Bible Expert ERUPTS on End Times Prophecy, the Anti-Christ & Christian Israel Links | Dan Hummel
00:10 Dan, thanks for coming in, man. Great to have you here. It's great to be here. So Alessie Alamon, who's working me for a very long time, has had a chance to talk with you. And he said, you are the guy when it comes to looking at modern day religion through the scope of geopolitics and how things have been maybe, you know, changed all over the place. So how'd you even end up like covering this kind of topic? It's obviously like hot button at the moment right now, but certainly a tough space where there's people with a lot of opinions in it. Yeah, so I'm a historian. So I came to all the stuff we're going to talk about today from being trained as a historian.
00:49 I was really interested as a grad student in merging diplomatic history, which is how you, you know, study sort of the relations between different states and then religious history. And there's a bunch of different topics you could do on that. But the one I picked was Christian Zionism. I didn't pick it in 20, this was like early 2010s. I didn't do it because it was, it wasn't particularly high. topic then. I mean, it was something that some people had studied and some hadn't. But I grew up an evangelical Christian. I sort of knew a bit of this world of the evangelical arguments for
01:23 supporting Israel. Where'd you grow up? I grew up, so I was a missionary kid. So my parents were Christian missionaries. And that meant that we moved around a lot. So I was born in Orange County, California. Both my parents are from there. But then moved to Texas when I was a baby and then ultimately moved to Germany. So ages. three to seven. I was in Germany. You were doing some missions. There's no Tom Cruise missions. That's right.
01:45 My parents were for sure. Actually, it was a really exciting time for them as American Christian missionaries. This would be in the late 80s. So there was still in East and West Germany. And they were there and we were there as a family when the Berlin Wall came down in 89. And then the country reunified as what we know today is Germany. And so East Germany was communist up until then and was very much opposed to organized religion, particularly sort of American Christianity. So my parents were there and got to work in a
02:16 very, what we call in the mission world, sort of an open field at that point. So right after reunification, there was a bunch of church planting and growing in East Germany. So we were there for four years, moved back to California, and then ultimately landed in Colorado Springs, which in the 90s was one of the hot spots for evangelical organizations moving. And cheap land, growing. growing economy, sort of centrally located if you think it's not on either the coast, so you can fly to both the coast a little quicker. And a beautiful place, Rocky Mountain. Yeah, it's gorgeous right there. So I ended up spending a pretty normal middle school, high school in Colorado, Colorado Springs. I met my wife in Colorado Springs. We ended up dating all
03:00 through college at Colorado State. That's where I really got interested in history, was at Colorado State and particularly history that I was in middle school when 9-11 happened. Iraq War followed when I was in high school. So I was very interested in foreign policy and the Middle East in particular. So at Colorado State, I majored in history and philosophy. And then I went back. We were just talking about this before. I graduated in 2007.
03:29 Job market is pretty rough. So as many people who graduated with a history. history degree do, they just go back and do more schooling. And that's what I did. And so I ended up taking classes in Arabic, the language, and then Middle East history, and really got into that. So I ended getting a master's degree in Middle East studies at Colorado State. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. You still speak Arabic a little bit? I do not. I never really spoke it. I was really interested in reading it. So as a historian, the sort of
04:03 the coin of the realm is being able to read sources. And so as someone who is interested in diplomatic history, you want to be able to read the transcripts or the memos that are being sent between different officials. So I didn't, you know, that was part of the frustration of taking Arabic out of a place like Colorado State is they really emphasize the, you could say, the social and casual talking or verbal skills. And I was really interested in like pretty narrow vocation. cab on government functions and things like that. I didn't really care about those. Does that say
04:38 bomb? Please. Come on. Intelligence and, you know, economic terms and all that kind of stuff. So, so I know, I can't speak it. But I did have that training and that fit into my PhD program at University of Wisconsin where I ended up taking Hebrew, modern Hebrew. And I did actually more of that than the Arabic because of the topic I picked Christian Zionism. I was very interested in understanding how did the Israeli government think about and perceive American Christianity? And what year is that where you're in grad school looking at that approximately? Yeah, so I went to, we moved to Madison, my wife and I in 2010. Okay.
05:16 So from 2010 to 2015, I graduated 2016. I was at Madison. I spent a year in Israel. There's a great exchange program with a, it's called the Mosse program at UW with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So every year there's a bunch of students that go to the Hebrew U from, UW Madison and vice versa. So there's these, I, I, what was that like?
05:38 It was crazy. It was a really interesting year. This was 2012. It was basically July 2012 to July 2013. There was a Gaza incursion during that. I believe it was a pillar of smoke or something was the name of the operation. And it was the first time I'd ever had like a missile siren in my life. So that happened for a few weeks.
06:01 There were a bunch of missile sirens. You know, we were students, so, or I was a student, and so we were very, we lived on a little the whole year, but we got to live right down next to the old city, which is the sort of, you know, historic space. We were about five-minute walk from there on Yafo Street. So it was an eye-opening year. I had very little knowledge on the personal knowledge of Israel as a country, of the West Bank, of any of that stuff. What did you think of it living there for a full year? So growing up in the evangelical world, you are presented with a very spiritual and sort of, yeah, spiritual and clean, I guess you could say, image of what Israel is like.
06:48 And I think a lot of people who go on a tour of Israel, particularly Christians in America, they spend 10 to 14 days there. I think they get that view because they get to see the nice things that are built specifically for tourists. When you live there, you realize it's no different than any other place on the planet in a lot of ways. I mean, there's plumbing and there's electricity. That's good. You know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but growing up in a religious home where Israel, the nation of visual, sort of spoken about is like fulfillment of prophecy, you just get a high view of like, oh, this must be like there's some liminal space I'm going to cross and it's going to be something more than what the rest of the earth is. Then you take a shit in your toilet clogs and it's all reality.
07:29 I got shit. That's right. And people are just as, or maybe even more, there are a lot of nice people there, but, you know, just as grumpy and short with each other as anywhere else. It definitely opens your eyes to the reality of the occupation. You know, we lived in downtown Jerusalem. It wasn't more than five miles away. Are major checkpoints that if you're not an American citizen or Israeli citizen, you can't really, you know, cross at any point. And where do they, where do those checkpoints go into?
07:57 The ones I'm thinking about the West Bank. Okay. So Jerusalem is sort of right on the eastern edge of the pre-1967 lines. That's right. And in fact, East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967, and that's one of these things that's being, you know, in some future diplomatic solution, something with East Jerusalem will have to happen. So that's even closer than five miles. I mean, that would have been a 10-minute walk for me. But East Jerusalem's different. It was annexed, so it's open flow. Anyone can sort of go on either side of the city. but not the case in the West Bank. Before you took this year, by the way, how long had you been in grad school at that point studying specifically like Christian Zionism-related topics?
08:39 Oh, Christian-Zinian specifically very little. So the first couple years of a PhD program, you're doing general classes. So you take a class on American Economic History and another one on religious history. So I knew almost nothing. I read, after you take those classes, you have to do what is called a prospectus
08:56 for your dissertation. So you have to write up about 20 pages and say, this is what I want to study and this is what I intend to find. It's a total shot in the dark. You're sort of just trying to project like what you think you'll find. So I'd read maybe, you know, five books or something on modern Israel and Christian Zionism. So I had very little background knowledge. I was reading a lot. That whole sort of in the six months to the lead up, I was reading a bunch of articles and stuff.
09:23 Was it was any of it morphing your opinion? to something new as opposed to what you had just heard growing up. I'm going to come back to your childhood a little bit, but I like staying with this because this is interesting. You spent a full year there early on. Yeah, yeah. So one of the biggest, there were a ton of things I just had no idea about before moving there. One of the ones specific on my topic was when I read about Christian Zionism from largely
09:50 American historians and political scientists, I assumed it was mostly an American movement. I assume the most, and there's a sort of famous or infamous, whatever, journal articles from the 80s and 90s that would talk about the oddness of like Southern Baptist preachers meeting with Israeli officials and how like big clash of cultures that is. When I went there, I realized actually the Christians who are interested in Israel for prophecy reasons or theological reasons, the vast majority of them are not American. They're Christians from what we call the global south. So from South America, from Africa, from Israel. Like in terms of numbers, I went, I went to different sort of, as an observer, went to rallies. One of them had 5,000 people in room. I would guess there were no more than a few hundred Americans.
10:35 As an observer. As an observer, that's right. I did actually a lot of that. That's one of the things that is not, historians tend not to do that as much as a anthropologist or something. But, no, I was not waving my flag at the same time. You didn't put the fist in the air just to pretend to blend in? It's also a different type of Christianity. So the typical Christians at these things are very charismatic.
11:00 They speak in tongues. They raise their hands. This is very common in that world. I didn't grow up in that world. So I felt out of the place just even though we're all sort of Christians. It was not my type of worship music. It was not I don't speak in tongues. I don't sort of, I mean, I remember there were healings happening in the room.
11:20 You know, people claiming to be healed from long-term sicknesses and things like that. in tongues though yeah you know what that is like the Voldemort kind of speak the snake uh a version of of that well I don't that would be really offensive to the to the Pentecostals but the idea is that the Holy Spirit gifts is sort of like speaking through you and it's in a language that you don't understand but it's a holy language so um this is very I mean there's hundreds of millions of Christians who do this um hundreds of millions oh yeah yeah around the world for sure yeah Does it have any like real patterns to it or is it just like making sounds? I'm a little skeptical, sorry.
12:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many people are skeptical. As we get older, many of us fight the good old battle of trying to keep good, healthy hair up top. And one of the best things you can do for healthy hair upkeep is using red light therapy. That's why you got to check out my friends at I Restore and their red light therapy cap, I Restore Elite, especially if you've experienced thinning, shedding, sparse areas, or any hair concerns this product is for you. I Restore makes it easy to bring clinically backed red light
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13:57 Oh, she's a real gem. You can get YouTube videos of her speaking in tongues. Yeah, that's not exactly an endorsement for it. Yeah, in most cases, the tongue being spoken is, it's only, it's sort of a, again, I'm on the outside of it. But no one understands it except for the Holy Spirit. So the original, so this is about 100 and so years old, 1906 is when the Pentecostal movement started. The original first years after that, so 1906 to 1916 say, what was meant by speaking in tongues was a miraculous ability to speak in another human language that you didn't know. So you could go to get back to like missionary work.
14:38 You could go as just a total uneducated in the sense of like Japanese language to Japan and the Holy Spirit would gift you the ability to speak in Japanese when you got there. And so there were reports of that. They were, of course, plenty of people were skeptical even within the Christian world. But that was the original idea of what speaking in tongues was it developed over time to be something that was much more about this language that no one can understand. Now, other people might have the gift of translating it. That's another one of these gifts. You translate? The thing that no one else can understand.
15:13 But in most cases, that's not happening. It's only sort of an utterance that you're supposed to basically acknowledge the spiritual power of the person doing it. Dave, can we pull up Paula Dean doing the tongue stuff? Paula Kane, White Kane. Paula White Kane, I think is the- Sorry, I did that on another podcast. I'm sorry, Paula Dean, that's twice now. Damn it.
15:35 Yeah, it's Paula Kane White. Is that what he said? Paula White Kane. Paula White-Cain. And Kane is the Journey guy, I think. Yeah. All right. So she really does this.
15:46 Is this Paula White speaking in tongues with subtitles? We should leave the subtitles. This might be the gift of translation right here. All right, let's see. No, you got out of Scythia. Power! So the idea, too, is when they do the video on the crowd, is that a lot of those people are doing the same thing, but they don't have the mic. Right. But yeah, so that's a version of that is one of the things I experienced going to these Christian Zionist rallies in Israel.
16:40 And that was just totally, so again, if you read the literature still, I think, this is the case, though there's been a lot of good literature in recent years. But still when you read the literature, you assume what you're going to see is a bunch of Southern Baptists who are pro-Israel. And they're there, but they're like in a little corner of the stadium or the auditorium. And the vast majority of these people are from Nigeria or Brazil or South Korea. And they're still very pro-Israel. We don't care about them as much when we talk about geopolitics because Brazil and Nigeria aren't as important geopolitically as the U.S. is to the fate of the state of Israel. But in terms of numbers, there's way more of them there. So that was one of the things I wrote a book in 2019. It was my dissertation turned into a book where I spend an extra year
17:27 writing that to get a handle on like what is what's now called global Christian Zionism. What is this movement that is somewhat connected to the American political religious scene, but also its own life and to try to sort of see how are those things connected and how are they basically different phenomena. All right. Can I pull you back for one second and then we'll come back around to that? And I just want to get an idea of like some of the origins of how you looked at this. So you'd mentioned at the beginning as a child, you were the son of Christian missionary. So your parents were obviously highly involved living out their Christian spirit like in the best kind of way, traveling the world, trying to spread the word. But that means as I'm taking it, it was really
18:08 ingrained in you from a young child that you were going to be an evangelical Christian. This is what we believe and, you know, this is what it is. Like, how would you describe how you came to believe in, like, the religion of Christianity? Was it just something that was always there, therefore you believed, or did you have your own journey with it growing up where you're like, okay, I buy this, I don't buy that, yada, yada. You're asking me for my testimony. Right. That's what we called in the evangelical world. Right. So, yeah, I did, I never had, I don't remember a time where I didn't sort of just assume Christianity was true, having grown up in it. But I do have my sort of conversion story or the day, I don't know the actual date, but when I was seven,
18:47 so this was back, we moved back from Germany. We were in California for a year before moving to Colorado. I remember walking with my dad along the street that our house was on and doing a version of what's called the sinner's prayer. So like praying to God that I'm a sinner. I need forgiveness. I, you know, I'm asking you to come into my heart, Jesus, and I want to follow you, that type of prayer. So I sort of date my formal status as a Christian, I guess you could say, to that. So I was seven. I never had like a huge rebellious phase where I rejected all that and tried out other religions or something. But I definitely in college, I was a history and philosophy major at a major state school. So most of my professors were not Christians. Some of the philosophy professors
19:32 were very opposed to Christianity or at least they were opposed to any type of Christianity that sort of relied on theology to argue for the validity of Christianity. And so that was a challenging period. I never had a crisis of faith. But I remember I read a ton. And that's where I really got confirmed that like, oh, I think I've always sort of believed this as a kid. I now have reasons that I can actually talk about for why I believe this. Some of that was reading people like C.S. Lewis, which is sort of very common.
20:03 Some of it's reading, this was sort of before my time, but I read his stuff, a guy named Francis Schaefer, who in the 1970s and 80s wrote a bunch of books thinking about modern thought and culture and how Christianity sort of intersected with that. And then somebody was reading around some of these hot issues. This was back in the 2000s. The new atheists were a big deal then. So people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. And so I read their stuff. I read the rebuttals to their stuff. And I ended up sort of becoming much more intellectually mature, you could say, as a Christian. So I think the bigger change for me was coming out of the particular subculture of Christianity, which was this subculture that was dispensationalist, which we'll get into that, but that's the sort of particular
20:45 theology that often a lot of the pro-Israel evangelicals have, and moving into a much, you can say, more a broader tradition of Christianity that I definitely appreciate where I grew up, and particularly I grew up really caring about the Bible and, and reading it for myself. So I like that. But in terms of the conclusions drawn, I now locate myself much more in a sort of general, still evangelical, but Protestant Christianity. And that was the bigger, I mean, it's not nearly as dramatic to most people, but that was the bigger change was sort of like, you know, working through that, relating to my family, which many of them are still in that, that subculture. And then also, you know, thinking about, I now write about that. So I write about
21:34 dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, how to how to write about that in the way that sort of respects where I came from, but is also pretty different in my conclusions. So you're going to, even though you guys were moving around a bunch, you're going to churches all the time. As you're growing up, you're hearing pastors preach and all that. Do you remember the first times you like heard them talk about like the state of Israel and how it was framed? I honestly don't, no, I don't. But I, There's a moment. It couldn't have been the first time. But in Colorado Springs, I went to a mega church. I've gone to mega churches a lot of my life. So these are these big 2,000 plus membership churches, often in auditoriums. And it happened to be the mega church that a guy named Jerry Jenkins went to. And Jerry Jenkins is one of the co-authors of the left behind novels, which were these really popular novels in the 90s and 2000s. It was a fictionalized version of the end times. The rapture was in the the first book and then the Antichrist and all that kind of stuff. This is a big touch point beyond just Christian culture in the 90s.
22:41 The book sold like 80 million copies or something. I think it was like the best-selling series until Harry Potter or something like that. Really? At least in those few decades. And that guy went to our church. Now, it's a huge church. So it's like I never actually met him. But he was like one of the Sundays in the main service,
23:02 we sort of like gave him a round of applause or something. And I assume it was because he published a book because they were publishing all these books. And that drove me to be more interested in that series. I ended up getting really into the left behind books as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old. And that's where I really started reading. So I guess it was reading more than hearing about Israel. Because in those books, the state of Israel plays a huge role, a good guy role, in what happens in the world. And then there's these particular characters who are Jewish that are very,
23:32 admirable and they're portrayed as like really you know protagonist type characters and I think that was probably so I was 1011 that was probably the first time I really was like oh that's a real you know they're talking about this country and I can see that country on the map it's a real place and and it was a very much inflected through like those books and that particular theology that was was informing those books got it so what's that there's that famous I guess like verse in there that you'll hear like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee always quote it says something like God protects those who protect Israel and everything yeah yeah and I think where a lot of people go wait wait a minute is in the Bible when it's referring to that it's referring to something different
24:16 than the state that was created in 1948 is that fair to say yeah well that's that's the debate is what is it referring to so yeah it's Genesis 123 so this is at the front end of the Bible he's on it Oh yeah, this is probably the verse right now. The verse. There's a lot of verses, so this is the one you... Like a move from JZ to this. Here we go. So the first 11 chapters of Genesis are the creation and then like the Noah's Flood and then the Tower of Babel.
24:46 And so the Tower of Babel happens in chapter 11. What happens there again? So the humans try to build a tower up to heaven and God confounds them and sort of disperses them all around the world. And many Christians traditionally thought this is where we get languages and even sort of racial and ethnic difference. Interesting. And so the idea here is like humans were so, had so much hubris that they thought they could reach God. And then God, you know, sort of confounds them. And so this is in the story of, so the book of Genesis is setting up like the world, God creates a beautiful world.
25:23 Humans screw it up. How's God going to correct it? And so Genesis 12 is where we're introduced to this character, Abram. who turns into Abraham. And this is like one of the first things God tells Abraham. He says, I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse. And that actually has worked out through the rest of Genesis and it has sort of its own narrative purpose in the Bible. But what Christian Zionists do what people like Ted Cruz do is they make some interpretive jumps from,
25:56 Okay, this is a verse blessing Abram, Abraham. Now, Abraham is the father of the Israelites, and so is the father of the Jewish people, you could say. But the jump here is saying, when God says, I will bless those who bless you, God doesn't mean just Abraham. He means all the people who are part of Abraham's family, and that the nation of Israel today is in the lineage of Abraham from Genesis 12. In Ted Cruz's mind, that is a very easy move to make because in dispensationalism, in the sort of conservative evangelical world, there's a lot of continuity between the Jewish people of the Old Testament and the state of Israel today. For other traditions, frankly most Christian traditions, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, a lot of other Protestants, God has a chosen people always, and they're called Israel. But in the Old Testament, that is the nation of Israel, the kingdom of Israel. In the New Testament, after Jesus comes, it's the church.
27:02 All right. Can I ask about the nation real quick? Was there a specific, like, geographic area given for that when they were referring to the nation? Or was it an idea of like a group of people themselves? So in Genesis 12, there's no specific territory laid out, but just a few chapters later in Genesis 15, God restates the covenant. or this is the beginning of the covenant. So another thing, like, I'm going to bless you as long as you serve me. And in that, there is territory laid out. And this is the very, when Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Huckabee, the ambassador,
27:40 the U.S. ambassador to Israel, they got into a debate about this. And in Genesis 15, the territory is very vast. It's from the Nile to the Euphrates, is what God promises. So that's like a lot of modern Egypt. all of modern day Jordan, this is the greater Israel thing. Yeah, yeah, this is the greater Israel thing. So in that text, that's what God promises Abraham
28:02 is like your descendants will have this land. So that's another one of these sort of things where people have different takes on that. One question on this. You know, how do you even, let's say that that was all exactly what it is and everything. How do you even draw everyone back to Abraham when there were so few people on the earth at the time that, frankly, his spawn
28:27 is everywhere. And you also have, like here in America, we have a melting pot of everybody, right? In Israel, they have some of that too because they have people whose ethnicity is derived from that region of the world. And then they have people whose ethnicity is derived from Eastern Europe, but they put it all under one umbrella. So how do they put two and two together to be able to fit, you know, that feels like a square and square peg in a round hole up to me?
28:51 Yeah, I think for a lot of Christians and frankly, a lot of Jews, it's through, I mean, I guess today they might do like DNA testing or something. But it's through like this through the mother. I mean, that's what the traditional Jewish way is, is if your mother was Jewish, you're Jewish. So the idea here is that there's a continuous group of people that, at least in the Bible, are documented, you know, generation after generation. And then when the biblical story ends, are continued to be, you know, sort of part of this community. some of it's now there's always people that are not genetically related to Israelites who are who are coming into the Israelite kingdom so even there's the book of Ruth so Ruth is this character she's not Israelite she's another
29:34 nation she comes in and so it's never just genetics but there is this idea that God has covenanted himself to a particular people group largely genetic not not totally genetic and that that is a continual like sort of unit through history that, you know, it has documentation going all the way from back then to the Middle Ages to today. There's a lot, been a lot of people over the, you know, centuries who've been skeptical of that or said it's been, it's been so diluted through all the different ways that, of course, a big part of the Jewish stories, they get scattered over and over again. And so they're intermarrying and, and that dilutes the understanding of who's in and who's out.
30:20 So the idea here is there's always been a remnant and the remnant can be traced and that the Jews who founded the state of Israel were part of that lineage. And so the state of Israel is part of that lineage. And part of that too is the way that evangelicals understand the prophetic, so the prophecy books in the Bible talk about Israel will be scattered and then regathered in its land. And so that's something that for these evangelicals, they see that. as something that when the prophets said it would be fulfilled many, many centuries in the future. And so they see a continuity here, which is these prophets spoke to a particular nation of Israel back in, say, 600 BC. And then in 1948, it's happening, like the sort of prophecy is being fulfilled. And so there's a continuity to the story there.
31:10 So that's another way they would make that case. Okay. You and I were talking off camera before we got on about the nature of passed down text. with any ancient texts, including in the context we were talking about it with the New Testament, where there's some arguments about when each gospel was written, how long after the facts were they, therefore what's true, what's been changed, what's not. And I recognize that, as I was telling you, like all ancient texts are some level of error. They're because humans are flawed and, you know, we change stories sometimes over time. But like if there's a modicum of truth in a bunch of these texts,
31:45 I think that's really, really interesting to me. When it comes to the Old Testament text, though, I keep thinking this while you're talking. And I do. don't even know if we've talked about this on a podcast. I'm not entirely sure. But when we're talking about, like, for example, the book of Genesis, or you mentioned the book of Ruth or the book of Revelations, what do we know about the records of when news were written and who wrote them? And, you know, I guess it's best we can do it how long after the fact they're writing this stuff? Yeah. Yeah. And that's definitely not my area specialty, but I know the basics here. And the basics are, particularly the further back you go, the less we know about the origins of the
32:26 texts, like who originally wrote, you know, the creation story. The idea, I mean, the sort of classic Christian, you know, the classic Christian teachings that Moses did, because in one of the books, early books, Moses sort of inserts himself as the narrator. But I think we can say Moses probably did some of it. There's probably a lot of other things going on. I think a lot of the scholarship talks about there's an editor that comes along centuries later and sort of smoothed it out and makes it a thematically linguistically more coherent and that we're talking about you know in the sort of 1,000 to 800 bc time period now the things in genesis are purported to be have happened you know thousands of years before that and and all that and and some of this is is there's
33:13 it's narrated in the bible that there's are discoveries of old scrolls in the temple of sort of after the King David era. And so we, at least from the stories in the Bible, we know that they're actually recovering their own scripture through the story of the Bible. And so the sort of, you know, you have some that are dated, really old like that. And then many scholars date the book of Daniel
33:41 as the last book written in the Old Testament. And what do they date, what do they base that on it being the last book written? So some of it is, is there a prophecies in that book that seem to be fulfilled in the second century? So depending on your metaphysics, if you don't think prophecies are true, then you would say, well, if the prophecy is fulfilled, then this must have been written after that. What are those prophecies? So those are largely about the destruction of different sort of kingdoms in the second century. Some of it have to do with like Alexander the Great and the consequences of his conquest of that whole sort of Hellenistic area.
34:17 There's also part, Daniel's also partially written in Aramaic, and that's a language that's more to the, what we call the second temple period. So like the second century BC through the second century, through AD 70 when the temple is destroyed. And so it's the only book of the Bible that has Aramaic in it. And so the idea is that's probably a later written book. So you're talking about a collection of books that are written over like a thousand years and edited throughout all that time. It seems like every AI expert you hear from recommends a different tool. There's the big ones we first heard about when this was all starting like chat GPT and Claude. Now there seems to be an AI program you can use that has some sort of specialty in anything. One's better at research, another's better at writing, another at coding. And suddenly you have several subscriptions that can't even talk to each other. That's why I like using perplexity computer. Instead of locking you into one model, it orchestrates leading AI models,
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35:42 link in my description below to try perplexity computer today. Most AI tools answer questions. Perplexity computer completes full projects. Now, by the time we get to, well, certainly by the time of Jesus, but even before that, there's a pretty standard text that every Jew is referring to as the law, the prophets, and the poetry and proverbs type things. That's where we get the word Tanakh is. Tanakh?
36:11 Tanakh. How you spell that? In English, it would be T-A-N-A-C-H. Okay. And this would be the Torah, which would be the first five books, and that's sort of the law. I'm going to forget the word now. The Nevi-Eem, I think, is the prophets. And then there's the historical books.
36:32 That would be like First and Second Kings, First and Second Samuel. They're just sort of narrating through the history of Israel. And that's sort of the corpus that we call the Old Testament, Jews called the Hebrew Bible. So by the time, like Jesus is referencing these various parts of the Old Testament during his, you know, during the Gospels. And they're pretty set by that point. So we know from that point, what's interesting, too, is like when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 40s. So these are sort of, you know, they are from the first or second century and no one's really touched them. then in 1947. These are in caves that are just outside of the Dead Sea in modern-day Israel.
37:18 And when those were discovered, they had copies of, say, like the book of Isaiah. And that was really helpful to scholars because it was like, well, if we can sort of see what they thought Isaiah was like in the year 100. And compare it to today, we'll know how much has changed since then. And overall, not much changed. There's a lot of grammatical things and small. small differences, but the 80, 90% of what we have today is Isaiah is what the Dead Sea Scroll people had as well. 80% to 90%. Yeah, it might even be more than that.
37:53 It was really like, there were tons and tons of sort of grammatical things, and part of that is Hebrew doesn't have vowels. And so it can be hard to know exactly what words are and stuff like that. Yeah, it also has a limited number of total words. right? I forget maybe it's like 30 or 40,000 words or something like that. I might be misremembering that as opposed to other languages to much more. Yeah, well, English certainly has way more. Yeah. And part of that's the verb structure. So like all Semitic languages, Hebrew has, you know, most of their words come down to a root of three consonants. And then you build up all
38:29 different types of words out of those consonants. And so it creates a smaller sort of corpus of of words than something like English which doesn't have that verb structure and also is global and assimilating words all over the place. Can we pull up the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls? That's crazy that they find something like 1,900 years later and their nitpick and define grammatical changes and things like that. But as you said, conservatively speaking, 80% of the So I mean, there's a crazy political part of this too. So it's 1947. So it's right at the you know, the creation of Israel's like the next year. And so this actually becomes tied up in a sort of politics of claiming who's land is this, right?
39:17 So it's like the Dead Sea community was, we think, part of this, like, sort of a radical set called the S-scenes, who were around the time that Jesus was around. There are some people speculated that John the Baptist might have been in this scene. They were sort of separatists. And so, so the idea here is like, well, if we can discover things in, in the state of Israel that are from the first century, then like this is, you know, that's a pre, that goes back before all the Muslim conquests. And so it can be a claim by Jews that like, hey, you know, we're older here. Like we have, of course they have the Bible and sort of these stories, but these are like actual artifacts. being found. And then most of the scholars who end up studying the Dead Sea Scrolls first are either Western American or French or British or Israeli scholars. So there's some pretty significant
40:16 Israeli politicians who started out as scholars or Israeli scholars who were studying the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 40s and 50s. As you and I both know so much of this stuff when it comes to these arguments where religion meets politics and stuff is based on semantics and based on narrative. Wouldn't you think that if you found something as potentially groundbreaking as this, you'd want to make sure you had representation from all the different types of religions or groups in the world and their best scholars to be able to come in altogether? And not even come to a consensus, but everyone have a chance to review it and find what they can and then put it out to the public all the different perspectives and allow people to decide.
41:01 Because I find it interesting when right away you say it's just some Western guys and some Israeli guys coming in and looking at this stuff when there's a whole big world out there of other types of people. Yes. Well, so part of it would be, yes, there is a big world. How many people have the expertise to read first century texts? I do not. Most people don't. And the people who do tend to be in the year 1947 tend to be in Western University. including some of these Israeli scholars were trained in Europe in previous, you know, before World
41:34 War II and stuff like that. So that's part of it. I think they tried to give them credit. They did try to make this a more cosmopolitan global effort to study these Dead Sea Scrolls. A big part of the effort was actually just understanding. So these are these are parchment papers wrapped around in sort of scrolls put in. We pulled them up deep so while Dan's explains. this, but go ahead, Dan. Yeah. And they were often in jars. Okay.
42:02 And the reason they're even still around is because they were in very, very dry caves where, you know, waters the enemy of keeping paper. And so you can see from the pictures there, I mean, there's like, you know, scraps. A lot of these are like scraps. You're like peeling apart layers of these scrolls. So a big challenge was just understanding what did they say. And that's where you can start, you know, you start pulling these a way and you see some of them are basically like the texts of the Bible and you can then start
42:33 comparing them to the text we have now. So a big challenge was that. So they, in that sense, they gathered, I mean, it was under the auspices of the Israeli government. That's a big part of the politics here is who controls the caves. And this is before it was created too. So it's just like the-ur-Haganah. Yeah, so 47 is the discovery. And there's a whole interesting story, which I don't remember all the details, too, about who actually gets to buy these things, because it's sort of on the black market for a while, or it's on, I mean, these are recognized to be very valuable. They're discovered, I believe, by some shepherds who's... Yeah, let's pull that up. Who's sheep or other animals sort of like go into one of these caves. So deep-scattered right here. The first seven original Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947 were initially bought from Bedouin Shepherds by two distinct buyers through Bethlehem Antiques Steelers. Archaeologists Elisar Lipa Sukranek bought three scrolls for the Hebrew University
43:31 and Archbishop Mar Athanas, Yeshuay, Samuel bought the other four for the Syrian Orthodox Church. Yeah, can we hit the Wikipedia, the CIA-Opedia one right there? Dave, let's just see what they say. So the Dead Sea Scrolls, do you go up a little bit? Sorry. Dead Sea Scrolls is the narrow sense identical with the Qumran Cave Scrolls or a set of ancient Jewish biblical manuscripts from the Second Temple Period. That's that like 100 year kind of thing you were saying.
43:57 Okay, they were discovered over a period of 10 years between 1946 and 56 at the Comran caves near Ein Fischkin in the West Bank in the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the first century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various Jewish and Christian biblical canons, including Dudo-canonical manuscripts from the late 2nd Temple, Judaism. as well as extra-biblical books. As such, they cast new light on the emergence of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity and their relationship with Jewish religious traditions. In the wider sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls also include similar findings and elsewhere in the Judean Desert and are sometimes called Judean Desert Scrolls. Some of the scrolls found outside Qumran are from later centuries.
44:43 Almost all of the 15,000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the shrine of the book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. So they were bought off these guys who were selling them. did we ever get the story of how they like they just walked into the caves one day and they're like oh shit I believe the story is they had like an errant animal like either a sheep or something that went into one of these caves and these caves are weird I don't know if you can pull up the the caves are sort of like on a at least some of them are on a cliff and so it it's not somewhere where people would be walking by regularly and obviously for centuries no one you know no one walked by yeah so you see like the
45:20 top left yeah see the One over, one over right there. Whoa, so all those holes right there are the caves. Right, those are the caves, yeah. And is that the Dead Sea down below, like we're looking from where the Dead Sea is, or am I? That's a good question.
45:36 I don't know. Damn it, Dan, you're supposed to know. My geography is not that good, but, but yeah, they're right there. You can go to them today, or you can, I don't know if you can go in them, but you can go and drive by them still today. Yeah, look at that one on the left.
45:50 Do you see it gray on the far left? Yeah, yeah, perfect. Oh, are those people? Those are people inside. Are they living inside? Wait, they have like cavemen? No, those are, those are excavating. Yeah, I think those are excavating.
46:06 Okay, well, they were, they were purring out, like they were trolls under the, yeah. Sorry, excavators. All right, wow. So a sheep went in there. I think that's the sort of, that's the folk history. I don't know if there's like a better documentation of that, but the idea is like they stumbled upon them. Shout out to that sheep. Right, right.
46:26 So yeah, so for centuries, no one knew these existed. If they had, they probably would have done something with them. And it's just through the sort of fortune of the dry desert that they were preserved. And so they become this huge balm show. I mean, it's sort of a, it's a really dramatic moment in archaeology history, which doesn't have too many dramatic moments, where you suddenly get to pull back almost 2,000 years and see, like, oh, how much of this is human construction between then and now? And what's interesting, though, too, is going back to who got to do this.
46:58 So, as you mentioned, Western, some Israeli scholars did this. It's actually not the, so a lot of those scholars actually ended up becoming quite, they were not Zionists in the way that we might think of Christian Zionists today, even if they were Christian. They were actually, many of them became critical of Israeli policy because for an archaeologist, your desire is to preserve whatever is around. Wars don't preserve things.
47:27 And for most of these archaeologists, they wanted access to the whole region. And besides Israel, the whole region is full of Arab and, you know, Turkey and Iran, of nations that are hostile to Israel. And so there's famous sort of archaeologists in the 60s and 70s who are very critical of Israel because in a, you want to give a... them credit, they want open, they don't want war, they want to preserve things. If you think about just their own self-interest, they want to be on the good side of Arab countries because they want access to Jordan, they want access to Egypt. And to be very pro-Israel is a quick way to sort
48:08 of get on the bad list of those countries. Not going to get you inside the bars there. Yeah, I feel yeah. So they find all this stuff. And what was interesting there in the language is how when they're describing these books of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or these scrolls, I should say, where it's between, I want to say, it was like third century BC and first century CE. And it used some sort of phrase like the Judaic and then Christian traditions. Yeah. Obviously, and I'm way over simplifying here. You can go way more academic on me.
48:42 But with Judaism, they follow the Torah, which is effectively the Old Testament, right? And then with Christianity, it adds in the New Testament. and this figure is a Messiah, Jesus Christ, and that's where the difference between the two religions are. So when they say they found stuff within those traditions, thinking of the timeline, it's overlapping for before, during, and after Christ, based on the years right there. But how do they, if you're finding both, how do you make sense of deciding that both can be right? And let me ask that in a better way. if Christianity's right, the Messiah happened and it was Jesus and it already, it happened.
49:23 And therefore, the Judaism religion that's waiting for the Messiah to happen is incorrect. If Judaism is correct, Jesus was just a guy who talked and, you know, he wasn't an actual Messiah. So not that I care, but like it has to be one or the other there, but it sounds like they found evidence and said, well, it can all be true or am I just misunderstanding that? I think what they were saying there was that the, so the Old Testament texts that were in the scrolls are claimed by both Christians and Jews. So, you know, Christians claim the Old Testament as part of their scripture. Jews do as Jews claim the Hebrew Bible. So if you find a scroll of Isaiah or Jeremiah, it's both interesting to Christians and to Jews. Got it.
50:08 Now, I mean, you bring up a much, you know, sort of bigger question about sort of how do you, How does Judaism and Christianity? How do Jews and Christians think about themselves in relation to each other? And, you know, for a lot of the last 2,000 years, it's been a story of conflict and antithesis, the idea that, like you said, that Jesus came and sort of in the theological language we use now, sort of the church superseded Israel. So superseding as taking the place of. So, yeah, God worked with Jews in the Old Testament. Now he's working with, you know, anyone who believes. in Jesus. And so, you know, the implications of that, theologically, if you look at like Augustine, he says, well, the Jews are going to stick around, but as an example of what happens when a people rejects Jesus. They're going to be, they're going to wander, they're not going to have a
51:03 state, they're going to be guests in other people's lands, and it'll be a good, it'll be a good teaching tool for the rest of us to remember what happens. So that's what what Augustine said. That was in the fourth century. What about the other religions that do have states, though, that don't accept Jesus? How did he? Yeah, so he would say, I mean, this is part of the particular thing is like there's a particular both, you could say, closeness and animosity between Jews and Christians because of the claim that, you know, both are claiming the Old Testament. And so that wasn't, Augustine wasn't creating a bigger, I guess, yeah, theology of, you only get a state if you're a Christian type thing. But he was saying the particular way
51:41 that the Jewish people lost their sovereignty, particularly they were occupied by the Romans. And then in the year 70, they tried to revolt or they tried to vote in 67. And by 70, you know, the Romans come in, destroy their temple, scatter them. The Roman army puts salt on where the temple is as a sign of like nothing will grow here ever again. And then since then, you know, up until Augustine's time, up until you could say the 20th century, Jews are wandering people. They don't get to claim statehood. So Augustine was saying that throughout the Middle Ages, you get other types of Christian views. This is where the anti-Jewish idea of like blood libel comes from. There's also a bigger theological idea. So the idea that the Old Testament is about laws and rules, and the New Testament is
52:34 about grace and love. And so Christianity is a superior religion to Judaism. These are sort of the categories that Christians and Jews have through the 20th century. So what changed? Yeah. And again, I don't. If it were up to me, no one would fight over this stuff. You believe what you want to believe we all have in common that we don't know what the fuck happens to the lights go out anyway. But since people do, and this is like a really big deal, the split in the 20th century, it sounds like obviously it's even before 1948 when an actual state forms.
53:08 but what changes such that suddenly there's now a group of Christians who become, you know, rabidly in support of like the Jewish state in particularly. Yeah. Well, it's part of a bigger movement, you could say, between Jews and Christians. So some of what happens is you get more liberal ideas of religion in the 19th century that are less exclusivist. And so you get Christians who say, yeah, Jesus is a way to the afterlife, to heaven. But it doesn't have to be the only way. And so in 1893, there's a world fair in Chicago.
53:44 There's something called the World Parliament of Religions put on by these more liberal people. The World Parliament of Religions. Yeah, funky. Pull up some images of that. Interesting. And so you're getting not just Muslims, Jews, and Christians, but you're getting Hindu and Buddhist leaders. And sometimes it looks, so they're all their different garb. So that's it.
54:07 That's in 1890. September 11th to 27th in 1893. Yeah. It's all like chilling. So this is in Chicago. And the idea here is maybe there's a larger truth that all the religions are pointing toward. So that's one thing that just sort of softens some of the edges. Another is by the 20s and 30s,
54:27 you start getting this idea that the difference between communism and then fascism and the West. is this religious tradition that goes back to the Hebrew Bible. And so you start getting, this is where the term Judeo-Christianity comes from. Oh, it comes from that? From the 20s and 30s. All right, can you explain that some more, like in detail? How specifically that rose? So the idea here is, it's really important that it's in the 20s and 30s.
54:57 So it's post-World War I. Yep. Bullshake Revolution happens. Major red scare in the U.S. And one of the questions that a lot of Americans are asking is sort of, well, what makes democracy and capitalism distinct from communism? And one of the things that a lot of, not just, you know, people like Woodrow Wilson would come up with this, but not just politicians come up with is, well, these ideas like democracy and capitalism are based on Christianity,
55:28 or Christian ideas, or more than the point, biblical ideas. So that's interesting. They base capitalism on Christian ideas. How do they square that? Yeah, so for capitalism would be like, you know, the Bible assumes sort of something like property, property rights. A lot of the rights language is in this era said, like, rights aren't just a natural thing out there. Like we want to, we have to source them. Like, and this goes back to, you know, people are endowed by their creator with life, liberty, and pursuit. Right. So it goes to sort of this idea of this tradition of Western liberalism that isn't Christian per se, but is inspired. by sort of Christian ideas. A key text here is in Genesis. One, when God creates man and woman,
56:16 he creates them in his image. And so the idea is like every person, every man and woman is endowed by their creator with the image of God on them. So there's like a dignity to the individual person. A lot of this was about differentiating the collectivism of Bolshevism and communism and the individuality that was at the heart
56:34 of Western ideas of of rights and you get capitalism and democracy and things coming out of that. It's interesting how that can go because like it's interesting how when I've read parts of the Bible and heard some of the stories, I'm always struck by how there's almost a mix of the two. Like there's a mix of individualism and there's a mix of socialism. I don't mean that literally politically. I mean that like some of the themes are kind of interspersed together. And then when you look at how these systems, if you want to put labels on it,
57:13 let's say you have radical socialism and radical libertarianism. If you saw either of those put into place today in any type of large population, they technically don't work. Right. You know what I mean? But it's like they had like this weird balance in the Bible. People who are going to twist my words when I say that. But that's always interesting to me. Oh, I think you're totally right. And that's part of what we're seeing in the American context is a largely Protestant. reading of this. So you go back to the Middle Ages, Middle Age Catholicism, not high on individual rights, very communal, very, you know, pay your ties. Pay your ties, you're part of your, you're a surf or you're part of your community. The king runs things. It's like it's not democratic.
57:55 So it's not like every Christian, every, every society that based itself on Christianity has to become a Western democracy. But you're getting in the 20th century, people in America, people in Britain making this case that particularly a Protestant reading of the Bible would put these ideas about individualism, dignity as sort of the unique contributions of Christianity to modern civilization. And they're pitting that against communism first, and then when fascism becomes a bigger deal in the 20s and 30s against fascism. Both of them are seen as these authoritarian absolutist-type collective projects. Can we take one tangent on this?
58:38 Because obviously, we're talking about the change that happened to where Christian Zionism really rose in the 20th century out of the 19th. But just for some historical context, because I always throw this around all the time, but there's a huge story in the middle of this involving Martin Luther and all that. When the Protestant Reformation, I think it was, happened to where they split, Martin Luther led the movement, and they split off from the Catholic, church that was back, I want to say in the 15th century, correct me if I'm wrong? 16th century.
59:05 16th century. What led to that and what, how was it set up differently? Obviously, we know they're different sects today, but like what, back at the beginning, what were the key differences between what became the Protestant church and the Catholic church? Yeah, I mean, so Luther, Martin Luther is the guy that sort of kicks this off. He nails his 95 feces to a wall in Wittenberg. That's sort of the, you know, the beginning of the reformation.
59:29 His big concerns were about corruption in the Catholic hierarchy, in the church hierarchy. And then he was really worked up over this idea of, well, now I'm forgetting the term, not tithes, but... Something involving payments? Yeah, involving payments for getting rid of your sins in the next life. And maybe we can... Yeah, that's on the tip of my tongue. I know what you're talking about. Maybe Dee can find it.
01:00:01 Yeah, yeah. The thing that the 95 thesis, the thing the Catholic Church would make people do... I'd say it starts with the C, but I'm not... Would pay to get rid of their sins? What's the term for what the Catholic Church? Indulgents is. It's not a C. Indulgences. Yes, that's it. So this was his big issue was that indulgence has created this perverse sort of incentive to basically pay your way into heaven. So, I mean, Luther himself doesn't intend to start, at least at the beginning, a different church. He wants to reform the existing church. His critiques are not well received by the hierarchy of the church.
01:00:37 And then the whole snowball effect happens. And you start getting distinct Lutheran churches. And then you get people like Calvin and Zwingli, who are the other two big sort of reformers a few decades later. And they end up developing a very strong critique of the Pope and of the, the church hierarchy and then of these distinct theological teachings of the church. And you have the 30 years war happening.
01:01:07 And so you have basically a permanent split by, you know, the 17th century. What were the biggest theological differences outside of like indulgences and stuff like that that they had with the Catholic Church that they didn't like? So a lot of it was around church authority and who got to decide church policy. So the idea that the Pope who's in this apostolic succession all the way going back to Peter in the disciple of Jesus, and with that the Pope had the authority to decide on bishops, to decide church policy, that is something. And then people like Calvin come along and really are introducing new theological ideas like predestination, like total depravity. these are sort of the key concept in Calvinism, which Calvin claims are going back to people like Augustine. So he's not saying I'm coming up with new things.
01:02:02 He's saying I'm recovering things that between in the last thousand years have been obscured by the church. A big part of this too is that the Bible is becoming translated into the vernacular languages like English and Luther translates the Bible into German. And this is another sort of hierarchy thing, but the idea is like every Christian should be reading the Bible now. Every literate Christian should be reading the Bible. Through the Middle Ages, that was not most Christians. Post printing press now. Right, right, post printing press. Most Christians, you know, the serfs and the peasants could not read. This is one reason why there's such beautiful stained glass imagery in cathedrals is because that's how you would learn the stories is someone would show you a picture of the Bible story instead of you personally reading it. And of course, the, the, The services were in Latin, and most Christians didn't know Latin. Oh, so they're just running with it. Yeah. Like, all right. Assuming this is right.
01:03:00 That guy said it. So here we go. And you can say it's a very communal understanding of Christianity. It's not up to you as an individual to sort of discern based on your own reason. If this is right, it's like I was born into this. My community is part of this. So the Reformation and the Protestants really, you know, flip that on its head and say each of us needs to, grapple with the text. Each of us, you know, this is Luther's famous, when he's sort of on trial,
01:03:27 he says, you know, here I stand, I can do no more. Like, it's like I'm an individual. This is what I believe in my conscience. I can't do anything else, but follow my conscience. So a lot of Catholic historians and sort of apologists today will say like everything wrong, you know, simplify, but like everything wrong with our modern culture of libertine vices and since, like it all goes back to Luther and sort of the sort of original insight of Luther's that like each one of us has our own conscience that we must follow. Now, of course, Lutherans wouldn't say that. They'd say, in this context, this is a much better reform of how we should engage the Bible
01:04:04 and Christian tradition. That doesn't mean you can go off and do whatever your inner self tells you to do. Right. But you can see the logic of where someone like Luther does that, how different people get inspired by that move to take it in other directions that Luther wouldn't have intended. And that's the thing. So it splits, but then it splits more over the next decades when it has sectors of Protestantism now form, which then continue to split over time. So it gets farther and farther away technically from what, say, the Catholic teaching of Christianity is, and that's where we
01:04:36 are today. Right. But I got you off this because you were explaining how that was a part of some of the interpretation that led to Christian Zionism in the 20th century. So let's go back there. Right. Right. So, yeah. So the, you know, in America is a largely Protestant country in the sense that its leadership has been mostly Protestant through most of its history. And certainly in the early 20th century, that was the case. Well, they killed the first Catholic. Say more? No, no, JFK. Oh, that's what you're saying. Yeah, I'm just saying. Okay. Yeah, though they, what was it, Al Smith ran in 1928. He was close. He was close. He was close. He got in his head blown off too, probably. Maybe. So, so in the 20s, the people who are coming up with his idea of
01:05:19 Judeo-Christianity tended to be Protestant, though not exclusively. And the idea was that there's some unique genius to the Hebrew Bible in particular, so the Old Testament, that is that, without that, we wouldn't have our modern culture. Now, the term Judeo-Christianity, it includes Jews, but it also includes Catholics. So that's a big move there is Judeo-Christianity. It's not Judeo-Protestine. It's Judeo-Christian. And the history of anti-Catholicism in the U.S.
01:05:49 a really big history as well. So throughout up until really the 20th century, it was, I mean, you mentioned JFK is the first Catholic president. It was very difficult to get ahead in public life if you were Catholic in, in the U.S. Is that because it was largely viewed as like, I don't know, a mainland European religion as opposed to like an, you know, the Anglo roots of the country, pre-immigration here? Some of, yeah, that's part of it. I mean, part of it was the sort of ethnic politics of who's Catholic and who's British and Protestant. The idea, too, and Kennedy had to deal with this, was Catholics, you know, in theory, listened to the Pope, and that's a foreign leader. And so can we trust, you know, a Catholic to... Foreign influence in U.S. politics.
01:06:37 Can't have that. That was the original. That goes back to, yeah, the early founding era and debates over, could Catholics be, you know, be governors and be senator? So that's a long history too. And this Judeo-Christian concept moves past that and says the deeper unity of Judaism, Protestantism, I guess you can say Orthodox Christianity, though there aren't many of them, and Catholicism, is this ethical tradition that is rooted in the Old Testament and is where we get our individual rights and all that kind of stuff. Do we know the person who invented that term?
01:07:13 I don't think it is. We know the organization. It's called the International Council of Christians in Jews and it was founded in the 20s for this very purpose. It was founded by a bunch of people, both Jews and Christians. So it said it appeared in 1821, in 1821 in a letter by English- Anglican missionary Alexander McCall to describe a Jewish person who converted to Christianity. German theologian Ferdinand Christian Barr used the German equivalent Eudenkrislich in 1831 in the theological context and the modern political meaning of a shared religious
01:07:52 cultural tradition was popularized in the late 30s and 1940s by interfaith groups and thinkers like Paul Tillich and George Orwell to fight fascism and totalism. So I guess what I'm getting out with the question too is like now there's been this, you know, people are starting to pay attention to the actual meaning now. Like why do we say that? But there's been this accepted verbiage for decades now in America where people say, this is a nation found on Judeo Christian values. Yes. When, you know, no disrespect, but like George Washington never heard that term.
01:08:28 No. You know, Ben Franklin never heard. Those early, so the 1820s and 30s, those are not, the term then is being used, and that term has been around, but is being used to describe a convert from Judaism to Christianity. Way different concept than the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's right. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that its history can be. do this. It's very interesting. Things you were born into and take for granted, you realize
01:08:50 we're only around a few decades before you were born. And it sort of can make you look at things anew and understand that like, oh, things I thought were settled, were only settled, you know, for a little while before I came on the scene. So this idea of Judeo-Christianity at the time in the 30s was seen as a very liberal and progressive idea because it was inclusive of more people and it was opposing communism, which for American liberals was, you know, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR was a big part of how they understood what they were about as well. And today it's seen more as a conservative value. Like it's actually like a limiter. It's like we say Judeo-Christian to say it's not Buddhist or it's not Hindu or something like that. That's a much different use. Now you could say
01:09:41 it had the same implication at the time, but in the third, 30s, there was no sort of conversation about including Hindus or Buddhists. It was about being more inclusive of the big traditions in the U.S. already. So it took on that different meaning. And this is also to get back to Israel, most of the Christian Zionists in the 1930s were not fundamentalists and people interested in prophecy. They were people who came out of this more liberal interfaith world. People like Reinhold Niebuhr was a major theologian. He was a major theologian. He was a major theologian. in the 20th century, he was at Union Theological Seminary, which is sort of like the citadel of liberal theology. He was a theologian who wrote in the 20s and 30s about,
01:10:29 he was basically a sort of Christian Marxist in a way. He ended up really rejecting communism, but in the 20s and 30s he wrote a lot about class in America and how this was the big thing the church was missing was that, you know, the poor are not getting Jesus. like they should. And he ended up being very concerned about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism in Europe. And so in the 30s, he's writing about the need for Jews to flee Europe and go to Palestine as an ethical sort of, as Christians in America to support this as an ethical obligation. Now, to go back in the history a little bit, you have the Dreyfus affair in the 1880s where famously a French soldier who was Jewish was tried for Christian.
01:11:15 crimes that he wasn't guilty of and there was a lot of, you know, I guess, fomented anti-Semitism that they were claiming came out of that. And so you end up getting, I guess, like the world Zionist Congress at some point there, these guys like Herzl are trying to figure out where you can set up a Jewish state. At some point, I want to say in 1904-ish, they vote on whether or not they're going to do it in like Uganda. Unfortunately, they voted no. I say unfortunately, because they ended up picking like the most controversial piece of land on the face of the earth. No matter where anyone picks to start any kind of country, somebody's going to lose. So there's always going to be some sort of issue.
01:11:55 I mean that respectfully. But like when they end up landing on Palestine through these things like the Balfour Declaration in 197, through these movements of people saying Jews should flee Europe and head to Palestine to set up a state there, they're doing it on the land where you have the converging. of the world's three, you know, very well-known religions. Right. You know, I don't really see a scenario where that wasn't going to cause a problem regardless of who it was, no?
01:12:23 Yeah, it was, yeah, certainly in hindsight we can see that. I think at the time, someone like Niebuhr, who was a liberal, you could say, but was very, he had a lot of blinders. And one of them was he did not appreciate that there were already a lot of people living in Palestine. I mean, this was one of those myths or misunderstandings that a lot of Americans had at the time, which was that largely Palestine was a land without a people, and the Jews were a people without a land, and that those things would...
01:12:56 Palestine was a land without a people. What about the people that were living there? Yeah. So for someone like Niebuhr in the 30s, he would say, there's enough room. We have a moral ethical crisis happening in Europe. Jews, which are part of this sort of civilized European culture are being rounded up. And he sort of saw before a lot that the Holocaust would probably be the logical conclusion of that. And so let's get them back to their ancestral homeland and deal with the fallout, you know, at another time.
01:13:28 There's also a lot of what we call now Orientalism at that time, which was the understanding that Jews were had money, were civilized, were Western. the locals in Palestine, whether Jewish or Arab, were... Whether Jewish or Arab. Since the first century after seven, there's been a continuous existence of Jews in the... But they counted them in what they viewed as like not as civilized as others. Yeah, well, because the Jews who were the, you could say, the native to Palestine tended to be more religious, if not Orthodox. And did not speak, you know, spoke Hebrew or... spoke Arabic and lived...
01:14:12 So they viewed them as less than? Yeah, they viewed them more as natives than as Western Jews from Western Europe. So that's interesting, though. So they've... But you use that word, they viewed them more as natives while sharing the same religion that's a part of what they're claiming is like the biblical prophecy that they should be back of this land. So the people who are the natives who share that religion that they think is the biblical prophecy
01:14:35 that's going to be back at this land or actually the people that are going to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. big boys are here now, get out of the way. That seems a little, a little backwards to me. Well, again, a lot of blinders. Now, someone like Niebuhr isn't thinking in the prophecy mode as much. He's thinking in the ethical mode, but he, I guess I mentioned the sort of local Jewish population to say the concern for someone like Niebuhr was much more about finding a place for civilized European Jewish citizens to find a safe place in light of anti-Semitism. And his idea was that, you know, there would become two states or there would be a way to work
01:15:18 out a one state. You know, that's something Niebuhr until later on was not necessarily committed to political Zionism in the sense that Jews had to have a political sovereign state. He thought, you know, they should have a place where they would not be. be persecuted basically. Yeah, I mean, I've always thought that any groups, and it's hard to come up with an arbitrary number, but let's say any groups around the world of a culture that exist in a large number.
01:15:45 I'll use the example of the Kurds. I think there's 33 million of them. It's wild to me the Kurds don't have a country. Yeah. You know, it's wild to me that like the Jewish people didn't have a country either. It's this weird thing, though, like I was saying a couple of minutes ago, to where if you're going to do it, though, someone has to lose. And then how do they lose and what are the methods used to lose and how messy does that get?
01:16:08 And then also how controversial is the land you're looking at like we were saying. And this is like a perfect, you know, pipe bomb of like having all those factors come together. Because I mean, I've heard over the years Benjamin Netanyahu make the argument where he's like, you know, they'll say to him, well, you know, there was a Jewish community that was always there in the Holy Land over the years, never left for sure, as you just laid out. But, you know, they, the last time they were there in large groups or had power over the land was say maybe like the 6th century or 7th century AD. And then obviously they get it back in 1948. And he's like, well, it's like you get kicked out of your apartment. And then you come back and you say you are a squatter and you remove them from the apartment. It's like, yeah, that's a lot of fucking apartments.
01:16:58 That's a lot of generations for that apartment. It's like 1,200 years. So, like, I don't have an answer for you, but at what point do you just accept that, like, maybe it's not ours? Because I do have to say, I'm living on land that I don't even have any family that was here prior to 1890 or 1900. And secondly, there were other people here in 1400, 1500, 1,500, 1,600, 1,600, and then people came in and set up a new country. I'm glad they did, but somebody lost. So where does this game end to where you get to say, hey, you know, these are the people here now you can't just kick them out? Yeah. Well, I think the answer that a lot of American Christians gave in after the Holocaust was, you know, this is, this will be the solution to the problem of, um.
01:17:47 Solution. That's a tough way. Yeah. Maybe I didn't. Yeah. Not the, the solution after the final solution to, um, and we're really, it was really connected to the Holocaust. So we've talked about the sort of liberal religion, more interfaith. We've talked about the Judeo-Christian concept. I think the third thing that sort of reorganizes Jewish Christian relations is the Holocaust. And the recognition by people like Niebuhr, but many other people, the Catholic Church had a major statement in Vatican II in 1962, really revising how they talked about the Jewish people and they had been talking about them for centuries. This is not just a theological question, this is a political question, too. And so the idea is the Holocaust was such a uniquely horrible event that the Jewish people need to have a land where they have the ability to protect themselves from any future Hitler. And the argument that Zionists were making was give us Palestine,
01:18:46 and that'll be the land. And that was from the eminence of, maybe this is a strong way to put it, but one place to draw the line of when that process may have began as 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. Is that fair to say? That was one of the legal claims, right? So this is part of the history of the Arabisraeli conflict is dueling legal claims over sort of who gets what and which authority are you following. So if you're following, yeah, if you care about what the British Empire says, then the Balfour Declaration matters to you because that was issued by Lord Balfour, the foreign minister at the time. You know, if you don't care about what the British Empire says, which was what many Arab countries or Arab peoples, there weren't even countries at that in 1917, that's not really that big of an authority for them. But a number of the Zionists who ended up founding Israel were British.
01:19:44 And so there is a deference to the British legal system that means, yes, they point back to the Balfour Declaration as one of the sort of legal documents that justify what they're doing. But they'll at one point appeal to that, and another, they'll appeal to the Bible and say, you know, the places. This is why, by the way, archaeology becomes important, too. You know, the places that are still around in, at that point, Palestine are named, usually they're named for, you mentioned. There was a lot of time between when Jews were there and 1948. So they were named, they had Arabic names or Turkish names based on the Ottoman Empire or British and German names because both of those countries. were imperialist and had like things in the Middle East. And what the Israelis want to do and the Zionists want to do is say, let's name these after,
01:20:33 like let's get back to the Hebrew name. The name that in the Bible is, you know, way older than even the Arabic names that came out in the 7th or 8th century. So this is where the archaeology gets important again because if you can make a credible claim that this place's original name was Hebrew and not Arabic, that does. lend some sort of argumentative weight to the claim that the people who speak Hebrew are the ones who are the original, you know, owners of this land. And so that's part of the post-Holocost thing, but the bigger one would be the overwhelming moral weight on Western Christians that many of them feel for being complicit in the Holocaust. And that's one of these big arguments
01:21:22 that comes out right in the late 40s and then just expands a lot in the 50s and 60s is it wasn't just Nazis that committed the Holocaust. It was confessing Lutherans and Catholics. Like most of the soldiers weren't just Nazis. And many of them were Nazis. I mean, they weren't part of the Nazi party. They were part of the German military. What they do every Sunday, they went to a Catholic church or a Lutheran church. And those are the people that could justify, you know, murdering six million Jews. And that is sort of the biggest problem for Christians, a Christian theologians in particular, to say, how could that have happened? Like how badly have we screwed up our teaching around Judaism? And part of the solution there is to rethink the idea of statehood and the Jewish people to go back to Augustine, to say, maybe Augustine had it wrong.
01:22:16 Maybe the Jews aren't destined to just be guests in other people's countries. countries. And for the people at the time, Israel seemed like, the state of Israel seemed like a post-colonial, like a decolonizing or post-colonial cause. Now we associate the exact opposite, that Israel looks like settler colonialism. In the 40s, 50s, there were dozens and dozens of countries being created out of the breakup of the European empires. And they all had moral causes. They all had reasons why the people in, say, Kenya or Algeria or Lebanon, why those people said, like, we need to throw off the shackles of our European oppressors. In that period, it seemed like the Jews had a very powerful moral case that they got to do that, too, not just, and the larger
01:23:05 because of the Holocaust. Yeah, and it's definitely clear that that helps put things over the top, for sure, because there was a lot of the world, like even in the West where, you know, the U.S. government's like, oh shit, weren't we turning away boats from Cuba and stuff? Like, whoops, sorry about that. And then, you know, you had other governments around the world that were expressing the same kind of thing. So naturally, it coalesces that way. But as we were saying, the process began long before that because you did have a clear setup of like kibbutz's forming in the 1920s and 1930s and developing a real mathematical percentage community. there such that when it actually does get across the finish line, 1948, they already had a lot of people there.
01:23:52 Yes. Yeah. And I mean, this is all also filtered through, you know, the years 1947 and 48 are very complicated. And really what ends up happening on the other end of that, which is that you have a state of Israel, a huge dispossession of Arab Palestinians that are now refugees in places like Jordan and Egypt. You know, that was what, I mean, some of the scholarship goes back and forth on this, but that does not seem to have been the master plan by anyone in, say, 1946. Like, no one could have orchestrated all those events. You had the UN being created in 1945. Suddenly the UN becomes the mediating sort of institution to decide this thing. You have multiple studies, sort of information studies commissioned by the UN to understand what is going on, the ground how many settlers are there how many natives are there where are they located in the country and then you have in 1947 you have the british saying we're giving up like we're getting out
01:24:55 and then you have you know these votes in the u.n that are you know to create two states to partition the land into two um the arab nations reject those and uh the war starts and then the war has its own logic that leads to the situation at the end of 1948 but all of that is being you know is very contingent on the people on the ground and the decisions being made but it's being interpreted by americans in these ethical terms as well as like well you know um it might be very you know very messy war with a lot of uh war crimes happening and everything but like the jews and the zionists are sort of morally in the right category because of the recency of the Holocaust. And that's a lot of the way that that conflict is interpreted by
01:25:48 American Christians. Yeah, and that's what's wild to me, the cognitive dissonance there, removing belief systems, removing whether you think you're right or wrong about the afterlife. Because by the way, Christians in this case are talking about people that they disagree with things on religion about. But when you start to see scenarios where one human life and another human life if they're not treated as equal. I don't care where it is. We've had problems with that in this country, obviously, well documented as well. There's just something about that that is inherently evil to me.
01:26:20 And it doesn't mean that the underdog is always perfect or anything like that. No one is. And there's, and there are, every group of people has evil within it. It's just human nature and what it is. But, you know, when you see such a continued campaign as we have for so long since 1948 of Israel, constantly saying the government of Israel saying we're being attacked, we're under threat or whatever, therefore, you know, we're going to kill all these people. I'm not saying they've never been under threat. I'm not saying they've never been under attack. They certainly have. But when they use that
01:26:56 as an excuse for every single thing they do, and then that results in things that are directly, say, anti-Christian values. And yet you'll get major, I would say, radical American Christians who are holding governmental positions where, by the way, we're supposed to have separation between church and state in this country, like a Mike Huckabee and stuff like that, or a senator like Ted Cruz, who then not only, they don't even turn a blind eye to this. They know what's happening. And they're like, yeah, not a big deal. There's something about that that is so anti-values of Jesus Christ that I just can't wrap my head around. I mean, I don't know if I'm crazy or not, but I feel like I'm not. And I feel like a lot of people out there probably agree with that.
01:27:40 Yeah, you're articulating, yeah, a very common, particularly since 2023, I would say. You know, what I can do as a historian is just try to, you know, get back in the heads of the people in the 40s and 50s through today, people like Cruz and Huckabee. Let's do it. And, you know, be, try to have some. project some empathy in the sense of trying to understand their perspective that does not condone what they view but but see how they got there but see how they got there and that's where you know one one of the famous so you know most Americans in in 1948 knew almost nothing about
01:28:24 Zionism Israel the Middle East and so they often you know interpreted those things through the little news they'd read or from some you know pop culture And so there was a very famous book right around that time called Exodus by a Jewish author that was about. So Exodus is the story in the Bible where the Jews escape Egypt. But it was being used as a metaphor for escaping Europe and entering the promised land again. And in that, in Exodus, it turned into a big Hollywood movie. The, you know, the protagonists are like downtrodden refugees from Europe, survivors of the Holocaust, who are being scrappy and they're the underdogs.
01:29:08 Like in that story, they're the underdogs. You look at a map and Palestine is this little thing. It's surrounded by Arab countries and kingdoms. And so that was a perspective of a lot of Americans who didn't do a bunch of extra reading or didn't have a deep historical understanding was Israel's the underdog. And the survivors of the Holocaust,
01:29:29 I mean, they're like the ultimate underdog. You could hardly think of a... So that's the vision of... That's the vision of Israel, largely in American culture, really, I mean, for some people still today, that, and this would be where the Huckabees and the cruises or the pastors like John Hagee, they continue to frame modern, like 2026 Israel within a Holocaust, post-Holocast frame. And so that is still the dominant way they think about it. For other Christians, for other Americans, the 67 war is where,
01:30:03 that that changes. And they see Israel just sort of dominate its neighbors. And so that's the six-day war? That's the six-day war in June 67. Yes. So from 48 to 67, there is no peace in 48. There's a bunch of armistice agreements. And so there's a, there's a Suez War in 56.
01:30:22 There's a lot of sniping across borders. In 67, it's pretty clear that there's a very sort of charismatic leader in Egypt called Gamal Nasser. He's the dictator there. It's pretty clearly he's trying to rally a war of the Arab nations around Israel to attack Israel. And so in May of 67, there's a lot of military buildup in Jordan, in Syria, in Egypt. And Israel is sort of convinced that they're going to attack. And so they decide to surprise attack on I think it's June 6th, the morning of June 6th.
01:30:58 And they are unbelievably successful. They basically destroy the Egyptian Air Force before it can get off the ground. And they sort of have this, some people thought it was miraculous, six days of just total domination of their enemies. And so by the end of the war, there is a significant amount of land that Israel is now occupying. Yeah, it took a lot of the Suez, right? They took the whole Suez. They took East Jerusalem. They took the West Bank.
01:31:28 A lot of the things that were still debating come from that war. they took the goal on heights. And then the idea from 67 on was that there would be some type of ultimate, or this was the idea by Western diplomats, but there'd be an ultimate land for peace trade. So Israel would give back that land, and then there would be some big peace agreement with the Arab countries. That happened in the 70s with Egypt. So that was the deal in 79 or 77 they start. Jimmy Carter.
01:32:00 Yeah, Anwar Sadat and Manachin Began, who's a sort of really interesting figure, but he's like the first right-wing Israeli politician. Yeah, he was in the Argoon. He's, yeah, all tends to purposes of a terrorist during the 30s. And it's him who's making peace, which is sort of blowing people's minds in the 70s. But that was the basic deal there was Israel would get back the Suez and Egypt would sign a peace deal. And by the way, there was interesting. I think there were settlers in the Suez that had moved there in the 70s. And so that was one of these big things where on the right in Israel, it seemed like Began had been a traitor because he not only made peace with an Arab country, but to make the peace, they had to dislocate settlers from the Suez.
01:32:44 And that, you know, in the right wing, this is like our sacred calling is to settle this, this land from the Nile to the... That's the problem. It's like it's never enough. Right. You know what I mean? And like to call him a traitor to that kind of cause would be nuts when you look at his history. Yeah, yeah. He certainly didn't understand it himself to be, he saw it as like a part of a bigger strategy to normalize relations. And so this is the war where after 67, because Israel is now the occupier, overseeing hundreds of thousands of, you know, in the West Bank and elsewhere of Palestinians, that idea of an underdog really starts becoming complex. Yeah, and I they're blending together in my head. I believe it was in Ronan Bergman's book, Rise and Kill First. I read that in I think like the spring of 2023. He talks about the complicated, I'll take that for some more water for you. He talks about the complicated relationship between the Jewish community that had been in Palestine before and then during the Holocaust and therefore Mark safe from the Holocaust, if you will. And, and, those who came afterwards to flee the Holocaust. And there's a couple very interesting lenses through which he tells the story.
01:34:04 One of them is he talks about how there was some animosity from the natives towards the European Holocaust survivors. And he tells this actually through one story where, I guess famously, there would be these five old guys playing pinnuckle in maybe the 1970s in January. Jerusalem and four of them had been there and one of them was a Holocaust survivor and the other four called him soap referring to him like a nickname as soap because he would have been turned into soap and you know almost to be like yeah this fucking guy and then the other story was the adolf eichmann mission which is one of the most insane spied expultrations ever pulled off adolf iceman largely
01:34:50 thought is to be one of the godfathers of the final solution, had gotten out through the rat lines, was living in, what was it? Was it Chile or Argentina? It was Argentina. It was Argentina. It was Argentina. And Mossad on a team led by Rafi Aitan got operatives in there, including Rafi, and were able to get him out of the country, bring him back to Israel and have him to stand trial for his crimes. And it's this whole thing, created a lot of unity, some form of, not that this exists, but like some form of closure for some people as it relates to the Holocaust and it allowed for a public international trial where you could hear the testimony of people who had been a victim to this guy. But the way Bergman, and I think it was Bergman who explained this, explained it was actually not even a mission Mossad was going to do.
01:35:40 They didn't give a shit. In fact, they had ex-Nazis on their payroll working for him in Egypt and stuff. They were like, well, we're going to worry about some old war criminal or something. And then they were sold on it because they were told this could be a huge political win. You'll get a lot of popularity. The international community will pay attention. They're like, all right, we'll do it. But they weren't like obsessed.
01:36:02 Like who was the guy who ran the Simon Wiesenthal was it in Europe who ran like the Nazi hunting and stuff? He was a victim of the Holocaust and all that. And his family was like those guys, they wanted to go get those guys. Whereas the connotation Bergman was making was a lot of like the native. kind of Jewish community people who were in the Misan and stuff like that were like, fuck this, which is really interesting because the way you're describing it, incorrectly so, is that a lot of the basis of the state being able to be created was because of the horrible things that happened in the Holocaust and using that as like the, well, we got to give them this, when in fact,
01:36:38 a lot of the people who were pushing for that creation happened to be using that happily as an excuse, even though in some cases, I don't want to say in all cases, they didn't even respect the people who had been. subjected to it. Yeah. It's kind of fascinating to me. Yeah, I think that that would be one way to show just sort of the different, yeah, the way that Americans have a very distinct perspective on this stuff and that's what's driving it. And it may or may not reflect the reality on the ground. Yeah, that's a, you know, and one of the things that came out of the Eichmann trial in the U.S. was this other conversation that Hannah Arendt was a philosopher who ended up writing a
01:37:18 book called Eichmann in Jerusalem that was sort of made a wave here. And that's where the, she coined a phrase called the banality of evil. And the idea is that, you know, Eichmann is like the most sort of small diminutive person. He's not a charismatic, he's not Hitler. He's like the opposite of Hitler. And yet he's the one who just was obsessed with getting, you know, the trains on time. And those trains just happen to be the ones going into and out of Dockow and other concentration camps and how sort of this idea of like, what do we think is evil is often the most sort of bureaucratic, mundane things, not the charismatic crazy things. That was one of the big conversations that came out in the U.S. culture that had a lot less
01:38:03 to do with Israel proper. In fact, the book got a lot of pushback because she ended up talking a lot about the complicity of certain Jews in Europe to the Holocaust, the way that. that depending on the pressure applied to different rabbis, they would actually give part of their community to the officials to try to save another part. And it created a much more complicated story. And she basically never lived this down the rest of her life.
01:38:26 She's a very famous philosopher. Create a much more complicated story about how the Holocaust actually was conducted, where there were a lot of people who were playing both sides. And there were definitely collaborators from the Jewish community. And anyway, that goes off. That's a much different message than the sort of moral clarity that the people putting on the trial were hoping to get out of it. I don't know if I were someone who had survived that and who more than likely lost all my family
01:39:05 and that, you know, the idea that then maybe I go live in Israel afterwards because, you know, I want to go to a place where I can be more safe. from that kind of stuff, cool. But the idea that I could be living among some people who did that from my community. Yeah. That's dark.
01:39:26 Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, and this is part of that interesting, you mentioned the sort of tension between the survivors of the Holocaust and the people, you know, the Jews that were in Israel before that or Palestine.
01:39:40 And there's another journalist, Tom Sege, he had a book called, I think it was called the seventh million. And so the six million are the ones that die. The seventh million are the ones that survive and they have to figure out what to do afterward. And it was a book looking at sort of that same thing of, you know, in some ways from the outside, particularly Americans would think, oh, these are sort of like, these are the humanitarian cause. These are the people that, you know, if we were to create a state of Israel, we'd want to create it for. But that in Israeli society, these people were often looked down upon, marginalized,
01:40:14 and seen as, well, many of them were very poor and had, as you can imagine, emotional, psychological issues and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it's one of those things where the way that Americans perceive Israel from the 40s on is often much simpler and different than the reality of Israel on the ground. Another big one that has a bit to do with this, too,
01:40:38 is most American evangelicals at least understand Israel to be a very religious culture. They think... They do? Yeah, and there's very narrow ways where that's true. If you go to Israel on Yom Kippur, everything shut down. Sure. That's a major holiday. On Saturdays, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
01:40:59 Certainly if you're in Jerusalem, it is very different. You know, the bus lines don't go. A lot of the shops are closed for Shabbat. That being said, that's a much more of a, you could say, a cultural practice than a religious practice. You know, the vast majority of Israeli Jews do not sort of, they practice a sort of cultural Judaism, but they're not going to synagogue every week. They're not reading their Bibles. They're not doing all the things that American evangelicals would expect. But there's another thing where, no matter how many sort of the image is locked in there for evangelicals, that because of all the Bible stuff
01:41:35 and the prophecy that Israel must be a very religious culture. And this goes back to Judeo Christianity too. If Israel is sort of the pillar of Judeo and America is the pillar of Christianity, just like America should be a Christian nation, Israel should be a Jewish nation. And that's just not how it is on the ground. It's one of the things, if you go there, you realize, like, yeah, I mean, there are synagogues and there are certainly religious people. There are Orthodox people around.
01:42:05 and there are others that practice, but by and far it's like as secular, certainly if you're in like Tel Aviv or Haifa, cities that aren't small or Jerusalem, they're not religious in the way that evangelicals in the U.S. would think they are. Because there's a mythology with it, as you put, that's been sold,
01:42:26 which also isn't even like fair to do because it's like there's not a ton of places in the world that are all one thing or all like that, you know? But it's interesting because I'd asked you earlier if you remembered the first time where like the state of Israel was discussed within, you know, your evangelical churches and stuff like that. And you can remember a specific time? But like, do you remember the messaging? Like, was there ever a clear message?
01:42:52 Like, we have to support Israel and stuff like that. And you just in passing kind of took that as right. Mythical place, God's prophecy, got to support them. No more questions to ask. Yeah. So I didn't grow up in the in the most I didn't grow up in a very politicized version of this. So there's other insert. There's other churches where, yes, the politics is right under the surface.
01:43:18 I say I encountered it more as, well, one, we call it the Holy Land, right? So there's already this like elevated sense of something holy is happening there. But there's a sense that the people of Israel today. the nation of Israel, the citizens of Israel, are prophetically significant. I would say that's the thing I took away as a kid was, you know, there's people in Thailand, they're normal people. There's people in Algeria. They're normal people. There's people in Israel. There's a prophecy about that. And the implications of that are, you know, you can say are pretty obvious in the sense that that must be a good, they're on the good guys. They're on the good side of the ledger. But I wasn't in the circles where we talked
01:44:02 deeply about the West Bank settlers or the newest peace deal, you know, the newest peace treaty and how Israel shouldn't sign it or something like that. But I definitely could see how that would be the implications I would draw. And if there was anyone who really cared about it and was trying to like get me to think that way, I had built in software, you could say, that would be like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. Like that lines up with the way I read the Bible and everything else. So I think that's actually where a lot of Christians, evangelical Christians tend to be. Like most evangelical Christians don't spend their days thinking about Israel. There's tens and tens of millions of them. A segment of them really care about this issue and
01:44:42 create all the literature and all the TV shows and all that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of built-in software in the broader culture, evangelical culture, that mean that people tilt that way. And then if they're pushed and if there are events in the world that activate them, that they're going to be more likely to go into pro-Israel. them. That's an interesting term to use there. I didn't mean it any more nefarious then. The chip, just yeah. That's wild. Yeah. Have you ever read Netanyahu's autobiography? The one from a few years ago? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I actually do recommend that to people all the time. I read it in 2023, trippy enough. I finished it two or three weeks before October 7th, which is kind of interesting timing right there.
01:45:27 But, you know, one of the things he talks about a couple things in there that tie together. Number one, he's not religious at all. He's literally an atheist. The way I would describe it, I don't know if this is his intention for it to come across this way. He's almost like, yeah, that fucking religious stuff. You know, but he loves invoking it when it's useful for his politics, which I think is one of the most things you can do. That said, he talks about in his years in America because he spent a lot of years here.
01:45:56 You know, he's obviously raised a lot of his childhood here. That's why he's got that Philadelphia English accent. And then he spent a lot of his younger adult life here. Went to MIT. He went to MIT. He went to MIT, then worked at Boston Consulting Group with Mitt Romney and all that. And, you know, obviously had a lot of relationships. But one of the things he openly, you could say, like, brags about is how he was one of many people,
01:46:18 but one of the representatives fortifying the allegiance between Israel and the evangelical Christians, who not only did he look down upon for believing in quote on quote any of that shit unquote, but it's also a different religion than what his people that he's protecting believe in that he also looks down upon. And yet he discusses it in such like a gleeful kind of like, yeah, this is a really important partnership and all that. And something about that just it's gross because it's like you're just trying to get political power in your own country and you're trying to get more power for said country.
01:46:55 the things you do and you are using as like some sort of protective trojan my estimation some sort of protective trojan horse a bunch of people in a different country america who have a different religion christianity to get them to believe all these tales that you yourself don't believe so that you can spread your cause far and wide for whatever end means that is like i don't know that seems kind of they're playing dirty to me um i could definitely See that perspective. Netanyahu is one of the more successful versions of it, and he's been around so long that you just, it's a huge track record.
01:47:33 I mean, this goes back to the original leaders of Israel. David Bingurion was the first prime minister. He was more or less a secular person as well, though from a different angle than Netanyahu. He would often invoke the Bible and God when he's in front of Christians, knowing that this is the common language that they're going to respond to. I mean, so one way you could say this is playing dirty. This is using something that's supposed to be sacred to pursue worldly means or something like that. I think from the, and this is something going back to when I got into the archives of the state archives of Israel.
01:48:10 So looking at their foreign ministry, their religious ministry, and their tourism ministry. When was this? When you looked at this? This was when I lived there. So this was my dissertation research. And you actually can't do this anymore. The archival system has changed there. you don't have the same type of access that you did 15 years ago.
01:48:28 They call that the Dan Hummel rule. I don't think I was, I think it was actually Denyahu's the, I think there's certain people in Israel who've, for a long time, have said like, why are we letting people research our archives? Who is this Dan Hummel? Get them out of here. So this is where, this is what historians tend to do, diplomatic historians. You go into the archives of the bureaucracy and you try to figure out what's the story based on the
01:48:52 memos and things like that. So in countries like the U.S., there are very open policies. Like, you have to either classify it or has to be accessible. Usually it's around 30 years. So if you follow the scholarship, you know, like right now, there's a ton of scholarship on the 80s because all the stuff from Reagan has become available to historians that want to research it. And Israel used to have that.
01:49:19 So I was there in 2012. I was able to research stuff up until the early 80s. And so it was nice. It was interesting to do that. Today, as I understand it, there is no physical space to go to anymore where you can actually, you know, get the box, open the pieces of paper and look at the transcripts. You have to request a document. You have to request a folder. And then some archivist will go and scan it for you and then send it to you.
01:49:45 As a historian, it's like there's so many ways that that could be misleading on what's in there. Also, a lot of what you do as a historian is you don't actually know exactly what you're looking for. And so you just sit there and you got to sift through all the stuff that's not relevant to find the good stuff. And it's like I can't just request a PDF of the thing I have no idea if it's going to be useful or not. So anyway, but when I was back there, you know, able to do this stuff, there is a term in Hebrew that is used a lot in these settings where Israelis are trying to appeal, not just to evangelicals, but to all types of people. It's Hasbara. It's public diplomacy. So in that sense, what Netanyahu is doing what they did for decades before him was just public diplomacy. It's like, what is, you know, you need this certain interest group in this certain country to be on your side.
01:50:35 The U.S. is a democracy. So you need sort of these domestic interest groups to somehow have affinity for you as the state of Israel. Well, what's the things that you could do? You could appeal to economics. You could appeal to the technology sector in Israel, which is, you know, significant in the Middle East. You could appeal to these like general ethical values about democracy or whatever, or you could appeal to the thing that is far more, you know, of importance to a lot of these people, which is, which is the Holy Land stuff and the, the religion stuff. And so in that sense,
01:51:12 I don't know if from a bureaucratic standpoint, there's much differentiation from in the Israeli government between religion and other ways that they would appeal to people. And they're not just doing it with the U.S. They're doing it all over the world. And every country is doing it. Yes. And there's all different ways that the U.S. tries to pull on the heartstrings of every country out there as well, depending on what the history is between the U.S.
01:51:38 and that country and what the U.S. thinks, you know, the public diplomacy people. Or just over sort of their government. That's been a, yeah, that's been a resort as well. But you think of like radio-free Europe and stuff from like, the Cold War, where it was a very similar sort of appeal to these like common Western things to try to get people behind the Iron Curtain to care about overthrowing the communists. So in that sense, I detected at least from the perspective of the bureaucrats that they didn't themselves understand the religious element to be unique beyond the sense that like it's
01:52:12 something that we can use here that other groups just don't have as an asset. And there, I don't know what to make of that because I think that that's in large part. It's in large part like how states interact with each other. Is they appeal to these things they think will activate someone in that. And particularly Israel is a small country halfway around the world. There's not a lot of reason why Americans outside of special reasons would care. They don't care about Jordan the same way. They don't care about Lebanon the same way.
01:52:47 And again, going back to like the 50s and 60s when this started, in the post-Holocast context, particularly when one of the interpretations, even in the Israeli state, was interfaith relations are really important because the breakdown of interfaith relations is in part what led to the Holocaust. Yes. Like this needs to be an area of concern. Like we need to somehow get Christians to reform their theology in order to be less hostile to Jews as a people. So that's a lot of where it's coming from. I think I agree with you that Netanyahu sort of operationalizes that and is very cynical in how he uses it. But he's in a tradition, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
01:53:25 Yeah. He's not the first one to do that. His father was doing it too. Yeah, Ben Zion had it. And Ben Zion was a scholar of the Inquisition, which went very poorly for the Jews in Spain. And so he had a very sort of ideological perspective on the threat of the Christian world as well. well that basically right of the Christian world that basically underneath underneath every Christian is a is an anti-Semite because of the history of because Christian theology is so anti-Jewish
01:53:56 and because um and because of history because of the way that Christians have mistreated this is ben zion's you know interpretation I think that Benjamin basically internalizes so if he does though isn't that kind of fascinating that Netanyat Benjamin has spent so much of his life invoking the Bible to appeal directly to the people that his father, possibly pure spec, taught him not to trust? That's kind of interesting to me. Well, I think what Benjamin has done is he's found what he believes to be the few Christian, the Christian traditions that aren't beholden to anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, particularly American evangelicals. And he's cultivated that relationship. And he's seen it as
01:54:45 You know, I can't do this with the Catholic Church. I can't do this with the Presbyterians or the Lutherans or the Anglicans. I can do it with these disorganized but powerful evangelical Christians in the U.S. And because of this particular theology of dispensationalism that holds a special place for the Jewish people in the future because of prophecy, they are not prone to the same type of anti-Jewish theology as the rest of the Christian world. They also have a lot of, you give a good visual there of them being like not organized at the same level. So they have a lot of captains of ships, if you will. You know, you can get these larger than life, really cultish mega pastors who also love that money.
01:55:32 Yes. And if you flow that money in there, they'll find the winds of God to follow it. You know what I mean? I'm looking at the Kenneth Copeland's of the world and people like that. So, you know, they can then use their, I call it what it is, their cult powers and stuff like that to then incentivize their people who would literally follow them off the George Washington Bridge if they told them to do what they say from a political standpoint, too. Yeah, and I think the sort of err version of this or the paradigm example is Jerry Falwell, the senior from the late 70s, early 80s. This is when Began, Menachin Began is prime minister. And Falwell is exactly what you said, a very charismatic, rich, politically influential
01:56:18 megachurch pastor who befriends Menachim Begand. And by 1980, Beggan is awarding him the Jabotinsky Award, which is named after his ideological hero of the revision of Zionists. And... Who is the one that brought back Hebrew, right? Wasn't it Jabotinsky? No. Aham.
01:56:39 Ahav Ha'am, maybe is his name. He was not the one who brought back Hebrew. Jabotinsky was a revolutionary in Europe in, and I believe died in the 40s. Yeah, he did. Who was sort of the inspiration for Began's own radicalism. And he, and so this award was sort of just concocted to give to people like Falwell as saying, like, hey, you're being honored for your friendship to Israel. But Fawdwell was also considered, you know, interpreted in 1980 as one of the reasons Ronald Reagan won the election that year. That Fawwell had activated these millions of Baptists in the South to vote for Republicans.
01:57:21 And that, you know, he had sort of turned the election in Reagan's favor. And so Fawlewell comes into the early 80s with a lot of political cachet. And he's also very invested in Israel. I think from Fawwell's perspective, it's like he gets to hang out with the head of a state. That's pretty cool. And you get to hang out with Reagan, or at least you don't hang out with him, but you visit the White House a lot. And so there's a lot of personal cachet that's accumulated for Falwell.
01:57:49 I think Jesus Christ was really worried about clout, too. Like he's in Scram. Well, so for Falwell, it's all for a good cause, right? So it's all for Christian values and all that kind of stuff. Always hide behind that. It's important. And so Falwell becomes a sort of indispensable ally to beg in in the early. early 80s, you know, one of the things Began does is a surprise air attack on a nuclear reactor
01:58:12 in Iraq. This is in 1981. And the story goes that the first person Began calls is Falwell after the attack. And he says something to the effect of, I know that if I get Falwell on my side, it'll really box in Reagan. Because Reagan's a conservative, follows a conservative. And so if there's a huge sort of swell of support for Israel, it's going to box in the Republican president. And it turns out that the US actually does denounce that attack. So it didn't work exactly like Began thought, but it's sort of revealing that that was where he went. And then in 82, Began launches the Lebanon War, which is disastrous. It ends up taking him down as prime minister. But part of the Pazbara on the part of Israel was to bring tons of evangelical pastors, including
01:58:58 Fahua Latour, to sort of observe for themselves that there weren't any war crimes happening, that the Lebanese really were happy that the Israelis had come. And Fawahua was a loyal ally in that. He came back and he said, listen, I didn't see anything wrong. I think it's the liberal media. It's where you get sort of, it's one of the origin points of that way that evangelical pastors, at least some of them talk about the liberal media misrepresenting things. It's actually from the late 70s, early 80s.
01:59:30 And the Lebanon war is actually an important inflection point there. But that's another thing Fawle did. He also did things that I find even more sort of sticking out on a limb for Israel. He would film from like West Bank settlements. He had like TV shows and specials that he would do. Specials from settlements. Yeah. How did he rationalize that?
01:59:54 So two ways. And you can hear Mike Huckabee says this too. This is divinely granted land to Israel. Just read the Bible. And two, the settlers are a fulfillment of prophecy. Like these people aren't just, like they're, it's in front of our eyes, we're seeing prophecy being fulfilled by Jews retaking the land that was given to them
02:00:19 back to Abraham in Genesis. And so he would love to film from there because he's like, I'm literally empirically showing you prophecy being fulfilled. Like if you believe the prophecies will literally be fulfilled, it's happening right here and I can document it. What kind of cognitive dissonance does it take for him to stand there knowing that he could be a guy that if he were living there, the prophecy would be being fulfilled on his house being taken from him? Yeah, that did not cross his mind.
02:00:47 Didn't cross his mind. No, not at all. Not at all. Yeah, did you see the thing the, this was, I guess, like a couple weeks ago, Piers Morgan had on that one crazy lady. Who's that psycho that runs the Daniela something? She's a settler who is like really racist. and he asked her the question is one
02:01:07 yeah Daniela Weiss is one Jewish life and one Palestinian life equal she couldn't answer a question I mean we know the answer the answer was she was literally laughing on it but like she refused to answer the question he's like you won't answer the question
02:01:23 it's a very simple question Daniela is is the life equal that's a terrible accent sorry but you know it just blows my mind that people could think that way or be that way. I don't know. Maybe I'm too egalitarian, but like to me, it's like real simple. You just don't, you don't kick people out of their homes. You don't fucking kill people because you don't like them. Like at the end of the day, we are all, we're all here the same species. I don't know. Like, that really is simple to me, but there's so many
02:01:53 places in the world in 2026, and it's not just the place we're talking about. It's a lot of places around the world, including sometimes in this country, of course, where it's like, that's just not how people treat it. And I just don't, I don't understand that at all. Yeah, well, we even talked about the, the idea of Judeo-Christianity being based on this idea of dignity of each person. So there's a, there's, ideally there's like a correction within, you know, back then, Falwell's own head that, like, how do you square this with your own stated commitment to the, to the, what the Bible says? I think the other thing, and this definitely comes out, I think the 80s are when our eco-chambers really begin to take shape that we still have in our media,
02:02:35 where there are just entirely different interpretations of what is happening on the ground to the point that if you're stuck in an echo chamber, that is Falwell's echo chamber. And follow might, I mean, I'm not beyond thinking that Falwell might believe his own stuff. Oh yeah, you tell yourself something enough times, you believe it.
02:02:55 That there is just an entirely different interpretation of why are we fighting this war, who are the bad guys, did these massacres happen or not? Like there's different interpretations of that from another, you know, from mainstream media or whatever and that a lot of the cognitive dissonance that an outsider would see is just not even present because they're not even interpreting the conflict
02:03:19 with the same facts as as outside observers would. And so once those echo chambers are created... Why was it the 80s, you think, that did that? Yeah, so I think some of this is technology and some of this is like the legal part of this too, but you start getting distinctive, you start getting our polarization that we have in our culture now. And then the technology enables that polarization to really get on a life of its own. And so you get, I mean, Fala was a televangelist to start going back to the early 70s. And so he was someone who deeply understood
02:03:57 the power of communication technology and create. a lot of it like he he he he he was his own sort of studio and you didn't really have I mean you had people pre previous to the 70s who would have their own radio show or you know write their own pamphlets and things like that but by the 70s particularly with these televangelists people like Jerry Falwell another big pro-Israel guy Pat Robertson you have people like Jim and Tammy Baker you have all these televangelists who are The televangelism is just part of their big media empire. And those media empires are being built out in the 70s and 80s.
02:04:38 That's sort of the heyday of that. And that, to me, is one version of an echo chamber. It's not the only one, but it's an early version. You know, plenty of people have talked about the rise of sort of a distinctively conservative radio culture. That's an 80s, 90s phenomenon, too. Rush Limbaugh being the pinnacle of that in the 90s. And then you're not too far from the Internet where those things can really flourish as well.
02:05:00 So I think some of it's the technology, some of it's the way that we are in this political culture that really does have an inflection point in the 70s where you have a distinctly conservative movement that ends up empowering Reagan and then the Reagan Revolution. And even still, though Trump has made that a lot more complicated, you know, Republicans up until very recently still referred to Reagan as sort of like the godfather of the movement. And you have this sort of culture wars framework. that has become the dominant framework of our, of the way we adjudicate things in our culture. And Israel was interestingly not, it was bipartisan for many, many decades of that, but has become in the last decade
02:05:43 part of that same landscape to where it's much more, you know, it's much more predictable how you land on Israel, whether you're conservative or liberal. Up until 10 years ago, everyone was more or less pro-Israel with different gradations. It's flipped all the way. Yeah. And now, you know, Democratic primaries are being decided in some cases on this issue.
02:06:06 But that's very new. It's Republican, it's Republican. Massey would be an example of someone who, yeah, it has, that was like the issue. It's a generational thing. Yeah. Look at the data, people below age 55, if you want to be more conservative about it, people below age 45 in this country are massively against Israel and what they do. And I could even say below 55, but then above.
02:06:29 55, even sometimes on the left side, but particularly on the right side, people are like, God gave him that land. Yeah. You know, and it's like, ooh. Well, they form their political views in a like Cold War era context, and that's just very far from young people. Yeah. Now, hold on a minute, though. You, this is what's interesting, though. Not that you changed your views because you're a young guy. You didn't change your views when you're 60. That's not what happened with you, but like, you had a lot of things ingrained in you from a young child over and over and over again. And then we're able, it's very clear from this conversation, to kind of step out and see things in a more like, oh, okay, there's a lot going on here kind of way. So psychologically, I've been
02:07:14 wanting to come back to that, the whole conversation. You talked about when you were studying Middle Eastern history at Colorado State and all that. And then you decided in graduate school to really do like a focus on a lot of Christian Zionism stuff as you progress. through graduate school. Like, you know, how were you getting yourself to open up your mind? And were there points where that was difficult when, say, maybe you came across some things that were directly against a worldview you had been told. And the first time you looked at it, maybe you said, wait, that can't be.
02:07:47 And like, how did you overcome that hurdle? Yeah. I mean, some of it is having parents who taught me to think critically, even as, you know, They were part of a subculture. A lot of books in our home, even as I was part of a subculture, read outside of that subculture a lot. So, you know, it's not purely education or something. It's also just sort of the gift of the family you grew up in.
02:08:16 I think there's back to the year I was in Israel, I met a lot of people that I didn't even know existed in terms of. the categories they were in. So I'm sure I had, because I was a semi-rail red person by that point, a sense that there were Christian Palestinians. I'm sure I knew that. I had never met one, living there and intentionally seeking out, like, what are the Christian communities in this country and seeing like, oh, there's a, you know, Bethlehem is of significance to Christians as a place. Well, there's a lot of Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem that have been there for a long time and have their churches and things like that. So meeting people like that,
02:08:56 and being confronted in a real visceral way. It's not just reading about them. It's like talking to them, getting their perspective. What did they say? I mean, one of the key things they would say about Western Christians is like, you guys don't know we exist. And as I said, I was part of that as well. So the idea that if you're Palestinian, you're Muslim, is very, you know, we've talked a few times here about sort of the myths or the simplistic, simplistic ways Americans think about Israel. This is another one is that Palestinian equals Muslim.
02:09:28 And so that was one thing they would say is you don't realize we exist. And the other would say would be we're Christians and we have a much different take on what Israel is and theological, experientially. What was there? All right, let's start with theologically and then go experience. Yeah. So, theologically, the ways we've been talking about American Christians, the dispensationalism, the prophecy, the God gave the land to this group of people. I mean, none of that is in their understanding of what the Bible says or what the or what Christians need to believe. And so, you know, an interesting part of that, and this is a bit touchy, but it's interesting is for many Palestinian Christians.
02:10:10 I mean, they're not Western Christians. They didn't, they have none of the baggage of the Holocaust, right? That wasn't their communities, their culture, did not commit the Holocaust. And so all of the post-Holocast ways that Christians talk about Jews, talk about Judeo-Christian tradition, like that's a much more difficult concept for Palestinian Christians to understand what do you mean Judeo-Christian? Like those things, like Judaism and Christianity are very separate religions. And so as someone who was sort of shaped by the post-Holocast conversation as an American, it can feel like you hear things and you're like, that doesn't.
02:10:48 sound right. Like, I would never say something about Judaism the way that they do, but they don't have any of the baggage that I do as a Western American Christian. So, so that, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, soologically they, um, and I'm thinking here of like, um, Bethlehem Bible College, which is in Bethlehem. It's, you could say it's evangelical and it's theology, but it's all Palestinians. And so, um, they have just a much different take. They have a conference they have every other year called Christ at the checkpoint, which is, an attempt to try to create a different sort of vision of what it means to be Christian and care about Israel and Palestine than the Christian Zionist view. So they're sort of like trying to
02:11:29 counterprogram all the pro-Israel stuff. So it sounds like they're not necessarily, maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but there's a lot of thought in that community of like, let's do a two-state solution here kind of deal. Is that fair to that? Yeah, yeah, they're more open to that. I mean, it's a complicated, you know, and they're a minority in the Palestinian community. community, and so they've got to handle that. But they're definitely looking for, yeah, a minimum, some type of sovereignty for the Palestinians. And, yeah, they're not usually, I mean, it's a complicated group as well, but they're not calling for no Israel. They're calling for some type of, yeah, two-state solution or federated one state where there's multiple communities that have some
02:12:10 type of larger, you know, sort of government over them or something. Do they feel, you know, at least when you were there and you were talking with them, did they feel subjugated, persecuted? Yes, very much so. And a lot of that was like their daily existence was one, we mentioned the checkpoints, right? So the idea that you can't really have freedom of movement in your own sort of communities. The potential for earning, if you're in Israel or five miles away in the West Bank, totally different. Your rights, your legal rights, totally different. even as a as a visitor when you go into any of the west bank areas there's this big sign that is in red that you have to drive by that says basically like you're giving like you're basically
02:13:03 entering into into an area that your legal rights are severely curtailed if something were to happen while you're here and so in all those ways and then of course it depends. depending on who you talked to, so I was there in 2012, that wasn't too far from the second in Teffada, which was in the early 2000s. And there was tons of violence, and there's been tons of violence in the last few years as well. In the, in the West Bank, settler violence on Palestinians, Israeli military sort of crowd control and all that kind of stuff. Did you ever witness any of that? I did. One of the sort of stories my wife and I continue to tell is my parents were actually visiting. So they, they, they've visited.
02:13:48 visited. We did like it, they were there for a while. They didn't do an official tour. I, my wife and I just sort of took them on all the key spots. But we ended up on our way driving home one day. We took a wrong turn. And we ended up sort of on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives, which is in the West Bank. And for, for a reason I don't remember now, I don't know if we didn't have cell service or whatever, but we didn't have like Google Maps. So we were just trying to figure it out. We ended up just sort of like, accidentally going into a village where there was a protest happening. And there was a ton of Palestinians.
02:14:27 And we saw sort of rubber bullets and smoke things being shot into the crowd. And I knew enough Hebrew to be able to, we pulled down the window, talk to one of the soldiers and understood what was going on. And so we turned around and left. And as we were leaving, I'm actually. sure we looked very odd to the people there. We were in a rental car from Israel for Americans sort of driving through. So we, we, we, we, we, one of these situations where like our car was surrounded by people and we just had to sort of inch through until we could back up and, and go back
02:15:03 out. So, so yeah, we, we accidentally sort of witnessed one of the, this would have been in, early 2013. And, yeah, it was, it was, I was sort of, I don't know if I was, I was scared at the, in, in the sense of like, I don't know what's going to happen here. We don't even know what's going on. So we saw that. And then there were a number of demonstrations right outside in the old city of Jerusalem. The Damascus gate is in East Jerusalem. And so it is often a site where protests happen that are, at that point, they're usually
02:15:37 Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel. They're citizens of Israel. They're not in the West Bank. But they're very critical of the Israeli government. and that would be where they would often have their protests. And some of them would get pretty raucous and the police would come in. There's a lot of horse police in Jerusalem.
02:15:58 And so that would be part of the dynamic there too. That was like a few blocks from where we lived. And so I would see a number of sort of those things over the year we were there based on what was happening. A lot of the, when I was there, there was a Gaza incursion. And so some of it was around that. Some of it was around access.
02:16:18 What did you think of that when you saw that? Like when there was a Gaza incursion, you're there? Like, what was your reaction like, I don't know, politically speaking to that? Yeah. I mean, I, so this was part of the, the mo the lawn strategy that that Israelis had for a long time. He was prime minister when I was there too. It's been around so long. So, you know, it seemed.
02:16:46 it seemed like this was a, we mentioned George Orwell a long time ago. So it seemed like it was an Orwellian situation here where part of what the policy is is to perpetuate the conflict, I guess, to say. So I felt a bit of that. You also feel a lot of like, there's a definite unifying effect among the Israelis.
02:17:11 So you're in a country where you're getting missile sirens over and over again, middle of the night, middle of your workday. That creates sort of a bond with people that otherwise, I mean, I was a total, I was a student, you know, a foreign student at that point. But like, I sat for hours in a basement with Israelis who you can't do anything else. The sort of rules are you can't go above ground. And that's just a, it's a, it was an interesting experience. I never expected something like that in the U.S.
02:17:42 We've never really had something like that. that COVID would be the closest thing we've had here where you'd be sort of stuck with at that end with COVID it really wasn't people you didn't know it was people you did know um it creates an interesting uh tight social bond that you really can't create any other way um so i i also experienced um that as well and then i i mentioned i mean one of the things you're just struck with is how in a you know in an unfortunate way how fortunate you are to have an american passport because that really gets you out of almost anything at least it did for me, where I was uncertain what would happen.
02:18:19 I'm also, you can see on the camera, I look quite American. I don't, I'm not mistaken for an Arab or an Israeli, a Jewish Israeli. And that got, I think that got me out of stuff. I also wore like. I've seen some ones from Brooklyn that look like you. Just saying. Well, and I wore, you know, I wore like cargo pants and like things that are like distinctly American.
02:18:40 I remember there was one time I was going, I was on the bus. And routinely, this is. in an Israeli bus, you get stopped and searched. And it's unclear why it just happens and you assume there's some logic to it. And depending on honestly how you looked, they would either pass over you or ask you to get up or ask for papers or whatever. And I never got asked for a thing once. And I'm pretty sure it's because they looked at me and they said, this guy is not part of it. It's not from here.
02:19:09 He's probably not, you know, doing whatever they're interested in. But I really, it was the, you know, it was the last time I've lived abroad. It was really just distinctly like how unique sort of my features and that I'm an American, give me privileges that just a lot of people don't have and they could never get because of the accident of where they were born and where I was born. Being there for a year, though, and taking this all in kind of step by step. obviously you're doing your studies, you're researching a lot of things too, but you're living in the area, you get to be a part of the culture like within it to understand it. You've explained a lot of that
02:19:47 today. But you know, you make friends with people who are Israeli and who have lived there. And I would imagine as like your views are morphing or, you know, you're taking it all in, I would imagine you probably had some pretty in-depth conversations with some of them. Is that fair to say? Yeah, about all types of stuff. I'm also Christian. I mean, Christianity, is a very less than 1% of Israelis are Christian. So it's also your, you have just a different fundamental perspective on a lot of things. But yeah, and those conversations, I mean, I can think of people I've known now for almost 15 years. And they've changed over the 15 years.
02:20:24 I think if you met enough Israelis, you'd see that there's a lot of diverse opinions on the Israeli side. You know, just before October 7th, there were huge protests in Israel. against the courts. Against the court, yeah, and frankly against Netanyahu. And then wartime kicks in and that all went away. That was convenient. Yeah, that saved Netanyahu since then. And yeah, so there's, I mentioned the sort of like sitting in a bunker with people as like a way to get to know them.
02:21:00 I remember distinctly there was one, so I took the bus a lot. we didn't have a car. And there was one day where it was just a bus stop in downtown Jerusalem on my way probably to the university. And I don't even remember what the person looked like, but someone had a duffel bag that they were carrying on the bus. Tons of people have backpacks, everything else. And the bus stops and the person holding it sets it down and starts to exit the bus. and if you know anything about the second intifada, the main way that terrorists would sort of,
02:21:38 or one of the main ways, would be bombing buses. And it was probably like two seconds that this person who ended up to, it wasn't a bomb, ended up, he just forgot, or she, I don't even remember who it was, forgot the duffel bag, got back in the bus real quick, picked it up and left. But for those two seconds, you could just feel like everyone looked at each other.
02:21:57 And it wasn't enough time to really do anything, but it was like, what do we do now? And that's just a weird thing. It was just totally foreign to me as someone who grew up largely in America that like something like a duffel bag just not having someone next to it would provoke like this deep existential like what do we do now type thing. So you know that's part of the the and that doesn't I guess again it's like it's like empathy. It's like trying to understand like where people are coming here. It doesn't excuse any particular policy or reaction to that. But it's also like I don't know if I could appreciate. appreciate being understand some of the ways that Israelis have in the Israeli government has reacted except by like experiencing things like that and saying like yeah i i don't want to excuse it i i want people to like you know trust their better angels and like like overcome the instinctual things that develop in societies that are at war um but i also have to like acknowledge how deeply imprinted these types of uh fears and responses are that are i i picked them up and i was
02:23:02 only there for you know a few months at by that point talk about living that affects belief systems big time oh definitely yeah and that's totally interpret your your religion justifies or you know emboldens those things as well and yeah and i was only there for a little while people who've been born there and live there that's one of the things that really is depressing um when you look at polling around uh younger Israelis is that they're further to the right you could say on these issues than their parents. In a way that is different than I agree with you that in the U.S., including among young evangelicals, they're depolarizing on this issue. They're far less pro-Israel instinctually for a lot of interesting reasons. But in Israel, it's sort of the opposite.
02:23:50 And part of that is those older generations of Israelis, just because of the situation in the 50, 60, 70s, actually knew more Arabs. They lived in closer proximity to each other, and as the conflict has continued, they've segregated into their own communities. And so there's tons of young Israelis who have no friends in the Arab community. And so that ingrained sort of instinctual othering of the other community is even more deeply embedded in them than their parents. So that's a really depressing thing to think about. As time goes on, it gets more polarized than we would hope, you know, in a more optimistic sense. that war would make people want to be, I don't know, more accommodating or reaching out to the other.
02:24:40 It's like actually what we see right now at least is the opposite. Yeah. And it's sadly human nature too. When you separate among each other and go into your own worlds, you can other the other person so much more. Like that's when I talk about it all the time. It's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to have grown up in New Jersey. I mean, I have won up everything when it comes to first. friends, you know what I mean? Like, we have so much culture here. And like, you know, it's also,
02:25:07 it's a place where like a lot of that, I'm not talking about like the DEI stuff. I'm saying like quite literally, like culture is is celebrated and like you understand like, okay, this, my friends who are of this type of group like this thing. My friends are this type of group like that thing and stuff. And like you kind of, you get a smorgasbord of everything. But, you know, if I had grown up somewhere else where maybe it was more one type of community or something like that, and I, of a whole different worldview. And it's hard for me to understand that. I talk with people all the time who are from rural areas maybe or other countries, you know, where it's more one ethnicity and stuff. And like, you know, I understand that because you only know what you know. Right.
02:25:49 Yeah, to go back to sort of how my thinking changed over time, too, I mean, one of the things, once we moved to Colorado was I was in public schools. And so, as opposed to a Christian school, I should say. And so my best friends in middle school and high school were there was a guy who was really good friends with who was Mormon and other one who was Catholic and then a few friends who just weren't particularly religious. And particularly the Mormon and I would have these long conversations about Mormon theology and Christian theology and all that kind of stuff. The golden tablets. The golden tablets, the underwear, all the different stuff that, you know, particularly a 13-year-old evangelical thinks it's funny about. Mormonism. I mean, he'd have the same stuff. You know, he'd be like, well, you know, there's this passage in judges where it says, you know, ye all shall be gods. And it's like, well, you know, what do you make of that? Like, that's what we believe. Why don't you believe that types? We'd have all those debates. And that really, so that's a different type of diversity than I'm sure
02:26:45 you experienced here in New Jersey. But it was like, I was always around people who I had to make the mental jump that, like, they don't think the same way I do about some poor things I care about. And so always doing that translation work of like, I'm not just going to assume you and I are coming from the same place. And when we start talking about things that we differ on, like, how do we talk about that in a way that doesn't like piss each other off right away? So yeah, I think that was part of why I was, you know, as I thought about my own theology and tradition and things like there was built into the way I grew up just like parts of my life where I was doing some version of thinking through those things all the time. All right, real quick, Dan, I got to go to the bathroom. But when we come back, you're an expert on the end times. We haven't talked about that yet today.
02:27:32 So we'll get to that. We'll be right back. All right. So you mentioned, we're back. You mentioned earlier today you've even written a full book on dispensationalism and you've studied like the cross between religion and geopolitics. And we've discussed a lot of that today. But one of the aspects you focus on is the way the interpretation of the quote unquote end times or the rapture is used to,
02:27:56 and correct me. wrong if I'm explaining this wrong, but is used to justify both religious doctrine and the way that that is interpreted for political, I guess, ideology. Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about the 1920s and 30s and 40s, where there's a lot of these cultural and ethical arguments that Christians bring. The end time stuff is in there, but someone like Reinhold Niebuhr, who we mentioned before, he was not a big end times guy. That was not his type of Christianity. But the type of Christianity we see in the 70s and 80s, the Jerry Falwell type of Christianity really connects their support for the state of Israel with end times or what
02:28:39 theologians called eschatology. So the study of the end is what that word means. And dispensationalism is often the term we use to describe this pretty specific set of beliefs that a lot of evangelicals have about how Israel plays into the end of time. And the, I mentioned those novels that got me hooked in when I was a kid, left behind novels. So the left behind novels are 12 novels that sort of fictionalize this scenario. And this scenario is developed from reading different passages throughout the Bible, not on one specific, it's not all like in one specific book, and trying to piece them together to say, uh, if, If we're going to take all of the prophecy, what's called literally, or that it's going to be fulfilled, like, in a way we could observe, like a journalist could observe, this is the scenario of events that have to happen.
02:29:35 And so the one that starts the end times off is the rapture. And the rapture is this idea that in any moment, in a split, you know, in a wink of an eye, all the true Christians will be suddenly disappeared and go to heaven. And they'll be, it'll be so dramatic that like if they're a pilot in an airplane, then the airplane will have no pilot and will crash. They'll just disappear. They'll just disappear in the thin air. So this is called the rap. This is what often Americans, when you hear the word rapture, this is like the thing that comes
02:30:13 to mind. So the idea is no one knows this time when this is going to happen. But when it happens, it'll be dramatic. And all the true Christians, the ones who really believe in Jesus, Jesus aren't just performing it will disappear at once. And that'll kick off a seven-year end-of-time tribulation, as it's called. And that's where Israel will play a big role. And the deeper theology here is that dispensationalists, unlike almost every other Christian
02:30:44 tradition, doesn't think that God is done with the Jewish people as a people, as a nation. as a nation, including a like sovereign nation state. Catholics, Orthodox, most Protestants would say that's how God worked in the Old Testament, the Kingdom of Israel, King David, all that kind of stuff. But once Jesus came, Jesus changed the covenant, and now it was about joining the church. And the church is the entity that God, you know, cares about. And, you know, is what is going to be the thing that Christians join to enact the sermon on the Mount and all that kind of stuff. Dispensationalists, and this goes back to the guy who sort of founded this in the 19th century, don't think that that's what happened when Jesus came, that Jesus created the church as a separate entity,
02:31:40 but that the ultimate plan, because they want to read the prophecies literally, is that God will fulfill these prophecies through the Jewish people. So like when the prophet Isaiah talks about the, or maybe Zachariah would be another one, these are just prophets in the Old Testament, talks about all the nations of the earth coming up to Jerusalem to pay honor to Jesus the king as some type of end times vision. Christians have tended to say, oh, that's spiritual, that's like all peoples will be part of the church and we will worship Jesus. Dispensation will say, no, no, no, no, no.
02:32:17 That's a literal thing. Like they're all going to go up to physically going to travel to Jerusalem and then pay honor to the king of the Jews who is Jesus. And so they go throughout the whole Old Testament. And it's largely the Old Testament where we have these prophecies that involve Israel or the seed of Abraham or the seat of David. And dismissal says, no, those are still going to happen just like they were prophesied way back when, which means they haven't been fulfilled yet, which means they must be fulfilled
02:32:46 in the future. which means there's still a future for the literal seat of Abraham, the ethnic Jewish people. And because they are committed to that, and it hasn't happened yet, they think all this stuff is going to happen in the future. And so that's where the end times piecing all this stuff together, they get the sense that the rapture happens. The rapture takes away the church from the chessboard. And so then Israel is the main character again, just like it was in the Old Testament. And so Israel will ultimately be sort of attacked by its enemies and will be miraculously saved. It will ultimately sign a peace treaty, but it will be a false treaty and they will be betrayed.
02:33:34 And the person that is going to adjudicate that treaty is actually the Antichrist, who's the inversion of Christ. He's this figure that seems like a savior but is actually demonic. So this is one reason why evangelicals are very skeptical of the peace process. Because when they think about peace in this prophetic sense, the only piece is going to be a false peace. And so the idea that, you know, there's actually authentic, you know, peacemakers is not part of their worldview. It's like this place is destined to be a conflict zone. And any type of peace can only be a false peace. But that false peace will be broken.
02:34:12 Israel will be betrayed. Many, many Jews will die. This is part of the awkwardness of this scenario when you're talking, when Israelis talk to Christian Zionists because in the Christian Zionist scenario, most of the Jews die based on how they interpret these prophecies.
02:34:29 So you've got to protect all of them because they're all going to die anyway. That's the cynical reading of it, right? Is that... Seems like a literal reading of it. And so the final sort of part of this scenario, seven-year scenario, Mario in the future is that there will be this massive culminating battle, the battle of
02:34:48 Armageddon that will be in Israel, literally, in a place called Telmigito, which is where the term Armageddon comes from. It's in sort of northern central Israel. And that the forces of Satan, that will be sort of like these particular countries that are satanic, part of the Antichrist Coalition, will fight against the remnant good forces. Who are the remnant? good forces in that. So this would be people who have become Christian since the rapture. Okay. So people who maybe their spouse was a Christian got raptured and they go,
02:35:23 she was right. I need to become a Christian now. These are called the tribulation saints. Right. So the remnants of the disappeared. The remnants of this period who recognized the truth. And then the remnants of the Jewish people who are not destroyed and all these things. There will still be a remnant. Do they believe in Jesus now? They should. They either should or will by the end because of what's going to happen at the end of the battle, which is Jesus will miraculously,
02:35:53 this will be his second coming, is he will come through the clouds with the army of heaven. And that includes all the raptured people. And they will destroy the evil forces, and that will be what sets up the millennial kingdom, the sort of future of peace and prosperity. So this is, so that millennial kingdom part is like the end of Revelation, like the last part. There's a thousand years apiece.
02:36:16 These other things are some in Revelation, some in the book of Daniel, some in Isaiah, some in Ezekiel, some when Jesus is talking in prophetic terms in Matthew, they're piecing all these things together to make this scenario. How did they square that? I'm just thinking of the story of Jesus right now. The historical figure that's been written down in religious texts like the Bible, of course. How did they square Jesus go in like full general patent, taking out the Nazis with, you know, a bunch of scud missiles and shit, you know, with a guy who as far as I can tell his entire life was based on rising above things, peace, turning the other cheek? like this, like just whether you're religious or not, like the example of like being like a good person and taking the high road on things that the historical character Jesus Christ represents is pretty amazing. And this seems a little bit, I don't know, counterintuitive to that narrative.
02:37:21 Different side of Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. So the response tends to be that Jesus is, you know, if he's part of the Trinity and he's God, God is about love. He's also about justice. And this is the justice side. And there is imagery in Revelation, so the last book of the Bible, of this Jesus returning on a horse, which is a military metaphor, with a sword coming out of his mouth like a tongue. So this is like... That's some decked-out Jesus right there. And it's a very different image than the Jesus you get in the Gospels. Though there is an edge, I mean, if you, there's an edge to Jesus in the Gospels. I don't think
02:38:01 it amounts to all of that. Well, when he was like switching people out of the... Yeah, and he tells his disciples, if you have a sword, bring it with you. This is right before the betrayal. And there's definitely a prophetic anger that Jesus has toward the hypocrites of his day and so forth. So that's where you can sort of maybe draw the line. But you're right that this is a much different composite of Jesus that's largely produced, except for those revelation references,
02:38:32 is produced by this scenario building of what we call it. It's like a systematic theology. It's like you're treating the whole Bible as just a data set of claims about the world and the future. And you're just trying to fit them all together so they all make sense in your mind. And so that's where the composite of this scenario comes from. Who did they suspect that Antichrist's force will be? That's changed a ton over time. Yeah.
02:39:01 Basically. We're good. We're good. Wait, was that the CIA checking in? You never know. I thought you were looking up. There is a, I don't remember the name of it. There's an 80s movie that tries to depict Jesus on a horse with a sword out of us now.
02:39:16 I think that's what he was pulling up. I was saying some, it's super corny. Okay. Yeah. Deep's digging through the files. I can see that. But yeah, so we were talking about who this army of like the dead. or what, I don't know, the white walkers of the fucking Armageddon would be.
02:39:32 Yeah, the Antichrist. So, so basically dispensationalism as a tradition starts in the 1830s. And you can basically any major world figure between 1830 and now, someone has claimed is possibly the Antichrist. So Napoleon III in the 1860s, the Kaiser of Germany, Hitler, the Kaiser of Germany in World War I, And then Hitler, Stalin, some type of Soviet figure, Saddam Hussein got a lot of play in the early 90s in the first Gulf War. Gorbachev, false peace. Gorbachev? Because what if the piece is false, right?
02:40:15 Like, he seems like a peacemaker, but. Yeah, he kind of seemed like the least of the bad ones, though. You know what I mean? Some crazy, I mean, some more fringe ones, Yitzhak Rabin, the, the prime minister who guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, who was in some sense. seeking peace to Putin. I mean, it's really, it's an open game. Anyone I don't like is the anti-crisis. Yeah. And you're looking for, so again, it's piecing these things together. So you're looking for, by the way, in the left behind novels, it's a guy named Nikolai Carpathia,
02:40:46 who is a Romanian, he's like the Romanian prime minister turned. That's a hard name. Turned, And, yeah. Nicolai Carpathia, yeah, who becomes the UN Secretary General. That's another one, as the UN is often anything. So some of the scene setting is this person needs to be leading a coalition of very powerful economies and nations. They will also not just be the anti-Christ in terms of like a dictator. They will be creating the false religion, one-world religion. The Pope is often, you know, someone that evangelical suspect as well. And so this person needs to be part of some type of global network. You know, there's, I don't know, maybe I'm just tying some strings together here, but there's a dude whose company is spending a lot of time in that area of the world right now, who named his in that company of many companies after the Lord of the Ring,
02:41:39 all-seeing I thing called Palantir. Yeah, yeah. Who's also running around the world right next to the Vatican sometimes lecturing people about the Antichrist and the coming named Peter Thiel, who's in some certain Epstein files, It's not such a good look, Pedy boy. Kind of interesting. It seems like maybe he's trying to create some, he's part, Bilderberg, all that stuff.
02:41:58 I don't know, pure spec. I'm just tying it all together here. Kind of interesting that he would be in the same area of play talking about all these things at the same time while pulling the strings on maybe setting up some of these people to go at each other and kill all of each other. And then maybe he's actually the guy that, you know,
02:42:13 turns into poof, the antigrancer. It sounds like a perfect explainer video slash pamphlet that you can hand out on the corner of people. That's right. Common sense. Yeah, call me tea pain. Yeah. So this is a, I mean, this is one of these things that the outsiders, even, even, you know, evangelicals who don't buy into this theology, it's sort of this, and never-ending revolving thing that seems like, come on, this doesn't make any sense that this would be your theology. The other one is often people have set dates for when, you know, this must happen by X year or whatever.
02:42:43 And that also comes and goes and seemingly doesn't, you know, sway a ton of people to ditch this whole theological. So the one that is most well known is there's a passage in Matthew where Jesus is talking about in terms that are very hard to understand all these horrible things that are going to happen. And he says, surely this will happen before this generation passes. And so what does it mean? What does you mean by that? If you're a future, if you believe that these prophecies are literal and in the future, then you have to somehow create a way where the 40 years is not. not the 40 years right after his right. So there's a whole
02:43:23 the way that dispensationalists understand the sort of ministry of Jesus and then his crucifixion and it's going to take us down a huge rabbit hole, but there's something in Daniel, the book of Daniel, very hard to understand prophecy book about the 70 weeks that are going to happen.
02:43:43 And this is the way dispensationalists see is that at the 69th week Jesus was crucified and there was essentially a pause put on the 70th week. And so when Jesus means generation, he doesn't mean generation from him. He means generation from when this timeline push play is happening again. So a bunch of people concluded in the 20th century that it must be a generation within when Israel was created as a state. So 48.
02:44:13 So 1988, generation, tons of different definitions. Let's pick 40 years as a generation. So if everything must happen before this generation passes, that means it must happen before 1988. So there was a ton of speculation by dispensationalists in 1987, 88, that the rapture is going to happen. It didn't. Certain people got egg on their face because of that.
02:44:38 Other people seemingly, including the guy who was most well known for this guy named Hal Lindsay, who published a book in the 70s called The Latee, Great Planet Earth, which was the best-selling nonfiction book in America, besides the Bible, in the 1970s. It was a speculative book about the Middle East and prophecy fulfillment. He sold about 10 million copies in the 70s. He was a big guy who was saying 88's a big year. He continued on after that, seemingly... He meant 2008. Well, he revised a bunch of times. He was also someone who was right when the Soviet Union collapsed, was quickly pivoted to saying, we were wrong about communism being with great threat. It's actually Islamic terrorism. And so he was early on
02:45:25 on the bandwagon of saying, you know, in 1989, 1990, let's be looking in the Middle East. What made him do that? Well, he, he's an agile interpreter of the text. So he, he had been, to give him, I guess, He had been speculating about this in the 80s, but his basic interpretation was, you know, people like Saddam Hussein much more closely fit the bill of the Antichrist than do distant Soviet leaders. And in some sense, he was right. This is one of these funny things. So the ancient city of Babylon is in modern day Iraq. And Hussein, who came to power, you know, as part of this secular nationalist movement, the Ba'ath party, really wanted to play up, not the Islamic part of his leadership, but the civilizational part. And so he actually played up a lot in the 80s that Babylon was in Iraq. And he would have sort of pageantry and ceremonies that were like trying to recreate this idea that like Iraq
02:46:34 goes all the way back to Babylon. And in their world, Babylon's a good thing. In the Christian world, Babylon's always the depiction of evil and corruption. But it was sort of this crazy confluence where Hussein was saying, yes, like identify me with Babylon. And these prophecy people were like, he's saying he's like Babylon. And Babylon's in the prophecies that Babylon's going to reemerge. The horror of Babylon is going to be this thing. So Hussein seemed to be a likely candidate as prophetically significant. And so Lindsay was just, you know, he was a very successful media guy and sold a lot of books, was able to make that pivot really quickly. But that let him sort of skate by the 1988 thing. Largely on, you know,
02:47:16 there were already a lot of people who didn't trust him, but the people who did continue to trust him. There were other people who made a lot about 88 and basically lost everything because of that. So this is the other thing, the identifying the Antichrist and then the date setting are two of the, in the book I wrote on dispensationalism, I call this pop dispensationalism. So this is the type of dispensationalism that's not really connected to deep theology, whether right or wrong. It's really about commercializing and politicizing the sort of meme parts of this theology that almost all have to do with the end times and have to do with Israel and politics and stuff like that. All right. Well, let's take it out of the commercialized and meme part and look at it
02:47:58 from scholarly as you do context. And even like, you know, if you want to put some religious, like pure interpretation, I don't know, Christianity context, like how would you define the Antichrist? And what is it? So if I'm going to think about it, the Antichrist is a figure that, well, one way to say is it's unclear from the Bible. It actually is clear. There are many Antichrists. So it is probably not a single individual in the future.
02:48:38 who's going to control the world. There are antichrists in the first century, according to the epistles. These are people who masquerade as Christians, but promote unchristian teachings or undermine our understanding of who Jesus was. So that would be the first thing I'd go to is don't be thinking about a single individual person
02:49:02 in the future, be thinking about an antichrist, is a type of, you know, a role that different people will fulfill at different times. And part of what, you know, this is where it gets uncomfortable for, often the Antichrist is going to be someone you think is a Christian, right? So someone who, say, a megachurch pastor, who has all the trappings of Christianity and can cite all the theology, but who is actually undermining the witness of the church based on their actions or what they're teaching.
02:49:37 So like a prosperity theology pastor could be an Antichrist. There's obviously more obvious ways you could be in that. If you're doing something illegal or totally corrupt. But that actually isn't the image of the Antichrist is actually someone who is very hard to understand that they're not, they're actually undermining the very thing that they say they're holding up. So that's where I, you know, that's where I would go first. Now, I think it's a, you know, there's a bunch of schools of thought in Christianity about the future and how literally or how spiritually or figuratively to take all of the imagery that we've been talking about. And whether or not it's even meant to be lined up in some type of like linear succession or if these are all people trying to get at some deeper truth that we just, there's no human words that can really express it.
02:50:30 and how much of what is being described actually has already happened. So a lot of what depends on the school of thought you go to, but there's certainly some things that it seems like Jesus predicted or these prophets predicted that would have seemed to be fulfilled with the destruction of the temple in 70. And then the dispersion of the Jewish people after that. That's where I think these things shall surely pass before this generation pass or have been for this generation.
02:51:00 generation passes. A lot of what Jesus is talking about there seems like a description of the destruction of the temple. And so that doesn't mean everything is. That's a view that is called preterism, which is the idea that literally there's no prophecy left to be fulfilled, the second coming even, the thing that every Christian cites in their creed, that actually happened back in the first century. That's a sort of fringe view. But part of what they argue, which is more rational and stream is that actually a lot of the prophecies are not future their past like they've already happened and so as Christians sitting in the 21st century we don't need to look for those things to be fulfilled in the future they're you know they're interesting um ways that they're fulfilled
02:51:47 in the in the first century um but uh but there are others like the second coming that most Christians including the Pope including you know most theologians see is still in the future at some point Like, that's something that Christians still talk about looking expectantly for, not as if it happened in the past. And that whatever it is, it's going to be something so significant that everyone will take note of it. So the Pope believes the, I guess, position in the Catholic Church is that something such as the end times will in fact happen. Yes. So every major denomination or church has some view on, again, I mentioned that word a while ago, eschatology, this idea of this idea of like the study of the end times. If you go back to any of the like the Nicene Creed or the Calcedonian
02:52:35 creed, like any of the major creeds of the Christian faith, they often end with some reference to the return of Jesus, the second coming. So, and this is something understood to be in the future of when you're uttering it. It's not something that happened. If the first coming was his, his, his, incarnation and crucifixion and resurrection, he is coming again in the future. And that is, you know, more or less universally held among Christians. I mentioned the preterists who have a funky side, but they're a very small group. The question is, okay, beyond that literal event,
02:53:10 how much more of this should we take as literal, as something that we will witness in space time? Or is it much more spiritual? Or is it something like, this is how I tend to read the book of Revelation, which has a whole plot. There's a people that are oppressed and then they rise up and they're able to overcome their oppressors. Or is this sort of what we call an idealist or a universal story that is to be applied to every generation of Christians can read this and understand that what Revelation is depicting is a cosmic struggle between God's people and God's enemies.
02:53:50 And it's not meant to say like these things will happen in some specific scenario in some particular year, but that this is the condition that the church is always in. And there is an end to it. It's not going to be forever. But what is being relayed as information and revelation is not, you know, a specific timeline. Right. So it could be a figurative, you know, metaphor to provide a warning to people about being on the right side of history or things like that. Yeah. And particularly for the original hearers of this in the first or second century, it would be much different context than now. It would be courage and hope in a time of persecution that God will win out in the end. That's the original context of this. It's not a Christian empire that's writing Revelation. It's a persecuted
02:54:40 minority who's trying to be encouraged that even though for them the Roman Empire seems all-powerful, seems anti-Christian. That's part of where Antichrist, it's the Caesar claims to be the son of God, claims to be divine. That's an Antichrist. Let's not, let's not be tricked into thinking that the Caesar is God. We know who God is. It's right. Someone who's, I got it. Yeah. So, so for that community, it's to, it's not, it's not just to sort of explain. It's to give them courage and hope that they, as dark as it looks, you are on the right side and ultimately, justice will prevail. And that's where you can understand a bit more the violent imagery maybe of of Jesus coming back is, yeah, in a way that's hard for us to appreciate,
02:55:29 particularly in the modern West. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Christianity was a minority religion, like Emperor Nero and others, like, killed Christians. You have the, you know, the stories of the gladiator games. Like, that's what they're, they're, they're looking for justice for that. And, and justice for that is not just a little slap on the wrist for Emperor Nero. It's, you know, you, you are punished. like you've persecuted Christians. So you have to keep creating a Nero to be able to punish in a way. You could definitely say, you could definitely say Christians today have done that a lot. Yeah. How has, I mean, this is kind of leading right into what I was thinking, I guess, but we've alluded to it today with certain political figures in the way they inject religion into politics and at a more biblical, pun intended, figurative level. But like, how has dispensational
02:56:23 and the focus on the end times impacted modern politics and general policy in the Western world. Yeah. So this is where I wanna say it's one factor. It's not, there's a lot of complicated factors. Some of you explored a lot on your show for why US policy toward Israel is what it is today. I would say evangelical Christians are a piece of that
02:56:49 and this theology is a piece of that piece. So it is not the Rosetta Stone to understanding why the U.S. is pro-Israel or anything like that. That said, pro-Israel Christians have been an important part of the Republican Party base for about 40 years now, 50 years. And they've been increasingly more organized on this issue. So in the 80s and 90s, we talk about people like Falwell. Falwell cared a lot about Israel. He cared a lot about a lot of stuff. I mean, he was much more well known for advocating for sort of pro-life anti-abortion stuff,
02:57:26 for prayer in schools, for an amendment on the definition of marriage, like stuff like that, more like domestic culture war stuff. So the amount of attention he could spend on Israel was not a lot, but it was a fraction of his total attention. And that's the same with someone like Pat Robertson, who created something called the Christian Coalition, in the 90s that was credited with the Republican return to the House majority in 1994. A lot of local organizing. And Robertson was a huge Christian Zionist. He had a lot of television stations and dedicated a lot of time to sort of pumping up Israel.
02:58:12 But he also was invested in all these issues. This was like one of the few foreign policy issues that someone like Robertson or Falwell cared about. When you get to the 2000s, you get John Hagey, who is younger than these folks, but only by a little, who gets really invested actually after that Iraqi nuclear reactor was bombed. And he feels like the Reagan administration did not stand up for Israel enough. And so he creates his first pro-Israel activism out of that. By the 2000s, Hagee has invested in this issue for decades. One of the things that was interesting, I could only follow it up to a certain year.
02:58:50 in the 80s, but he is making contacts with Israeli diplomats and sort of their Hasbara people early on in the 80s, and they're working with each other. By the 2000s, he creates Christians United for Israel, or what's called Kufi, for short. And this, Kofi, Kufi. Kufi. So I'm fortunate an acronym. It is, but saying Christians United for Israel is a pain. And Kofi becomes the largest national single issue organization for pro-Israel activism in the country. It outstrips any of the Jewish organizations in terms of membership. Cofi claims to have 10 million members. That's almost as many, if not more, than the number of American Jews in the entire country.
02:59:36 And that's just a segment of the evangelical world. So Kufi comes on the scene in 2006. And Hagee, who is a, before this, was a mega church pastor in San Antonio, Texas, also a televangelist. Much more on the Pentecostal speak in tongues side of things than Falwell or Robertson. But he is a, he was, and he's still around, he's quite old now, but very skilled political organizer and makes Kofi a basically a necessary stop, ultimately by the 2010s for basically any Republican who wants to run. for president and many of the senators and people like Marco Rubio. They have a summit every summer in Washington, D.C., where all the big speakers come, all the politicians come and give their pro-Israel talk, and then they actually go and lobby Congress. So they break up into groups
03:00:30 based on your district and you go and you talk to your congressperson and you say, like, I care about this issue, you should do X, Y, and Z. Some of this is about the foreign policy. Some of it's about the boycott movement and opposing the BDS movement at like a state level. So there's a number of states who have passed anti-BDS legislation. There's a lot of states, yeah. And a lot of them have large QFI organized entities in them because that's one of the interest groups that cares about this. Yeah. And that's just, that's where a lot of people are drawing the line because it's like you're, you're injecting money into politics, technically legally, which is something we got to to look in the mirror as a country about where it's representing the interests of a foreign nation.
03:01:15 And sometimes you have groups that also then are able to Trojan horse the interests of said nation behind some sort of religious movement, which, you know, creates this whole thing. But like, I've also been thinking of this too with all the work you've done. You know, you, it's so clear talk with you today. You look at things so, like, objectively and try to make sense of all of it. And you're so fair as well. but like have you gotten blowback for some of the work you've done you know from various religious communities frankly um i nothing rising not a ton of blowback i've gotten critiques
03:01:52 and some of it's been so i made a decision probably 10 years ago that i would not be um an activist scholar on this so you know other people get into this because like they really care about a certain outcome. Frankly, Christian Zionism is an area where almost all the scholarship still is produced by people who are very personally invested on one side or the other, mostly, you know, opposing Christian Zionism. I made a decision partly just based on my personality type, partly because, I mean, I hate admitting this. It's like this is actually not the issue I care the most about. Like, of all the things that I wake up and I just stress out about, there's a lot of things much closer to home than at least for most of the last 10 years than
03:02:39 Christian Zionism. And what's that for you? Oh, it's, you know, our political system, the politicians we elect, it's caring about health care and our public schools. I've got kids, you know, thinking about public. Like those are, those things to me are much more visceral. for me of like I care about that. I am super interested and I care, you know, ethically about what's happening in the Middle East,
03:03:10 but I don't have the visceral like, I mean, I don't have personal connections in terms of family connections with the region. And I just came to it much more intellectual than emotional. And so I've been, and so I've sort of carved out that space as I will talk about this stuff. I will critique it from a scholarly perspective, but I will not sort of become an activist on it. And so even with that, so I've gotten pushback, but it hasn't been the sort of same type of pushback that someone who's an activist would get. But I remember I published an article, this has been almost 10 years ago now, nine years ago, on what I called the new, I wasn't the only one calling it this, but the new Christian Zionism, which is this global Christian Zionism, this thing that if you're just an American, consuming American media, you wouldn't understand. And I wrote the article. It was for first things,
03:04:07 which is a Catholic journal, a little different now than it was then, but it was interested in this topic, so they bought the piece. And the next issue, they had two long letters to the editor from leaders in the new Christian Zionism. One of them was from Hungary, and he was sort of the head of a pro-Israel group there. And I don't remember where the other one was from, but I think it was an American. And they both, I don't think they, they certainly didn't coordinate because they both wrote sort of letters to the editor. And the Hungarian guy loved the piece.
03:04:40 And he's like, I'm so happy first things is covering this and blah. And the other one was like, this is, you know, this is based like, this is a total, like, freak out by first things about something that doesn't really exist. You're trying to just scare your readers into thinking that Christian Zionism is a big, bad boogeyman. And so I found, I found that an interesting way to get critiqued. which is like there's two people in the movement. One of them thinks what I said is spot on
03:05:05 and the other one doesn't. And it's like I felt like there was cover for me there because the guy in the movement who like it was like, hey, you're saying something true. So I've gotten pushback like that. And then I've gotten a lot of pushback for not being an activist, I guess would be the other one. So people, I would say particularly since 2023,
03:05:21 people saying like, why can't you sign this thing or why don't you join this organization? I think that, and I've questioned that a lot. Like should I get more active? What I've what's held out the What I've not done that is I've had a lot of opportunities to present my research and to present a different view of Christian Zionism to mixed audiences and particularly to audiences that I'm come out of the evangelical world that tend toward this whether they're conscious about or not
03:05:52 I don't think I'd have those opportunities if if I was known as someone who was sort of strongly opposed to Christian Zionism I think I think it's an admirable thing for you to stay on the scholar side of it, if you will, the fact-finding side of it, because I think, you know, obviously when horrible things are happening in the moment and people are losing lives and stuff like that, I fully understand why people are extremely passionate about that. I am too. But there has to be the court system, if you will, that's the parallel I'm making here.
03:06:24 And I think, you know, the best judges are the ones who, even in the hardest cases, can remain let's stick with the facts let's look what we got here and let's try to chart a better way forward for like a better way of putting it and i think you're doing that with what you do so i i understand you know because you look at it all the time you study it obviously there's some sort of pull towards that but i think what you're doing is great and you know we we definitely need voices like that and it's so educational too like having you heard today has been awesome to go through this and look at a lot of context you know from a research historical and even religious standpoint but you You mentioned your own Christian faith has morphed over the years just based on things that you've looked at.
03:07:06 And it's obviously, I think you said it's different from, like, say, what you grew up with your parents. But like today, would you say, like, you have strong faith? It's just in that different lens? Or how would you describe it? Yeah. I mean, I work for a Christian organization. I'm an elder at my church. My wife works for a church.
03:07:24 Like, we're in it. We're in that world a lot. So, yeah, I don't, over my life. life at least, I've, there's definitely been seasons where there's been more skepticism and less, but the overall trend has been a deepening of faith and a deeper understanding of the much broader tradition that we call Christianity than the one I inherited or the one I'm even aware of now. And that means that, yeah, I definitely have changed my political views on certain things. I'm definitely way more skeptical of whatever, you know,
03:08:00 comes out of Israel than I was when I was younger. But there's been a, but I've also like part of the education, I was recognizing like that's actually not the core of the Christian faith isn't about like a certain view on Israel. And that's where unfortunately I think a lot of Christians go wrong. And they do equate sort of a certain view of Israel with true Bible believing Christianity or something like that. And what they mean is a certain interpretation of the Bible. But what they say, or I don't know if that mean that.
03:08:32 What I think they mean is that. But what they say is like, no, there's a Christian line on this one issue. And I don't think, for the most part, I don't consider, you know, Christian Zionists heretics. There's been a, there's sort of a stream of critique that's like, this is a heresy. I think it's a very unfortunate, and there couldn't be versions of it that could be a heresy. I think for most American evangelicals who are pro-Israel, I think there's an unfortunate and misinformed way that they think about. some core biblical categories, but still in other ways are very Christian. And in fact, on other issues can, I can line up with them on, including how they, plenty of Christian Zionists, when they're not,
03:09:16 you know, supporting Israel, are doing great work in their community, or, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so that's part of this too is realizing when you call someone a Christian Zionist, you are in effect sort of collapsing their entire identity into this one issue. And it might be the issue that's really important right now, so we need to talk about them in that way. But a lot of people who really care about Israel also care a lot about other things as well. Yeah, and that's the thing, especially when things aren't in your backyard. As human beings, we can have blind spots on things, and I like to look at people as the sum of all parts rather than one. You know, sometimes it's harder on emotional issues, but I think that's a good point. But Dan, I have to fly back to Wisconsin.
03:09:56 There's a lot we didn't talk about today, so we're not to do this again. But, you know, You're extremely intelligent and obviously like all the stuff you laid out was wildly interesting today. So we're going to link your books down below so people can check out your work. But amazing stuff, man. Thank you for coming. It's been a pleasure. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is.
03:10:13 Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge help. Thank you.
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