Pints With Aquinas - Your Bible Questions Answered w/ Dr. John Bergsma

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

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That. We're live. It's a bit different, isn't it? Uh, it is St. Paul center or whatever. Right, right. We're much more professional videos. You do dignified. Yeah. Schedule. That's right. Yeah. Speaking of St. Paul center, the Emmaus Academy, Emmaus Academy. Yeah. I want to run a good check out St. Paul center.com slash Mac. Click the link in the description.

You'll get two weeks free of a bunch of excellent courses taught by Dr. Bergsmuth, Dr. Hahn, others. Father Daniel Klemick. I was watching his stuff on the blessed mother last night. Again, just going through his course, amazing stuff. He's a mystic. You know, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Marian apparitions with Oxford University Press. He's like the world's expert on this. And, but, but, you know, also one of the most moving preachers, you know, that I've ever encountered. He celebrates mass, of course, up at the university and stuff. So

he's the whole package. If you could kind of sum up why people should try the two-week trial for free. Yes, because it's like, Emmaus Academy fills in all these gaps that we all have. I'm a Protestant convert, so there's all kinds of things. I'm like, Our Lady is a Sorrows. Where did that ever come from? So I was watching that episode last night,

because I personally wasn't part of my upbringing, right? And Father Daniel Klemick was explaining how that developed in the Middle Ages and that whole devotion. And so I feel like we all have that. We have this Catholic inadequacy, like I never got that in CCD, or I never got that at St. Elizabeth Elementary School

where I went. And there's all, you know, these courses on Emmaus Road are all these fill-in-the-gaps, like, oh yeah, I can feel comfortable now. I really feel like I got a handle on, you know, Marian devotion. I really got a handle on the role of the magisterium, you know? And then, you know, got a handle on how to pray as a Catholic, beautiful, beautiful course on personal prayer. And all that work goes into it, right? Yeah.

If it were me, I'd be like, well, I just watch YouTube videos on that. What's the difference? Right, well, this is professionals. Typically people have got PhDs, teach this stuff for a living. Right. And really high production quality,

and laying it down like systematically and you get a little credential at the end, little quizzes, you know, so you feel that sense of accomplishment. Nice. St. Paul's center.com slash Matt, you get a two week trial sign up today. If you don't like it after two weeks, you can cancel it. You won't be charged to send. You said that you've said this last time you said someone was a mystic and you just said

it again and I've been thinking, is somebody allowed to call themselves a mystic? Probably not. Yeah, you only let us say that about other people who are like, no. Yeah, no. They never claimed that for themselves. I'm giving my perspective and I'm using the term casually and not as some kind of canonical definition. But yeah, we've got some awesome people. So it was great having you on the show last time We only got I think was an hour and 12 minutes, right?

I think at some point you realize that I wanted you here for like three hours Oh, no, that's not gonna happen at all. I got a good not that day But I got all the time in the world today. So whatever you want to do Yeah, well, it was a joy to speak to you last time I know a lot of people really enjoyed it a lot of people get told that the Bible is really unreliable, that the Exodus never occurred, that Jesus didn't exist, or if he did, what's in the New Testament really isn't what he said. And people are carried away. They started thinking of him as divine, and that's how Christianity arose. And so it is really important that we address these things. If people haven't

watched the last episode, go check that out. but just sum up where we were last episode. Yeah, so last episode I think we covered things like the manuscript evidence for the New Testament, pointing out that, you know, we have, for example, copies of the Gospel of John and most of the letters of St. Paul from, say, AD 200, only like 150 years after they were written. Actually, our earliest copy or fragment of the Gospel, John, goes back to 125 AD, maybe 35 years after it was written. That's amazing, because most of our other copies, manuscripts of ancient compositions like Plato or Socrates, only go back to the

time of Charlemagne, and we have nothing before, say, AD 700. So we have like an 800, 900-year gap between when these ancient authors wrote and when our manuscripts are. But in the case of the Bible, we're going back to within a century, a century and a half of the composition, we're going back to within a century, a century and a half of the composition of these. So we talked about that manuscript evidence, that we have such thousands of handwritten manuscripts of particularly the New Testament books compared to maybe dozens at best of many of the other classical works by Cicero or Julius Caesar or what have

you. So we covered that material, we talked about that. We talked about Jesus' divinity in the Gospels, not just the Gospel of John, but if you read the synoptics like a Jew, you can see that the calming of the storm, his correction of Moses and the Sermon on Mount, these are all acts of divinity. So we covered that. We talked a good bit about the relationship with the Dead Sea Scrolls and how Mark and John have these little episodes, these little vignettes that are illuminated by information from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written in the first century, give us that kind of contemporary color, contemporary cultural color, showing that they're not written generations later by Christians who didn't know the first century Judaism.

And yeah, we talked a little bit about Bart Ehrman and the theory of anonymous gospels. And yeah, and then, yeah. I'm thinking like we probably have earlier manuscript evidence for Star Wars than we do for the Bible. So early manuscript evidence isn't enough. Right. Like someone could find the text of the Star Wars movies and say, look, this this is gonna be true because it was written. Well okay what our argument isn't that oh you know the gospels have to be true because the manuscripts are so early right we're just trying to put this in context with you know what we believe about the rest of the ancient world like nobody. Nobody doubts that julius caesar wrote the gallic war and. Julius Caesar wrote the Gallic War and, you know, that these recording events that took place, even though there's like a 750-year gap between when he actually wrote that down and when our

earliest manuscripts are of it. But in the case of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the actual manuscript evidence that we have in the time of composition are a very narrow window, so that doesn't allow a whole lot of time for legendary expansions and interpolations and confusion and all that. So it's really remarkable within the context of doing ancient history. Yeah, that makes sense. I remember when I was an agnostic throwing these questions at my teachers as if they cared anyway, saying things like, why should I believe something that was written 2000 years ago,

not realizing that that's precisely the wrong question? I mean, who cares if something was written 2000 years ago? The question is, when was it written in relation to the events? Like, good evidence doesn't become bad evidence because of the passage of time. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And that's another thing we talked about last time, you know, the dating of the New Testament. A recent book by Jonathan Bernier, just a couple years old now, entitled Redating the New Testament, where he goes through and shows that there's no good reason to place any of the documents in the New Testament, even after the destruction of Jerusalem, much less after the first century.

But one of the things we didn't get to last time, Matt, was talking about Luke and his contribution to the historicity of the faith and the testimony and historical reliability of the gospel tradition. And in the case of Luke, we can tell that he writes two books, the Gospel of Luke and Acts, and Acts ends with Paul still alive, around AD 62. So that's only 30 years after the ascension of our Lord, so easily within living memory for somebody who was around at that time. And there's no, you know, St. Paul is still in prison, awaiting his trial at the end of Acts, and the most logical conclusion to draw from why the book ends that way is that Luke has brought

us up to the contemporary moment when he is finishing up this work. You know, scholars have proposed other explanations for it, but none of them really are as compelling as simply the most common-sense interpretation of the facts. This is what's going on. He's brought us up to the contemporary period. So if Luke is finishing Acts in 62 with Peter and Paul still alive, that means he's writing about the history of our Lord in living memory of many of the people who are still alive. Most middle-aged people alive at that time were in their childhood during the events of Jesus. So the significance of that, Matt, is it's much harder to make stuff up. And this is unique within world history. I mean, yes, we have legends about miracle workers and holy men from all different cultures, but those legends and stories come from centuries

after the lifetime of the actual figure. That's probably not always the case. Well, it's bound to be some bizarre stories of mystical wonder workers. Do you know one? No. Yeah. But I've never tried to disprove Christianity

from this angle. Right. But it's bound to be. Look it up. Look it up. Sorry, I was paying attention to something else. What did you say? What did I say? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

See what I have to work with here? I was saying- I'm also trying to run the stream over here. There's got to be wonder workers throughout history that we have early evidence, you know, early manuscript evidence of. It's got to be. That is closer to the time of the events than that of Christ. early evidence, you know, early manuscript evidence of it's gotta be that that is closer to the time of the events than that of Christ. Oh, okay. I'll try to find not with Buddha.

Yeah, not with Buddha. What about more modern? Well, I looked into that. Well, yeah, I mean, you have the apparitions. I mean, think of the Marian apparitions, the apparitions at Zaytun Egypt and you know You have contemporary Journalistic accounts of the miracle the Sun You've got yeah, you know, you've got verification for no, you know Padre Pio is bleeding from his hands, you know

Yeah, I'm thinking of stuff that would contradict Christianity, though, not support it. Yeah, well. But isn't there a confounding variable with the newer stuff that there's more of a, like, recording things is more of a normal thing to do now, whereas recording things written down would have not been common until... Yeah, it would have been more expensive, presumably, to write something down if you had to be very committed to this thing in order to... Right, it's a little bit, yeah, it's a little bit anachronistic to use kind of modern standards of journalism where everybody's got a cell phone and can, you know, videotape people

as it were right on their phones and then apply that to those standards to the ancient world. I think it's, you know, most appropriate to apply it to, you know, use standards that are appropriate to the time when we're talking about, you know, historical events. So if we use the general standards that are used for authenticating, you know, historical events. So if we use the general standards that are used for authenticating, you know, historical events in the ancient world, the New Testament comes across very favorable. That's what I'm trying to point out.

So how expensive or laborious would have it have been to write the book of Acts, say? Yeah. Well, quite expensive. That's it's a great question. But I mean, you've got to get the parchment. You've got to get the papyrus, this is not cheap. So quite a bit of labor went into that. Wasn't that it was, you know, drastically uncommon. It wasn't outside the reach of, you know,

a middle-class or upper-class person. But it doesn't just go to show that, what's your reason for taking on this endeavor? Like, if I'm writing the gospel, there's really got to be a reason. It's not like there's probably not many dear diaries from the first century, given the expense. So if you're going to write an account of this wonder worker exorcist from the first century, then you really have to have a reason.

And it might be for power or influence or fame or whatever. And I think part of the reason in the case of Luke acts, aside from, you know, the, the general desire to evangelize the nations, um, Luke is trying to defend St. Paul and he's St. Paul's in an ongoing trial. He's about to be heard before Nero. And so Luke wants to, you know, provide some positive press out there and, uh, get the story straight, you know, for, for the general culture and I think try to create a positive vibe among some of the elite and intelligentsia and, you know,

politically powerful people in Rome and in Israel, etc., in terms of, you know, favorability to St. Paul. So I think that's one of the reasons why we have this beautiful composition of Luke-Ax. And if Ax is being finished finished up in 62, then the Gospel had been written before that, because Axe picks up at the end of Luke. And it's very clear that Luke is writing history. I mean, this is one of the things, you know? Like what are the genre of the Gospels? And Jordan Peterson is very prominent nowadays.

I listen to him periodically, and he doesn't really engage the historicity of the Bible very much. He's always doing this psychiatric, evolutionary psychology kind of thing. There was a Babylon Bee article that said, Jordan Peterson considers every interpretation of a passage except for the one the author intended.

Right, exactly, yeah. Something like that. And not to slam him too hard because he does have some good insights on a number of occasions. But, you know, just at the beginning of Acts, I'm sorry, the beginning of Luke, St. Luke says, look, many have undertaken to write a composition of the events that have happened. But now I have followed everything closely for some time and I'm setting down to write an orderly account for you, O Theophilus, okay? And that idea of the orderly account and having followed things for some time past and then St. Luke in fact mentions from eyewitnesses, for those who are witnesses to the events,

all of this information in the introduction to Luke's Gospel is signaling to the audience that St. Luke is following the Thucydidean tradition in Greek historiography. And let me just give a little background on that, because I know that was like a big phrase there. But with, you know, Greek historiography had been going on for over 400 years by the time Saint Luke was writing the Gospel of Luke. And there were two schools of thought about how you went about it. There was a school of Herodotus, and the idea there was you write down everything that you hear, and you let your readers sort out fact from fiction. Then there was a school of Thucydides, and Thucydides, and you know, both Herodotus and

Thucydides wrote an account of the Persian War against the Greeks back in the 400s. And Thucydides' approach was like, no, no, no, no, you don't do that. You only write what you yourself witnessed or what you get from eyewitnesses. And again, if you analyze the introduction to Luke's Gospel, Luke is signaling to his readers that he's taking the more conservative approach, that this is stuff that he's witnessed or that he's gotten from eyewitnesses. Now, you don't have to believe his claim, but at least acknowledge that he is telling people that, �I am writing history here, I'm not writing something that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

And then you get into the early chapters of Luke, and when you got the Magnificat, the account of the Visitation, the account of the Annunciation, it's very clear that Luke is drawing on sources that are speaking either Hebrew or Aramaic, you know, the spoken language of the Jews, because he's translating it to Greek, and what he translates into Greek doesn't always make sense. Like that famous phrase, blessed art thou among women. Like, what does that mean? That doesn't really work in Greek, doesn't really work in English.

It's actually a Hebrew idiom. Does it not make sense? I've never thought of this. If I say blessed are you among women, it seems to me to say like out of all women you are the most favored or something. Well that's the Hebrew idiom. But in English you would say you are the most blessed of all women. But Hebrew and Aramaic don't have a superlative. They don't have an isama, they don't have very, there's no way to say the most of anything. And so the way that you say this, and every Hebrew student learns this in elementary Hebrew, the way that you say it is if you want to say that Bill is the fastest man, you say, Bill is fast among men. And that's exactly what, that's exactly the idiom that you got there, blessed art thou among women.

That means you are the most blessed of this category, you know? So again, it's a Hebrewism, it's a Hebrew idiom, and it's very clear then that, you know, Luke's sources are not speaking Greek, not thinking Greek. He's either getting this orally or written from sources that are in the language of the Jews. And in the case of Luke 1 and 2, like in 219 and in 251, it mentions the Blessed Mother either pondering these things or holding these things in her heart. And for a long time, and reaffirmed by St. John Paul II, this has been viewed as Luke

essentially tipping his hand as to where his sources are coming from. But again, the fact that he's not writing idiomatic Greek there again points that, yeah, this is coming from – he's not making this stuff up, this is coming from a source that he's translating into the common language of the time. So yeah, so Luke is just a very important historical source for our understanding of the Gospels, and then of course the early growth of the Church. And then once we get into the book of Acts, he's present for the second half of Acts. We have all these famous we passages, these four extended narratives in acts where he's writing the first person plural. We went here, we went there. And you can tell he was present because the narrative gets super high resolution in

the we passages. So all full of this like extraneous trivial detail that's like, why did you even include that? You know, like he throws in, oh yeah, the figure head of our ship was the twin gods, Castor and Pollux. Like, well, thank you for that, Luke, you know, I'll take that to my prayer. But it is just like, he can't avoid, he can't help throwing it in because it made a powerful impression on him because he was there. So he kind of, you know, the fact that the level of detail, like increases by three or four fold when he's writing in the first person plural as opposed to other passages. It's really, you know, lends authenticity to the fact that he was present for these events. Plus the fact that, you know, as

they're traveling around, Luke manages to get the names of all these different political figures that they have trials in front of correctly. And this is very hard to do, because the Roman Empire was this mishmash of different political organizations that the Romans had taken over, and so the leaders in any given area had different names. So in Thessalonica, the town elders were called polytarchs, which means leaders of a city. In Ephesus, they were called aegiarcs, which means Asian leaders. In the colony of Philippi, which was a colony of retired Roman soldiers, the town elders were called generals, because everybody was ex-army, you know, army retirees. And as you move around in Acts

and they go to these different areas, Luke nails it every time. He gets the right title for the right leader and he's got dozens of historical figures who we know from Josephus and other historical figures. My favorite episode actually in the book of Acts, favorite episode actually in the Book of Acts, Matt, is actually when St. Paul is taken in front of this figure known as Galio. And it's right in the middle of Acts, and they're in Achaea, which is central Greece, and it mentions that St. Paul was dragged

in front of the local governor who was named Galio. Well, this guy actually, his full name is Junius Galio, and he's kind of like the Jeb Bush of the ancient world. Okay? Why Jeb Bush? Well, Jeb Bush, governor Jeb Bush, you know, governor of Florida, you know, relatively successful politician, but overshadowed by whom? His more famous father and his more famous brother, right? Both of whom were presidents of the

United States, right? Well Junius Gallio was a successful politician in his own right. He was a Roman governor, etc., but overshadowed by his dad, who was Seneca the Elder, and his brother, who was Seneca the Younger, both of whom were famous orators and philosophers and all this, and really made a splash in Latin literature. So, you know, he's this bit player within this larger picture. And he was only governor of central Greece for a single year between about 51 and 52 AD. And when it says that Paul was taken in front of him,

it allows us to date this trial of Paul in the middle of Acts to the very year, because this famous governor, like, he doesn't mean anything to us. We really like Galio, like, who the heck is Galio? But everybody in the ancient world, well, that's Jeb Bush, you know? Like, his brother was this, and his father was that. You know, this is like a world-famous figure, world-famous, you know, character within Roman culture. and there's Paul giving the defense of the gospel in front of him in that one year that he happened to be governor of central Greece.

You know, so again, it's the little things that really impress me, Matt, because it's hard to get the little things right. You know, if you, you know, I compare it to, you know, every state in the US has some kind of Bureau of Motor Vehicles, but when you go to the actual titles, some states call it a Department of Motor Vehicles, some call it a Division of Motor Vehicles, some call it a Motor Vehicle Department,

some call it a Bureau of Motor Vehicles. So every state has its different terminology, and it's really hard to nail that. And if somebody was trying to make up stuff about getting their license in the US in the 21st century, you know, they would mangle that. But Luke moves all over the Roman world in the Book of Acts, going in front

of different government officials in nailing their titles and the timing and the dating and these famous figures, all while they're still living, you know? And there's even Marilyn Monroe-type figures in the Book of Acts. When you get to the end, okay, there's two famous princesses, both of whom Paul preaches the gospel in front of him and gives a defense of his ministry. One is Princess Drusilla, who was the wife of Felix, the Roman governor, and she was a femme fatale. And when Felix arrives in Judea, he was just smitten with her because she was drop-dead

gorgeous. And he persuaded her to divorce her husband, and he divorced his wife and got married to her. So it was scandalous, you know, something like the scandals of Princess Di or whatever. How do we know about her then from extra biblical sources? From Josephus, the Jewish historian of the time, as well as from Roman soldiers. And she appears in some satirical Roman plays and stuff like this. So she's like world-renowned, like everybody knew about Princess Drusilla, you know?

And even more famous was her older sister Queen Bernice, who also shows up near the end of Acts when there's a trial, and King Agrippa shows up with his sister, who's Queen Bernice, and she had been married to one king after another and divorced them all and eventually went to live with her brother, who was a king, and she was drop-dead gorgeous. There's an after story. After the Book of Acts is finished, she went on to become the girlfriend of the Roman Emperor Titus, who defeats Jerusalem and then goes back and becomes emperor of the Roman Emperor Titus who defeats Jerusalem and then goes back and becomes emperor of the Roman world. So that vaulted her into the spotlight and now she's, you know,

mistress of the Roman Emperor. She's like Marilyn Monroe kind of figure. Everybody knew about her. The Roman populace despised her because she wasn't Roman and they kind of politically forced Titus to put her away and so he you know broke off that Relationship and married a Roman woman to become Empress and so on but that what my point Matt is these are world famous Figures as famous in our own day as say Marco Rubio Joe Manchin Taylor Swift whatever kind of celebrities and political figures you want to describe. And Luke is describing Paul giving a defense of the gospel in front of these people who are still alive. And Bernice was at the height of her power in 62. She was the most powerful woman in Judea, you know? And so, Luke can't make up stuff. You don't have the freedom to make

up fiction about powerful people who are still alive, you know, and fabricate that, you know, some bishop or some preacher, you know, was dragged in front of, you know, Marilyn Monroe and JFK, you know, and had a trial in front of them. You can't make that up while they're still alive, you know, and pass that off without being refuted. So the fact that we have the Gospels being written within living memory of those who witnessed the events is a very strong argument in favor of their trustworthiness. You just can't get away with this. I'm just thinking like you reading the Bible must be like if I took you to my town of Port Piri where I grew up, I could tell you about every street. I could tell you about all the things that happened here and who owned that

shop. It would be in some ways a much better experience for me than you, though you'd be seeing it afresh and trying to take it all in. Man, it must be beautiful when you read the Bible. Yeah, well it didn't always start off that way. I read that and I have no idea who these people are, and like you said, I don't care. I don't mean to not care, I just can't help myself. Right, absolutely. But again, when we can place ourselves in the contemporary period, we can go back and try to lean into what must it have been like to say,

read the Gospel of John for the first time, or read Acts when it was hot off the press in like the year 63, you know? When all the figures mentioned, Pontius Pilate and Felix and Festus and Agrippa, they're still alive, you know? And Paul is awaiting trial, you know? And so there's so much backstory to it. And again, when you can give backstory to little details of a document, they give it colour and greater impact. I mean, I think these are some of the most powerful testimony to the trustworthiness of a document. Mason Harkness Scott Hahn said that boredom with the scriptures is not a result of familiarity with the scriptures, like we often say, but due to a lack of familiarity with them. The more you go

into it the more fascinating it is. Right, absolutely. Yeah, a lifetime of research. Do you ever wonder why Christ appeared 2,000 years ago and, you know, why not now? Is there any kind of good sociological speculation that you've thought about? Right. Well, there's different reasons. I mean, there's the chronology of the coming of the Messiah that was revealed to Daniel. Right. But I mean, from all eternity, God knew he was going to show up in 2020. Why not? Why not do that? I know this is an answer we're just speculating about, but. Right. Yeah, no, I've always, I've always believed that the reason why Jesus showed up at the time he did

was because of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, the Pax Augustus. When Augustus came to the throne when our Lord was born, there was a kind of worldwide peace. There was really no major threat, no power that was able to stand against Rome. Rome was the master of the known world. They were great road builders, they were great letter writers, they had a high literary culture, they admired the Greeks, they advanced Greek learning. And so you're living through a cultural golden age.

It was a golden age of literature, a golden age of learning and technology, and you had the ability to travel and spread the gospel through the known world. Look at how easily Paul can travel. Paul can travel from Syria all the way to Spain, and he can be safe doing it. He can just book a passage on a boat. He can travel along the Roman roads. This really facilitated the spread of the gospel. If our Lord had appeared in a different age, if He had appeared like the early medieval

period when you have the breakdown of communication, really would have hampered the spread of the Gospel. But I think that social conditions were just right for the rapid spread of the Gospel throughout the civilized world. You also had the invention of the book, and this was a providential invention. We take this for granted. You know, we usually think of a book as this, but technically this is a codex. What is a codex? A codex is a book made not as a scroll,

because a scroll is a book, but scrolls are clumsy. Scrolls can get crushed if you put something on top of them. Scrolls can only be written on one side, because if you write it in the back, the ink smudges when you roll and unroll them with your hands. Check this out. This can be written on both sides of the paper. This is like double density. Some of our viewers are old enough to remember double density

floppy disks that had an entire half a meg on them. 512k man! Wow! There's no end to that. But anyway, double density stuff. But you can get twice the amount of information on the same amount of paper But you can get twice the amount of information on the same amount of paper because you can write on both sides. It's also random access rather than sequential access. I remember as a kid having to work with cassette drives to save information where you had to move around,

you know, rewind and fast forward to get, but, and then, and then floppies came out where you could drop down the head of the floppy on anywhere on the disk as it Was spinning around and instantly get your stuff But look at this we can instantly go to revelation and then I'm gonna Matthew and then back, you know Try doing that with a scroll. So this was invented around the time Sorry, you're gonna get clipped

Try doing that with a scroll. Yeah. These are like a little one line of jokes that intellectuals tell each other. I like it. But this was- I saw the whole edit in my head as he said it. That's why I lost.

Sorry. That's fine. So this is being invented around the time our Lord is born. And then- Not the book. Yeah, the codex. This concept of stacking paper and stitching on one side, then binding it. We take it for granted, but it's an invention.

I thought that was like a medieval thing. No, no. It's invented around the turn of the millennia. You know, it starts being popularized around. As Christianity grows, this form is growing in popularity. And some scholars theorize that the reason why this triumphed, at least so quickly, over the scroll was due to Christian missionary work. Because this was so handy for Christian missionaries to take the Bible with them. And in fact, the earliest fragment of the New Testament

we have, Papyrus 52, which we talked about last time, a little snippet of the Gospel of John from like around John 18, that is taken from a codex. We know that it's a fragment of a codex because it's written on both sides of the paper, and it's got a little margin at the top and it's a little triangular piece. And by looking at the parts of John in the front and the parts of John in the back, we can figure out how much text he lapsed from the front to the back, and then we can calculate the size of the page. I see.

And it turns out that it was from a copy of John that was about the size of my little New Testament that I carry with me. So a pocket edition of the Gospel of John. You have taught me something completely new. I had no idea. Why wouldn't you have the same problem of smudging? Like you said on the scroll, you can't write front and back. Because because with a scroll you went you roll it with your hands like this, you know, and and with the page like you never have to place your fingers on the page.

You can just flip. What's the earliest codex we have like an intact codex? Can you look that up? Yeah, I really put you to work. The earliest codex book. That would be fascinating. Yeah. Well, I know the earliest codices of the New Testament come from around, you know, 200.

We have a nearly complete gospel of John from around 200. I don't mean in fragments though. I mean, what is the book we still have? Well, that, you know, that intact book, intact codex. That is a virtually, yeah. There are probably earlier Codices. And I think that the Egyptians played around

with Codices way back when, but it didn't catch on. You know? Bloody Egyptians. Yeah, yeah. But in the first century, but it didn't catch on. You know? It didn't catch on. Bloody Egyptians. Yeah, yeah. But the first century really goes to it. It must be too old. I mean, I've got a book of the Brothers Karamazov

that I've read like five times right now, and the thing's almost falling apart. I either need to buy a new one or have it rebound. Right. I've had that for like eight years. Right. Yeah. Yeah, my Bible.

I've had it rebound twice. That's your Bible? Yeah, that's my personal Bible. Why didn't you rebind it with something more interesting a why don't you get like a nice leather cover. Well you know this is a library binding I had this done by Franciscan University library and that's what they chose to do. So this this was this is like it's not leather but it's like some kind of library grade okay thing that was done like fifteen years ago you like hard, a hardback cover. I like a cover that lasts. I recommend to people get a leather covered Bible cause that is your longest lasting product. And everyone wants to get a paperback. Do not buy a paperback Bible. That is wrong with you. Yeah. That's a problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Unless you read the Bible as much as most people read it, in which case it should be fine. More than that. What did Luke get wrong? Well, it is claimed that Luke gets the date of our Lord's birth wrong, because in Luke 2, it says something to the effect of Quirinius being governor of Syria during the census that was the cause of St. Joseph going down to Bethlehem. So the way that that's usually translated is something like, this was the first census while Quirinius was governor of Syria.

However, even there, it's not clear that Luke is wrong, because it's possible to translate the Greek there differently and say, this was the census prior to Quirinius being governor of Syria. And if you translate it that way, it resolves the historical problem. And there's others that say, oh no, our date of Quirius is wrong, and you know, Dr. Hahn has a theory on that. But yeah, that is probably the, you know, that's a classic, you know, one example where Luke dropped the ball, and it's not even clear that he dropped the ball there. If you translate differently, he's correct there. So he is a really reliable historian.

All right, then what did one of the gospel writers get wrong? It's gonna be something. I don't believe they got anything wrong. I mean, one of the biggest things that's claimed is that they get the date of Passion Week wrong. Have we talked about that? No. Haven't talked about that.

I don't think so. Well, this is- I found the book. All right, when is it from? It is. We still have. From around, oh, I have to do math now. It says it's 2,600 years old

and it's actually written on gold. Cool. How do you do that? That didn't catch off. How do you write on gold? It's like, print, like it's like, they like, you know, imprinted Braille like like punched.

I mean, not really, but like they did. They did a little like like engraving drawings on it. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I called the huge gold book. Very cool. Did not make 60 B.C.

Six sixty. Yeah, that's that's what Donald Trump's official biography is going to be on. Six sheets of 24 karat gold. Wow. Well, yeah, so- It says here that it records the Israelites leaving Israel at the time of Jeremiah and sailing all the way to-

Sorry. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll stop. I'll stop. Too soon. I'm sorry. That gets a lot of happy people. it was right there.

It was excellent. It was excellent. I want to I'm happy to get to what you just brought up there, but I also am interested if you have any if we have any good reason to think that the Exodus happened because often I've heard a lot of defense of the historicity of the New Testament, the reliability that we can compare and contrast and see that there's very few discrepancies. But what do you say when someone says, we've got really good evidence to think the Exodus never occurred?

It's a nice fairy tale, it's a myth of a people, but it's not something that happened. Yeah, I would say, okay, first of all, you're not gonna get direct evidence of that because the Egyptians were masters of propaganda. So they never record any defeats or anything that goes wrong. Okay, so it's kinda like our newspapers. It's like the New York Times. Just, it's very ideological. So that's how Egyptian historiography was.

So you would not expect that a story of a massive defeat of one of the pharaohs, say, Ramses II, or something like that, where he lost a major part of his workforce, you know, and was defeated by a foreign god, that's never going to be recorded in Egyptian annals. So you can just forget, like having direct attestation wars, you know, and was defeated by a foreign god. That's never going to be recorded in Egyptian annals, so you can just forget like having direct attestation from the Egyptians. Now what you can look for, though, is indirect evidence of authenticity. And what I find

really compelling about the Exodus accounts is in particular the account of the building of the tabernacle in the wilderness. And what I find so fascinating about that is that when you look at how the tabernacle is built, it strongly resembles the the Egyptian war tent of the Pharaohs like Ramses II. And these pharaohs were gods, and when they would go on campaign up into Canaan, for example, they would reside in these big courtyards that were ringed around by curtains, and they would have like a tent in the middle, and this tent would have an outer court and an inner court, and the pharaoh would sit enthroned on the inner court on a throne with two cherubim on either side.

Wow. Now, we have pictures of this. We have ancient engravings of what these war tents look like. And the dimensions, the layout, it all resembles very similar to the layout of the tabernacle in the books of Exodus and thereafter. And what's so interesting about that, Matt, is that it's been popular ever since the middle of the 1800s to suggest that the Pentateuch was actually written in the time of Ezra, like a thousand years after the events that it records, and it's all fictitious. Well, if it's being written in the time of Ezra, how is it that it matches up so well with Egyptian cultural realia of that time, of what we call the New Kingdom Period, which

is often suggested as we're talking about like the 13th century BC, the 1200s BC, the time around Ramses II and before and a little bit after within that time period. This is often suggested as the time of the Exodus, and in fact, the technology and the cultural forms that are described in the Exodus resemble that time period in Egypt. In fact, in King Tut's tomb, we have something that looks like the Ark of the Covenant. We have this big gold box on poles, only on top it's got a figure of the god Anubis, this like, jackal-like god, or it's got a figure of the god Anubis, this, you know, like, jackal-like god or it's like dog god.

But anybody biblically, literally, it looks at it like, wow, that looks like the Ark of the Covenant with a pagan god on top. And so what is going on? What I would argue, Matt, is that when Moses leads the people out of Egypt, he uses, you know, some cultural forms and some cultural technology, you know, even like the shape of different vessels and chairs and tents and so on like that, that they're familiar with, because they built these things for Pharaoh. But Moses tells a radically different theological message with this material. So the Egyptians had this

kind of sacred tent of Pharaoh, their god-king, when they went out on war. Well, the Egyptians had this kind of sacred tent of Pharaoh, their god-king, when they went out on war. Well, the Israelites go out into the desert and they organize themselves as an army, too, as we see in, say, Numbers 10. They're waging the battles of the Lord. But they have a tent, and in the sacred throne room of the tabernacle, you have the two cherubim that are signs of divinity and of royalty, but no idol, no image. This is the unseen God.

This is the God that cannot be represented by animals or human form or whatever. And so we're using, you know, and this makes sense to me, Matt, because, you know, you would, you would want to use language and cultural forms that these Egyptian slaves could understand. So you want to use something that communicates just like we want to, you know, we, you know, we use the form of the podcast, whatever, to communicate to our contemporaries, right? So you want to use cultural forms that communicate, but you want to say something radically different than what was said with them previously. And I think that's what we see in the exodus.

So that kind of indirect evidence, again, that to me is very strong that, yeah, this is being composed, this is reflecting the historical reality of the time period that it's describing. So indirect evidence feels more compelling because it's accidental evidence, it seems. As it were, yeah. Right. The big stuff can be faked. There was just some names dropped in the Book of Exodus, well, you know, you could

say, well, some fiction writer looked up in a history book and found some names of some pharaohs to drop. But when it's embedded into, as it were, the culture of the Pentateuch, that's even stronger. And then, too, we have from the Egyptian New Kingdom period, we also have a whole bunch of treaty documents, covenant documents, between, say, the Pharaoh and the king of Hattiland or the Hittite Empire, which we would know as Asia Minor. So these were major empires that kind of intersected in what's now Israel, they kind of had a border there. And so they made treaties back and forth with one another.

And the fascinating thing about these treaty covenants that we've discovered, and we have several of them, they're written in Egyptian, and there's a copy in Hittite, and also in the international language at that time, which was Akkadian, and you don't want to go on to all that and get down on a rabbit trail, but different languages these covenants are preserved in, and the structure of them looks like the book of Deuteronomy, with an introduction and

then kind of a historical prologue about the past history of thevenant parties, and then we get into some major constitutional principles, and then we get into a whole bunch of very specific laws, and then we end with instructions about how to store the treaty document and how often it should be read publicly, and a list of blessings for following the Covenant and curses for breaking the Covenant. Boom, boom, boom, boom. This has been known for, boy, since the 1950s at least, this material has come out. It's like, dang, the book of Deuteronomy is following this covenant treaty format that we can attest to the time period that many have proposed as the time period of the Exodus. And what do we know about Moses?

Well, he was raised in the Egyptian royal court where they were sending these documents. This is like, you know, political, you know, international politics with international political treaties that were passing back and forth. And Moses, if he was raised in the court of Pharaoh, would have been trained to read these languages and read these political documents and be familiar with them, and how to engage in international diplomacy. So, you know, Moses would be a natural person to be able to write such a document, not between two great foreign kings, but between the king of creation, God himself, and his covenant people.

Okay, that's fascinating. What about Noah's Ark? Noah's Ark. Yes. Well, atheists often claim there's no reason to think there was a worldwide flood, therefore this is clearly just a... Right, yeah, yeah. Well, you get into all kinds of things there. You know, there's two schools of... First of all, I don't think it's an option for us as Christians to just dismiss the flood and say, oh, this is a myth. If you look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, treats Noah and his covenant as real, okay, and talks about the covenant of Noah remaining in force.

So I don't think it's an option to just dismiss it. Now if we're going to take Noah seriously and the flood seriously, there's basically two options. There's a local flood option and there's a global flood option. Right? So if you're going to go with a local flood, one of the best candidates is the inundation of the Black Sea Basin, which is thought to have happened around 5000 BC, where that narrow strip of land that's now near Istanbul collapsed and that whole area was radically flooded.

Now, some have put that forward, and it's in about the right place of the world to fit with the account of Noah, so possibly that. And so, in that case, you have a massive, albeit regional flood that's described in kind of hyperbolic language in the Bible. And you can kind of work with that. I'm personally not totally satisfied with that. If you want to go with a global flood, then you basically have to-

Why aren't you satisfied with the local flood option? Well, because you don't need an ark then. You could just migrate to high ground and stuff like that. So it doesn't make, you know, the arc really, you know, kind of demands a global flood. So, you know, so if you're gonna go with a global flood then you need to reinterpret the geological column. And there's reasons to believe that a lot of the geological column was laid down very quickly Geological column is everything that's under our feet right here in, Ohio It's like two miles of sedimentary rock all laid down by seawater. Do ever think about that?

No, and it covers the whole continent, you know, so you go to the Grand Canyon. It's all exposed there because you know a you know, a post-Ice Age lake collapsed and tore out the Grand Canyon, so we can see all the the layers down like a layer cake. But all this sedimentary rock that was, you know, deposited when oceans covered the entire continent of North America. Oh, dang, that's a lot of mud. That's a lot of debris being laid down. Not only that, but in many of these layers you have entire layers where all these fish or shellfish or nautiloids is one one that particularly comes to mind. There's a whole layer of frozen nautiloids, which are these these long very pointy squid-like creatures,

kind of long shell like that, kind of like a long cone. And they're very speedy creatures and they're all frozen, you know, like tick, you know? And the mud got laid down and they're frozen in time. So this is something that happened very fast. We're not talking about like sediment filtering down and like burying them on the bottom of the ocean, a lot of the fossils that we have in the geological column are just frozen time, frozen instant.

We have fossils of one fish in the act of eating another fish, or of a fish giving birth, you know, and then frozen there and so on. So there's a lot of a lot of evidence of catastrophic virtually instantaneous fossilization in the geological column and young Earth creationists, you know, those who, you know, really take the global flood seriously point to this kind of data as, you know, evidence that points to a, you know, global catastrophic flood. So these young Earth folks, would they say that Noah brought kangaroos on the ark or the Created after or they evolved from different creatures. Yeah. Yeah, probably no what they would they would I would assume they would say that they were

On the ark. Yeah, it just it just sounds bullshit to me when you say that I'm just it just sounds completely implausible Why would why people go with how big does this ark have to be? How many animals is that? Well, you know, there's a lot of the variation that we see in species can be explained by genetic decay, genetic entropy, okay? So, for example, all the great cats can interbreed. So, depending on how you define a species, you might say they're all one species. And, you know, so it could be that, you know, all the major cats derived by genetic entropy from, uh, you know, originally very large, something like a saber tooth tiger, you know, kind of animal, you know? So I don't know, you know, this is, I'm getting all to, this is, this is out of my, you're getting me out of my lane. you know? I'm just speculating. You know, folks can, you know,

that's not really my wheelhouse. So folks can go look at. But these are questions that atheists throw at us. So it's nice to know that there's a couple of options that the Christian would take. What about things like Sodom and Gomorrah? Sodom and Gomorrah, that is one of the most sensational stories

in recent history. Sum it up for those who are not as aware as they should be. Yes. Okay. I mean, so Sodom and Gomorrah, it looks like one of those mythological stories out of the Bible, right? Oh yeah, sure. You know, fire comes from heaven.

Yeah. Tell me another one. And I'll be honest with you, Matt, when I was growing up and, you know, reading Genesis 19 and stuff like that, it was a challenge for my faith. I'm like, okay, come on, really? You know, this really happened? Are we supposed to understand this? Something else.

But you know, so several years ago now, maybe like 15 years ago, I was at the Society of Biblical Literature, which is being held in that year in San Francisco. And I was in one of these conference rooms, and I just wandered into this session because it had an intriguing title, something about archaeological discoveries at Tel El Hamam in Jordan. I thought, well, I'll walk into this. Because a lot of these conferences

at the Societabitical Literature, like these ideologically driven post-colonial feminist whatever interpretation of this, that, or the other thing. So I like to go to ones that are actually about language or history or something. Somebody actually dug something up and we're talking about data, you know. So, so this archaeological session I wander in, I start listening, and as I'm listening to this presentation for about 45 minutes, near the end of it, I began to realize, oh my gosh, these people presenting think that they have found the biblical cities

of Sodom and Gomorrah. That's what they're saying in a really roundabout, really understated way. So at the end of the presentation, they stop the presentation and they open up for questions and they describe these two city mounds that they had found on the Jordanian side of the Jordan River, and in this destruction layer and so on. And so I raised my hand immediately and I said, well, did you find any arrowheads? The reason I asked that, Matt, is when you have a destruction layer of an ancient city, if you find arrowheads in the destruction layer, it means that an army caused the destruction and they were shooting arrows at the defenders and blah, blah, blah, blah. If you find a destruction

layer and there aren't arrowheads, that means an army did not destroy the city and then probably it was some kind of natural event, right? So I'm curious, like what destroyed these two cities that you guys think are Sodom and Gomorrah? And so the researcher starts to get very bashful when I asked this question. He says, well, I didn't really wanna go there, but all I wanna say while we're recording this session is that it was a heat event.

And there was like 20 other people in the room and we're like, look at each other, like a heat event? Like, is that like a wardrobe malfunction? Like what is, what is a heat event? You know, like, okay. And then, and then he stopped the recording and like the official session was over, you know? And so it was like off camera at this point. So all of us in the room, like mobbed the guy stopped the recording, like the official session was over, you know, and so it was like off camera at this point.

So all of us in the room, like mobbed the guy at the front, like, okay, you know, tell us what's going on. And so this researcher, Stephen Collins, from a Southwestern university in the US here, he says, okay, so we get down to this destruction layer of this city that we're beginning to think is Sodom, and we pulled up a piece of pottery. And when I looked on one side of it, I thought, oh no, our research is ruined, because I saw that it was glazed.

And glazing wasn't invented until the Ottoman period, or at least the kind of glazing that he thought he saw. And the Ottoman period is like 1000 AD. And if you're pulling that up, that means you've got contamination in your archaeological dig. You've got like later artifacts down there. But then he turned the pottery over and on the back of it, it was typical bronze age pottery, but it was glazed on one side and not on the other. Like what on earth is going on? So make a long story short, he sends this away to a lab in the U.S. for testing and they come back and say, well, that glazing is trinitite. Okay, great. What's trinitite? Well trinitite is that glass layer that you get when you basically set off an atomic bomb in the

desert and it melts the glass and you get a kind of crystalline formation that's called trinitite. So this pottery was raised to over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a brief moment of time. Like, oh my gosh, this is what's going on. So they continue to bring up this glazed pottery and eventually what they discover is, among other things, they also begin to find human remains. They find human skeletons that are complete up until about halfway up the backbone, and then there's just a scorch mark and there's nothing on the top of the body. And they find the skeleton behind a wall that's about four feet high. So what's going on here? Well, long story short, they find massive evidence that a huge heat blast from the sky at about 25 degrees above the horizon incinerated these

twin cities on the Jordanian side of the river just north of the Dead Sea. Yeah. And they have the artifacts to prove it. And again, the reason it has to be from the sky? What's that? The reason it had to be from above? Because of the angle like they have these these human remains that apparently were standing upright behind a wall and everything above the wall was incinerated and they do like the angular Calculations and they can see oh that blast was coming like this, you know So they can calculate the angle at which and and and the stuff when they when they find this stuff in situ And they've got a scorched side or a melted side, again, they can triangulate where this is coming from.

And so long story short, from a natural material explanation, this looks like a meteor blast. That's what I was about to ask, what was the naturalistic explanation? Yeah, like in Tunguska, I think it was called Siberia back in the 1800s. There was this massive meteor blast that flattens several hundred square miles of taiga, of northern Russian forest and so on. And when a meteor comes into the atmosphere,

it heats up and then explodes and it can be like an atomic blast. But again, the timing and the location and the cities all track with what is described of Abraham and Lot in Genesis 19 and the surrounding chapters. And then the Bible talks a lot about Sodom and Gomorrah. For centuries thereafter, you know, all the way into the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah continue to mention Sodom and Gomorrah. This stuck in the cultural memory because this was a major world historical traumatic event for us, like the two towers going down, you know? Like this major disaster where these two cities were entirely

wiped out by a heat blast from the sky, you know, by the hand of God as it were. But no historical source records this, even though Sodom and Gomorrah were arguably the two most powerful cities in that entire region. They were at a trade route, you know, from going from east to the west, from Egypt out to the far east, and everything was passing through there. So very powerful, very wealthy cities, and only the biblical record has a historical account of this meteorological, geological event that we can now attest that tracks with the time period and the description. And also that blast going up creates a great vacuum which then re-collapses and pulls all

kinds of salt sediment from the Dead Sea and then slams it on that location that was in the bullseye of – and that's where you get the discussion of �became a pillar of salt and all the hellfire, the brimstone, that was all torn up by the blast and redeposited over the cities. It's absolutely fascinating. If folks can look this up, I'm not making this up. Steve Collins, a very reputable archaeologist from something like Southwestern Methodist University or something like this. You can look online, just go to Amazon and type in like the discovery of Sodom and Gomorrah in his book. I forget the exact title. But yeah, yeah, you can find it and put a link to it.

And so yeah, that really changed my perspective on the Old Testament map, because what it pointed out to me is things that sounded too outlandish to be history, that even I as a believer was tempted to discount, suddenly and sensationally shown to be, you know, actually that's a historical event. Now, do you think it was a meteor? Do you think that a Christian can say it was a meteor and it's God using the

media? Absolutely. I see. You know, I think this, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the Providence is in the timing. I mean, that's in the, that's the timing of God. It's like, it's like if you're a sinner and you walk into a church and get struck by lightning. Something like that. Right, right. Oh, that was just a natural, you know, naturalistic.

No, these things are in the hands of God, you know? So I don't see any conflict there. Now, you're so good to answer all these questions because I'm peppering you with things I didn't tell you we were going to talk about before this. I'm shocked at how much you know. You'd be shocked at how little I know, I think. The The Red Sea was it the Red Sea or is that a typo? Yeah. Yeah. No The Hebrew says yam suf which means sea of reeds

So I think that the body of water that's being talked about is one of the many large reedy lakes that are on the border of Egypt that that that that are on the border of Egypt that cause a major barrier to travel when you're trying to get east and out of Egypt. And it gets translated in the Septuagint as the Red Sea. Why is that? Probably because they were uncertain of the meaning of the Hebrew and they were trying to connect it up with a body of water that they knew was geographically in that area. So I suspect that was that. So God didn't necessarily, God didn't split the Red Sea then?

Not as we know it. I wouldn't, I, you know, there are those who theorize that he did, you know, that argue and that have a root for the Exodus and I have no problem with my God splitting a major body of water. That's not a problem for me. But it's just that, you know, the Hebrew says yam suv, you know, which is sea of reeds. And I think that the intention is, you know, we don't know exactly what the layout was because at the border of Egypt, he kind of got a rift valley there, and you got many of these lakes there. But one of them was this Sea of Reeds, and it's still a miracle, because you could say, well, it wasn't as much water, but well, it

was plenty enough water to drown the whole Egyptian army. OK, so if this event actually occurred, shouldn't we expect to find chariots and armor from Egyptian soldiers and some of these? Right. Yeah, yeah, I would expect so. Oh, yeah. But no, we haven't yet. But it's not just very easy to go through and do a systematic you know, that's good water again. Right. Yeah. I mean, if it's the bottom of the Red Sea, I mean, these are politically charged places.

They're not easy to go in there. You gotta get, you know, you gotta get permission from different governments. Everybody's got an, has an interest in this. So it's just not easy to conduct. But surely people have tried. They have, you know, and the people have had, have tried and people have seen things that look like

chariots at the bottom of the sea and, you know, fleeting glimpses of artifacts that they were not able to recover. So there's tantalizing reports, but nothing, you know, verified at this point. So then if the Exodus account is accurate, what about the splitting of the Sea of Reeds? Do we have any other reasons, any incidental reasons, or any such thing like that to think that it actually happened? Well, the Exodus route is very plausible, and on a question like this, I would really recommend the works of James K. Hofmeier, who is a professional Egyptologist and taught for a number of years at Trinity International University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School up in the

Chicago area. And he's got two books in particular, one called Israel in Egypt and the other called Israel in Sinai. And one's about the historicity of, you know, the Israelite sojourn in Egypt. And he points to, you know, a lot of evidence for large groups of Semitic slaves in Egypt during the New Kingdom period, etc., their housing and where they would have lived and so on. Unfortunately, the area where the Israelites lived was in muddy delta land that just basically kind of absorbs anything that gets built on it. So it's really hard to excavate.

Not as nice as upper Egypt, just very dry, desert conditions and things will preserve for thousands of years. So it's hard to get precise archaeological remains from the areas where the Israelites live. We have some though that points to Semitic slaves. Semitic would be the people group that the Israelites are part of. And the Exodus route is plausible, and some of the specific geographical markers that are mentioned can be connected.

You can kind of connect the dots in the ancient geographical locations of these Egyptian fortresses and border cities and so on as you mark the way out. So whosoever writing the account of the Exodus has a familiarity with Egyptian geography in the second, why do I keep saying second temple? I'm thinking New Testament stuff, in the New Kingdom period. So there's a lot of, again, a lot of circumstantial evidence for the plausibility and the historical context of the narrative. So yeah, I'd really recommend that.

Hofmeyer, Israel in Egypt, and also Israel in Sinai, which goes into the book of Numbers, and you can kind of trace the itinerary that's mentioned in Numbers and Deuteronomy from known locations as they're wandering around in the wilderness. And some of the cultural phenomena that's mentioned too is stuff that's attested out in Sinai. You know, like rocks cracking open and releasing water. This is part of the nature of the terrain. You get these aquifers and sometimes you got a lot of breccia, which is like these shattered rocks and the geological formations

of the area. And so you can kind of get the sudden emergence of a spring, and that's described a couple of times in the numbers narrative. So yeah, there's kind of that circumstantial evidence. We would like more, you know, we'd like to dig up an Israelite sandal or something like this. And thus far, you know, that's not been forthcoming, but hey, you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls

took us till 1947 to uncover. So if you want to accept something. Yeah. Yeah. Gee, that's fascinating, eh? Can you think of something that you learned through your studies about the Old Testament, in addition to what you've already said, that really increased your faith

in the reliability of the Old Testament. So if you talk to that, it's automatically more. Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. Like when I was going through Summoner in the late 90s, that was a really bad period in terms of biblical archeology where a school called Minimalism was really in control, where people were just freely claiming that David and Solomon were these myths of some ancient

fiction writer. I could never bring myself to believe that the accounts of David in First and Second Samuel were mythical. And the reason why, Matt, is because those narratives are told at such a high level of cultural resolution and so much attention is paid in 1st and 2nd Samuel to minor characters like Abner or Joab, these generals that worked for Saul and for David, who really play no theological role thereafter, or really aren't important outside of the lifetime of, say, David and maybe a little ways into Solomon. So the question with the books of Samuel is why mention David's wife Abigail and her husband

Nabal? Why talk about Saul at all? Saul, Saul has like no theological significance after David comes to the throne. And why talk about so, a lot of like, embarrassing episodes in David's life, like the Bathsheba incident, and you know, when he acted like a crazy man to get out of the court of one of the Philistine kings, you know, it's like not very flattering, you know? So, there's a lot of unflattering stuff about David and a lot of just kind of, you know, cultural and biographical stuff in first and second Samuel that doesn't go anywhere, but it's great storytelling. And so just reading it, you have a sense that

whoever is writing this is writing within the lifetime of these figures or at least their descendants. And these characters are still fresh, they're still important to the public that's going to read these books, etc. And so, you know, even in the 90s when I was in seminary and people were claiming, you know, David and Solomon are fictitious, I was like, no, the books of Samuel do not read like a later fiction writer. This is material that's very contemporary at the time of writing. But then, in the late 90s, thanks be to God, they found a stele, a monument inscription,

s-t-e-l-e, pronounced different ways, some people say Stella, some people say Stele, anyway. But this inscribed, this monumental inscription up in Dan, which is far northern Israel, it's called the Tel Dan inscription. And it's an inscription from an Araman or a Syrian king, Haseel, and he's bragging about how he conquered a bunch of Israelite and Judean kings, and he refers to the kingdom of Judah as the House of David. And so it was the first time when David's name was recognized on an archaeologically recovered

inscription, and it just sent shockwaves through the entire biblical world, you know, the House of David. And of course, the minimalists were backpedaling and trying to reinterpret and say that, well, it doesn't really say that. But they didn't win the day. And most people were like, no, it says House of David, guys. You know, that's what it's for.

And that was how the kingdom of Judah was being referred, because these ancient kingdoms were typically called the House of and then the founder of the dynasty that was ruling them. So that's very significant, the House of David about a century to a century and a half after, you know, the time of David. And then a few years later, they found a major tax collections center called Tel Zayit, which was west of Jerusalem, where the government collected wine and oil and other agricultural products from the farmers as taxes to the royal government. And this tax collection center dates to the time of David. So that means we've got like an administrative royal structure going on here and we're collecting

taxes and that suggests something of a considerable like state, you know, bureaucracy and stuff going on in the time period of David. And then they went back and re-looked at a famous inscription called the Moabite Stone, or sometimes called the Masha Stone, which is written about the middle of the 800s by a certain King Masha of Moab, who's mentioned in 1 Kings chapter 3. And he writes about how he has thrown off the yoke of King Omri of Israel, and actually he claims to have destroyed Israel. A little bit hyperbolic there. He claims that nobody's left.

But anyway, so like I said, fake news and propaganda was very common in the ancient world as it is in modern journalism. And there too, on that Mace Estella, they found David's name as well. Also, the Kingdom of Judah being referred to as the House of David. So now, two instances of David's name on extra-biblical, archaeologically recovered instances. And you know, that really, that was pretty significant. That kind of reset the discussion in terms of the central historical narrative of the Old Testament. That's wonderful. Hey, Thursday, can we take a break? And then we'll come back and ask a ton more questions that I'm not going to tell you that I'm going to ask.

This clip was sponsored by Hallow, and I have to say it's very easy to promote these guys, because their app is probably the best app I've ever used. Not just Catholic wise but just all apps ever. If you want to grow in your prayer life, if you want to learn how to meditate, if you want to listen to excellent Catholic audiobooks, you can't go past Hallow. Go to Hallow.com slash Matt, sign up over there and you will get access to the entire app for free for three whole months. So what are you good to lose? Here's the answer, nothing. All right, I wanna say thank you to Emmaus Academy. They've put out this brand new digital platform to help you grow in your love of sacred scripture

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For good and for evil. The good Lord would have us lay hold of what is worst in ourselves. Do not think that people who have virtue and kindness and other great talents just came by these things naturally. They had to work out them very hard. Any sinner is capable of being a great sinner. All right, you're back. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Go and sign up.

We you know, we played the ad, right? Did you play the ad? Yeah. I thought you just played like the intro. No, no, no, no, no, no. I played the ad. I cut. Don't worry about it. All right. We've got a ton of questions filing in only from our local supporters. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

You get the point. Still go sign up though. Still go sign up. Hello.com, Sledgmap, Rad, whatever. Get three months of free over there. Still do sign up, but. Yeah, sign up. But just, I'm not gonna.

Hey, Dr. B. Do you like him? Do you look at you, Dr. B.? It's fine. All right. That's a no. He does not at all. No, no, no.

That's what I usually go by actually. Dr. B, when are you and Dr. Petrie going to publish volume two of a Catholic? One of your favorite questions. Most frequently asked question ever. Let me finish it just so people know what we're doing, but a Catholic introduction to the Bible, volume two of it. Your first volume on the Old Testament was awesome. Much love from a past disciple of the word.

Cool. Yes. So Dr. Pet past disciple of the word. Cool. Yes, so Dr. Petrie is hard at work at that. The word he gave to me was that- Oh, this is the first one here? Yeah, this is the first one. Oh no, I can see that on the camera. Hold it up by your face and I'll see it by your face. It's beautiful.

This is by my face. Yeah, that's lovely. Thank you. Yep. And so yeah, so the New Testament, which was always planned, this was always planned, this was always planned to be a two volume work, that is in the hands of Dr. Petrie.

He is probably 85% at least done with that. He sent me the first 50% of it two years ago, and then got busy with the Augustin Institute. But the word is that the Augustin Institute's giving him a couple semesters off to finish this baby. And so he's doing that. So I drafted this and then he looked it over and added some stuff.

Now the shoe's on the other foot. So he's drafting the new test of volume. I'll look it over when he's done, add a little, you know, my tweaks and then we'll get that through the process with Ignatius press So have you ever considered writing a book on the incidental proofs or verifications of that has been done Oh, yeah, like there's stuff like that out there Linda McGrew did something like that. Yes. That's what I'm thinking of Yeah, it's what is it called? Yeah, the unintentional convergences or

something like that I just I just read that actually yeah I just read that like Linda McGrew just see her books and you'll figure out which one it is but yeah yeah she's an interesting character her husband's fascinating yeah, he's uh, how do you spell McGrew? I think MCG REW Drew says using dr. Bergsmuth book Bible basics for Catholics to lead a Bible study with a group of my friends cool cool Alyssa says what are the comparisons of how many Transcripts we have of the Gospels versus other historical texts, and where can we go to find this information? Yeah. One really good classic source is FF Bruce.

Goes by his two first initials, F period, F period Bruce. The New Testament documents, are they reliable? This is written back in the 50s, I believe, the first edition. He updated it through his life. Now they just keep reprinting it, but you can get a cheap copy. You can get a used copy for $3 off Amazon, I would imagine. And Bruce goes through and he lines up the statistics on the manuscripts. So working just on my working memory, there's something like 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament ranging from, you know, the the 200s AD all the way into the, you know, later medieval period, as opposed

to say something like Julius Caesar's Gallic War, there's like maybe 10 manuscripts of that. And then, yeah, and you know, things like Plato's Republic, you know, you're talking maybe a dozen manuscripts and so on. So, but Bruce lays out all those comparisons. And so it's usually, you know, And so it's usually, you know, tens of copies or less than tens, like in single digits for a lot of classical documents versus like 5,000. Wow. Yeah. Did you find that book by chance? Yeah, I got it.

Oh, hidden in plain view, undesigned coincidences in the gospel and acts. That's right. Undesigned coincidences. It's in the description. Thank you very much. That's great book. C.S. Madore says, Hi, Dr. John, I'm sure you've been asked this till your ears bleed, but I haven't heard your answer yet. So I'll ask, what is your impression of Jordan Peterson's psychological reading of Genesis?

I've listened to them and find some parts compelling and some parts where he just misses the mark. But what are your thoughts? Yeah, I you know, it's funny. He should ask because I'm reading through His what is it 12 principles to live by which I did not realize for 12 Yeah, no, it's this one. It's the first one. Yeah, and I was not aware how much of that book is biblical interpretation, actually. It's his psychological interpretation. First thing I would say about it is he's working in a very revered tradition of philosophical reinterpretation of the Bible. And this is a Hori tradition that goes back all the way to Philo Gideas, Philo of Alexandria,

the Jewish philosopher who was a contemporary of St. Paul. And he does a philosophical reinterpretation of the scriptures of Israel, you know, using the tools of Greek philosophy. And I see Jordan Peterson standing in that kind of tradition. He's got one foot in philosophy and one foot in the psychotherapeutic tradition, especially Carl Jung and figures like that. And so I think there's a tradition of doing this kind of thing with the Scriptures, and I think there's some validity to it. As I listen to Jordan Peterson, half the time he seems to me to be doing a lot of evolutionary, psychological superstition,

I would call it. It's just kind of like pseudoscience. And I strongly object to his ideas of our human evolution. I think a lot of the points he's making could be just based on biology. You don't have to make up a just-so story about we were hunter-gatherers or the bear at the mouth of the cave. You can just talk about our biology. But the other half of the time I'm powerfully moved by insights that he sees, and a lot of the things that he sees, like in the creation narrative, the nakedness as vulnerability,

I've been saying that for years. Well, you find that in the interpretive tradition. There is a lot of fundamentally archetypical stuff going on in the stories of Genesis. The stories are true. I believe they're speaking about historical figures, but they also speak to the human condition and are generally apical to dimensions of our life. So on the whole, I think it's positive. I am very grateful to Jordan Peterson for bringing the Bible back into mainstream discussion of culture, and I think that's very valuable, and so I would

say net positive. Father Bolz says, it's great to hear about the increasing evidence for the reliability of scripture. However, are there arguments and evidence for such things being passed around Christian circles that you think actually aren't very good and Christians should stop citing them? No, I'm not too aware of that. And the reason for that is I'm not usually out into the kind of like popular Christian social media and stuff like that.

I'm not aware. Periodically, students will come to me and say, well, I heard somebody say this, you know, that the Greek really says that, or the Hebrew really says this. And sometimes it's just like, you know, I got a doctorate in this stuff, I've never heard that. You know, and I just don't know where that's coming from. So I do run across kind of like, you know, pseudo information. Are there arguments you used to use to support the reliability of the scriptures that you've

since decided aren't as good as you once thought? Not that I can remember offhand. What about this? Someone has told me that the plagues that God sent in Egypt represented a different Egyptian god. Is that true? That is true. With many, well, okay, maybe not every one of the plagues, you know, that's debatable, but on many of the plagues, you can clearly recognize that there's a particular Egyptian god that's in the bullseye of that target. Like was the Nile something?

Yeah, the Nile god was, that was Hopi, was the Nile god, and that was one of the major gods of Egypt, and so the turning of the Nile to blood, I mean, in terms of Egyptian culture, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's being said culturally by that. You know, it's like, I slew your god and he bled out. That's the message of the Nile being turned to blood. At the end of the plague sequence, when you get the three days of darkness, that also is clearly aimed at Amon-Re, the Egyptian sun god, the head of the Egyptian pantheon, and

every night he would descend in the west and do battle with the Egyptian chaos demon Apep, also known as Apophis in the Greek tradition, and then every morning he would rise victorious over the forces of darkness and you'd have daylight again. Well, him not showing up for three days probably made all the Egyptian priests sweat themselves because the sun god's not coming back, you know? And so it was a ritual slaying of the sun god. So yeah, and then the plague on the frogs, you know, the Egyptian goddess of fertility was known as Hekhet, and she was portrayed as a woman with a frog's head. Very attractive.

Yeah, exactly. A great buddy, though. Yeah, yeah, right. And she's the goddess of fertility, and she gets out of hand, and you got frogs everywhere, frogs in the kitchen, frogs in the fridge, frogs in the bedroom, frogs in the streets. frogs in the bedroom, frogs in the streets, you know? It's comical, it's ludicrous.

It's making a laughing stock out of the Egyptian goddess of fertility. So I don't know that you can- Like gnats? Yeah, gnats, you know, that's a little bit harder. You know, some have linked him up with Khepher, the Egyptian god of resurrection who was portrayed as a beetle. It's more of a stretch.

But I would say this, even the plagues where the specific matter of the plague might not directly point to a specific Egyptian god, you still have the general fact that the Egyptian gods were responsible for the welfare of Egypt and they were doing a poor job of it in the face of the god of Israel. And that's actually reflected if you look in Exodus 12.12, it says, at the end of the plague narrative, I will place judgments on all the gods of Egypt." So the biblical text itself suggests that there's a theomachy or a divine combat going on here, and that God's not just judging the Egyptians, but he's judging the Egyptian gods. So yeah, there's validity to that interpretation,

and with several of the plagues, it as clear as day that we are doing, you know, a kind of attack on Egyptian theology. Wow, that is fascinating. That really changes the way you read that. Yeah. C. Blair says, new supporter, longtime lurker. Thank you so much for being a local supporter. Can you discuss the Q document and the relationship with the Gospels? In college I got a minor in Christian religious studies and found this theory interesting, if not a little troubling. Thank you. Okay, yeah, let's talk about that. And you know, this is more the the wheelhouse of Brant Petrie and Michael Barber, who are New Testament scholars and specifically

have, you know, written major works on the Gospels and stuff like that. So I defer to them and often consult with them on these topics. But the Q document, what is the Q document? Well, the Q document is a hypothetical document that was hypothesized by scholars to explain why there are passages between Matthew and Luke where Matthew and Luke are very similar, but it's not in Mark. And so the dominant hypothesis within kind of like mainstream secular New Testament scholarship right now about the composition of the Gospels is that Mark writes very early on and some other unknown person writes a document called Q that has a lot of the teachings of Jesus included in

it, and then Matthew comes along and uses Mark and Q and his own materials, and then Luke comes along and uses Mark and Q and his own materials, but Matthew and Luke don't use each other. Now this theory is under serious attack by many other scholars. Mark Goodacre is a well-known Gospels expert who's written a famous book called The Case Against Q, and he says, no, it's simpler to just take Luke as using Matthew and then get rid of the hypothetical document. So I don't think that Q really needs to pose a danger to the faith. F.F. Bruce, who I mentioned

before as, you know, people should look up his classic book, the New Testament documents, are they reliable? F. F. Bruce looked at this paradigm, and he suggested actually that Q was an early form of the Gospel of Matthew, or it might be the collection of sayings that Matthew is said to have written according to early fathers like Popius. So in Bruce's understanding, you've got Mark writing early and Matthew producing an early document of Jesus' teachings, and then Matthew or Matthew's co-workers coming back later and taking Mark's narrative, which had the authority of Peter behind it, and combining it with Matthew's already existing teachings document and then adding some more unique Mathian material in it, and that's our canonical Gospel of Matthew.

Now unfortunately, this theory is usually not presented in such a benign way. When you go to most major universities, they say Mark and Q, and then they draw an invisible lasso around mark and cue and posit the unwarranted proposition that anything that's not mark and cue is made up. So you can kind of trust mark and you can kind of trust cue, but anything that's in Matthew and Luke that's not in mark and cue is fiction made up by Matthew and Luke. But that's not a necessary proposition. There's no reason that the material that's unique to Matthew or unique to Luke could be just as early, just as authentic, could come from an eyewitness, etc., but just wasn't

written down by Mark or this other document. So that's kind of it in a nutshell. That's great. Mitchell Godfrey says, do the skeptical critics who use later dates regarding the Gospels, do they have a response to recent arguments that the Gospels were written earlier? Are they still trying to maintain that they were written much later? Yeah. You know, you can look at the response that's come to Jonathan Bernier's book on redating the New Testament, and actually there's not a lot of response. It's rare in New Testament scholarship for scholars to come outright and present the data for why there is the claim that, say, Matthew and Luke have to be written in the 80s and so on. My colleague, Brant Petrie, when we were together in graduate school, he decided to track that

down and found that if you track the whole datings down, it gets back to scholars in, you know, roughly speaking, 19th century Germany who are saying that, oh, the descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem and the eschatological discourses are like Jesus' last sermons in Matthew and Luke where he describes Jerusalem being destroyed. Those have to be written after the fact. That's what it comes down to. And so for those who don't believe that Jesus, well, I should reverse that.

For those of us who believe that Jesus could know the future, the usual reason for dating Luke and Matthew into the 80s doesn't hold. I see. But that's really what it comes down to. And so Brandt wanted to write about this, but his doctoral advisor emailed him back in all caps and said, �Do not question

the date of the Gospels.� So that was off the table. You don't want to touch these sacred cows when you're a young scholar. You want to wait until you have tenure. That's basically it. So interesting. T Anne says, �How do I respond to my daughter who is in a same-sex relationship? When she says the passages in the Bible that refer to homosexuality don't apply today and to those in loving relationships I got a kind of first response

And go ahead. Yeah, it would be just to ask Okay If I could show you that you're mistaken and that these verses do in fact condemn homosexual acts, would you change your lifestyle in mind? Because I often think what we're doing when we're engaged in simple activity is looking for a justification for that thing. Yeah. And really, if we were to be honest, they really wouldn't change. That would be the first thing.

Are you even interested in looking at these verses to show they do in fact condemn homosexuality or not? And then if you are, then we can have a serious discussion about it. But I think a lot of the times the answer is like, not really. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you, Matt. And yeah, there's there's been, you know, a lot written on that. You know, in a couple of minutes, I could come up with with some books that have been written to refute that. Over here at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, a famous scholar, you know, drawing a blank on his name, but written an entire book on the Bible and homosexuality, addressing all those claims

like, oh, well, you haven't translated the Greek word properly, or whatever. Suffice it to say, I just got done writing a biblical theology of matrimony going from Genesis to Revelation, and all through the Bible. It's one man, one woman for life. Even people say, well, what about polygamy? Polygamy is always shown to be a familial discord, and even rabbis and biblical theologians and so on for a long time have recognized us. It's what I call the implicit critique of polygamy in Scripture.

I mean, take it, the first man to take more than one wife is Lamech, this guy who's seven times more evil than Cain. Jordan Peterson talks about him in his 12 rules. Lamech, who claims to be 77 times worse than his ancestor and stuff like that. He's the first one to take more than one. What is the sacred author trying to communicate by telling us that Bigamy was invented by this sociopath who brags about his murders to his multiple wives, you know? And then when you look at the flood narrative, it's actually the sons of God taking multiple wives or becoming polygamous that provokes God to send the flood, and all the humans

and all the animals that get on the ark are monogamous. Remember two by two? Whereas those that get drowned in the flood are polygamous. And the ancient Essenes we've talked about before, the Dead Sea Scrolls and so on, they noticed that, and that was a major argument for lifelong monogamy that they took from the Scriptures. So anyway, you know, from Genesis to Revelation, it's man and woman, and marriage is not just like a tangential thing to biblical revelation. Like the marriage of Adam and Eve is the high point of the creation narrative, if you study it, you know, chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. The marriage of the bride and the lamb in the book of Revelation is really the culminating point of the whole

Bible, okay, and also the book of Revelation. And right in the middle of the Bible you have the celebration of marriage in the Song of Songs, which is understood in the Israelite tradition as messianic, as referring to David and his bride, which is Israel, which is to come. So all through the Bible, marriage is this central reality that symbolizes God's covenant relationship with his people. And there's kind of a metaphysical resonance between the covenant between God and his people

and the covenant between a man and a woman, like two crystal glasses, like if you rub on one and the other vibrates. That's what human marriage is to the covenant between God and His people. And so when we monkey around with human marriage and try to do man and man or woman and woman or one man and two women or whatever you have, every time we vary from what we have revealed in scripture, it leads to great difficulty. I found the book on homosexuality by the way. Yeah, what's that? Robert Gagnon. That's it.

Bible and homosexual practices, texts and hermeneutics. Yeah, that's what I would recommend folks look at for these arguments that, oh, it doesn't mean homosexuality means something else, you know. I would recommend folks look at for these arguments that, oh, it doesn't mean homosexuality means something else. You know, I would also recommend people check out some of the stuff Trent Horn has written. He did a debate slash dialogue with a quote unquote pastor who identifies as gay Brandon Robertson. So if you look up Trent Horn, Brandon, B.R.A.N.

D.A.N. Robertson, you might find that debate Trent Horn, Brandon, B R A N D A N Robertson, you might find that debate interesting because they go over a lot of the arguments. Yeah. And then, um, father John, a Weiss, uh, I think it's, I think it's middle nationals as a, but, uh, Weiss W A I S S, uh, has written from like a pastoral perspective, a really, really good book. It's something like Love and Our Brokenness or something like that, but which deals with same sex attraction and,

Born to Love, Lesbian Identity Relationships. Wow, this is a long title. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, put a link to that. Father Weiss, a very good book and very pastoral and sympathetic because he's, you know, just done pastoral care with a lot of people with, you know, attracted to people of the same sex. We have an interview coming out soon with a fellow who was actually a seminarian hiring gay prostitutes, encountered Christ in seminary, imagine that, and began to find a great deal of healing in his own life. And years later,

he's now married to a woman, still has same sex attraction as well as all. So it's, and it's a beautiful story and it's a, it's very merciful. And you might find it's going to come out shortly. You might find that helpful. Yeah. All right. Josh Mumby says, Dr. Elaine Pagels, religion historian, makes the claim that the Gospel of John was written in response to the Gospel of Thomas. What does Dr. Bergsmith think? I don't see any evidence for that. And the irony with Elaine Pagels is that she's a feminist, but she's a defender of these Gnostic gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas and others

that are written centuries later that don't have the early manuscript attestation that we've been talking about. You know, John, you know, complete Gospel of John, you know, essentially a nearly complete codex of the Gospel of John. We're missing some of the first leaves of it that got worn off, you know, from the year 200. The manuscript evidence for things like the Gospel of it that got worn off from the year 200. The manuscript evidence for things like the Gospel of Thomas, we're talking like the 300s and later.

But this is the thing, Matt. Elaine Pagels is a feminist, but she's a champion of these Gnostic Gospels. But these Gnostic Gospels are really so anti-woman. And some of them say things like, oh, say to Mary Magdalene, well, portray Jesus as telling one of the women in the gospel narratives that she's got to become a man in order to become saved. Transgenderism! Yeah, exactly. The first proof, biblical proof.

The first proof of transgenderism, yeah. Sorry. But it was really, it's like, you know, women are more earthy or more bodily, and so they've got to be more transformed. And so I think like, you know, Dr. Pagels, why, if you want to exalt the status of women, why, you know, change the Gnostic Gospels? Interesting. Mitchell Godfrey says, the prodo evangelium of James does provide a lot of information

important to Catholic tradition. How many of the fake Gospels are attempted pious? That's a great question. First of all, can we just talk about the Proto-Avigelium of James for those who aren't aware and what we learn about the Blessed Mother through that and how reliable that might be. Yeah. So the Proto-Avigelium of James, you know, people are going to give different dates, but you know, maybe the two hundreds. Okay. So maybe third century. Some might put it into the second century, I don't know. But it's an infancy gospel talking a lot about the circumstances of our Lord's birth, but

most significantly it attests to an early Christian belief in the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mother, and so it actually recounts like a midwife going in and testing the Blessed Mother out and finding that she's still Virgo Intacta, you know, and this stuff is quite blunt about that. Not historically, like I wouldn't put historical credence to it, but what is interesting, what I think it is helpful is to show that the belief in the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mother was so early and so firm that there were overzealous Christians in these very early centuries already producing works to kind of go a little

too far in trying to defend it. And so even if you don't accept the historicity of it, or at least the reliability of it, it does show, correct me if I'm wrong, an early belief that they were virgins consecrated to God, yes? Yes, yeah. It attests to a very early, very firmly held belief in the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mother before, during, and after. So this is not like some kind of medieval devotion that gets exaggerated. It's there from the very early generations of Christianity.

So he asks, and it's a great question, I haven't thought of this before so this document we're talking about Provides some information important to Catholics. So how many of the fake Gospels are Attempted pious writings and how many are nefarious? Gnostic or other writings trying to twist the faithful away from apostolic teaching. Yeah. Yeah, most of them are from apostolic teaching. Yeah, yeah. Most of them are the latter. Most of them are heretical. Most of them are Gnostic. And you can tell that because of the emphasis. Yeah, because the direction where they're going, they, they, um, they have a tendency to deny the real humanity of Jesus. Um, some of these, uh, fake or, uh, you know, pseudepigraphical gospels go into docetism, which is the idea that Jesus

only appeared to be really human. So typically it's pretty easy to pick up where the, you know, kind of the theological ideology is going in these documents. And the reason why they were composed, you know, several generations later into the Christian movement so to speak, is to provide some kind of textual basis, some kind of scriptural basis for these, you know, non-Orthodox beliefs essentially. Mason- Have you looked into whether or not Muhammad, I think it is quite clear that he did, used apocryphal gospels in his writings, and if you have, do you think that's a good argument?

Many good arguments, another good argument against Muhammadism. Yeah, no, I haven't looked into that specifically. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. Kyle Whittington says, how do you respond to the accusation that Abraham should not have been praised for his willingness to sacrifice Isaac in light of all the prohibitions of human sacrifice throughout the rest of the Old Testament?

Hmm. Yeah. No, I would say that Abraham is in dialogue with God, and he's acting in trust. And the book of Hebrews explains that Abraham figured that God could raise the debt. And so Abraham's whole willingness to go through with that was a kind of implicit faith in the resurrection already. And the whole key to understanding that narrative in Genesis 22 is to understand that it's radically pointing forward to a different only begotten son who's going to

carry the wood of his sacrifice up that very same mountain, because that is the Temple Mount where they're at, and there that other only begotten son's going to be laid on the wood and actually going to be sacrificed. And so I think it's really impossible to deal with Genesis 22 apart from looking at the anti-type, looking at the telos, looking at the goal towards which it's pointing. And the real message there is it's a singular test, and God doesn't do this kind of testing really to any other figure in salvation history, and not to most of us. But God is asking Abraham and Isaac, Isaac who's a young man at this time, Isaac who's stronger than his father Abraham, Isaac who carries the heavier load up the mountain.

Remember, he's got the load of logs for the sacrifice His geriatric father's only carrying the the knife in the in the fire pot You know no way that Abraham could have overpowered Isaac at the top this had to be an eyes Sacrifice that Isaac willingly or freely accepted And that's what all the most ancient Jewish commentaries, the Targums, they all make a point that Isaac's grown, that he accepts this willingly, and that's implied by the narrative itself. So this is a willing sacrifice on the part of father and son, a cooperative act. But really what God is saying is, Abraham and Isaac, are you willing to go through with

the kind of sacrifice that I, the Holy Trinity, am going to have to experience in order to bring blessing to all the nations?" And Abraham and Isaac say, we are willing, and then by their actions they prove it. And so at the last minute, God calls that off because He only wanted to see the consent. And since they've shown that they consent to this kind of self-sacrificial love that the Holy Trinity is going to have to undergo, they merit becoming the instruments through which God's going to bless the nations. And that's the message at the end there, Genesis 22, 15 through 18, because you have done this

and have not withheld from me your son, your only begotten son, it says in the RSVCE And if not withheld from me, your only begotten Son," it says in the RSVCE second edition, I will surely bless you. And then it goes in and it's a bunch of blessings. And then the climactic one is, and through your seed or in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. And that's looking forward to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit from symbolized by the blood and water from the side of Christ when he gives his life on the wood at that very location, you know, 1700 years or so later.

Thanks. We have a lot of local supporters who are Protestant and they're discerning the Catholic faith and it's wonderful to see them there. This person, Bronze Fury, says, what are the differences between the Protestant and Catholic Bibles and why do they differ? Great question, okay. There are seven books in Catholic Bibles that are not found in Protestant Bibles. The typical Protestant claim that I believe for the first 28 years of my life was that Catholics added these seven additional, from Protestant perspective, additional books into

the canon of the Old Testament at the Council of Trent in order to bolster their papist non-biblical opinions, right? Well, first of all, out of these seven books that are commonly called the Deuterocanonical books, and we're talking like 1 and 2 Maccabees, Sirach, the Book of Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, and Baruch, okay? So, out of these seven books, the only one that touches on a Protestant Catholic controversy is Second Maccabees, which records prayers for the dead, and the practice of praying for the dead implies such a place as purgatory. Okay, so that's – and all the rest are kind of neutral.

The content of Tobit, Judith, etc., on terms of Catholic Protestant issues, this really makes no difference. So it's only 2nd Maccabees, okay? Now what happened was Martin Luther in his debates, and he wasn't even, you know, Martin Luther wasn't envisioning the whole thing that happened with the Reformation, but he was just spouting off and complaining. And he got into debates and he took issue with purgatory and the whole doctrine of purgatory. And his opponents in public debate said, well, you know, look, 2nd Maccabees implies that there's got to be some kind of place like purgatory.

And in the heat of debate, Luther kind of made a radical move, like he pulled the ripcord and like parachuted out by claiming that 2nd Maccabees wasn't canonical. And on what basis would Martin Luther claim that 2nd Maccabees wasn't canonical? Well, it wasn't accepted by the Jews, okay, that was one argument. And the other thing was St. Jerome, who was heavily influenced by the Jewish tradition because he went to Bethlehem and learned Hebrew, St. Jerome speaks against some of the Deuterocanonical books in his prefaces to the Vulgate translation. So based on St. Jerome's complaints and the Jewish tradition, Martin Luther dispenses with the Deuteronocanonical books in order to get rid of Second Maccabees. That's in a nutshell. I know professional historians are just like cringing right now and saying,

oh, you know, I understand you want to go into much higher resolution now that all worked out, but I'm trying to keep this brief. All right. So what I discovered in my first semester in graduate school, we had to read St. Augustine, and we had to read his famous work called On Christian Doctrine, which is a little manual on biblical interpretation, which I still use in my classes for my grad students. And in, I believe it's Book 3 of On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine talks about the canon of scripture, and he talks about how you determine which books are inspired and which aren't, and then he gives a list of the inspired books, and he

includes all of the Deuterocanonicals. And I almost lost it when I was reading this, because I was still Protestant. It was the fall of 1999, and I was shocked. I couldn't believe that Augustine was listing Tobit and the Books of Maccabees as biblical. And the reason, Matt, is because Lutherans and Calvinists, who are kind of the classic Protestants, okay, I was a Calvinist, Lutherans and Calvinists revere St. Augustine. Lutherans regard him as the proto-Luther, Calvinists regard Augustine as the proto-Calvin. And so I read a lot of Augustine, but never

a passage where he lists these Catholic books, you know, because I was taught they weren't added until Trent in the 1500s. I later went on to find out not only does St. Augustine list them as canonical, but the Council of Rome under Pope Damasus I in 380 – 382 – AD 382 listed them as part of the canon, reaffirmed by some local councils in Hippo and Carthage in North Africa in like 397 and into the 400s. And then it wasn't much of an issue through much of the medieval ages, but you can find them all listed in Thomas Aquinas in like his first inaugural lecture at the University of Paris. He gave a famous lecture

called Heek est Lieber, or This is the Book, and he lists all the books of the Bible, including the Deuterocanonicals. St. Bonaventure lists them, and we're talking three centuries before the Protestant Reformation. And then perhaps most significantly, the Ecumenical Council of Florence in the 1400s, okay, lists – and this is a council in like the 1440s, like 1441, okay, it was one of the dates given for the Council of Florence, a little messy council, but this is a council where the Greek bishops and the Greek emperor were invited to come over to Italy, and so you had representation of the West and the East, and it was truly ecumenical. They hashed out the differences between East and West,

and they came up with a common canon, and that's still the kin that we use as Catholics and it's the same one from Rome 382 that's been reordered with with the Deuterocanonicals and this is in 1441. How many years is that? That's 60, 70, 77 years before 1517 when Luther nails the theses. Okay, so you've got an ecumenical council more than 70 years before Luther that's listing all the Deuterocanonicals. So the reason I emphasize this, Matt, so much is that Protestants are consistently going to claim that we Catholics added these books at Trent, and that's just not historically true. They were used, quoted, and listed by the Church Fathers, like Augustine being a primary example,

affirmed by Church councils in antiquity, and then affirmed by an ecumenical council three-quarters of a century before the Reformation actually broke out. So that's not what is at stake there. Wow. As a Calvinist, when you learned that Augustine listed the Bibles we have in the Catholic Bible, other than shock, how did you process that? I processed it by saying to myself, oh my gosh, I've only been exposed to a limited selection of Augustine's works. We only read the Confessions and only certain parts of the confessions and then in certain parts of the city of God. And I'm like, I have not, you know, the full truth has been hidden from me. The full truth has not been revealed to me. People have not been completely honest with me about the history of the canyon.

Canon, that's how I processed that. How long then before that moment and you looking into the Catholic Church? Only a matter of months. Oh really? So a few months later I was in dialogue with a Catholic friend, Michael Dauphiné, now at Ave Maria University, and we had reached an impasse in kind of biblical apologetics. I gained a lot of respect for his Catholic apologetics. In fact, today's first reading for the Feast of the Assumption, that was my first indication

that Mary might be something more than just the mother of Jesus, but might actually be Queen of Heaven. There was this incident where Michael and I were sitting in the food court called the Huddle in the University of Notre Dame, and he had just defeated several of my apologetic points about Catholicism, and I was trying to think of something to really pin him to the wall. And so I challenged him, because I saw this icon of the Blessed Mother on the wall in the food court that said, Mary, Queen of Heaven. I'm like, alright, here's one for you. Give me one passage of Scripture that gives

any indication that Mary is Queen of Heaven. That's an almost blasphemous title. And he didn't even miss a beat. He went straight to Revelation 12. And he just laid it out and he says, look, we've got a woman here. She's in the sky, which is the heavens, so she's heavenly. She's got a crown, so she's a queen, so she's a heavenly queen. And then she gives birth to a male child who's destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron, which is clearly Jesus, because that's an illusion of Psalm 2 about the Messianic son of David. And so you've got a heavenly queen who gives birth to Jesus. How can this not be talking in some sense at least about the Blessed Mother? And I was

like, you know, where did you come up with that passage? You know, are you sure that's in the book of Revelation? Let me check my Bible. Let me check my Bible. And that just floored me. A common response to that from Protestants though though, is it represents Israel or the church with the 12 apostles or the 12 disciples. Yeah, sure, but every other character there is an individual. Like Satan's there, he's the red dragon and he's an individual.

The male child is clearly Jesus and he's an individual, so if you're going to accept that the male child isn't just a corporate identity, but specifically Jesus and the dragon, isn't just a corporate identity, it's specifically Satan. Like how can you rule out that the woman can't be also be an individual, you know? Yeah, fair enough. Because there's also an eagle that takes her into the desert. The eagle doesn't represent anyone individually. Right. Yeah. And it doesn't work to take her just, you know, just corporately, you know. Um, no, my argument's against yours.

So you have the eagle that takes the woman. I'm saying to you that that wasn't an individual person. Revelation was pointing to. So why not, you know, so, so maybe your argument isn't as good as you think it is. If you say every individual in this mentioned in revelation is in reference to a specific individual since I don't think the eagle is right. Well, okay. Let me go back, you know, back to this though. The woman gives birth to the male child. Okay. Um, but it's not Mary. It's like, okay, but why do you have to say that? Like, why, why you so bent on this not being Mary when it couldn't seem clear? Right. I mean, that's my, but okay, my, my,

this is the thing. Like, the way that Michael put it to me is like, can you rule out? I like that. I like that low bar. Yeah. Can you rule out? I'm like, no, I can't rule that out. Yeah, can you rule out? And I'm like, no, I can't rule that out. And all through the scriptures, Mary is more than Mary. I mean, she's symbolic of the people of God, just like Jesus in many episodes is more than Jesus. He's kind of like, when Jesus goes into the desert, he's kind of the embodiment of Israel. you know? Forty days in the desert for Israel, forty years in the wilderness. And so, you know, John, when he leans his head on the chest of Jesus, that's kind of an archetypical act for every disciple, and yet John is also a historical individual, you know?

So the question of like, is Mary symbolic of the people of God or is she an individual it's like Not an either or kind of thing. Anyway, this is yeah, but where are we going with this? Canon you would you I asked you how long you became till you became a Catholic Yeah, yeah, and so so so Michael challenged me to read the Apostolic Fathers, and so I read Clement of Rome, who's clearly not a Calvinist, and that whole document's about apostolic succession, which is clearly a very Catholic thing. And so I was frustrated with Clement of Rome, I began reading Ignatius of Antioch, thinking that he would prove to be a Calvinist and make my point that the early church was Calvinist.

Well, that didn't work. And I start reading through Ignatius of Antioch his seven letters, and I really recommend that people do this. But when I got to his letter to the Smyrneans where he says, I'm going to paraphrase a little bit and then I'm going to quote, did I quote this before on the show? Yeah, sure. I can't remember. But anyway, St. Ignatius of Ant Annex says, stay away from anyone who refuses to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father raised for our salvation.

And that bullseye kind of hammer force testimony to the real presence, and that anybody who doesn't hold that it's the flesh that suffered and the flesh that was raised is the same as the Eucharist. Anybody who doesn't hold that isn't even an Orthodox Christian and don't even hang around with them. I was so convicted, and I realized that my belief was not the faith of the early church, and if I went back to the first century I wouldn't even be recognized as a real Christian. And that was so convicting, and I decided I needed to become Catholic, if only for the real presence. And then Augustine, speaking of Augustine, he's got these amazing testimonies to the

real presence. In his Psalms commentary he says that Jesus held his body in his own hands at the Last Supper. Deal with that, Calvinists. In another place he says, it's not a sin to worship the Eucharist, it's a sin not to worship the Eucharist. And that was particularly powerful for me as a Dutch Calvinist, because we had a doctoral statement that said that the Catholic Mass was a condemnable idolatry, because in it bread and wine were worshipped as if they were God. So we were outright dogmatically committed to denying the real presence and condemning the

Mass as an idolatry. And here's Augustine saying, no, it's a sin not to worship Jesus's Eucharistic body. Do you remember where he says that? Oh, we can find it. Sure, sure, yeah. I've quoted it and I've cited it. I should have it right to my... No, no, it's fair. It's in my book, Stunned by Scripture, How the Bible Made Me Catholic. Okay, that's good to know. I hadn't heard of that book, Stunned by Scripture.

Yeah, Stunned by Scripture, How the Bible Made Me Catholic, OSV. Oh yeah. So now one thing I've heard, um, James White bring up in debates against Catholics in regard to solar scriptura is, you know, Christ would often say to the Jews, have you not read, he seemed to be holding them, uh, to these books that were God breathed and there was no pope or church to infallibly declare which was infallible and which wasn't, and yet Christ still expected them to know. So what with that?

And here's the question that someone says, on what basis did the Jews before Christ trust in the Old Testament if the church's authority as as we know it, hadn't been established yet? What distinguished inspired from not inspired books? Well, they were in a state of confusion. I mean, certain books were held by all branches of Judaism, and those were the five books of Moses. So those were indisputed, and you'll see that Jesus will often have recourse to them. And specifically, like when Jesus is challenged by the Sadducees, who only accepted the five books of Moses on the question of resurrection

during Passion Week, you'll notice that Jesus doesn't attempt to persuade the Sadducees based on the testimony of the prophets. Like when you're talking about the resurrection, the easy place to go would be like Ezekiel 37 in the vision of the dry bones or something like that, or one of the chapters of Daniel that speaks about the resurrection of the dead. But he can't do that because they don't accept that as canonical. And so he goes to the passage of the bush and says, look, God is the God of the living, not of the dead. I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God wouldn't identify himself that way unless those figures were still living. Why would God identify himself

by dead people?" Powerful argument, actually. It really worked with the Sadducees, but it's quoting from the books of Moses. So the issue here, Matt, is that the different divisions of Jews had different views on canon. Sadducees and Samaritans said it was only the Pentateuch. The Pharisees said, well, there's 22 books, and it was roughly like the Jewish Bible is today. The Essenes were including the Book of Jubilees and the Books of Enoch as canonical in their Bible, so to speak. So there was a lot of religious confusion going on, and they were waiting the Messiah to come and solve this. And Jesus does this. Jesus

teaches the Apostles by word and example, which books to quote as authoritative, that was passed down by example until the late 300s, where it starts to get written down by the councils of bishops. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah, okay. That's really good. Kyle Whittington asks, does the Bible condone slavery? Actually not.

You know, I wrote my dissertation on the Jubilee laws, which are the laws of freedom. And so what you find out is that under Moses, true slavery is outlawed for Israelites. That's the point of Leviticus 25. You can indenture a fellow Israelite if he owes you money. That means you can you can make him work for you, okay, but you can't treat him like a slave. His civil rights are always intact, you know, what that would look like. I don't know exactly in the ancient world, but he has civil rights as a free man, but yes, he can work for you to pay off his debt to a point, only to the Jubilee year. And then every 50th year, all this is canceled and everybody's freed and goes home.

So the worst thing that can happen to an Israelite is that you have to work for somebody to pay off your debt to them. You know, it's kind of like indentured servitude. Now the other people surrounding the people of Israel could be enslaved, but only temporarily. And this is what you find, for example, in Deuteronomy 15, and there's a parallel passage earlier in Exodus 21. It talks about Hebrew slaves. Now the things that people mistake about that is they think that Hebrew is synonymous with Israelite.

It's not. Abraham was a Hebrew, so all of Abraham's descendants are Hebrews as well. That includes the Ishmaelites, the Edomites, and a whole bunch of nations that we would regard as Semitic peoples, including most of the Arabs. Peoples that later settled in a ring around the nation of Israel, which is the logical place where they might get, you know, might purchase slaves. So in Deuteronomy 15, it allows the Israelites to buy slaves from the Hebrews, which would

be the people surrounding them. But even there, it limits the term of slavery only for six years. And in the seventh year, you have to release even your foreigner has to be released, so it cannot be permanent unless they want it, unless they feel like their position in your household is better than what they're liable to get anywhere else. And then if they submit to it, then their earlobe can be pierced and then they could become a permanent member of the household.

And people say, like, why would you ever wanna be a slave for your whole life? Well, I'll tell you why. Employment security and benefits, like the ancient world was brutal. Working for yourself was no fun. It was a good way to die. It was, as Jordan P used to say, not good.

It's not good. It's not good. Day laboring was not a very fun thing in the ancient world. If a day laborer was sick, he didn't eat that day because he didn't earn any money that day. Oftentimes it was hand to mouth. But a slave, a slave was a member of the household. If he got sick, he was cared for. The master, if for no other reason than the fact that he had a huge investment in this worker, you know, would care for you and nurse you back to health and so on because, yeah, he had invested a lot of money

in you and needed your labor and so on. So slavery typically had benefits to it, and you frequently find in the ancient world that bonds of affection arose between masters that bonds of affection arose between masters and their servants in these situations. And people would sell themselves into slavery in order to gain the security that it offered over being a day laborer.

That's hard for us to get our minds around in the modern age. Was it chattel slavery? Like is practiced in the new world, but. No, I mean. I think people get that confused a lot. What's so perverse about slavery in the new world was it ended up as a race-based thing.

And people have a hard time wrapping their mind around the fact that in the ancient world it's like anybody could become a slave, you know, whether you're Caucasian or African or Semitic or whatever, that was like equal opportunity employer. Within Egypt, Egyptians themselves could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or something like that.

And so it was not racial at all in the ancient world. So that's one thing you have to wrap your mind in. And the other thing you gotta wrap your mind around is that typically, there were expectations, there were cultural expectations. And yeah, legally, an owner might be able to be a real jerk, but there were social norms that were typically upheld, and most people did not want to be perceived as an evil person in the eyes of the rest

of society. And so, usually there was this effort to be humanitarian towards the people that worked for you. Yeah. This Jubilee year. Yeah. So that, does that So yeah, I mean, to recap on the biblical thing, so Moses prohibits slavery for Israelites and even limits it for foreigners that the Israelites might buy. No more than seven years unless they really like being part of your household.

So that's the Old Testament, you know? And if that's the Old Testament, the freedom that we have in Christ, shouldn't that, you know, bestique more? So you have the passages in Ephesians, for example, where Paul says, �Masters, you know, do not be harsh with your slaves, and slaves obey your masters.� And that's a pragmatic thing, because there were huge numbers of folks that were dependent on their sustenance by their master. And Paul can't just make some kind of blanket fiat declaration that everybody free your slaves because that could actually be non-humanitarian for a large number of people, that would put a lot of people out onto the open marketplace where they may or may not have had skills to really make it as day laborers.

And the elderly, you know, elderly servants in the Greco-Worman world, it was regarded as a noble thing to keep the elderly on your roles as servants and allow them to do light labor into what we would regard their retirement years. And at that point, the household was not getting as much economic value out of these elderly servants as they were actually producing, if you know what I mean. There was like more care was involved in keeping them alive than they were doing by like, you know, snapping peas in the kitchen. But that was regarded as a noble thing because there are these bonds, like they were part

of the household and so on. So Paul doesn't do anything so rash as just say, well, everybody free your slaves, because that could lead to a lot of sick people, elderly people, weak people, etc., you know, out on the open marketplace and starving to death. But he does apply the law of love, you know, and the law of doing to others what you would have them do to you, the golden rule. That applies in all situations, and that can redeem even situations that are like legally or economically non-advantages. So if you're in a situation where this guy

owns a bunch of slaves and it's really awkward, if he tries to manumit them, and what are they all going to do if they're suddenly not part of his household, that's their source of sustenance. But he can treat them well, and they can treat him well, and we can work past this. And then when there's an opportunity to change the way that society works, we can take that opportunity to make institutions that are less susceptible to being abused. But in the meantime, we know, we gotta do something. And what is that?

Why that's to love each other and to treat each other well within imperfect, imperfect economic institutions. Excellent. Yeah, excellent, thanks. How historically reliable is Tobit, asks one local supporter. I've heard Protestants say it contains errors, legendary characters like Ahikar, mixing up kings, bad timeline, etc.

Right. So I would say the, you know, I think the core of the core of Tobit is a historical narrative. But we do have kind of a, you know, a bit of literary license going on to enhance the narrative a little bit and make it poignant and catchy and good for retelling. But I think that ultimately Tobit and Sarah and Tobias and these are real people. What about Job? Yeah, Job. Job, you know, these are real people. What about Job? Yeah, Job. Job, I believe, is a historical figure. He's treated as historical in the New Testament.

But the book of Job is written as a drama. So I like to compare it to, say, the dramas that Shakespeare did on historical figures. So there's, you know, there's, the structure of Job is very stylized. It's a set of dialogues with his three friends. You have three cycles where each of the three friends speak in order and Job responds in order. And that's very much like a kind of a, you know, a play.

And you can perform it, and it has been performed with actors, you know, and giving these been performed, with actors, giving these long soliloquies essentially back and forth between each other. But that doesn't mean that Job is not a historical figure. I mean, you can write a drama about a historical figure, and you can write a drama that is inspired by God theologically, and that leads us into a profound exploration of the human condition of sin and of evil. And that's what I think we have in Job. Having Christ or an Apostle reference an Old Testament figure isn't proof that they believed

him or her to be such. What do you mean by that? Well, you're saying that he's treated as a historical figure in the New Testament. Where are you getting that from in the New Testament? Right, well in the book of Hebrews he's one of the historical figure in the New Testament. Where are you getting that from in the New Testament? Right, well, in the book of Hebrews, he's one of the saints that's mentioned and held up as an example of his patience. I'm just thinking, if these are fictitious stories, it shouldn't be terribly surprising if people in the New Testament refer to them,

and them referring to them doesn't make them. Yeah, when you're dealing with our Lord though, you gotta exercise care, because if we just dismiss the knowledge of the God man as bounded by the culture as time, then there's no end of what you can do that. So why should we trust Jesus? He was just a Jew of his age.

So yeah, there's some wiggle room there with some of the authors of the New Testament perhaps, but especially when we're looking at the testimony of Jesus towards the Old Testament. I think this is particularly applicable with figures like Moses. Again and again, Jesus refers to Moses as a historical prophet who wrote and spoke and taught. And yeah, and that's, I think, ultimately that's not compatible with views of Moses that hold him to be merely a literary figure, later fiction of the time of Ezra or something. All right, couple of fun questions as we wrap up here. So you teach at Franciscan University,

student bill? Yes. Why is that a great school? Franciscan is a great school because we've been blessed with a beautiful fusion of charismatic spirituality with theological orthodoxy. And so the teaching is sound. It's in keeping with the teaching of the saints and the teaching of the magisterium. But there's also kind of a beautiful freedom about the way that the faith is expressed.

And there's a variety of, you know, kind of different devotional and worship. Sorry. There's a variety of different devotional and worship practices and styles as it were. I'm out of water. This has not been touched by my lips. I promise you. We just, it just fell up the, it filled up the Stein. All right. Good. Yeah, no, yeah. Divine liturgy is sometimes celebrated. Latin mass was sometimes celebrated.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's kind of a freedom and an openness with a unquestioned loyalty to the Church's teaching. So here's the question. If Franciscan gave you a one-year sabbatical, and you could study anything you wanted to, maybe write another dissertation,

what would it be on? anything you wanted to maybe write another dissertation what would it be on? I would finish my critique of modern Pentateuchal studies probably because I think there there really wasn't Moses and I think it's an important thing and I think that his books get treated as these late fictions and there's very strong reasons why that's not the case and Not a good interpretation said probably that'd be one thing. All right final question also catch up on my sleep. Yeah What is the least impressive thing you do for leisure? Watch Hallmark movies

Why I'm a married man Watch Hallmark movies. Do you really? Yeah. Why? I'm a married man. So your wife watches them and you're forced to or do you force her to watch them? No, I wouldn't say forced, but I mean, what's a married couple to do? You know, you want to watch something that's not morally offensive.

That doesn't leave you gagging, you know. That's a good point. And everything's so woke and so crude and, you know, but. Has Hallmark not ventured in that direction? They have some woke stuff, which we don't watch, but most of it isn't. It's just still traditional man meets girl. They don't show any bedroom scenes, you know, so it's kind of innocent, lighthearted. It's all terribly unrealistic

and it's all shot in British Columbia. But, and after a while you get to recognize that. Which kind of spoils the mood. But yeah, but you know, it's like, it's like innocent, lighthearted entertainment. And you know, our lives are pretty serious. I do kind of pretty serious thing for a living. And some of our kids have some pretty serious health issues.

And so we're looking for a little bit of escapism. I like that. Yeah. The kind of gagging that modern television has you do. You could just swap that, and the gagging can be over the acting, and that can at least be better. I just watched, unfortunately, and it won't interest you if you haven't heard of it.

It might interest you. The last of us. So much gay crap pushed, it was disgusting. Also, having women who are in charge of small armies, whiny, chubby women, you know, they would be slapped and they're taking orders from these beefy bearded men. Just a small tap to the head with a gun would have taken them out.

When you watch it and you know, they're very clearly pushing the fact that women can do what men can do, even though everybody knows that's obviously not the case. Bro, you triggered me. You don't have to be here for what we're about to say. Yeah. When Jeff Cavins was in your seat, he started reading his Bible. He was uncomfortable. I just, I've been noticing more and more that like women in leadership When Jeff Cavins was in your seat, he started reading his Bible whenever he was uncomfortable. I've been noticing more and more that like women in leadership positions, when they do

something that seems to be even like a small mistake, it results in like doubling down. Like I'm seeing it in like politics now, where like there are like female governors, like you remember the governor of North Dakota or South Dakota? And she like made a comment about how she's OK with transgenderism or something. And like the entire Republican Party exploded. And instead of just being like, yep, my bad, she like doubled down on it. And it got worse. And it's like. And everyone's like that today. That's not a woman thing.

I think it's worse with women. Yeah, just when you when you're getting sold a bill of goods, it's worse with women. Um, yeah, just when you, when you're just getting sold a bill of goods, it's, and the, and what was funny is, and I wouldn't recommend people watch the show. Don't watch it. It was not worth it, but my wife, when she starts something, she has to finish it. Go play the games. But on the second to last episode of the third to last episode, it opened up with this guy who was a white,osexual Christian male and I said

to my wife I promise you he's gonna be evil and immediately within minutes he's completely evil it was just because we're all evil we are yeah yeah no no no no let's go anyway that took a turn thank you for being here I always love talking to you you are a wealth of knowledge. You have such a great way of putting things and helping knuckleheads like me get a better understanding of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. Is it so we started this show talking about

Emmaus Academy, St. Paul Center, dot com slash Matt. Two week trial. Click it. Check it out. Is there one course on there that you've done that you're most proud of that you think, gosh, go check this out. Yeah, check out my I've there one course on there that you've done that you're most proud of that you think, gosh, go check this out. I'm proud of all of them. Yeah, check out my, I've got a course on the Gospels and then my Psalms course just got released. So if folks want to get into the Psalms, that's a beautiful thing. Maybe people pray in the office. If you don't pray in the office, maybe you'd just like to get the Psalms into your life. They are the heartbeat of the church's prayer. And so yeah, I did a little course in the Psalms. I helped people get acquainted with the book of Psalms,

and then gave some suggestions about how you can work it into your prayer life on a daily basis. So I hope that people check that out. Really, you know, that's really important. My mom started me on this practice of reading five Psalms a day. What a mom. Yeah, it's kind of like a, I realized in hindsight,

it was kind of like a poor man's divine office kind of thing. You know, so it's like every three hours, you read a Psalm and you go every 30th Psalm. So on the first day of the month, it's like Psalm one, Psalm 31, Psalm 61, et cetera. And that gives you five Psalms a day. And you do it every three hours.

And it's amazing how like, if you actually do that like your life Events at that moment in your day so often like tie in with the Word of God So it's a beautiful practice. I want to let people know how they can game the system here So I click the link st. Paul center comm slash Matt you'll get a two-week trial if you sign up there Take dr. Bergsman's course within two weeks and then quit if you want to and then you have to pay them anything She'll never want to quit No, but I like that in your ad

No, what's that? They might not like you telling people how to not give them money in the ad No, but I know and it's here's why I say it. I think there are so many things out there Clamoring for our attention. Oh, we just say'll just piss off. I'm sure it's good, whatever. But what I'm saying is what's great about a two week trial is you can actually decide for yourself if it's good. And I actually was really impressed. Like when y'all sent it over, I'm like, I'm sure it's fine. But I was like, holy mackerel, this is amazing. I don't think people want to quit, but yeah,

yes. Have Dr. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Dr. Hahn in your living room. Yeah. It's like taking a course on bed with you and having read to you on. Hello. I did this to your life can be horrified. Have I played you? Of your life.

Dr. Hahn reading to you. It might. We're going to do it right now before we wrap up. You read scripture. Yeah. So there's Bible stories. And I keep saying that it's always awkward listening to Dr. Hahn to get back to sleep.

And then I see him in the morning and I blush. I don't really. Let's see. Good evening and welcome to tonight's Bible story. Name is Dr. Scott Hahn. Come on, you can't last five minutes with that guy reading, do you? He'll put you right to bed. There you go. Well, thank you for coming on. God bless. Thanks, Thursday.