha, that we don't even have in English, and they didn't have in Greek either.

So they're doing the best they can to transliterate this, because Greek has this, that is a kai is it's the letter kai in greek um so they're doing the best they can to write this and write this aramaic sound in greek what's the aramaic by the aramaic letter for the the he it's it's a kha it's a kof okay what does it look like yeah it looks like it kind of looks like well it looks like a p thing but it's it's the source of our q yes it's the source of our latin q actually yeah um because the alphabet wandered from phrenicia to greece to the atruscans and

ultimately to rome and that's where we get it from so You have this, you have this, Cah sound that the Greeks don't know what to do with, but they write the next closest thing, which is C, which is we transliterate with C-H there into English. But that's a Kai. That's the letter,

the letter Kai in Greek, right? We can go look at it. Yeah. So, yeah, however you want to pronounce it. Right. Who cares? Modern Greeks say it. Yeah, modern Greeks,

whatever. It's, it's, it's, in ancient Greek. That's what's going on there. The, the Semitic languages have the sound sure.

And Greek, as you know, does not have the sound sure. So, So Greeks did not pronounce the sound shah. They did have the sound so, like a regular S. And so anytime there is a word in any Semitic language that has a shah sound, and there's lots of them, and they want to try to pronounce that in Greek, they write S instead of because it's the next closest thing.

Okay. Okay. So this is Shabach in the original Aramaic, which means it's this trilateral root. You put vowels in the middle, Shabakka, that means to forsake, all right? you inflect it by putting a second singular masculine ending on it, which is the ta, the T-H-A there. Right. That's the second singular masculine ending because Jesus is talking to God. And second singular is you.

Okay, so he's talking to you, God, singular. And then the knee, Semitic languages have this really cool thing where they actually just attach object pronouns right to the word. So in English, if you say have forsaken me, me is a separate word from forsaken. You don't say forsaken me all is one word, right? Right. But in Semitic languages, you say that all as one word. First second, me, and you write it all as one word. So that knee is the first person singular object pronoun.

So when Jesus says Sa Bakhtani, that's why it takes four English words, which, by the way, shows that Semitic languages are very elegant. They can actually express a lot of ideas that take us multiple words in English, which is another reason I push back against your idea that somehow Hebrew is not as superior as Greek, because it's pretty cool. It's a very elegant language. And this is Aramaic, which is similar to Hebrew, right?

So the author of Mark is going out of his way. He doesn't have to do this. He's writing in Greek, but he goes out of his way to say, actually, Jesus said this in Aramaic. And then he quotes the exact Aramaic here. Well, he doesn't say he says it in Aramaic. That's Aramaic.

No, but he doesn't say it's an Aramaic. Elsewhere, there's another quote where he says, in Hebrew, Jesus said. Okay, but here he's not saying, this is an Aramaic. Why does it matter if you know? Why would it matter if he says it? If it's written in Aramaic, why does he have to say it's Aramaic? Because it's written in Aramaic is your conclusion.

Okay, go ahead. It's not, it's not Aramaic. Go back to the Greek. Go back to the Greek. Go back to the Greek text. Let's see. Maybe it's not Aramaic. Is it possible? It's not in Greek letters. Is it possible?

It's not in Aramaic? I have all ears. I am all ears. Right. Scholars. Scholars entertain discussion, right? It's a museum. blow it up, Steve, on the, on the verse. What verse was that?

A little further down, a little further down. What verse is? Do you remember? There it is. There it is. It's right above 35. Right in the upper middle, right side. Right margin, right margin. No, no, go right.

Go right. There is. There is. Right up. Blow that up, that last word. That last word before the semicone. And remember, there's your semicone. Wait, just show me.

That's not a semicone. That's a question mark. Right. In Greek, you write question marks to Semicolns. Right? And who'll put that in? So Byzantine nerd, the Greeks didn't put that in. That's true.

I mean, all the punctuation is later. Right, right. All the capitalization is later. Right. And the word spacing, there's no, there's no. There's no. There's no spaces. Okay, Steve.

Steve's blown up. You just got to know. Just blow up that one word. That's as blown up as I can get. Is that as blown up? Yeah. Just this one word, because this is the verb. And to be honest, this is the most interesting of the words.

Furb is always awesome. Oh, sure. So if this is Aramaic, as you say, this should have really no Greek essence to it. Why? It should have. What do you mean by Greek essence? Because there's no influence. There's no Aramaic influence on Greek.

There are people bilingual with each other. We have no authors, though, who are saying, I'm going to use this Aramaeism, and I'm going to write and write it out. We don't have that. Mark is just doing this. Okay. Well, no, not if it's a quote. He's quoting him. Right.

It's just a direct quote. It's just a direct quote. You say, Sabakthon, is there anything in that that looks Greek? If I have read the Greek magical papyrus, I know my anus twitches. Because you can see both the roots for Sabah that worship and the Kthonian divinity that is the Christing head, the ion, who is the person inside the synagogue. that is pictured on the walls of the synagogues, the god ion.

That is Saba of the thorn. This is used in magic. Jesus is from the cross using magic Greek. And he's talking about that God that induces that transfer from death to resurrection. And if you look up, if you, you know the Saba root, right, that I'm talking. You mean the chthouni. Not the sabrout. Are you talking about sabomai to worship?

Yeah, sabomai is the verb. So that's a different word. But here the sabba, no, this is the same. Sabaoth, the god. That's different altogether. He's going to say it's Hebrew. See? I told you.

It's the same thing. Where is the literature that backs you up? What do you mean the literature that backs me up? Where's the literature outside the Bible that backs you up? Because I can give you literature outside of this that backs the set. We've already been over this methodological theory. It doesn't exist. We're just beating a dead horse.

It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. You don't have evidence that it exists. You don't have any Hebrew literature that's going to use the term Sabbath. What you have is Greek and you have Greek in the magical. You have Greek that is telling us, even the pharmacology does this. His reasoning for that is because he thinks it all got, well, he says, we know, it all got burned down.

Magically got disappeared. All the libraries are gone. There was nothing magic. It was imperialism. If your evidence got. magically disappeared. It's easy to make whatever argument you want. Sure, you can say that. We have Greek evidence that where these roots are coming from the...

What are you talking about? Okay, Sabakthon. When you look in the PGM, we're just talking about the PGM. You've worked with professors who helped translate it, right? Sure. And so did I. Yeah. Go on. So fantastic. In the PGM, do we refer to the God of the Sabbath? Sabah Oath appears in the PGM.

Right, right. Is that a Hebrew... concept? Absolutely. Where's the Hebrew to back it up? It's behind the PGM. So we talked about the PGM earlier. It doesn't exist. Explain what you mean. It's behind the PGM. Yes. So we talked about the PGM earlier. Actually right near the start of this and I mentioned that the PGM is a collection of diverse cultures, cultural sources. Okay. They reference Egyptian gods like Thoth. Okay. So according to Amun's argument here, if we see the Greek letters, TH OTH, that proves it's Greek and not Egyptian, which is not true, of course. We know that's because you're saying that's because there's also.

Not what I'm saying. I'm saying the cult, because I'm not talking ethnicities. I'm talking language. I'm talking language too. Language conveys the practice of a cult and the cult terminology is the sabbakhthon, the god of Sabbath. Okay. So that is not Hebrew. That is Greek.

We're dealing with three different things here that you're conflating and none of them have anything to do with each other. There's the Greek word sebole, which means to revere, to worship, Theosabase means God worshiping. Theosabase, okay? Correct. That's an Indo-European route. That goes back to the Indo-European route.

Tiegu, which is found as far afield as India. And you will put an asterisk. You will put an asterisk on that term because that is a back formation. You are guessing. Indo-European is guess one. For the thousandth time, we're guessing about everything. Guessing. Well, I'm not.

These are texts and I don't want to guess. I have seen that expression. in magical text. That is not Hebrew or Aramaic. There's no guesswork here. He's quoting him in Aramaic. This is pure philology. There is no text. You have to back that up. There is no Hebrew doctor. There's no Hebrew epics. There's no Hebrew plays. There's nothing outside of the Hebrew Bible. Nothing. I think we've already disproven that point several times. So I think we should move on. So here's the deal. Sebomai, all right, is a Greek word. Goes back to an Indian-European. route that is found, and you write back formed because Indo-European language, proto-Indo-European, that was spoken by very early Greeks. Tell people what back formation is.

Yeah, what it means. And I did my master's degree on this for two years. Okay. So, and honestly, I think I think anyone who's interested in ancient text should probably become a historical English. It's fascinating stuff. So what we do is we look at the texts that exist, the text that exist

in the real world, whether Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Old English, whatever. And we notice, similarities that are highly unlikely to be accidental. Okay. And the scholars, the European scholars who first noticed this, they already knew Greek and Latin. They went to India as part of the British colonial project

that was there. And then they learned Sanskrit. Some of them learned Sanskrit and they said, Sanskrit is suspiciously similar to Greek and Latin. Okay. Now there were always theories like in antiquity, people already noticed that Latin and Greek were suspiciously similar.

Their theories usually ran in the direction of, well, like the wrong, Latin is like a borrowing of Greek or something like that. But what scholars have recently realized in the past couple hundred years is that none of them are stealing from each other. The reason they look similar is the same reason that you look similar to your brothers and sisters and cousins. It's not because you stole genetic material from your brothers and sisters and cousins because you have a common ancestor. There's an evolutionary tree that's going on here. And so the Sanskrit word tiudge means to worship.

It means to revere. It means to do that kind of thing. And in and we're talking about science and data. So historical linguistics is all about science and data. That's really all we do in historical linguistics. I think you'd like it, Amun. So you, so what happens? We're in the Grim brothers.

Oh, sure. They were in the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Grim's law is a famous sound law in ancient, ancient Germanic linguistics. So they, so what we've seen in historical linguistics is anytime you have the sound, ti, it paladolizes. That's kind of a technical term in linguistics. It paladolizes to an S, all right, tier becomes S, which you got, you can I almost kind of see how tier, sier, not that different, right?

So anytime you have a tiya in proto-European, it's going to become a se in Greek. And then any time you have a gua, it's going to become a bu. It simplifies to a bu. So Seb is the regular outcome of this hypothetical, but I think pretty well substantiate, based on the linguistic evidence, inter-European root of mental worship. In Sanskrit, it doesn't change as much. The Guo becomes a j, which we write J, usually, but it's in Davenogri originally. And so you get this form, all right?

So, Sebo Mai is a well-understood Indo-European root that goes back thousands of years in the Greek language that means to worship. So back formation is the creation of a word that you don't have a text to back it up. That's because there were no text 6,000 years ago. Yes, yeah. We already said that. So the back formation is a creation. It's not a reality. In language and philology, it's not a reality.

That's why they have to put an asterisk next to it in linguistics to show you this is not a real word. Do you think those are all made up? There is no evidence. They are all speculation, just like you were saying. Everything is. We are speculating. The question is when we go to Vegas, what odds are we going to get on that speculation? I don't want to speculate.

Then you can't do this work. All you can do is speculation. Everything is speculation. When you talk about historical linguistics, the Greeks themselves, the grammarians, I don't know if you read many grammarians, but I do. And the grammarians will talk about the influence of languages like Pulaskian with the double sigma. And they'll talk about how that arrives. And the influence as far west as the Etruscans.

That's the type of historical development. You don't have to put an asterisk next to. The Grim brothers, with all of their stories, oh, God, it's just speculation. and I don't want speculation for this text. If I see other Greek texts that use this word and it's a magical text, that makes me think this is probably a magical term. Okay, so you keep harking on this thing, just speculation, just speculation, just speculation. But then in your work, we've already noticed that a lot of what you do is speculation.

No, give me an example. Yes, we've already talked about this, okay? Give me an example. Like the earlier thing we were doing. The flaccio. The flaccio, pure speculation. No, it said it was a euphemism. It said it's a euphemism.

I didn't say that. Okay, when you speculate that that's what that word means in that context, it's pure speculation. Now, we can go to Vegas and put odds on it, but you don't know that. We've already covered that ground. You don't know that. When it says the promise in his hand, you don't know that. You don't think.

Okay. Another thing. Something's wrong. There's a wall here. There's a wall here. So it seems, it seems like you think that texts are divine. Like you think that it's in the texts. That's all we got.

Text are divine. No, I'm a classical philologist. That's all I do is text. That's a problem because you have to have context for the text. There's more to just what we're doing than just what the text is. We have to analyze it. We have to say, is this text wrong? Is it right? Who wrote it? What's the propaganda angle? What was everyone else saying in different professions surrounding that? Like doctors or lawyers or physician or whatever philosophers? Yeah. Can we return to Sabakhtani because there's several more points?

My speculations. I want to hear more about. Let's wrap up. Let's wrap this. I want to move on after this. Yeah. Yeah. So, Amin, what did you say about the Cathon? You said it's connected to Cathon. Kathaian divinities, correct. Okay. All right. So let me point out the methodological problem with the way that you're approaching this word. It seems that you're saying, hey, look, there's this word that doesn't appear to be in Greek because it's nonsense in Greek. Sabakhtani doesn't mean anything in Greek. But there's a part of it that looks like a word that is Greek. It's not nonsense. There's a part of it. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, you're wrong. That's not what I'm saying. It's not nonsense. It's not nonsense. Sabakthon is tested in the PGM. You can go and look at a goddamn ion wall. Are you mixing up Sabah Oof and Sub-Oak-Ti.

Do you know who the God-I-O-O-O-Eon is? Yeah, I'm familiar with it. What does Ion give the Jew or the Christian? Ionic life. It's why he's sitting in the Senate. Ion. Yes, and IDios. Why is that also mean eternity?

What does this have to do with Sub-Acthaw-Thani? No, no. Because listen, listen, I'm telling you, read so much. Greek. I can show you. So you can mystically see things that nobody else, even me cannot see. No, I'm showing you what experience does. Oh, so 20 years not enough. Am I going to learn this in your 30? 32? When am I going to get to this? I'm going to bring you when I bring you an apocryphal text that uses Ionic right next to eternal ideals. And you will see the difference, but you haven't because you are trusting in Jesus. You are trusting in that text. You are the one who's

making this thing. I have no idea what you're talking about right now. Yes. Do you, Danny? You don't have it. Listen. Listen, have you read philuminous? Does it matter? Why does it matter? I'm asking you. Have you why it matters? Not most of it. Why does it matter? So you have no idea what's in philuminous, correct? We're reading Mark on philuminous right now. If I told you philuminous, let's try to, let's try to stay on topic. It's becoming more confusing trying to bring in all this other stuff that I don't even, I don't even know what you're talking about. Okay. So I want to get back to

what we're talking about with Kthon here because Ammon interrupt me when I was trying to talk about this. So Amund's methodology seems to be, hey, there's a Greek word Kothon, which we both agree is a real Greek word that means earth. Okay. And it's in various compounds like, you know, different erythonyous mythical, mythical early King of Athens, etc. Okay. It's not the same word. There's a, there's a vowel different, Kthon versus Kathan, but at least it sounds like it. It's not the same word, but it sounds like, by the way, vowels are very important in Greek. You can't just substitute them in and out. Vowels to, vowels are very important. So you can't, you can't say that Kthon and Kethon are the same thing. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say, oh, you know,

they're mispronouncing it. Okay, whatever. Let me, let me, let me, hold on. Stop putting arguments in my mouth. That's disingenuous, man. You are mispronoun. You don't do that at Camus, do you? You are misproness. Do you talk about, do you talk about? I know, I know, come on. That's unprofessional. No, come on. I'm not so, I was a professor. So, okay. So, here's the deal. So we got Kthone, which is a valid Greek word, we all agree with this, okay? Amon says he sees the word kathone in this Aramaic word. or what everyone else except Amman thinks is an Aramaic word, Sabakhani, okay?

So here's the problem with this kind of methodology. And I actually talk about this in my book on wine, which came out in my dissertation. I have a whole chapter on linguistics and linguistic methodology in that book, okay? And in that chapter, literally the very first part of the chapter when you open it up is a quote from an ancient grammarian,

because we were talking about this. I love the grammarians, okay? And they talk, they try to make connections like this. So I'm in- Wait, wait, wait, can I- Can I- Say that again? Well, let me explain. They try to make connections like this.

Let me explain. Okay. Yeah. So I deal with the wine word. Oino-Sweenem, you know, this word that's floating around the ancient Mediterranean, right? And what I'm doing when I do this is I'm, first of all, I'm going all the way back to the original sources. What did the grammarian say about it? Like, what did the Greek gromerians say about this word?

What did Romans say about this word? And their speculation usually relies on what I call in the book, the sounds like principle, okay? So they'll say, the word. word oinos or weinos in Greek means why. You put the digama. Of course, of course, classic, right? Nice, nice. Love the digama.

So you got oinos or oneos, we know him in Latin. And they're already trying to figure out like where this word comes from. Like what other words out there in the universe is it connected to? Right. And they use what I call the sounds like principle. So what and there's multiple layers of speculation where they say, oh, maybe it's connected to this word that sounds like weinos or oinos, maybe it's connected to this way. What, you know, one of them says, hey, maybe it's connected to this word, onescy

which means benefit because onesios, aoinos kind of sound alike. They have most of the same consonants, right? And that's the methodology that the ancient grammarians use, all right? Modern historical linguistics has moved far past that methodology, all right? Oh, you know, that sounds so arrogant.

That sounds so arrogant. It's just called building on things. Do you think science is musical? What do you think the Greek is musical? Do you think science has made progress in the past 2,000 years or not? Science is completely based on one, that great concept of how to create a hypothesis.

Okay, so has science progress in the past 2000? Not beyond its roots. Now, technologically, yes, but not beyond its basic methodological roots. Well, what I'm saying is the methodology has progressed. And I told you we would come back to this time and time again. The methodology has progressed, all right? We are not doing the sounds like principle anymore because it didn't work. Let me explain.

No, of course not. The Greeks were brilliant for their time period. Hey, you're talking to me. I love the Greeks. I know. I love Greeks. So don't put words in my mouth. Just not great grammarians, right? They're, they don't read them, but we don't believe everything they say like some kind of religion. They're arguing like this in antiquity too. The etymology of words is important to the Greeks. Some people say, you're full of shit. Absolutely is. You don't know what you're talking about. Here's why this sounds like principle doesn't work. So I'm going to saying, okay, there's this there's this part that sounds like something else that he has read, which is a legit thing, kthon, whatever. How do we know it's connected though? All right? So there's lots of things that sound like other things.

Okay. So for instance, let's say that as a linguist, I said that your name, Danny contains the word knee. The last syllable contains knee, which proves that there's a connection to the knee that's your body part. And then I could make up a story. I could say your ancestors would knee people. I don't know. Who knows? Or maybe a little more fanciful.

I could say, you know what? Your ancestors were the knights who said knee. Okay. right from from funny python okay okay love that movie love that reference and so your ancestors stood in a forest and and demanded shrubberies from passing nights because of the knee in your name okay that's where the sounds like principle leads us i could do it with sabbacthani sure i could say see the first uh syllable sob that proves that it's connected to the swedish car company okay that produces sobs all right that's where the sounds like principle can lead us it can lead us anywhere random

Anything sounds like anything. It's not good enough, right? Right. So we need a more principled way of acting, and that's where the modern discipline of historical linguistics comes in. Okay. So the modern discipline,

to go back to your name, I assume Danny's short for Daniel. Okay. So Daniel is a Hebrew word. I don't know if Amun believes this or not, but everyone else does. Daniel's a Hebrew word, and we can break it down into three morphemes.

So I'm Jewish? Well, your name is. Okay. Your name is Hebrew. Yeah. But lots of our names are, mine isn't, but lots of our names are from some Hebrew source

in the Hebrew Bible, which was written in Hebrew. Right. So, Daniel, we can break it down to three morphemes. Let me, your ears pricked up because I said morphine, but I didn't. Morpheme, morpheme, which is a meaning-bearing unit of language. Every language has morphemes. Like if you say the word trees, there's two things that have meaning in there.

Tree and tree means a thing that grows out of the ground, and this means plural, more than one. Okay. That's all a morpheme is. All right. Okay. So there are three morphemes in the name Daniel. Don, which is the Hebrew word for judge, E, the I in the middle of your name,

which means my, it's the same I in Eloy, actually, right there. And L, which means God, but there are, no. Hold on, hold on, let me, this is interesting, me hear. So Don Y E.L means God is my judge. It literally means God my judge, but you throw in the is to make it makes sense.

You learn that because that's what ancient Hebrew grammarians wrote, right? Yeah, they got burned to the ground. We talked about that. Oh, but how do you know that then that's what it means? We don't know anything. We talked about that, too. Oh, my God.

Am I stoned? You might be. Yes, you are. Oh my God. Wait, even, all of that was based on not having any evidence, though. That's bad, bro. That's bad. I think we've gone through this already.

I don't know if we need to go through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What time is it? We're already three hours in. How long is this? We're almost three hours in. Yeah, yeah. We have a lot of ground to cover.

I might have to come back. We have to move on. We have so much to cover that. Yeah, we will. Can we come back? Yeah. Well, we're not going to end it right now. Oh, no, I know.

I know. Oh, I know. Absolutely. I just think we have another five hours left here. I mean, we got way more. I'm wondering if we're keeping the audience. Yes. Yeah, we really got stuck here in the weeds here on this,

this stuff about the subtergent and this word. But so basically the case Luke is making is Jesus spoke Aramaic. He was Jewish and you think he was Greek. He think he only spoke Greek. Textual evidence. Right. Which Amin loves. Right.

The audience can make up their mind. we'll have to definitely do another one on this. So now I want to move on to Amin's biggest claim is that Christ is a pharmaceutical term. Now, the case Amin makes, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the original, the first time the word Christ was ever used in Greek was from Homer, and it's been used hundreds of, of times before Jesus Christ.

Correct. And Amin specializes in ancient pharmacology and ancient pharmacy. And he uses that context to corroborate all of this other historical writing we have from Homer and everything else talking about christing arrows with poisons and all kinds of christing, right? Applying something to the skin, to the eyes, to an arrow, to something else. And he's taking that and connecting it to Jesus Christ, saying that Jesus was someone who was known and was connected to drugs. Is that about right? Correct. Yes.

Yeah. We have the reference. Bring up Odysseus. It's a gorgeous picture. So he has tons of references. And he sent us in our group chat a whole list of hundreds of references. Just to make a long story short, you can tell by having read all those references, and you've read hundreds. Sure.

Over a hundred. If you search for all the compounds of Christing, you're going to find thousands and thousands. This is like not an unusual word. That's why when Bart Ehrman came along and said, I doubt if Christing came before the Septuagint, why he looked so bad, because it's a... It's overwhelming the history of this word. Biblical scholars have no idea what Christing is. They don't know it's an actual drug.

They don't know the action of Christing as somebody applying a drug. They don't know that Hrio is associated with oysters, the sting of the gadfly, the Greeks that established in mental, mental changes, frustration, craziness, mania, right? Those are all associated with being Christing. We have an Escalis himself with I-O-O-O, right? And she says, what about this? I'm being Christed by this powerful mind-altering thing.

So from the arguments I've heard against Amin, me using my best judgment, is that what most people believe is that Christing was applying something. It could have been drugs. It could have been a roof. It could have been a coating underneath a ship to make ships more buoyant. They would cry something.

Christen painting something. Yes, it was drugs. It was lots of other things. But they don't believe that Christ had anything to do with this word similar to your Dick, Dick Cheney. Yeah, pulling at Dick Nixon. Dick Nixon, right. Sure.

Yeah. Okay. That seems to be the general pushback to... But Amund thinks Christing was exclusively drugs. No, no, no. It definitely wasn't exclusively. No, see, here's the thing. You can creole all sorts of things.

I don't come up with ideas. I just read the text. Now, in the overwhelming majority, it's drugs. You can Christ plaster shit. Heraclitus chrised himself with poop. Right? Dung. There's all sorts of things.

You can chrised a ship with the pitch so that it's not waterproof, right? But the overwhelming majority are drugs. And the texts that I read are talking about the use over and over. And even texts like, Notice as paraphrase of John, he talks about the antidote, that's the Greek word, that was given to Jesus when he was on the cross.

So this is not the association of Christing. you can Christ your penis. There's a very well-known Sater's right where you Christ the penis. And you introduce that Christ's penis to the vagina. And that process is to kickstart the mystery. It's a bachic satanic chorus. You didn't know. Did you know in Greek that you have the expression the bachic satanic chorus?

I mean, Satan is a Jewish idea, not a Greek idea. So what are you talking about? I'm asking you, did you know that there is a Greek town? that uses the Greek term, Bacic, satanic chorus. I'd have to see the text and I think you would agree with that belief in text. This is probably not the time. All right, here's the point. Here's the point.

Here's my question. Are you just saying it's overwhelmingly associated with drugs because you specialize in drugs and read drug texts or have you looked through everything? I'm saying performing a TLG search on everything that we've got on Christing, the overwhelming majority are drug associated. That should be pretty easy to prove or disprove, right? With the TLG. Okay, so do you think inject is a drug term?

The English term? Inject, yeah, the English inject. I think it's a pharmaceutically associated term. I agree. I agree. Yeah, so it's a term that is often used in drug context. Sure. It's also used in other context, like let me inject myself into this conversation. Right, right.

And so the verb, creo in Greek is the same way. Okay. It can be used in various terms. because it means to apply something, apply something to the surface of something else. Right. So if you're applying an ointment, which is a medicine, which could be called a drug, then sure, if you want to call that a drug term, go for it. I'm not going to argue with you on that. And you have all these references where there's some kind of ointment, some applied, you know, medicine, drug, pharmacon. Right. That's fine.

There was your epitides, he said, was it a potable or a Christ? What kind of drug is it, he says in a politics? Is it a Christ? or is it a potable? Is it one that's anointed? In other words, smeared on like an enguint? Right. Or is it one that you drink? Right.

Because those are two main different kinds of drugs. There's also a big catch. You probably didn't catch this. Or you did and you went past it because you accepted the common modern notion. In Greek, the expression in Christoi, right? It's coupled with Jesus, a genitive form of Jesus, in the Christ of Jesus. every time it occurs in Paul, it's in the Bible in general, it's translated as what Paul uses it most. It's translated as in Jesus Christ.

We have faith in Jesus Christ. We have this in Jesus Christ. The problem is that genitive is just a genitive and nowhere else in Greek. Are you going to translate that as part of that dative? So it literally should be translated in the Christ of Jesus. Jesus was performing the mystery openly. The fact that he is casting out demons is perfect, perfect evidence of that.

He knows these terms or he wouldn't be called the one who was Christed and there wouldn't be a naked kid with a medicated bandage. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here. With him there. So do you think Christ spoke Greek or new Greek at all? Probably not. No, my God.

No. Oh, my God. God, right. Who knew Hebrew? If there's that much Hebrew, he didn't speak Hebrew. He spoke Aramay if we talked about that. And if there's that much Hebrew, then there would have been documents left. This magical disappearance of all the Hebrew. It's literally quoted. We're not talking about Hebrew anymore. We're talking about Aramaic. So if you agree, you agree with Luke that Christing was similar to the English word inject.

Christ was similar to inject. I think that. Inject is commonly associated today as injecting something into your body, but you can also use other words. I would say it's overwhelmingly associated with a syringe. right? Obviously, but you can use that expression for other things like a conversation or whatever. If you could expand it to in. Would you agree with him on that? When you say inject though, you're not including things like injection. What is the substance that Christ becomes the substance as opposed to the act of Christing? So inject, okay, maybe injection. An injection. Okay, and then you have like fuel injection engines. Right. Which doesn't have to do with drugs, but has to do with something else.

we're being put into something else, right? Yeah, I think we agree on that, mostly. Okay. So where do we disagree here? Yeah, so this is an important thing that you just brought up, which there's different parts of speech. There's injects, there's injection, there's past participles, there's present participles.

You have this verb creo in Greek, which is a well-understood verb. You can make a present participle out of it. In English, our present participle ending is I-N-G, right? So you are anointing. If we just used the sort of whatever, term anointing. anointing, like I am anointing my body with some drug or all of what, it doesn't matter. And then there's the past participle, which means you have been anointed. Right. Okay. I want to use the word just to kind of to make this point here.

I want to use the word bite, which is a different word, but the reason I'm using this word is going to become clear. Specifically, in English, our past tense, like I, I anointed my body yesterday and the past participle, my body has been anointed or often identical with most verbs, but that's confusing. the point because in Greek they're not identical as as I'm a nose. Greek is sexy. Yeah, because common thinks Greek is superior, which I love Greek too, so whatever. So I'm using bite because because in English, bite is one of the relatively small number of verbs where the past tense is different from the past participle. I bit into a cake yesterday, but I have been bitten.

So, so bitten is the past participle. If you were in a state of having been bitten, then you were already bit. and you have, you know, been resulted from that action. Like, I was bitten by, and I'm going to get in this, I was bitten by a vampire. I was not. That's not a confession. But that's, you know, that's how we would use the term, right? So bite, bit, bitten.

Biting is the present participle. Bitten is the past participle. So the first point I want to make is that, is, you know, this is, I just want to make it clear because I'm here to call balls and strikes, and I think people, people know, you know this. This is the simplest chromatic thing in the world. Right. Christing is not a word in Greek. and let me explain

because I'm not accusing you of anything super I'm just explaining here all right Christos is a past participial form of creo so the cree in Christos is the verb part the toast part at the end is a past participle like bitten

yeah like bitten exactly like bitten is one who has been anointed a Christos can be one who has been anointed or a drug like in the Jesus the Christ did right we're gonna get there we're gonna get there

it's somebody who has been had an action that action. An action of anointing that has done of them. So I just, again, I just want to make clear that the ING ending is the present participle and you can't mix those two. Okay. So when when Amun says Christing, he's actually taking the tea of the past participle and then putting a present participle onto it and you will never find that form in Greek. No, I'm making an English word. Correct. Yeah. You're making a neologism. Yeah. And we deal with neologisms all the time. So I just want to make it clear. Just because I don't want to say anoint because the friends. Because it sounds like. something else. The verb is Creo. The verb is creos. So just use the Christ. Just use the root. It's Christ.

But the work that that neologism is doing for you is that it's making people who don't know Greek think the connection to Christ is more obvious than it is. Because that's not a word. I think it is that obvious. But you're doing the, you're making the argument without doing the work by using that word. If they had read, though, if this audience that we're talking to that were right now, if they had read all these documents in Greek, it's going to hit them like it's Yeah, you can say that all day long, but they're never going to do that. So you have to make a case in something we can understand.

Yeah. Right. So this is me calling balls and strikes. Sure. I'm saying that's not a word in Greek. It's based on a true story. Yeah. But there's no word. Christing in Greek. All right, because that's a past part of cing in Greek. Christing. Christing. Christing is not a word either. I just made it up with an eye. How about the participle? Well, that's also a participle. That's a present mediopathic part of it. It's Christing, though. How would you translate that? Being anointed. That's what that means. Peromonos. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. All right. I just wanted to establish that. Yes. Hopefully not controversial. I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page here so that people understand that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, So Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, which is a past participial form, which means the anointed one.

The person who has been anointed. The person who has been bitten. Yeah, exactly. The person who has been bitten. Christos means you're bitten, a bitten one. You've been anointed. Anointed. Yeah, except not Christed, the anointed one.

But again, it's a neologism as long as we're all clear. You can use a neologism as long as that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, cool, cool. Onward. So I want to take an analogy here, using this word bite that, that I, that I, I think will help us understand. Yeah.

And Amman's going to disagree with this. I'm going to say it anyways. It's what 99.99% of us would agree with, except maybe Amin, but let's hear what he says. Let's see. I'm excited. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So as I've already said, Greek was the colonial language of the day.

Yeah. And in that sense, it's like modern English. All right. Modern English has spread all over the globe. Partially, that's the legacy of, you know, British colonialism for the past three, 400 years or whatever. British people sailed everywhere, you know, Australia, New Zealand, obviously North America, South Africa, whatever. They've taken English and lots of people who didn't used to speak English, their descendants now speak English, right?

Like the Maori in New Zealand were the natives. They didn't speak English. But now because it's a colonial language, they now speak English, right? Greek was the same way. Greek was a language that was originally just spoken in a relatively small part of the world called Greece and not even all of it that we were called. Greece, really just the southern part. And then Alexander the Great comes along. And Alexander the Great conquers everything from Greece to India, including Egypt, Palestine, and everywhere in between, right? So he brings the Greek language all over that part of the world. He spreads it all over that part of the world.

And it becomes the colonial language of the day, just like English has become the colonial language of our day. And so you have a lot of people speaking Greek post-Alexander, and Jesus is living 300 some odd years after Alexander the Great. So he's living in what we call the Hellenistic period, which means the Greek period. The Greeks call themselves the Hellenes. So you have a lot of local colonized ethnicities

who are speaking Greek sometimes, okay? But sometimes they're not. Okay. So oftentimes what there is is there's an upper crust, and this happens in Egypt. We all know this happens in Egypt. There's an upper crust of, say, Egyptians who speak Greek because it is.

the cosmopolitan colonial language of the day, but the everyday peasants in Egypt are not speaking Greek. They're speaking Coptic, all right, which is the native Egyptian language. Like, they didn't get it from anywhere. That's just what they've always been speaking there in Egypt. And we have Coptic records from a little bit later. Okay. So this is the case in a lot of the Greek-speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Okay. And this is similar, and I'm going to extend this analogy. This is similar to English speakers, let's say the British sailed to the South Pacific, which we know they did, James Cook, whatever. And I'm just going to invent a South Pacific community. It doesn't really matter who for the purpose of the analogy. And there is a

local Polynesian group, Polynesianly ethnic, I just made up an advert, Polynesianly ethnic group in the South Pacific that has their own local customs, but then the British show up and they colonize them. And there might be some people who learn English. but then most of the like to deal with their English colonial overlords or whatever. And of course at this point, English becomes the elite language. And if you're a Polynesian person from this South Pacific country, island chain or whatever, and you want to leave, you're going to need to know English to go to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the United States, whatever.

Okay. So you have this colonial relationship that is going on. Okay. Let's say that there is a tradition in this local Polynesian island chain. Again, it's hypothetical, but I'm making a point because this is actually the history of the era we're dealing with 2,000 years ago. And they have a tradition. I'm going back to this bite word now. They have a tradition, and I made this up specially for you because I know you like this.

They have a tradition where if you become the ruler, or maybe in order to become the ruler of this local island, you have to get bitten by a snake. You like this, right? I know you would like this. You have to get bitten by a snake. They put a snake up to your arm. It's non-venomous. It doesn't kill you. maybe Amin would say it's going to inject you with some pharmacor whatever.

That's boring. Yeah, well, you can't die because you're going to be the ruler. Why don't they use the venomous snakes? You're going to be the ruler. Give me the rule. You can't die. Can't fall over. Okay. So, so in this local Polynesian community, they refer to their kings as the bitten ones.

And it's based on a very specific ceremony that they do in their part of the world to create rulers. they get bitten by a snake. That's cool. It is cool. I just made it up just for you. Okay. So you're making this up? Yes, hypothal.

Oh, God damn. And I thought there were some Mao. We're going to start a religion. Well, there might be. I don't know. I'm not a Maori expert. I was going to say they should have a theriac. And then they got bitten and they wouldn't, you know.

Okay. So let's keep going. So they've been colonized by the English. They are hoping for freedom from English colonial overlords. All right. And they are hoping that one of, their bitten ones, which is their rulers, will rise up and throw the English out. And so they're looking forward to the day that a bitten one. And of course, they're using their own native

Polynesian language, which again, is hypothetical. It's like Hawaiian. It's like Maori. It's one of those languages. It doesn't matter what the word is. It's not the word bitten because that's an English word. And they're not speaking English because they're a local people, right? They're not speaking English. So they use this word bitten to refer to to their kings. And then they are looking forward to a king, a bitten one, as they would call them, in their local language, who is going to kick the English out so they can get their freedom back. Okay. Now, let's say that there is a, is a, is a, is a, a, a, a, a, uh, ruler in this local Polynesian society. And, and, and, and some people think he is the bitten one who is to come. And some people don't. There's arguments about

them. Um, and then he, he dies. And, and then there are missionaries who go out from those Polynesian Islands and they believe that he came back from the dead or some religious thing happened. It doesn't really matter, but they think some religious thing happened with this guy. And but they decide they're going to leave their native islands and go preach the message of the bitten one to other places in the world. When they do that, they can't use their own language to spread that message anymore because no one except the people on their island chain understands their local language. They have to use English, right? Because English is the global colonial language. So they translate that native term that was referring to a native

kind of, you know, unusual custom of getting bitten by snake to be, to be a ruler, right? They, they translate that word as bitten into English. And then they go out and preach the message of the bitten one in English. Now, in the English speaking world, they have to explain what they even mean by a bitten one, right? Because if someone rolled up to you and said, have you heard the good news of the bitten one, you'd be like, what does that even mean, right? Nobody knows what that means because we're not Polynesian. Right. We're not from this, this local culture. And we're not familiar with the whole snake biting.

We're not familiar with the snake biting thing. And honestly, at some point, it gets attenuated to the point that maybe the people preaching it to you don't even remember that original. They just call him the bitten one, because that's what he's known for as being the bitten one, right? But now they're using English. They weren't originally using English,

but now they're using English, okay? And so they're preaching the message of the bitten one in the United States, in England. And some people are converting. People who are not Polynesian, who never spoke that Polynesian language, but they hear about this this hypothetical potentially religious divine figure called the bitten one and they decide to convert to bittenism okay all right now some people

bitianity that's perfect i love it bitianity so in the english speaking world that word bitten has it's a native word that stretches back to old english this is this this word is attested in shakespeare's test in chaucer it's it's a good old english word all right so we have a thousand thousand plus year literary textual history of this word bitten. But it, but that doesn't, that those uses of the word bitten from a thousand years ago don't have anything to do with this new use from Polynesia of the word bitten. That's actually a translation of a local Polynesian term and a translation of a local Polynesian custom. Do we have texts about the bitten? Hold on. Hold on. Let's finish this. I just, I just made it up. I wish we do. I'm making this up. No, no, I'm asking you in

this hypothetical world. Oh, in the hypothetical, right? Because the Polynesian. Well, no, they probably They didn't write it down. No, they didn't write anything down either. They probably didn't. Yeah. It's strange. And it's not strange at all. Most cultures that have ever existed never had texts.

I mean, you agree with that, right? Most cultures that have existed have never had texts because most cultures that have existed have crap language. Okay, well, that's your judgment. That's fine. You're welcome to, I don't think that's why. I'm totally biased. All right.

That's fine. I just want to know if in your hypothetical example, if there was written. Why do these cultures always not leave anything? written. Most of them don't. If what you're saying is true, it gets destroyed. Interesting. So so so so so so so so so why. Can I say one more thing about yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So just one more thing in in English we have a rich tradition of vampire literature. Mm-hmm. And in vampire literature, there is a clear connection to the word bitten. Right? Like you're bitten by a vampire and then something happens, right? So when these when these missionaries from

Polynesia roll up into English-speaking places and they and they preach the message of the bitten one, some people think they're talking about vampires because we know that there is in fact in english you know this tradition of vampire literature right now if we understand the history there's this this this was not a vampire king okay from polynesia there's this there's this there's this uh local custom about being bitten by a snake but it doesn't have to do with vampires but a lot of people are going to think that it has to do with vampires and then when this new religious tradition gets loose in the global english speaking community some people are are going to start to worship the bitten one as a vampire lord because they misunderstand the original

meaning of it or they're just like hey i mean we got biting we got bitten ones in english they're vampires now from a historical perspective we would say well we know that that's not the original meaning of the word but there there there may well be people and there probably are going to be people in this hypothetical scenario who take who take this this religious figure this new religious figure from an ethnicity that's that's not even english um and from a language specifically that's not even english and they are going to say, oh, there's a connection. Okay, let me bring this back. You can probably already see where this is going.

Jews were a subject colonized population by Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great conquered that whole area, including Palestine, which is where Jews were living around Jerusalem in the 300s BC. Jews were not speaking Greek at the time that Alexander the Great colonized them. Yeah. Why would they? He was the one who brought the Greek. How about the Jews?

This is an Asian minor. One second. I don't want to derail this yet. So it's generally conceded that the Jews who were, living in and around Jerusalem, when Alexander showed up for the first time bringing Greek, we're speaking Aramaic. Hebrew was already a liturgical language by that point, but their living language was Aramaic, which, by the way, is why Jesus gets quoted.

What do you mean liturgical language? Liturgical is like Latin in the Catholic Church today. It's used in religious circumstances. Okay. But it's not a language that people speak every day with each other, you know, unless you're the Pope and you learn Latin or something. Okay. So that's what I mean by liturgical. So the Aramaic was like their regular language they used with each other on a daily basis. When you say that they were assuming they're using it, the Aramaic, is that because we have Aramaic texts?

We do. We have lots of Aramaic texts from the Second Temple period. Fantastic. Yeah. And some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible, aka Old Testament, are written in Aramaic, like a whole chunk of Daniels written in Aramaic. Yeah, which is probably from that period. All right.

So you have data. So you have data. That's data. Yeah. So Alexander is the great comes. Alexander, Great Comes. He's the one bringing Greek for the first time to Palestine. There's no evidence of Greek speakers in Palestine until Alexander comes.

But just like in my analogy or my metaphor or whatever, he's the colonial power who's coming and conquering this other area, just like the British come and conquer Polynesia and bring English. So Alexander's bringing Greek just like they're bringing English. There are local customs. They're obviously the Jews or their own ethnicity. They're not Greek. Okay. Of course, over the centuries, there's over 300 years between Alexander and Jesus. right? You have the upper crust of Jews learning Greek because it's the cosmopolitan language.

It's the elite language, just like in what I was saying, you would have upper level Polynesians maybe learning English so they could travel, they could talk to their English overlords, the colonial overlords, whatever, okay. But you still have most of the people, but the common people, the peasants who are not being educated, who are speaking the local traditional language of Aramaic and not Greek. Now, Jesus, Jesus is very likely one of them. This is where we're going to disagree, but Jesus was very likely one of those peasants. He doesn't seem to have come from a wealthy family.

He seems to have lived a poor peasant existence. And he's gathering his followers from the peasantry and not the upper level groups. He never goes to the elite cities where Greek is being spoken. So nobody who reads the Bible. How do we know that? Well, let's read the Bible. Let's go back to the text because you like the text. How do you know he didn't like?

I'm genuinely asking this. Bible scarring. How do you know that he didn't? How can you make the statement, Jesus never went to Alexandria? Well, we can't for sure, because here we go, for sure, right? What's going on? Sounds like a battery backup. Oh, God. Huh? We broke the system. Yeah. So should I pick up with like sort of, I already fleshed out the analogy, but like bringing it into what we're really talking about here. So you have Alexander, he's bringing Greek as the, this colonial language with all these conquests. The upper crust in these, among these local subject populations speak Greek,

but most of the peasants never learn it. They're still speaking their native language. In Egypt, they're speaking Coptic, which is the native Egyptian language. In Palestine, they're speaking Aramaic, because that's by this point the native Jewish language, all right? And everywhere else they're speaking anything, okay? All over the place, there's different subject languages. Barbarian letters.

Well, that's what the Greeks called them, right? The Greeks called them barbarians because the Greeks were a chauvinist. But most cultures are chauvinist at the end of the day. Because they don't speak Greek, man. Because they don't speak Greek. And it was all ethnicities. The Syrians spoke Greek. Well, at some point, they learned it, right?

At some point, at some point, at some point... Mother Greek went down and seduced them. They all abandoned the crap they were speaking and they embraced it just like the Judeans and Alexandria. Yeah. Just to make the point, I'll say, and if you go to a linguist school, they're never going to say that some languages are crap. Yeah, no. Of course not. That's your personal thing.

Fine. disagree on that, but that's neither here nor there. Right. That's fine. Just me. I'm on, I'm free to say that. So you're not. I would never have said that as a professor. I mean, I don't believe it, honestly. Like, I'm telling you what I believe I don't think that's true. Okay. So,

so to bring my analogy to, because that was all hypothetical with the Polynesians and everything else. Yeah. You have Jesus and oh, you know, we were talking and you wrote it the good point. How do we know Jesus didn't speak Greek? We don't. Okay, we're doing exactly what you want us to do, which is look at the text.

Okay, so every time Jesus is directly quoted, it's in Aramaic, like what we looked at. I know we just agree. I think I made my point. So it's in Aramaic. There's a couple other texts. Maybe when we come back, we can look at the other text. Whatever, neither here or there. So when he's quoted, it's in Aramaic.

And again, his earliest followers are these peasant Jews who seem to be speaking Aramaic and not Greek. You have John writing the Book of Revelation in Greek. And he's a Jewish guy. But his Greek looks like a guy who learned Greek as a second language as an adult, and he's making some basic grammatical mistakes. Like a second language learner. Okay, like somebody who moved from, who learned a local native language,

but then moved to London and had to learn English as an adult. And he never gets quite comfortable with it. But then he has to, that's what Revelation looks like in Greek. I know you're familiar with the Greek of Revelation. It's pretty trippy, right? It's pretty true. Anyways, I wouldn't say it uneducated. I didn't say an educated.

I didn't say an educated. People criticize Peter, too. They say, ah, it's Greek, isn't it? Fuck you, man. Peter's awesome. His Greek is great. I worked with an M-Div on Peter. And I can't, I can't fall to his style, baby.

People say he's not as good as Paul. Fuck you, you know what I mean? In First Peter, he says that he wrote this letter, Dia Soluonu, which means through the agency of Solvannis, who's a Greek guy, which means that Peter, as a, native Aramaic speaker is probably telling this content to his friend who's bilingual and Aramaic and Greek and Solvannis is writing it in Greek form. So vanis is his bitch.

Sure. And he does exactly what he should do. Scribes are very common. So is Mark, man. Mark ends up his bitch too. And he's right. How are you defining bitch here again? And he's what's your specific technical?

Define bitch. What's the technical? Somebody who is subservient. His servant. To another. Is there right? No, not technically a slave, right? It doesn't have to be that, right?

Okay. Akalutho, I'm your attendant. Follower, attendant. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. Okay, right. So, so Jesus, just like our local Polynesian,

bitten one, there's a local Jewish custom of anointing kings. And usually it's with olive oil, all right? Maybe Amin would have some theory about the... It was a Jewish custom of anointing kings with olive oil. Yeah, and it goes all the way back throughout the Bible. Every Jewish king, and sometimes priests and prophets as well. They get olive oil poured on their heads, which is a local custom. The Greeks, Romans don't do this, but Jews do it.

And that's their traditional way of showing that you've been inaugurated. Okay, the example I always use because everyone's going to get it is it's like putting your hand on the Bible and saying the oath when you become president. If you think about it, that's kind of a weird custom. Yeah. That's how we Americans do it. Yeah. And that's how we show, okay, you have now become this new thing that's important, right? Yeah.

And different cultures have different things. And this made-up culture from Polynesia, you get bitten with a snake. In Judaism, in Jewish culture, you get olive oil oil oil in your head. You get anointed. All right. Right. So when you have been anointed, you are the anointed one. Just like once you have been bitten, you're the bitten one.

Right. In Hebrew, that native word is Messiah, which means anointed one. this person who has that oil poured on their head. Literally, that's all that word means, okay? You get oil part in your head, now you're the king. And so people can refer to the king as the anointed one, the one who has been anointed in the past and therefore is in a state of being anointed. That's what a past participle does.

And they're trying to translate this into Greek. They are translating into Greek with Christos. With Christos. Because Christos is a past participle in Greek that means anointed one. That's all they're doing. So just like you translate the local Polynesian word. I want to register. He's made an error.

Just like. You can correct them in a minute. Yeah, try to correct me, yeah. So, Oh, somebody's a challenge, baby. You've got to restrain that. You know what I mean? Your people and your faculty, you'll be like, oh, that's all right.

You can't so. He's rolling. He's going. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. So, we've been bringing it on with each other this whole time. Good.

Yeah, let's keep doing it. Let's keep doing it. Luke. So you have the anointed one. It's in the, in the, in the Hebrew. Right. And then just like the word bitten in this local Polynesian language is not the English word bitten.

It's some other word. I didn't even bother making. one up sure that's the that's the equivalent of a Messiah in this case got it's a local it's a local word it's a local custom and then after the death and as his followers believe the resurrection of Jesus whom they declared to be the anointed one they were waiting for they called him the anointed one right which is which is which is by the way as you as you probably know we transliterate that even the Greeks transliterate that as Messiah remember I said that the Greeks don't have the

sure that's the exact point I remember they don't yeah okay yeah let's let's let's let's let's Let's start that. We have a Greek word messias, right? Yeah, which is a transliteration of the Ehrim, Christ is not Misiah. Christ is Christing. Okay, anyway. All right.

So you have the local Hebrew word. Sometimes the Greeks do transliterate that Hebrew word as Misias, which we just talked about. Sometimes they do what's called a calque, C-A-L-Q-U-E, which is a loan translation, which means that you translate a word as you're borrowing it into your language. Okay? So they borrow this local Jewish,

custom of anointing rulers. And when somebody has been anointed, that person is the Messiah, the anointed one, the person who has had oil port on the heads to show that they're a king. No, no, no, Christos is a native Greek word. But then when they take that language into the cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world that was created by Alexander, the colonial world, they can't speak Aramaic anymore because no one will understand them. Just like the local Polynesians can't speak their local Polynesian language if they come to London or New York City. They have They have to translate everything into English, and they translate that term as the bitten one, because that's the English word, right? In the same way, when those local Aramaic peasants who are following Jesus and believe that he was resurrected and is the king that was to come, and they call him the anointed one, the Mishiak as a result, they translate that term as Christos.

Yes. Because that's the Greek equivalent of Mishak. Now, when that term gets loose out there in the Greek-speaking cosmopolitan colonial world, just like in my, just like what I was saying, that some people are going to make a connection with vampires because there's this vampire literature in English, and it involves biting and being bitten and all these other things. So also, once you get the message of the Machiach, aka the Christos,

Jesus Christ, as we would call him, which is a past participle, someone who has that oil poured on his head, anointed, right? or as you would call it Christ, you're going to have Greeks hearing this message who are radically divorced from the original Jewish context. They don't know Aramaic. Why would they? It's a local language within the Greek-speaking world. And those people might think that Christos has something to do with drugs, that Jesus is a drug lord because Christos can, like inject, can be a drug term, right? Just like bitten. We use the word bitten all the time in English. It doesn't have to be a vampire.

We would think it's a vampire. Yeah, you might think it's a vampire. You don't have to. Drugs and sex, don't leave out the sex element because even Jeb, the great classicist, you know Jeb? Yeah, Jeb Bush, of course. Fantastic. No, we're talking about a great classicist who's already pointed out that Christing is used with drugs to induce sexuality. I think this is a little far of field.

just discussed. The fieltr. This is a, yeah, yeah. Wernona, you were talking about messias, weren't you? Yeah, I want you to respond to what I just said. Okay. Like, where's, where's there? No, no, I'm done.

So, so, so what Luke just said seems to make sense to a dumb, dumb like me. Like that, that seems to make logical sense. That what he was saying about the, the Jew speaking Aramaic and Alexander the Great, bringing in the Greek, the people who were divorced from, who didn't know, understand the Aramaic, they're used to the word, Christos, that is being associated with injection or applying something to the skin. They might confuse that Machia word with a drug term. Right. Right. You are meant to be confused by all of this.

Remember, this is a thought experiment, correct? You're not talking about actual sources. I created an analogy based on the sources that we have from the ancient world. They talk about the history that will happen. I have no clue. I have no clue if there is any element of reality in what was just spoken. So Jews didn't speak Arabic ever? I know, I know that we have texts and that those texts tell us about who is speaking what and we don't have.

You've read Josephus, right? Josephus talks about this. Josephus is writing in Greek, perfect beautiful Greek, perfect beautiful Greek, perfect beautiful. for Greek, it's a pleasure to read Josephus. He probably had a scribe helping him with that. It's a pleasure. Who is Josephus? He's a Jewish guy.

Despite the farting, phylo too, right? Philo Judeas, right? So, just like today, Jews were scattered all over the, well, the Mediterranean at that point. And so they spoke different languages, just like Jews today. Jews in America are going to speak English. Jews in Sweden are going to speak Swedish, whatever. And so you had Jews living in Palestine who were speaking Aramaic. were speaking Aramaic. That was the Jewish homeland. That's their native, that's their native

homeland, right? They're speaking their traditional language, which at that point was Aramaic, after they came back from the Babylonian exile. Jews as they went out into different parts of the world, just like Jews today, oftentimes spoke whatever the local language was as their original language. Okay. So Jews in Egypt were 100% speaking Greek as their first language in Egypt. He's true. He's educated. Philo. Oh, yeah, Philo is. Filo is educated. He's quoting. Okay. He's not a Palestinian, too. Okay. Fantastic. Greek sources. Okay.

For somebody to say that that's not Greek. Of course it's Greek. Who said that? He's stewing. A professor from Haifah said he is writing in Jewish Greek. Okay. Josephus? Josephus, the Septuagint, Philo.

It's a dialect of Greek, yes. No, it's not. It doesn't exist. Okay, do you believe there is. There is no Jewish Greek. It's just Greek. I'm telling you, I read it all the time. It's just the same fucking language.

This is something we need to. to come back to in the next interview because we didn't actually get into this. Do you think there's a difference between Coyne and when I say classical Greek? Do you think there's a difference? It's a later version, right? Classical evolves into Coyne Cic. Is Coyne Greek? Is Coyne Greek? Of course it is. It's a different stage. It's a classicist like yourself qualified to read Coyne Greek. Just tell me that. Yes. Okay. What's your point? So what we're being flotted with is people saying, no, no, no, this guy is an expert in classical Greek, not Coyne. It's stupid misconceptions.

You're saying people are saying that about you? Yeah. It's stupid misconceptions like this that come from the biblical side. People saying, let me state it very simply, Amon has a PhD in classical Greek. He's not qualified to read the Coyne Greek because it's a different language. Okay, I disagree with that. It's bullshit, isn't it? Of course it is.

Yeah, exactly. They are different dialects, but not that different. Not that different. Okay, you can go between them. What is the koine from? Which dialect is it coine of? It mostly comes from Attic Ionic Greek. Yes, very nice.

Gorgeous. See, he knows what he's talking about. Right? Fantastic. So this is the thing that is replacing the little languages of the backwaters like Judea. to admit, Judea is a shithole. Nobody wants to go to Judea. The governors that are getting assigned there, it's punishment, right? So we have no system of education. When Jesus comes back from Egypt, because he was given a shit ton of money from the magi, and you're well

familiar with what a Magus is, correct? Oh, course. Because you teach ancient magic. Yeah, they're Maggi, not wise men. Yeah. Sure. When he goes with all the gold. What are the Magi? Oh, that's a whole other thing. Just like for people, just for people that are listening.

Yeah, I actually think this is a whole other hour we could do just on this topic. It's where the word magic comes from, but it doesn't mean magic necessarily. They were, it comes from a Persian word. Speaking of Persian and Persian that we have left, the priests of the Persian religion, which was the rastrianism were called Magush. And that was the regular word in old Persian for the priesthood. Okay. Yeah.

The Greeks heard about them, and they borrowed that word into Greek. And they called them Magoi, which is the closest they got to that. It was pretty similar, obviously. They know the drugs. They're known for practicing the pharmacia. All the drug works. Right. They're the ones bringing us in the gift Jesus, all the gold and the frankincense and the myrrons and the mure.

The frankincense of the mure bases for drugs. When he comes back from Egypt. It's also just valuable spices. When he comes back from Egypt. plus venoms. When he comes back from Egypt. Which gift of the wise men was that? It's the guy who put it in his buttocks.

I don't remember that in the text. That's how they administer it. Hmm. No, I'm not kidding you. The doctors are talking about this, right? Even Diascorides talks about the Magoy and what they do with the drugs. So you're making the case that Jesus, there's texts that connect Jesus to drug use. Yes.

Quite literally. Yes. When he came back from Egypt, he goes to the temple and he's, you know, he's just a kid, but he's outsmarting the people that are there because it's backwater shithole. He went to an educated Egypt to Alexandria. It's only unified in its Greek that you were talking about. You think he didn't speak Greek? Of course he did.

Christos, that's a Greek concept. So deities. is a Greek concept, right? I only know of one early halfway anything reliable reference to Jesus going to Egypt is when he's a baby and he comes back while he's still a baby. I don't know of anything early that ever

says he goes to Egypt. Now, we've seen, because remember that very first thing we looked at, we saw that there's all these crazy stories about Egypt, sorry about Jesus, Egypt too, from hundreds of years later, they may or may not be reliable. Often they're not. So you're saying, let's look at the text, and I'm saying,

reliable. Okay, this is perfect. I'm glad you said that. This is something I don't do. I used to, but I don't do it anymore. I don't discriminate between the Bible, the New Testament, and any of the other Christian literature, any of it that's contemporary. I read it all, the apocryphal stuff, everything. I read it too, but I do discriminate. And there's a very good historical, methodological reason I discriminate in any historian would. And that is that we go by the principle, the earlier, the better. So this is true for any historical event, not just about Jesus. I mean, we use this for everything. If you call witnesses into a courtroom, actually, you know, let's, we can do this with anything. Yeah. If you have a source that that was written, let's say it's the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Sure. Lots of, lots of theories. Let's say you have a source from 1964 about it. Right. And we know it's written in 1964. And then you have a source from today. I don't know. They made something up yesterday, or maybe not made something up, but they wrote something yesterday and it's not necessarily based on earlier sources, you're going to be more likely to just, just a priori, judge that the 1964 source is more likely to be reliable. Right. Then the 2025 source. Now, that's not a guarantee. That's not a guarantee. There could have been some... Contemporary. No, I totally agree. You need contemporary sources. So we need to discriminate. We need to discriminate based on age of the text. If we can date the text, right? So I think

we should discriminate. Now, if I, quote, quote, discriminate in favor of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it's not for a religious reason. It's for a historical reason. Those are the four earliest stories we have about Jesus, or sources we have about Jesus. All of this stuff that's coming from 200s, 300s, 400s, we know there's all this mythology that grows up about Jesus in those intervening centuries, right? That doesn't mean it's all made up. Okay, so when we put something up on the screen from 350 or something. He's 370. I'm not saying all, it's all fake. We should throw it out. I'm not saying that's the same principle. I'm saying methodologically, it's a lot less likely to be true than something written 30 years after he walked the earth.

Right. That's the principle. That's why I think diascortes is so important because you need contemporary data to back up. And Christing, if you want to see more about Christing than any other source, go look in diiscortes, dude. Right? It's, you've got more. Christing there than anywhere. And it's exactly. In the Greek tradition. Exactly. Contemporary with Jesus.

It's perfect. Nobody pays attention to that. So it's philumines. Right? So antidotes. Antidotes. Right? It's all there.

So what is the best connection in your view, Amon, that Jesus had anything to do with actual drug use? His title, right? But he just explained that. He just explained. What we, the history of his title is most important. By the time Jesus Christ is called the Christed one.

There is a thousand years of popular history to Christing. It is something that is featured on the democratic stage of fucking out. Athens. Right. Yeah, it's a Greek word. As well as 300. No, no, no, no, Christing. The actual verb Christing is what I'm talking about. Creole. All the forms. Look, we're all about the language. But they were using it way before Jesus. Right. And they were also using it way after Jesus's time and after Jesus's time. Right. You take a look and figure out the best evidence that you're talking about comes from his contemporaries. What are the contemporaries saying?

And when you jump into that pond, you're going to find sex drugs and mystery ritual that involves the consumption of semen by a bunch of child traffickers. And that's why Jesus is screaming out when he's arrested. I am not a laystays. You could have arrested me at any time. Why did you come out here with all the weapons? I am not a lace stays. That's something that we should definitely talk about.

next time. Yeah, that's a whole other thing. I think we need hours. At least as our late days. Yeah. Can we save that? Can we come back for that? Did you read Lution? Yeah, I'm familiar with it. Let's come back for that. Let's come back for that. Yeah. If we can. Yeah. No, that's, that's something that I'm definitely fascinated by. And, um, yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to short shrift that. Right. Yeah. Okay. We'll do a part two to that then. Yeah. Well, thank you guys. I think, this has been fantastic. I think there's definitely a lot. I think there's definitely a lot more for us to discuss. We should definitely set up a part two. And yeah, I have tons, I have tons more questions. I feel like we're only halfway through this, but that's what I feel

too. I think that's why we needed part two. Yeah. I just wish we could have talked about some of the Christings like I was looking forward to the shit Christing and yeah. Christing virgin breasts and little boys. Did you see that one in there? I mean, I try to avoid little boys. Personally, I know, but did you see that and all the Christings that I sent both, let the world hear it. Yeah. I sent both of these champions. I sent them all the Christings with the sex stuff and Christing, your balanos fried. There's no doubt that Christos was a term that could be a drug term that was used going back a thousand years.

I don't think there's a debate. Did you get all the sex stuff I said? There's sex stuff in there too, sure. A lot of graphic sex stuff, right? Well, of course. With saviors. Yeah, Sotera was a Greek word that was very complicated that later got applied to Jesus. And it has a pharmaceutical history.

You would love that. It's a history. I love words. I'm a philologist. We should talk about that. We're definitely going to talk about this. One quick thing, completely unrelated to any of this, I want to ask before we wrap it up.

The Isaiah Scroll. found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic texts from a thousand AD. There are people who say that it's like a miracle that the Masoretic text of Isaiah match the Isaiah scroll word for word. First of all, is that real? Second of all, what do you make of that claim? Yeah, I would want to actually, and maybe we can, maybe I can answer this question in part two just because I want to be as responsible as possible. I haven't compared compared them word for word personally.

Okay. I will say in general, because I do know this, that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of them matched the MT, the Masoretic text, whose earliest copies we still have are from a thousand years later, and some don't. So those are all over the place. I want to double check the Isaiah Scroll before I say anything. Okay. Yeah.

Can I just say, no fucking way. Do you have that much time and the transmission of the text is exact? No way. A thousand years. a miracle. I will say it's possible. That would make me believe in God if that was real. Here's why I know it's possible. We've talked about India. I took three semesters of Sanskrit. The Rig Veda, the earliest texts of the Sanskrit or the Hindu religion that are written in very early, very early, early Sanskrit. They were handed down orally for, I think around 2,000 years before they were written down.

And they are pristine. I mean, they look exactly like we would think from the early. release level of Sanskrit. I mean, linguists think that they almost didn't change a single word in 2000 years in Hinduism. But also wouldn't it be possible for for people to be copying that scroll? Like when they hid those scrolls in those in those pots or whatever, isn't it also possible that there was many other copies existing? There were. And that were being copied up until that time. There were multiple copies. The Dead Sea community had their copies. Other people in Jerusalem and elsewhere would have had their copies as well. When does the first copy of the Hebrew Bible emerge?

Like complete copy? Yes. Yeah, I think it's 11th century. The oldest one that still exists. Now, the reason, and I know you know this, is not because there weren't earlier copies. You don't think they invented it in the 11th century, do you? I'm wondering if it was a process of not just at one time, but a process. Why don't we have like consistent copies?

That's what I don't understand. It's a Masoretic invention, right? The vowels are a masoretic invention. The vowel points. They were the ones who started writing the vowels, so the continental text is older. The vowel points probably go back to the 7th century. Isn't it possible?

And why does every, all the translators, why do they use just that Masoretic text? I wouldn't want to just use the Masoretic text. I would want to look at the subduzant. I would want to look at the Vulgate. Because you know, why didn't they? Good Bible translations look at all those. They don't just look at the empty.

Are there good Bible translation? What would you recommend? Yeah, I would recommend learning Hebrew and reading it. Okay. For the, okay. Just like learning Greek. Learning Greek and reading it. That's a shame, though, isn't it?

What's a shame? Learning the original language? What is the Greek? No, if this is my thought experiment, I get one too. What if the Greek is the original? Then you're doing yourself a huge disservice. I read the Greek too. Yeah.

I study the translation because we both agree. there's a translation going on here. 99.9% of the world, including me, thinks it's Hebrew to Greek. You think it's Greek to Hebrew, but we both agree it's a translation. And what did you think about the Tohu, Waboho, Waboho? Can you just like sum it up? Going from these really sophisticated concepts and Greek to these really basic, and it means the same thing, empty and empty.

Yeah, I'm still not sure of your logic as to why you think it has to go in one direction. I don't understand that. Okay, so if you do have this Hebrew original and you're translating it into Greek, You're going to see Tohu wabohu, which both mean empty, and somehow you're going to get two concepts of Aoratos. And I got the Skables Toast. They're totally different. Well, that's how translation works.

You have to choose the best word you have in the target language. Why didn't they just choose empty? Because they didn't want to. Why does any translator choose any word? It's a stylistic choice. Do you understand why it sounds suss to me? I don't think I do. I mean, I want to understand.

I do genuinely want to understand. the Greeks had a rich philosophical tradition so they had complicated words like aorostos and Akadastkawastos right that's fine so they had those linguistic technology you want to call it that linguistic technology all right that they could just okay

let's plug this into this word all right Hebrew had Tohu Wabohu now we don't know what kind of Hebrew philosophical tradition preceded the cataclysmic destruction yeah because nothing survives well the Torah survives and the rest of it

besides the Torah. Nothing. None of this rich literature. And the archaeology. Right. And those goddamn silver tablets. By the way, I do think we should bring this up again in part two. First of all, I think it's a good discussion we had.

Yeah. I think there's more that both of us could bring to bear. I have other points. I made a list of about 10. I got through three of them. What are something of mine? We'll do the replay. And I'm sure you can bring more.

I have many more points that I could make as to why arguments for why the Septuagint, the Greek is a translation of the Hebrew. the other way around. Right. And I'd like to hear what he has to say about those. Fantastic. Everybody, this has been super fascinating. I think, I think this has been a great discussion between both you guys. You guys obviously respect each other's expertise. You guys share the same passion for these languages. And this has been super informative for me. And at the very least, I think what this discussion is going to do is going to bring more inquiry into this stuff and bring more interest into this classics,

the study of classics and the ancient language and all this stuff. And thank you guys so much for your time. Can I say one thing before you finish? Yes. This is the first time that you've seen somebody trained in the dojo. Do you understand why I say now that without the classicist, you've got the Bible scholars and they're not up to snuff? They really don't work with these texts, right?

They just kind of do a little peripheral and pull in and BS and people are supposed to follow them. Yeah. But this is a classicist today, Luke, who has stepped forward. And do you see how the training is different? Yeah. And that's why I say, I can spot it. Yeah. I can't, I want to thank you for bringing that force.

Yes. And Luke, thank you for engaging. It's been a long battle for me to get somebody with training to be able to sit here and talk to. And I know you don't think that Jesus was arrested in a public park. We'll get to that. That'll be part to that. It'll come. Let's see it.

Thank you guys both. Luke. Where can people find more about you online or read your work or anything like that? Yeah. I have a side project that's a YouTube show. channel called Word Safari that's pretty small. It doesn't deal with any of this stuff except etymology. So I deal with a lot of Greek and Latin roots on that channel. And it's all about English, to be clear like that. That is about English words that come from Greek and Latin. And I think you

agree with that, right? There's nothing controversial here, right? Yeah, I've watched it. Your audience must be totally brainy nerd. They have some very smart comments. Yeah, I always appreciate the comments. You know, there's episodes on the origin of the alphabet, you know, from Greek, Phoenician, all the way back. Yeah. So, so yeah, and I think, and I think you said you watched a few episodes. We probably don't have any argument about this stuff, right? Origins of English and Greek and Latin.

Every once in a while, some kind of origin, I'll be like, yeah, that's possible, but they don't know for sure. You know what I mean? Just kind of like that. As I've been saying, there's a lot we don't know for sure. And I think you have, I am comfortable with that. I'm not. As a classicist, I'm comfortable with not knowing things for sure

because we're just never going to know for sure. 100% for sure. Right. We can take the odds in Vegas and we go from there. You're optimistic. I'm going to be negative and say no. And we're a good foil. We're a good foil for each other. We're providing both sides. Let's go, Christ. Amen, Lady Babylon on YouTube.

That's the main place people can find you. We'll link both of those YouTube channels below for everyone who wants to learn more. And I'm very much looking forward to part two. Thank you, Danny, for the opportunity. My pleasure. Good night, everybody.