Bart Ehrman

And it'd be kind of like today if you go to some developing country and you have missionaries there who are trying to put parts of the New Testament into that language. So like you have these translators, these conservative missionaries who try – Wycliffe translators, they'll take the Bible and they'll put it into some language in Africa that hasn't ever been put into English before.

So you do that so that the people in that language can read it. In the ancient world, after – After Alexander the Great, so after the fourth century, Jews are spread throughout what was then – at one point it was kind of a Greek empire, but then became the empires around the Mediterranean. The educated people read Greek. They didn't read Hebrew.

They would read Hebrew in Israel, but not in other places. So in different places, the Bible is being translated into Greek. Mm-hmm. Eventually, there was one form of that Greek that came together, and that is what they're calling the Septuagint. But it's a mistake to think it was a one-time event. Oh, interesting.

And people say that because there's a letter called the Letter of Aristias, which is a Jewish writing that's trying to explain how it happened. And the way it explains it can't possibly be right. I mean, it describes it to this miracle. It says you had these 70 Jewish scholars who were brought together. They were all put in separate rooms. They were all given the assignment to translate it.

They all translated it literally word for word the same. Which is like, of course, that's crazy. But it does show that they were aware of the fact that it came out of the Hebrew into the Greek. And again, this is not... I know you don't like people saying there's not a disputed topic, but there's a reason this is not a disputed topic.

I mean, because for one thing, I'll give you one piece of evidence. I mean, a linguist would just tear that apart, that whole idea apart. One reason it would be torn apart – I mean, like a serious linguist who knows both the Semitic languages and the Indo-European languages would tear it apart. And one of the reasons is because there are many instances where the Greek –

That was the view taught at the Moody Bible Institute I went to and also at Wheaton College where I finished my undergraduate degree. That view started shifting when I went into graduate school. As I started, I learned Hebrew, and so I was reading the New Testament in Greek and the Old Testament in Hebrew.

embodies what are called Semiticisms. The Greek of the Septuagint. And the Greek of the New Testament. A Semiticism is when you're taking a grammatical construction that doesn't work in the language that you're translating it into.

or is not normally used in the language you're translating it into, but you keep the grammatical construction of the original language for the sake of authenticity or because you don't know quite how to. And so, just as an example, in Hebrew, if you want to say the Holy Spirit, there's no way to say Holy Spirit in Hebrew. The phrase in Hebrew is the Spirit of Holiness, right?

The way you make an adjectival attribution in Hebrew is not by using an adjective, but by putting together two nouns and saying of. So the spirit of holiness means the Holy Spirit, or the way of righteousness means the right way. Okay? So Greek speakers don't do that. They use adjectives. Okay. But when you get in biblical Greek, Septuagint and the New Testament, you have these Semiticisms.

My background? How long do you have? At least three hours. Yeah, okay. Well, right. So I'm a scholar of the New Testament, early Christianity. I have a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Testament studies. My background, I got into biblical studies because I was a Christian as a teenager, a born-again evangelical Christian.

That shows these are not original Greek compositions. Okay. They're being translated from Hebrew with using Semitic forms.

Well, I don't know what you mean by the original.

We have Hebrew manuscripts, yes.

I'm not sure what the them is that you're referring to. The manuscripts. We don't have the ancient – we don't have original manuscripts for any writing from the ancient world.

We don't have the original writings for Euripides or for Plato or for Cicero or for Seneca or for the Book of Isaiah or for the Gospel of Matthew. We don't have the originals for any of those. The original manuscript, if you mean by that, that the author sits down and he writes. So I'm Mark and I'm writing my thing and I write my thing. We don't have that thing he wrote.

Unless it's a personal letter, a correspondent. But in terms of literary texts...

um they're they're copies wow yeah oh wow it's a big problem yeah no i can imagine it's a huge problem yeah that was what my phd was because my the reason i was interested in analyzing greek manuscripts is because with the new testament we have thousands of greek manuscripts but they all disagree with each other because they're all copies and the scribes made mistakes right or they changed things on purpose so you got to figure out well what did the author say then

And I learned French and German, so I could read what modern scholars are saying in these countries and learned other ancient languages. And the more I studied, the more I realized, in fact, the Bible does have mistakes in it. There are contradictions, there are discrepancies, there are geographical errors, there are problems with the Bible.

you know if if you've got suppose you've got 10 copies of plato's republic or something okay and the 10 have like they word certain lines differently like they certain sentences are worded differently among these 10 manuscripts well okay so you got that but you want to figure out what to play to write you got to figure it out and there's a whole science to doing that oh wow that's so interesting um switching gears a little bit you do you think

Good question.

Well, if I were arguing that case, I would argue, I would say, I guess, I mean, you're saying it's a best argument. It's kind of like it's a very low bar. Right. Yeah, best. I understand. Yeah, okay, you know, like, you know, what's my best round of golf? I mean, it's like, well, okay, you know, it's like... So, I think what gives some people pause, not so much... Yeah, okay.

What would give people pause is that we don't have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus. We have records that are from probably 40 to 60 years later. Our first author who mentions Jesus is the Apostle Paul, and he's writing in the 50s. Jesus died around the year 30. So the first time we have Jesus mentioned in any source is about 20 years after his death. Okay.

Yeah, that's later. That's in the second or third season. Oh, it's later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a much debated thing. People say they know what it is, but in fact it's debated among experts what it actually represents. It's clearly Jesus on the cross with a donkey's head and a graffiti next to it. But no, it's much later.

For a number of years, I became more of a mainline Protestant type who had a fairly liberal view of the Bible, a pretty liberal view of social issues and politics and things, but I've still identified with the church. I ended up leaving Christianity maybe about 30 years ago or so, and it wasn't directly related to my scholarship.

So the first reference to Jesus at all would – our first Christian writing is the book of 1 Thessalonians. And it's usually dated to the year 49 or 50. Jesus died around the year 30. So it's about 20 years later. So the argument would be that we don't have any eyewitness reports or we don't have any, you know, things that are really close to the Gospels.

The first Gospel is written around the year 70. So that's 40 years later. So, you know, so why should we think he really lived? That's kind of the argument. Yeah. It's not a good argument, but it's an argument.

Yeah, well, 30 years is very different from a thousand years. Yes, very different. So, when Paul's writing, there are people alive who knew Jesus. Right. And Paul knows some of them. So, it's a much better case for Jesus than Moses. Right. I mean, Paul knows his brother. Paul personally knew Jesus' brother. So, I mean, you know, if Jesus didn't exist, you'd think his brother would know it.

That's a joke. So, yeah, Moses is a whole different thing. I mean, so if Moses lived, Moses would have probably lived in the 13th century BCE. And it's not clear if we have any sources that mention him for centuries.

So that's a different thing from somebody talking about him who knows his brother.

So, you know, someone like Thomas Paine is a very important figure for like the – history of biblical scholarship. He wasn't a biblical scholar himself. But these 18th century English deists mainly led to the development of biblical scholarship and the scholarship in early Christianity, especially in Germany, as it turns out, but then also in England and France and eventually in America.

If you want to know what was really going on in Christianity, you don't want to rely on what they have to say, because they're at the very beginning. It'd be like if you're going to be studying what evolutionary biologists think today, you definitely have to start with Darwin. But you can't base your views of evolutionary biology on Darwin.

You've got to see what we've found since then because even though Darwin was a genius, there are other geniuses who are standing on his shoulders. And so he opened the way for people to learn more and more and more. But it'd be silly to assume that like everybody now agrees with what he was saying then because they don't. And it's the same with any field.

If you look at the giants because they're just absolutely amazing and they make these breakthroughs. But if you want to see what we know now, both on the basis of new discoveries and new ways of analysis and deeper analysis by experts, then you have to go to the modern experts.

It was trying to wrestle with the problem of why there's suffering in the world, why there's so much pain and misery if there's a God who's in control. And so I'd spent, you know, I actually taught on it. I've written a book on it. I read a lot of philosophers and theologians and biblical scholars and what regular old people say about why they're suffering.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, it's much debated about why people believe in higher power, and there are a lot going on. But the whole project that the people of the Enlightenment were doing, that Paine and the other people of the Enlightenment were doing, whether historians or philosophers or theologians or biblical scholars, whatever –

What they were doing is they were trying to break with the tradition of the church that had been established for hundreds and hundreds of years, where your knowledge came from revelation from God. That's how you know things, because God reveals it to you. And the people in the Enlightenment realized, well, actually, you know, we can figure things out ourselves.

And that's when the sciences develop. And it's only when someone like Isaac Newton comes along and realizes – Even though he's a devout Christian, he says, you know, you can't trust Revelation for anything. You've got to do the experiment. And if the experiment comes out to be differently from what you expect it to be because of your beliefs, so much the worse for your beliefs.

Once you say that, you start science, and it changes everything. But Paine is all part of that, even though he's not a scientist.

I'm not sure how that affected their – yeah.

But the thing about all of these, pain or anyone else, whatever their other associations, whatever their other religious commitments or non-commitments, whatever their philosophical stance, when they say something, it needs to be evaluated. That's true of all, everything, you know, for me. I mean, I'm basically a historian.

And so when I want to know whether somebody said is true or not, I have to do the analysis. So if he's a Mason, you know, if he's a, I mean, you know, whatever. I mean, today, if somebody is whatever, I mean, is a, you know, a Satan worshiper, is a Mormon, is a Roman Catholic priest, whoever, whatever it is, If she or he says something, I look at it and evaluate it.

It's not based on what they happen to be.

And I just got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore, that there's actually some kind of divine being who's in charge of the world.

They're very closely related, and it depends which kind of biblical scholar you're talking to. Most biblical scholars work in a theological context, in divinity schools, in seminaries, and they would be more closely related to theologians than they'd be related to classicists.

Well, I'm sure he probably wanted to sell some books. No, he didn't.

Yeah, well, that's fine. He wants his views out there then. No, I'd say it's just categorically false, what he's saying. It's not true. And so, you know, to somebody, it's difficult to kind of explain to somebody who's not a scholar or an ancient linguist about how it works, but that isn't how it works. The term Christ is not always used as drugs. It's rarely used as drugs.

It comes from a word krio, which means to anoint. And so, of course, some medications in the ancient world were used for ointments. But it's not everywhere at all. The term Christ doesn't occur very much, actually. The Christos, the term Christos doesn't occur very much. In fact, it's kind of a weird word.

In Greek, it's just the translation of the Hebrew word mashiach, which means anointed one, isn't it? It's used in the Old Testament for when somebody becomes a king, they have a coronation ceremony. Like, you know, today when we have a president being sworn in, there's a ceremony he goes through. He puts his hand on the Bible and swears the oath of office.

And in ancient Israel, going back to the earliest kings, Saul and David and Solomon, they had— Did you hear that?

Well, Harry, you could do this. You don't need that. Look for interlinear, Revelation 318, interlinear online. There it is. And the second to last word is the one. To anoint.

My training was mainly in that kind of world, the theological world, because even my master's degree and my PhD were at Princeton Theological Seminary, which trains Presbyterian ministers. But they were also very interested in serious scholarship. And so it kind of was more kind of crossing the lines.

Well, it is. So the first two letters mean in, so it's to anoint on. So kriyo is the, if you move the cursor, you can see it better, yeah. So you see that thing? Oh, I see, kri-sai. Kri-sai. Kri-sai, okay. So it's just saying that you anoint the eye salve on your eyes. So an eye salve, it's like taking eye drops. So what are they talking about there? What's going on there?

He's saying you've got blurry eyes. He's saying you're naked and you've got blurry eyes. Go to the pit before it so we can talk about the whole thing. Oh, I see. You know what? It helps if I just actually look at the passage in my text because this is one of the – Revelation 3 is a passage where Christ is writing to one of the seven churches of Asia Minor.

And he's writing to the church in, let's see, this is 318. So he's writing to the church in Laodicea. And he's ticked off the Christians in Laodicea because they're not fervent enough in their faith. Christ is dictating a letter to the prophet John, who's writing the letter to this church in Laodicea, which is in what's modern Turkey. And he's ticked off because he says, you're not hot or cold.

I wish you were either hot or cold. Since you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth, he says. Yeah, yeah. It's Revelation 3.16. Yeah, so Christ is being portrayed as being ticked off because people aren't either for him or against him. They're kind of lukewarm Christians. Since you're lukewarm, I'll spit you out of my mouth. So he's threatening to take away their salvation.

And so then he says that he counsels you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich. In other words, trust in me instead of trust on your earthly riches. You should try and get white garments to clothe you with instead of those dirty rags of untruth that you're following.

And you should keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen because people realize that you're an emperor with no clothes. And you should get salve to avoid your eyes so you can see because you're blinded here. You've blinded yourselves. And so you need some eye drops. So they didn't have eye drops.

In the ancient world, if you wanted to heal an eye problem, if you had like an irritated eye, they would use salve, S-A-L-V-E. And you just spread it on the eye. And so it's like an eye drop.

It's anything. It's just any kind of oily substance that you put on a wound.

Well, no. It's just the word Christ comes from the word anointed. The word Christ is not a common word in Greek. It's rare. Yeah, probably if the Apostle Paul went into some city and said, I want to preach to you about Christ, they'd have no idea what he's talking about. It wasn't a name, and it wasn't where you would describe anybody. It just meant somebody who's been anointed, and they'd think –

It's kind of like, you know, somebody just had a workout in the gym and, you know, so they rub olive oil over them afterwards. It's like typical in the ancient world in gymnasiums. They would, you know, as part, you'd have a massage and they would rub oil on your skin. And that makes you the anointed one. That makes you the Christ. Really? Yeah. They rubbed olive oil on their skin? Oh, yeah.

My professor, my main professor, Bruce Metzger, was actually, his graduate degrees were in classics. And so I had a bit of that. But once I started teaching, I really shifted more kind of away from anything having to do theology and interpreting the Bible for the church kind of thing, and far more into kind of the classics.

Yeah, because they didn't use soap and things, and they'd work up a sweat, and then they had these instruments to kind of take the metal instruments to kind of take off the sweat, and then they'd have oil rubbed on them, and it could be anointed. It could be perfumed oil, and yeah. Wow. Yeah, so you get a workout.

So if somebody's a Christophs, they're anointed one, that just means they've had like oil spread on them. So it's got nothing to do with drugs. I mean, of course, drugs also could be, you could have some drugs that are anointed. But this is just a word. It just means being anointed. Nobody thinks drugs.

And so when this fellow says it's all over the place, well, the word actually is not that common. And the word Christos is definitely not common. And they call him Christos just because in the Hebrew Bible, The king is called the Mashiach. He's the anointed one. And so when you read that in the Greek Bible, he's the Christos. He's the anointed one.

It's got nothing to do with him taking drugs or something. Are you familiar with Euripides? Yes, I read Euripides this morning for an hour. Wow. Yeah, no, I loved Euripides.

I'm not sure which one you're talking about, actually.

I wouldn't be able to. I'd have to look at it.

My latest passion is more of the Medea and the Alcestis. Oh, really? Yeah.

Every morning I get up for a nap. The first thing I do in the morning is to read Greek. Really? And I've been reading Euripides lately. Yeah, fantastic.

Yeah. Oh, Phaedra. Okay. Well, that story. Yeah. So that's kind of an unusual story. Yeah. Try that one. Okay. Which one are we looking at? Is that the right one? Well, this is, this is one of the plays it's okay. Phaedra's in love with her.

Well, so it's this weird story where she's in love with her stepson and wants her stepson to sleep with her. And he refuses to do it. And it gets all messed up because his father finds out. And it's one of these things where people are killing themselves and getting killed over this love thing with – with Hippolytus and Phaedra.

Oh, well, there might be. I haven't read the story for a while, so I don't know that there's... Steve, what can you find?

He must mean Creo. He must mean anointing is.

No, just say anointing. Anointing. Yeah, anointing, something like that, or ointment maybe.

And so I have a secondary appointment at UNC Chapel Hill in the classics department. And those are the people I really resonate with are the classicists.

That's in the Gospel of Mark. Exactly. Yeah, but that's bogus.

It's the end that actually was not originally in Mark. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, so he's just making stuff up here. Who put that in there? Later scribes. You know, as I was telling you, we don't have the original of Mark. And one of the big things they did with Mark is they added 12 verses after Jesus' resurrection, the scribes did, in order to show that Jesus really appeared to his disciples.

Because in Mark's gospel in particular, Jesus is raised from the dead and his tomb is empty. The women are told to go tell the disciples that he's been raised, but they don't tell anybody. And it ends there. They don't tell anybody. So scribes thought that was a bit abrupt.

And so they added 12 verses where they do go tell the disciples and Jesus tells them this thing about handling snakes and drinking poison. I wonder why they added that. Well, they added it because it sounds pretty spectacular and because there are traditions in early Christianity already in the book of Acts of people being bitten by poisonous snakes and not hurting them. Paul is.

And people speaking in other languages. That happens in the book of Acts. And so these Christians were adding this on that Jesus would indicate that that would happen. And there are traditions in early Christianity of people being able to drink poison without it hurting them. What – so – Was it specifically snake venoms and snake poisons? No, not necessarily. It's two different things.

You can handle snakes and you can drink poison and it won't hurt you, says Jesus, in those additional verses. Oh, wow. That's interesting. Those are the verses that the Appalachian snake handlers used to justify their practices. I don't know if you know about the Appalachian snake handlers. No.

oh there's there are these groups of christians these christian denominations where during their worship services they pull out the rattlesnakes or whatever the deadly snakes and and handle them in the church service to show that they really can do this because that's what jesus said but they don't realize that jesus didn't really say that and it was added by scribes oh no and they often sometimes they do get bitten and they go to the hospital

That's crazy. So this guy shouldn't be using stuff like that.

The best? Yeah.

For anything. Brownie recipes?

Right.

I don't know of any, but maybe there was. I don't know. I mean I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, yeah. But it doesn't mean that that's what the name Christ means. Yeah. The fact that you've got a verb that means to anoint. Anytime you kind of spread some kind of liquid substance on your body, you're anointing it. Mm-hmm. But, you know, usually it's not to get a high.

So, well, they're very different from each other.

Well, it probably wouldn't be productive. I mean, it sounds like he likes ridiculing people. Yeah, well, it would be— I mean, I never debate people who want to ridicule, who think ridicule is a form of intellectual discourse. I mean, it's—but, you know, from that clip you showed, I mean, he's just kind of mocking this person who's just actually giving factual information.

And so I'm not interested in debating somebody who thinks mockery is a way to engage in intellectual discussion.

Any classicist would be able to do it. It's just whether they want to deal with somebody like that in a public context. So it's not that they're – I think it would be a mistake to think that he's come up with something that nobody can refute. Right. That is so far from the truth. So, I mean, at my university, we have a very strong classics department.

Well, they're unrelated. And so Greek is an Indo-European language like English. And so the grammar of Greek can be taught. If somebody knows English grammar, which nobody does anymore, but if they did know English grammar, the grammar of the Greek makes sense in many ways. It doesn't in many other ways because it's an ancient language.

These are people who have got international reputations in classics, and any one of them could take them apart.

What do you mean he confirms everything?

What do you mean he's confirmed everything this guy says?

This guy says that? Where does he say that?

He thinks that Jesus Christ, Harvard University, classical philology. Yeah, no, this is a serious guy. But I mean, he actually says that the name Jesus Christ means Jesus drugs.

Well, okay, I'll tell you what you do. There are a couple of comprehensive Greek lexicons in existence. The big one is called the Liddell and Scott. It is a massive volume that gives definitions for every Greek word and shows how the Greek word is used in every context.

What's it called again?

Liddell and Scott. So those are two 19th century British scholars. L-I-D-E-L-L, Liddell and Scott, S-C-O-T-T. Okay. Or you could get the Cambridge – there it is. You want the long one, the big one.

Okay. I've heard of this. There are three versions of it. You want the big one. But there's also a new Cambridge lexicon of Greek that is also comprehensive. And just look up the word Christos and see what it says. It's not hard. I mean, so anybody can do it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I wonder, it might be online. In fact, you can get this online. You can get their definition online. Let me see.

So if you will search for... I think it's like lsj.com or something simple like that.

There it is.

There.

Boom.

Search all the texts. Why not? See what you got.

Hebrew is a Semitic language, and so it's different in every way. It has a different alphabet. Instead of going from left to right, it goes from right to left. It doesn't have the same ways of doing grammar. And so – And there aren't as many texts in ancient Hebrew as there are in ancient Greek. For Greek, we have thousands and thousands of texts.

Keep going. I'm not sure why they're doing this.

Euripides.

So, click on Euripides.

Oh, there's Christos. Whether... Ah, no, that's a case. Phaedra. Yeah, there it is. Phaedra? Yeah, where it says whether it is the anointment or the drug drink.

Yeah, whether anointment or drug drink. In other words, the poisonous drink or the anointment.

No. Can we give it credit for being here? No, because it says... Or drug drink. I'd have to read the context, but it looks like it's contrasting the thing that it'd be anointed on or the thing being drunk. Oh, unless the pharmacist... I don't know. I'd have to look at the whole context. Oh, that's why it said 516. This is the one place.

It looks like it's saying this is the one place in the Phaedra that it's used and the one place in Euripides that it's used. Whoa, that would be interesting. I don't think that the word Christos actually probably – it'd be worth looking up. I mean, if I had my resources here, I could look it up. I'd be surprised if the word Christos, what became the name Christ, occurs before the Hebrew Bible.

The Septuagint, before it gets translated.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if anybody uses the actual word Christos before the Septuagint. So I don't think Euripides was long before the Septuagint.

Well, he was 5th century BCE, and so he's about 3... It depends when... If the Septuagint was done around the year 200 BCE, then it'd be about 300 years at least before.

No, it's using the word creo, the verb.

I think. At least the passage we saw in the Phaedra, that's the verb. It's not the noun. I'll just tell you the short of it is that I think if you get any dictionary, if you ask anybody who does classics for a living and you just ask them, does Creo, not does it sometimes refer to drugs, but does it necessarily refer to drugs or does it usually refer to drugs? Okay.

I mean, going back to Homer and Hesiod and on up, and it just goes forever. For the Bible, for the Hebrew, like biblical Hebrew, the Bible is the only Hebrew Bible, the only sources from its time period that we have. And so in some ways it's harder to analyze Hebrew texts when it comes to things like just words. Like if there's a word that occurs one time in the Hebrew Bible,

They will all tell you the same thing.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, he's been dead for a long time. Yes, I'd say he's been dead for a long time. He's been dead since the second century. A little while, huh? And we actually only have, we don't have much of his stuff. Yeah. I'd be suspicious. What did he say that Julius Africanus said?

How would Julius Africanus know that?

He was living 400 years later. He doesn't know. How would he know? Maybe he read Greek. I don't know. No, he did read Greek. Right. But so what? Look.

If somebody today, for the first time, says that the Declaration of Independence was written originally in French, and this is the first time anybody said it, living hundreds of years later, would then, like in 2,000 years, say, oh, yeah, but that person said it. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's hundreds of years later by somebody who had no idea.

I see what you're saying. Yeah. All right, I've already explained why the Septuagint is- No, we're already past that. We're already past that. I made a mistake by saying that. But it applies to the Creo thing. Right. It's the same thing. The word can be used, of course, for medical application.

So it's in the evening. He's arrested in the evening. He's had his last supper. He goes out and prays. The figure of the boy in the park is in Mark 14, and it's only in Mark, and it's a strange passage. Very strange. Yeah, so it'd be nighttime.

Well, it depends which gospel you read in Mark. He died at Mark. He gets crucified at nine in the morning in John. He doesn't get crucified until in the afternoon.

We're not told in the New Testament. There are later legends that deal with them. Okay. Where they're actually – yeah.

Well, there's not – so people were crucified for a variety of reasons. And I guess – I guess I haven't really looked around to see what the consensus would be, but my suspicion is that they also were accused of some kind of insurrection things. Because normally the people who would be crucified tended to be the very lowest level of the social scale, so slaves.

If slaves did something nasty, they'd get crucified. But the Romans are basically crucifying people that they see as a threat. And so probably—Jesus is crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews in all the Gospels. It's like the unanimous thing in the Gospels.

Well, that's the only time the word occurs anywhere, that time period. And so how do you know what it means? Right, exactly. And so there are places where you can't really even tell. You know it's some kind of probably a four-legged animal of some kind, but you don't know what.

And so the problem is that the Romans are ruling Israel, and so if he calls himself the king, he's saying that he's the ruler of Israel. And so they don't like that. They crucify people like that. Okay. So it may be that they were also—they're called—the problem is, in the Gospels, they're called a word that's often translated robbers. The Greek word is lestes. Lestes.

Lestes, though, in Josephus, the Jewish historian Josephus, uses the term lestes to refer to guerrilla warriors, people engaged in guerrilla warfare. Mm-hmm. And so if that's what it means – When was he? First century. First. Yeah. So he talks about people – yeah. He's our main source for information about first century Judaism. And by the way, he doesn't say much about drugs.

Those are different things. The virgin birth refers to Jesus' mother who conceived as a virgin. The immaculate conception has to do with how his mother was born. She was born, God did a miracle. Her mother was not a virgin, but the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that when Mary was conceived, unlike every other human being, she conceived with, was conceived without a sin nature. Oh, okay.

So her mother did not pass on the sin nature to Mary. That became a later doctrine to show why Jesus did not inherit a sin nature from his mother. Okay. So the Immaculate Conception isn't about the birth of Jesus.

And I went off to a fundamentalist Bible college after high school and then went off to an evangelical liberal arts college. And I got really interested in studying Greek. Greek is an ancient language and decided to do graduate work analyzing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

Well, yeah, well, you know, where does any theologian come up with their ideas? And so the...

the earliest accounts of jesus uh mother are in a book called the infancy it's i'm sorry it's called the proto-gospel of james and um it is a early second century book and it actually doesn't even match mention the immaculate conception yet in this account it is an account of mary's birth and it's a miracle because god gets her pregnant even though she she can't get pregnant from her husband

And so with Greek, it's not that way because, I mean, there are Greek words that we aren't really quite sure what they mean, even in the New Testament. Right. But most of the time, the words are used so many times in so many pieces of Greek literature that you can analyze how they're being used in the context.

But the strange thing about this story is that it's actually a virgin birth rather than a virginal conception. So a virginal conception is in the New Testament. That's when in Luke and Matthew she conceives without having sex. But that's different from a virgin birth. A virgin birth is if she gives birth and her hymen hasn't broken in the process of giving birth. Right.

The hymen breaks because the baby comes through the birth canal. And in the Protogospel of James, a midwife gives her an internal exam. Mary, this is a legend, gives her an internal exam to see whether her hymen is broken. And it has not. And so now it's not just a virginal conception, it's a virginal birth.

And as theologians started thinking more about it, they realized she must not have only conceived as a virgin and given birth as a virgin. She must have been a perpetual virgin. And so then you later get the idea of the perpetual virginity, where she never had sex. And then after that, you come up with the idea she never even had a sin nature.

And so the idea of the Immaculate Conception becomes, especially becomes a doctrine in the fourth and fifth centuries. That's so bizarre. I didn't know that.

How did he get born? How did he get born from a virgin?

Ah, well, they're called C-sections because, so they're Caesarian sections, they're Caesarians, named after Julius Caesar. Oh, because his mother was having trouble giving birth. And so they took him out of her womb. Does she survive? I don't think so. They usually didn't in the ancient world. They usually would take the baby instead of the mother.

Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. See, that's why I'm here. Yes. That is why you're here.

You know, I just did a class on this yesterday at Chapel Hill. I had my students read a bunch of Greek and Roman myths about people being miraculously born. Because there are a lot, we have them. We have accounts of a god getting a woman pregnant. throughout Greek and Roman mythology. In every case, though, the woman is not actually a virgin in the Greek and Roman versions.

And you can use the context in order to establish the basic meaning of the word and how it's used variously. And so that's a luxury that you get with Greek, and you also get that with Latin. But you don't get it so much with Hebrew or Coptic, which is another language that people might field study, or Syriac.

Most of the time, she's just a woman who's had sex a lot, never had kids, or God gets her pregnant, but God gets her pregnant. But the God always has sex with her. And so there are these fantastic stories. My students thought this was really bizarre because you have these stories about how Alexander the Great was born.

And it turns out that Alexander the Great was born, that he was the son of Zeus. And Zeus came down in the form of a snake and lay with his mother. And his father, Philip, Alexander's father, Philip, was watching through the door and seeing this snake cohabiting with his wife.

And then she got pregnant by the snake, who was Zeus, and Alexander the Great was the son of Zeus, because the snake got her pregnant. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's very... Incestual. And Freudian to boot. And so... Freudian, yeah. Yeah, so, but in any event... So you have these stories of gods getting women pregnant. Right. What doesn't happen is gods get... She remains a virgin.

So that's different in... They're all different. Like all the stories are different from each other, right? Getting pregnant from a snake is different than being pregnant by a swan, you know, or something. Right, right, right, right. But so there are accounts of divine men. There are almost always men with only one or two exceptions whose father is a god.

But the difference is in the New Testament, the father who's a god, the woman is still a virgin. Okay. Yeah.

In other words, there's been no penetration. Whereas in the Greek and Roman myths, there's penetration.

They're nowhere near as obsessed.

Depends where you lived. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, you know, today, you know, if you sleep with somebody else's spouse, you know, your spouse might leave you. In Israel, if the woman slept with her neighbor's husband, they'd kill her, which takes it more seriously.

But in those cultures, a lot of the time, the sanctions for inappropriate sex were connected with property rights. And so already in the Old Testament, the problem with a woman committing adultery is that – so a married woman has sex with another man. The problem is this other man has taken the husband's property rights.

But Greek and Latin, which is what the classicists do, we're really well set with those in comparison.

And so that's why in the Ten Commandments it says you should not covet your neighbor's house, his wife, his donkey, his ox. So the wife is right up there with the donkey as one of the guy's properties. And so it's a property issue, but it still takes it far more seriously than we do.

Do our listeners know what the greater questions of Mary is?

Oh, good. Yeah, well, people should know about my, you know, the kind of stuff we're talking about is stuff I talk about on my blog all the time. Yeah. Like I post five times a week on dealing with this kind of stuff. Big fan of your blog. We'll link that below. Okay. So, right. The greater questions of Mary.

Let me see if I remember this accurately because I haven't looked at this thing in many years. Jesus, does he pull a woman out of his own side and has sex with her? I think that's what it is. Something like that.

Eat my seed. Yeah, that's part of it. But she's up there. So Mary Magdalene is up there and he pulls a woman out of his side and he has sex with her. And then, yeah, I think they consume his semen. And he says something about do this and you will live.

Yeah. Yeah, pull it up so I can see what... There we go.

Okay. Keep going.

Yeah. Take care of Mary. Pray. Extracted a woman from her side. Had sexual intercourse with her. I got it right. He gathered a semen in his hand. Explained this was what we must do to live.

You know, well, because he could. Then she was disturbed, and yeah. So, look, okay, the reality is that this is quoted in a church father named Epiphanius, who wrote a multi-volume work called, the English word for it is The Medicine Chest. Oh, yeah, your guy might have liked this book, The Medicine Chest. So it's called – the Greek word is panarion.

And it's called The Medicine Chest because it provides the antidotes for the venom of snakes. And the venom of snakes are the heretics. who the heretics- Antichrists. Will poison you. No, they're not. Well, they might call them antichrists, but these are like Christian teachers who are teaching false doctrine. Okay. So they're teaching false doctrine, and it's like being stung by a snake.

It'll kill you. The heresy will kill you. And so he provides the antidotes for this by telling you the truth. The truth will save you from the poison bites of the heretics. That's the idea of this long work. And so one of the groups that he attacks-

is a group called the Phibianites that he accuses of engaging in wild nocturnal orgies as part of their Christian ritual, like literal orgies at night. Phibianites? Phibianites. P-H-I. Phibianites. I don't know why they're called that. But it's a group of Gnostic Christians. And he claims that this is one of their documents, The Greater Questions of Mary.

That they have a – this is a book that they use to justify their crazy ritual practices, which include having random sex. The man – this is during the worship service. They meet at night. They turn out all the lights. which are on lampstands, torches. They extinguish all the torches. They randomly mix men and women, have sex together. The man pulls out before he orgasms, orgasms in his hands.

They eat the semen together, and then they drink the woman's menstrual blood. And this is the body and blood of Christ. And so— Epiphanius claims this is happening. When was this guy writing this? So he's writing in the end of the fourth Christian century. Okay. And he's saying that these groups are doing this stuff. So basically what he's doing is he's trashing people by making stuff up.

No, no, he doesn't participate in anything. He's a strict moralist.

But he's saying that if you start hanging out with these Gnostic people, these Gnostic Christians, this is the kind of stuff you're going to get into, and it's going to send you straight to hell. And so it's like overly voyeuristic for somebody who's a Puritan. But he's one of these people who just enjoys telling these kinds of things.

He doesn't tell a lot of these kinds of things, but he tells some of these things to scare his audiences away from this form of Christianity. There are a lot of scholars, probably the majority of scholars, think that there's some kind of historical root to what he's claiming these people were doing. And I don't think so. I think he's just making this stuff up.

oh no, there's no way Jesus did this. I'm saying there's no way that these Gnostics actually thought he did it. There's no way that Gnostics actually thought he did it. Oh, okay. There's no way he did it. And I think there's no way they actually thought he did. Epiphanius is making up slanders against his enemies in order to show how horrible they are.

So he's making the, I think he's making the thing up.

Oh, absolutely. No, absolutely. And if in 2,000 years, they find... this, that, or the other conspiracy theory is the thing, they'll think, well, that's what everybody thought. Right, exactly.

But see, this is – again, it's why – expertise matters. Because experts read these documents in their original languages. They read them in the Greek and the Latin, the Coptic, the Syriac, the Hebrew, whatever. They know what these words mean. They understand how it works. They know the history of the period.

They know the political history of the period, the economic history of the period, the social history of the period, the cultural history of the period. And they study these things. So if somebody comes along and reads Epiphanius, like just a regular old person comes along and reads Epiphanius, they'll just think, well, that's what was happening. Right.

and experts will be able to explain it'll take a while to explain it'll take a while for an expert to explain but if you listen to them and hear the explanation you'll understand oh yeah that's right or and if you have different experts saying different things then you can kind of evaluate them but without the expertise You just say anything. And there's so much stuff on the internet.

It's just people just saying stuff and getting people to believe them because they said it. Yes. Okay, fine. But I mean, you know, there are ways to analyze ancients. So I know it sounds confusing, but if you study this stuff for 30 years, you know how to analyze this stuff.

There are inscriptions, for example, in Greek. So an inscription would be things written out on stone that are not religious. In Hebrew? Yes. Okay. And some of the – there have been other discoveries of texts that are in Hebrew from – there aren't very many of them, but like they'll find a cache of letters, for example, written in Hebrew.

No, I think Sumerian is a different language. Completely separated, right? Yeah, Ugaritic is a language that's comparable to Hebrew. So there were cognate Hebrew languages. So when I said earlier that the Hebrew Bible, you only have the Hebrew Bible, one thing that helps translators is, is to know the cognate languages from antiquity.

So a cognate language is, like, suppose you've got Spanish and Portuguese. So if you know Spanish, Portuguese is pretty close, pretty close. And, you know, if you've got a word in Portuguese, you don't know what this means, but you know the Spanish word that looks just like it, then you can probably guess, yeah, that's probably what it means. You can do that with the Hebrew Bible. Right.

And so Hebrew Bible translators, when they see this word, this word doesn't occur anywhere else in Hebrew, but you have a similar word that occurs in this language and that language and that language that are cognates, like Ugaritic, then that probably suggests what it is.

No, I think Sumerian is a different language. Right, right. Different language group. It's got to be a Semitic language. Right.

What's that got to do with Sumerian?

Okay. Okay, look, the roots of a word, the etymological roots of a word, are not indicative of what the word means. So we have lots of words in English that don't mean what the roots mean. You can see where they got it, but, I mean, for example, if you say lion's teeth... The teeth of lions.

You're not referring to the thing that you go out and dig in your garden, the weed that has a yellow thing coming up, the dandelion. Dandelion, Dr. Leon, the lion's teeth. And so the fact that it's called lion's teeth doesn't tell you what the, when your dad tells you go out and dig the dandelions. Right. You don't go around looking for lion's teeth.

And so there are some things, but not for the Hebrew Bible period itself. The Dead Sea Scrolls are much – Later than the – I mean the Hebrew Bible period dates basically from – it's debated when the first texts were written, 10th century maybe BCE up to maybe the 2nd century BCE. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are more around the time of Jesus. And so it's a different period. Right.

So the root of a word is not how you establish what the word means. Right. So it doesn't matter what the Sumerian root was for this, that, or the other thing. Right. It's irrelevant.

But it wouldn't matter. I mean, for one thing, what does a mushroom in Jesus have to do with either one?

Right, yeah, that's biology.

I know, I know. No, you know, the thing was, he started out as a fine scholar, and he was an expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But every now and then, you get somebody who's very erudite, who takes this weird turn, and wow, okay. So, yeah.

Well, the problem is that people who are experts in religion don't do a very good job of showing why it's interesting on its own without crazy ideas. Right. And so you don't need crazy ideas.

I mean, the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, got a lot of people interested in Mary Magdalene or in the Council of Nicaea or how we got the canon of the New Testament or how Jesus became the Son of God. And everything Dan Brown said in the Da Vinci Code about those things was wrong.

I mean, I wrote a book on it. I wrote a book on the da Vinci going through point by point. And so, yeah, I got people into it, but it got them thinking wrong things. So how good is that?

Like me.

Yeah, okay.

Okay, fair enough.

Maybe not. Yeah, maybe that isn't how it worked. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, well, sometimes truth is a lot more boring than... That's very true. But sometimes truth is really interesting. And I think scholars generally do not do a good job of showing what's interesting about what they do across the field. That...

People become scholars because they're really deeply interested in something, and they're interested in it because there's something that is interesting in it. But they have the hardest time to explain to somebody what's interesting about this.

And so I think what scholars need to do is figure out how to communicate better, because otherwise you just have these people who come up with these crazy ideas.

It's frowned upon if you don't have support for it. If you just spout off some crazy theory, then yeah, you get fired.

No, I never felt that way. I mean, I've been in academia since – I've been a professor since 1984, and I've never felt that I'm bound to say one thing or another except if I say something that doesn't have any support for it.

as a historian you know so like i just can't claim crazy things right and you know i i you know i just i can't claim that you know constantine uh the emperor constantine uh is uh you know is the one who uh formulated the hail marys and he's and that that he you know i don't know you just you you just say something and like it's just demonstrably wrong well you can't do that

If you're a historian or if you're a scientist or whatever you are, if you make a statement, you've got to be able to back it up with facts. Otherwise, yes, you should walk in eggshells. But I mean, you know, and probably, you know, if you say that every time the word Christ used, it's referring to a drug, that's like, you can't back it up.

And you can laugh at people who say you can't back it up, but you can't back it up. And it can be just shown by anybody who can read a dictionary that you can't back it up.

I don't think it's complicated. You look it up in a dictionary. And if you don't, and you don't trust the dictionary, you know, dictionaries can't be trusted either.

Yeah.

Well, it probably wasn't an exhaustive dictionary. That's why you get... It was a biblical dictionary. Of course it was. Oh, that's the problem. Right, right. Exactly. That's the main problem with it, right? Yeah, well, of course. I mean, because... Right. So that is a main problem because you can't trust like a biblical dictionary or a dictionary of biblical Greek.

You can't trust a dictionary of biblical Greek to understand Greek more broadly because a dictionary of biblical Greek is kind of like a dictionary of New York Times, today's edition English. So it tells you what it means in that dictionary. within that, but if you get within that corpus.

But if you move outside the corpus of the New Testament into broader Greek, then you want to know what Lestes means, because that might affect what it actually means in the New Testament, and it actually does. So it means all of those things.

But when I say it's not complicated, it's because what you do is you look it up in a comprehensive dictionary, and you can't trust that, but it gives you references. Euripides, Phaedra, you look that up, And you look up all the references and you say, yeah, that's right. It is what it means here. It's got to mean that here. It can't mean something else here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's not important as evidence. So that's the first thing to say. And no really good scholar ever uses it as evidence. In other words, the fact that everybody says so doesn't make it so. The reason people say that, and I say it as well, is because if you have a counter opinion, then it needs to be examined. And you need to look at it.

And so if you see a passage that says that the ship of the Lestai was sunk. Pirates. Yeah, it's pirates. If you say, the Lacedace was caught with a loaf of bread, you know, red-handed with a loaf of bread, robber.

So it's the context.

And so it isn't, so that's the problem with saying that the etymology is what tells you the meaning. Right. It doesn't.

pulling up on me like i'm some lace days like what is he what is he probably saying here yeah he doesn't but he doesn't say that in mark he says that in john and so uh so the kid is one one story the lace days is in a different story

Yeah, I think it's in two different versions. I don't think that's in Mark. Hold on. Let me check. Let's find it. Let's find it. I thought it was in Mark. Maybe it is. Maybe it is. Steve.

I've got John on my mind right now because the Lestes has a kind of double meaning in the Gospel of John. Okay. And so that's why. Let me see.

Yeah, it does use Lestes and Mark. Mark 15, 27? No, it's in 1448. I hate this freaking – Yeah, you're right. It does occur there. But what's it got to do with the kid? So what does it occur? What does the passage say? Mark 14, 48. Jesus answered and said to him – have you come upon me as a lace days with swords, uh, in order to arrest me. Right.

If when I am or a robber, it's, it's talking about being an insurrectionist, an insurrectionist. Yeah. Why else would soldiers come after him? You don't send a band of soldiers after somebody's stolen a loaf of bread. Exactly, right?

No, it's not stealing. It's here. It's not that he's stealing something. It's that they're arresting him for being an insurrectionist. Right. And the way you know that is because they arrest him, they put him on trial for being an insurrectionist. So that's why they're arresting him. Not for being a robber and not for being a pirate. So yeah, but I'm not sure what the kid has to do with that.

So the kid is only in Mark, but it's a strange story because they try and grab the guy. They pull his towel off. No, he's wearing like a robe or something, a linen robe. And they grab him, and it says he's wearing a linen robe over his nakedness. They grab for him.

Sindon. Yeah, okay, good enough. And so they grab it, and he runs away buck naked. And that's it. It's Mark 14, 62. And so the question is, what in the world is that all about?

And people have different theories.

So does Martin. So does Martin Smith. Do you know about Martin? No. Oh, my God. Well, you should be interested in Martin Smith. So Martin, have you ever heard of the secret gospel of Mark? No.

But you need to realize that there's a reason that everybody thinks the other. And these are, you know, when it comes to biblical scholarship, for example, you know, biblical scholarship's been around for 300 years. And lots and lots and lots of things get changed, have been changed, do get changed. But if somebody says that virtually all scholars agree that the gospel,

Oh my God, you need to do some episodes like this. Oh yeah, please. Yeah, Morton Smith, man, I'm telling you. Well, he's written a whole book. Oh God, no, it would take three hours to describe the secret gospel, Mark. But what he argues in the secret gospel, now this guy is a serious guy, Morton Smith. He was like, oh my God, he was so much smarter than anybody else. And he knew it.

And he, oh God, this guy was brilliant. But he had this kind of, He had this kind of ultra theory. He taught at Columbia University and wrote his first dissertation in Hebrew, modern Hebrew, and is a New Testament scholar and scholar of early Christianity, scholar of early Judaism, and he was absolutely flipping brilliant.

And so I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where the world's expert in the analysis of Greek manuscripts worked. And I spent years there working on that and did a master's degree and a PhD. Ended up teaching at Rutgers University for a few years, and I've been at North Carolina Chapel Hill now for, well, since 1988. Oh, wow.

But he claimed to discover a new gospel, a gospel that was a secret version of Mark that had been published by Mark earlier. later than the mark that we have that had additions to it. And he wrote two big books on this thing.

And the reason it caused a big uproar is because he argued that this passage in Mark 1462 about the young man running away with just a linen cloth over his nakedness is actually referred to in this secret gospel as

And that it suggests that this is a young man that Jesus had baptized in the nude, which is to baptize people in the nude, and then had spent the night with, spent the night with him, teaching him the mysteries of the kingdom of God.

come on jesus we can do better oh no he thought he was doing pretty well according to this version and so and so uh so but more he has these two books one is called the secret gospel of mark which is written for lay people but he wrote a scholarly edition of of this whole thing because he claimed to have discovered this this manuscript in a monastery in israel

And it's not clear whether it was a forgery or not. And it's not clear whether he may have forged it. Interesting. Is this it? Yeah, there it is, yeah.

Yeah, well, Morton Smith does. And some people agree with him. And some people think that he's just... Some people think that he's just actually doing this to make waves and to forge something that other scholars accept as authentic.

Yeah, most people didn't like that.

But the thing is, you could accept the secret gospel and not accept his interpretation of it. Because the gospel itself doesn't say that Jesus was engaged in homosexual activities. Right, exactly. And so it's the interpretation that people objected to. But now there's big questions about whether – whether it's an authentic writing or not, if it is, when it was written, and so forth.

Whoever wrote Matthew was using the Gospel of Mark. And you say, like, virtually everybody agrees with that. You say virtually because there will be some exceptions. But the reason that you say that is because these are— Most of these people are ones who have actually looked at it seriously and thought about it really hard and seen all of the evidence.

Well, yes, I suppose it is fun. So, yeah, well, you know, I think that, you know, every theory needs to be considered seriously. And one needs to evaluate probabilities. And just, I mean, for openers, in the text, it's clearly a Passover meal. in all of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it's the Passover meal. And it doesn't say anything about Jesus drinking venom, obviously.

What he does is he takes the, so at the Passover meal, we know what foods were eaten at the Passover meal, included unleavened bread and several cups of wine. And he takes the bread and breaks it and says, this is my body. And he takes the cup of wine and says, this is the new covenant in my blood. So... Normally at Passover they weren't drinking venom.

And on the basis of all this evidence, they say, you know, it's probably this. And so it's like, you know, it's like that in every field.

We have no record of anybody drinking venom at Passover. We have many, many, many references to people drinking wine. And it's portrayed as wine. It's likened to his blood. Normally it's thought that's because it's red wine that looks like his blood. I don't think venom normally looks like blood. So, right. As to the young boy, it doesn't say anything about that.

And so it's just, you know, you can make things up and it sounds interesting and people will say, oh, that sounds interesting. But what's the evidence of it? And what is, what's the evidence that he's drinking Venom?

And what is it?

To me, it just feels like a cop-out.

Well, they understand it well enough to refute that one. I mean, how hard is it? I mean, blood is hymen. Is that used for venom? So I think you don't need a, I mean, look, there are a lot of biblical scholars who are very fine linguists. I mean, superb.

Correct. But nobody uses it. People... People object when someone says that. They say, well, that's not an argument. But nobody's using it. They shouldn't be using it as an argument. If they are using it as an argument, that's stupid. I mean, you know, so the fact that everybody agrees the world is round doesn't mean it's round.

Yeah, but Christianity doesn't mean fundamentalist. When I went to Princeton Theological Seminary, I was very conservative at the time. But when I went there, I mean, all of my professors believed there are contradictions in the Bible, there are historical mistakes, there are discrepancies all over the map. There are things that Jesus said he didn't really say.

I mean, just like they all agreed to that. And so it isn't like they're a bunch of fundamentalists just going around pounding the Bible. These were very serious scholars who are, you know, and so I think it's unfair to say that they can't be trusted because they have some religious beliefs. You know, you have to look at the scholarship for the scholarship.

Plus, you know, there's plenty of us who aren't religious at all, who study this stuff, who think that that sort of thing, it's just like, sorry, but I mean, no. No.

I mean, you know, if I come up with some account of, you know, Joe Biden being taken out of this world by a Martian spaceship, and that's why we don't see him anymore, I can certainly say that, and there will be people who believe me. But, you know, there'd be ways to kind of check to see if it's right, right?

And the problem in the world right now is people don't check to see if anything's right. People won't even – if they hear something, they assume it's a fact. And, of course, politically that's a big problem because on both sides, people just assume things are facts without bothering to look into them.

But in my field, I mean, there are ways to check out facts. So people should do that.

Well, a lot of people do. And, you know, my view of it is that religion can be used for good or bad. And there are horrible things that get done in the name of religion, obviously. But there are also good things that get done in the name of religion. Sure. And so that's another complication.

So I don't think that you can, you know, I just don't think like the way people think today, it's so binary. It's like this or that, you know, and it just, it's few things really are just this or that. And just, you know, as a, you know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a New Testament scholar. And when I say something positive about Christianity, I have some atheists who just come down my throat.

How can you possibly say anything good about Christianity? Right. Well, why not? Right. It has done good. And, you know, and if I say anything negative, then the Christians, you know, the fundamentalists get down my throat.

But, you know, if you don't think it's round, you really have a burden of proof. So by saying it's a consensus, you just say, yeah, okay, well, if you think otherwise, let me see your stuff.

Not to come out of left field, but what's up with Job? Ha! Job is another book that people almost always misunderstand. So it depends what you mean by it.

Well, it depends what you mean. It's written in Hebrew, so it's connected with other things. Job, in Job, interesting, it's in the Hebrew Bible, but Job is not an Israelite. Yeah. So, I'll tell you the reason the book of Job is complicated, and it's for a reason that Thomas Paine would not have known. Isn't it the first book that mentions Satan? Kind of, but that's not the complication.

So there is a figure in there called Hasatan, which in Hebrew means the adversary. But he's not the devil. He's not like this evil force that we think of today, like the head of the demons. He's actually one of God's council members. God has a group of angelic beings around him that he asks advice for. Right. in a number of passages in the Old Testament.

So scholars just call it the divine council. And the Satan, the adversary, is one of those figures. And so later on, hundreds of years later, Jews started developing the idea that this adversary was actually an enemy of God, the devil. That starts up about 200 years before Jesus. But it's long after the book of Job was written. And Job, he's one of the – yeah, well, he plays devil's advocate.

He tries to – he brings up the opposite side of what God says, just as a kind of challenge him, and then God responds kind of thing. The problem with Job is that people have – the reason they don't understand it is because – And it begins two chapters that are kind of a short story about this guy, Job, who's very righteous.

And Satan convinces God to take everything away from him to see if he'll still be righteous. Because, like, the guy's filthy rich, richest guy on the planet, fantastic family, big family, you know, tons of cattle and sheep and camels and things. He's, like, filthy rich, but he's very pious. And the Satan figure says he's only pious because all the stuff you're giving him here.

Take away the stuff and then he'll curse you to your face. And so that's what happens. And so God says, no, he won't. Satan says, yes, he will. So God said, okay, do it. And so Satan does it. And then so it goes like that. But then so that's the first two chapters. But then the book is like 40 chapters long. And almost all of it is not about that.

Almost all of it is about Job having a conversation with his three so-called friends who say that the reason he's suffering so much is because God's punishing him. And Job keeps saying, I haven't done anything wrong. He says, no, God's punishing you. And it goes on like this for like 37 chapters. And then it gets back to the short story. So the back and forth of friends is all in poetry, right?

And the beginning and end is a pro-short story. And scholars, long after Paine, came to realize these are actually two different stories that have been put together. The beginning and the end is about the patient Job who suffers even though he's righteous and God rewards at the end. And in the middle, Job is not patient. God doesn't want anything to do with him.

The friends are not friends, they're enemies. And so they're two different things that have been spliced together. So the whole thing as a whole doesn't make sense because you've got these two accounts put together.

No, that's not true. At the end of the poetry, Job's saying he's completely innocent, and the friend's saying you're guilty. Job says, look, if God will just show up, I'll be able to make my case. And God shows up and just... Drives him into the ground, just squishes him under his thumb and just blasts away because basically God is the almighty and you're a peon.

What are you talking about me for? But in that, God says, where were you when I created the foundations of the earth? Where were you? And he starts talking about the stars and all the stuff that he's created. And even in the other things in the book, occasionally there'll be astronomical references, but there are things that were like unknown to ancient Israelites at all. Okay.

Ancient Israelites were just as interested in astronomy as anyone else.

Oh, yeah, but that's centuries later.

That's many, many centuries later. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. No, you do have zodiacs in some, not in temples, but in synagogues.

Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff that archaeology has told us that for centuries people didn't realize because it was always said that Jews could not have pictorial art, for example, that you couldn't have pictures of humans because that's like an idol or something and you can't have that. And that's just not true. Now they've dug up synagogues that have pictorial art in them. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.

They've dug up a synagogue that appears to have a picture, a mosaic of Alexander the Great.

There it is.

Psychotropic drugs. I'm telling you, man, it's everywhere. Look at this.

Oh, wow. Holy crap. Yeah. Well, okay. Vessels of this shape are from the 16th to the 5th century. This particular one dates to 3rd century. Interesting. Oh, somewhere between 3rd century BCE and 3rd century. Great. Yeah, interesting.

Oh, I see. They're saying generally. Generally, that's the case. Have you studied this one?

Stop it.

Okay, by analyzing... The authors found – and plant – they also found human blood. That's fantastic. Oh, my God.

That they mix with sesame seeds. You know, that's the best way to consume vaginal mucus is with sesame seeds. They probably have a recipe. Probably on the bottom of this cup you'll find a recipe for –

Yeah, no, that's amazing stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, cool.

Yeah, I tell you. And, you know, they still find stuff, and it's amazing. It's really quite amazing, yeah. Yeah, it's insane.

Interesting.

No, I know some of the technology, you know, they don't know a lot about how the technology worked. I mean, there are classicists, you know, who work on ancient technology. Like, this is what they do. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, how do you build a temple? Like, how do you put it? How do you have this, you know, this column that goes up, you know, 40 feet and each of the drums of the column weighs?

What kind of, you know, how do you do that? And so, yeah, there are people who do that kind of thing. But, you know, there's also a lot of prehistoric stuff, right? I mean, like the rock circles, like the Stonehenge things. Yeah, yeah. There's some amazing finds where you'll have two stone circles like that on different continents. that are exactly the same size to the millimeter. What? How?

Yeah, I mean, it's stuff. And it's like, you know, the ancient world is amazing. And it's like... Yeah.

In some ways they did. And the problem is that so much of it is lost. But they certainly did in some ways. But they didn't have electricity. And they didn't have ways of creating engines the way we do. And so they didn't have... So they didn't know anything about internal combustion or anything like that. So... But what they did was absolutely spectacular. But they also had a lot of people power.

Yes, right.

Don't know that I have.

Well, they are, but they're also always around places where there's major water supplies. Right. With that all flood. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, if I wanted to know about that, I'd probably talk to a high-level university geologist. I probably wouldn't go online to find out. You wouldn't go on TikTok? Well, not anymore, apparently. Oh, yeah.

As of yesterday, apparently, yeah.

Well, the Supreme Court, yeah, I forget. Anyway, who cares? Yeah.

My pleasure.

So there are a couple things. One is my blog. So my blog is this unusual thing because it's, I mean, you know, thousands of people have blogs. But my blog, it's on New Testament, early Christianity, everything cognate to it. The ancient Roman world, the ancient Judaism, early Christianity up through Constantine and beyond. I post five times a day. Five times a week. Five times a week.

You are human. 1,200 to 1,400 words. I've done it for almost 13 years now. And so it's like every day. And I answer questions. Every question I get, I answer. So the reason I do this is not for my jollies. It's both to spread knowledge about my field, but it's also to raise money for charity. So there's a small membership fee that people pay. It's not big.

It comes out to like the cheapest level is like a dime a week kind of thing. It's like $24.95 for a year. But there are higher levels where there are more perks. But I give all of the money to charity. And so I don't keep a dime myself, and I do separate fundraising to pay for our expenses so that every penny goes into the charities, which are all dealing with hunger and homelessness issues.

Last year, 2024, we raised $575,000. Wow.

Yeah, well, it's not a very good argument. I don't know who this is, but I mean, it's a very bad argument. You frequently have translations go both ways. Translated up, translated down. It's just an empirical fact. English is a much more complicated language than many works that are translated into English. And the Bible gets translated into many languages that are much more simple than Greek.

what yeah holy smokes so people just by joining and getting all these perks like like you know my posts and at higher levels uh uh there's audio versions of they they can get and i do live q and a's and i do at the higher levels i do uh webinars periodic webinars with people in the higher groups so people should just look up so it's urbanblog.org okay uh and they can look it up

The other thing, about three years ago, we started a company that produces online courses on all topics. We started out doing mainly biblical studies, which is what we still mainly do. And I started out doing the courses myself. I'll do something on the Gospel of Mark, like eight lectures on the Gospel of Mark on a weekend. Or we'll have short, like, one-off lectures.

Like, I did a thing on the dark side of Christmas where I did two lectures talking about, like, the really parts that don't look good about what's happening in the Christmas story. Like, why does Herod have to kill all the babies so that Jesus can be born? That kind of thing. And so we have these courses. They can find that on barterman.com. I've got a thing on courses.

But we've also started this thing connected with it where we do semester-long courses taught by high-level university professors.

We have one going on now on an introduction to the New Testament by a very fine New Testament scholar who's a terrific teacher. And it meets twice a week, like a university course, 50-minute lectures followed by Q&A each time with suggested readings people could do, quizzes if they want to take quizzes. And so it's like getting a— Our first course was by Duke University professor Mark Goodacre.

You get a Duke University course online for this thing. So this one is not for charity. It's a business we have going. But that's called the Biblical Studies Academy. So if people just look up Biblical Studies Academy, it's like a streaming service. They pay a monthly fee, and if they pay the monthly fee, they get all the courses that are already available.

They can go to these university-level courses. They have chat groups. They have discussion groups. They have book-reading groups, movie-watching groups. It's like it's this community. For people who are not—you know, a lot of people are interested in the Bible, but they don't have anybody to talk to about it, like academically interested, as opposed to being like in the church-interested sense.

And they just want to talk about stuff that they're interested in. They don't have anybody. This is a forum for them to do it. So we just started a Biblical Studies Academy, and they could look it up.

Serious scholarship made accessible and interesting to people who aren't scholars. That's amazing. Yeah.

Thanks.

Night, everybody.

So it goes both ways, and it always goes both ways. Moreover, how does he know there are 7,000 unique words in Hebrew? He's basing that on the fact that we've got these texts that have 7,000 unique words. Okay? These are the only texts we have. People spoke Hebrew.

Teaching both undergraduate students and PhD students in early Christianity, New Testament, those kinds of things. Wow.

have no idea what their vocabulary was for him to say that it had to be only these 7 000 words it's a little bit crazy that's like saying if you get a copy of time magazine or something or what may it's not imprinted anymore but you get time magazine and you say this is the extent of the english vocabulary like in 3 000 years somebody finds somebody finds a time magazine

And they categorize all the words and say, okay, those are the only words in English. And so it could not have been translated into a language that has more words because it doesn't work that way.

What's his evidence?

What's his evidence?

That's right.

No, no, they're not estimates. He's basing this on a count of what the Hebrew words we have. But when people translated the Hebrew into the Greek, they didn't have just those 7,000 words. This was 2,000 years ago.

It doesn't matter how similar it is because it's not always that you take something more complicated and make it more simple or that you take something more simple and make it more complicated. You can absolutely just show time after time after time where that is and how it happens. There are also very good reasons for thinking it did not go from Greek to Hebrew.

Um... that went from something less complicated to more complex. For example, Hebrew to Greek. Coptic is a very simple language in many ways. You have Coptic – we have ancient Coptic texts. The grammar isn't as difficult. It gets translated into English all the time. English is a far more complicated language. Okay.

We don't know. For one thing, it's not that early. But what...

Well, I was raised in the church. I was raised in the Episcopal Church. But then when I was a teenager, late teenager, mid-teenager, I had a born-again experience and became a very conservative evangelical. And a lot of my faith at that point was built on the idea that the Bible has no mistakes in it, completely inerrant.

There wasn't a Septuagint. So when people talk about the Septuagint, they're using, when scholars say the Septuagint, they're using a shorthand. There were numerous translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek that were floating around.