Bible Expert (likely Wesley Huff or a co-host closely involved with Biblical scholarship)

Well, I think at the end of the day, it's still like you're in Adam or you're in Christ. And so like, this is what I said when I was on Rogan and I was commenting on Jordan Peterson is like, we need to be careful that the law, the doing good things is the mirror. Don't try to clean yourself with the mirror. The mirror shows you how dirty you are, right?

What's the one?

I'm doing what all your homies did too, but why do you have a higher expectation for us when we never even met you? So the answer to that is that It's, it's not like faith isn't simply about believing the right things, right? Because even in Matthew's gospel at the end, Jesus has been with them, right? Luke tells us 40 days. And at the end, he commissions them, go make disciples of all nations.

And it says that they worshiped him, but some still doubted. So you've been with the resurrected Jesus. What are they doubting about? And that's where I think that ultimately, I think Christianity is true because I ultimately believe that the publicly available evidence communicates that it's true.

But salvation is not merely an intellectual endeavor in that I can't just think of all the right things and that gets me to where I need to be. There's something that's different. You're making my argument. Yeah. It's not about thinking it. It's about doing it. But it's not about doing it either. Okay.

It's about you being changed by the Spirit to not just feel, think, or do the right things, but to actually be. So when Jesus says to Nicodemus— So what defines changed by the Spirit? Yeah. So here's the thing. When Nicodemus, who's John 3, 16— We're about to get there. We're about to get there, bro. They gave his only son, right? John 3, 16, the most famous verse.

Then Jesus says that you need to be born again. There's a play on words there in the Greek, which means both born again and born from above. It's the same term in the Greek. And Nicodemus takes it as, I need to be born again. He's like, well, how can I do that? Shut me in the back of my mom. It doesn't work like that. But there's something that goes beyond the carnal in the life of the believer.

That's what being born again means. is that there's not an awakening in an Eastern way, but an understanding of the fact that Christ has reached into your life and he's revealed something that is beyond the simple facts.

Yeah, and there seems to be, in the New Testament, this buzz that it's going to happen soon. Because when Jesus talks with the woman at the well, he's... He's talking to her and she basically says like the Messiah is going to come and he's going to reveal all these things. There's this like cultural expectation. Yeah. This guy's going to come.

Is that what's going on? Yes.

Like every woman who makes herself men.

And I think that's where... God, like what I said before, is not going to judge us on what we don't know. He's going to judge us on what we do know. That doesn't mean that we're innocent. At the exact same time, I think the Spirit of God is constantly speaking to us and convicting us. We call it a conscience, right?

So there's an aspect of God's means of grace that is just general to everybody in that we understand that murder is wrong. And that arguably everybody throughout history, barring a few wackadoos, believes that. And that is the image of God that we are created in, screaming at. This is, yes, same page.

Yeah, so you're not saved by your works, but you're saved for your works. So that's the fruit in the cursing of the fig tree. It's like, if I see a friend and he's claimed to be a Christian, but his entire life is reflecting the complete opposite... I would say to him, listen, I don't know what's between you and God. That's not my place.

However, I have no evidence to see that the things that you actually confess have an actual outpouring in that. And I think that that should worry you. I want to grab you by your baptism, and I want to say, I'm going to hold you to the standard that you yourself are claiming. So what's the inverse of that? The fruit is that which—Jesus says, you will know my followers by their fruit.

Things are bad with the Romans and he's going to rescue us from the Romans. Got it. They kind of thought that that would be military leader. Right. Right. So the expectation was that the Messiah was going to, he was going to save us from the Romans. He wasn't going to get murdered by the Romans.

And that's why it's problematic when we see Christians doing things that are unchristian. Right. That's why people point out things like the Crusades or the Inquisitions. I think these are legitimate things that we can point to and say— You know, if you pour out the substance here, let me give you an illustration. So the methodology of form and substance, I said, it's slow. So you don't think.

Thank you very much. Methodology of form and substance has this idea that this is black rifle. Oh, sweet. We don't have this in Canada. You know, we don't have this. Of course not. Every time I come to America, it's freedom. We don't have that up north. Oh, we know. So black rifle.

energy yeah okay um i come in the room i say andrew can i drink this and you say yeah i say what is it you say black rifle energy i crack it open i take a sip it's gasoline yeah okay it is black rifle energy drink in form and that it claims to be but not in substance and that the actual contents are not what the can is describing so when we look at the contents of

when we look at what Christianity actually dictates, and we see things like Jesus saying, love those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you, turn the other cheek, and then you look at something like conversion by the sword, we can say, based on the actual contents of what Christianity and the Bible claims to be, that is it in form but not in substance, and that person either is in a lot of trouble in that they're claiming to be something they aren't, or they really need to figure out what's what.

and that they're going down a dangerous road. And so I forgot the original intention of this illustration. Faith and works.

I would say ultimately— The substance is Christian, but the form is not. Right. So I would say that— When Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. All the good works, if they're not done in the love of God, that is actually a commandment that someone who doesn't believe cannot fulfill.

Yeah.

Say it again? So I get asked sometimes, like, is there something that a Christian can do that an atheist can't morally? There's something a Christian can do that an atheist can't morally. No. And I would say yes, and it's love God. The atheist doesn't want to. He's not going to do it, and he can't do it. And that is when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment?

That's the thing he points to.

And it's adorable. Yeah.

There's layers to this. I think, you know, Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all things who can know it. And I think there's an aspect of, should I say it slower?

Who can know it? Who can know? So the idea is that even our good things are going to be done with a motivation apart from actually understanding who God is and what our relationship to him is properly. They're going to be... It's the people who are feeding homeless people and making YouTube videos about it. I think that's profound.

In the end, there's still a selfishness to a particular thing.

Yeah. And they could be consistent in that way. However... The survival of the fittest doesn't actually give you a grounding standard for being moral. Yeah, I agree. So my friend Glenn Scrivener, who wrote a great book called The Air We Breathe, he describes it in this way. I mean, he's British, so he talks about trousers.

But when we say the atheists, when we ask them, where do you get your morality from? Often the response I get is that people think I'm accusing them of not being moral. I'm not doing that. Yeah. Right. I think atheists can be moral because I think they're creating the image of God and that's like outpouring from them. But when I say, where do you get your morality from?

Glenn says, it's like asking Mark, where do you get your trousers from? And Mark going, I'm wearing trousers. You're like, no, no, where do you get it from? Like, how dare you tell me I'm not wearing trousers? It's like, no, that's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking the origin of the morality to actually ground doing something that is good. I fully believe that you can do good things.

I'm just asking, where is the objective idea that that actually stems from? Because evolution doesn't get you there. I would say that...

Okay, okay. Maybe you can clarify that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep the blasphemies to a minimum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have three more. I have three more.

How do you know he's not in there? It's written on your heart. Sure. But if he's confessing Sikhism, the tenets of Sikhism. Confessing.

God's going.

So here's the thing. All religions are saying.

So, I mean, yeah, there is an idea there. I think all the evidence we have of the historical John the Baptist kind of points otherwise. And there are actually followers of John the Baptist in the second century that kind of outlived Jesus. And so you have these different factions there. Some people are still following John the Baptist.

I'll pray for you. Now we're cooking, though. That belittling thing that Christians say, right? Yeah. Thoughts and prayers. Bless your heart. Bless your heart. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, all religions at their core are saying counter things, right? Like I said before, like they can't be all true. It's the equivalent of if we say like they're all true.

It's the equivalent of me saying I went to the library and I read all the books and I came to the conclusion that all the books, despite their differences, are really saying the same thing. They have words, grammar, syntax, letters, numbers, you know, everything from one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish to Mein Kampf. It's the same thing. Whoa. Right? You could conclude one of two things.

I didn't read all the books or I read the books so poorly that I'm not giving justice to what the content of the books is. I didn't read all the books or I read them so poorly that I'm like, yeah, yeah. And I would say the same goes for worldview perspectives.

If we say that all of them are saying the same thing or getting to the same result, we either are not studying the religions themselves and what they actually say, or we're not doing justice to the fact that they say mutually exclusive things.

Exactly.

yes you know what's funny I was just in Turkey and Billy's now in Turkey I missed him by a week we were in the exact same location wow we could have I had this thought yes when we went because I went to Derinkuyu which is the underground city yes yeah and I had the thought when we're like going in I was like what are the chances I run into Billy Carson down here because he'd said in an interview last year that he was going to go to Derinkuyu in a year and it was like almost the exact same time for him

But I do get what you're saying. I understand. Stop putting words in my mouth.

Are you saying people make response videos? Yeah.

No, no. I get what you're saying. And I think, once again, I'm not saying that people of all worldview perspectives cannot do good things, cannot be good people, cannot actually articulate good. What would be like even if it's superficial fruit?

I think that's good and I would implore everybody, right, of whatever, atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, even the Scientologists, even the Scientologists, to do good things, right? Like I want people to do that because I think it's just better for humanity. Yeah. Ultimately, though, I want everybody to confess Jesus Christ as Lord.

But on a superficial level, I think just for the sake of human flourishing, for what is good for society, I want to implore people to do good things. And I think that the foundation for that is actually a Judeo-Christian one that comes from the Scripture, because I believe that everybody's created in the image of God, and everybody is intrinsically worth something.

No. They stay true to John. Well, and even in the Gospels, there's this—so John the Baptist speaks out against, like, the local leader. The local leader— He has a party with his daughter, and he gets his daughter—well, she dances. It's kind of a weird scene. She dances in Herod's palace, and then he says, I'll give anything to you up to half of my, like, empire.

Summarize 2,000 years of Trinitarian theology before the Uber comes. Got it. Yes. Okay. No, it's a good question because I think what you see in the biblical New Testament and the early Christians are wrestling through this because we have the benefit of standing 2,000 years down the road and they've hammered out the language we use today. Got it. So they're wrestling through this.

The Father is called Yahweh God. The Spirit is called Yahweh God. And Jesus is called Yahweh God. There's only one Yahweh. How do we figure this out? So what they do is eventually they come up with this language of being and person. Being describes what you are. Person describes who you are. This chair has being, right? It's what philosophers called ontological status, right?

But it doesn't have personhood. I didn't ask its permission to sit on it. Right. But it does exist. And so being is what you are. So God is Yahweh. And we see this in the sense that Jesus tells his disciples to... go baptize in the name on among Greek. It's a singular. And then he says, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So he says the singular name, but then he describes three persons.

And so this is the question the early church is wrestling through when they say, okay, Jesus is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God. It's an acronym, hands. The Spirit is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God. And the Father is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God.

There's only one God. How do we understand this? Now, the ancient Jews actually already had a concept of this in that they weren't Unitarian fully. They understood that God is complex within His unity, and that God can rule and reign in heaven, and yet the Ark of the Covenant could still have God's presence.

And we even see examples when before Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham is met by three individuals, two that are identified as angels and one that is identified as Yahweh God. The angels go off to Sodom and Gomorrah to find Lot and his family. Abraham dialogues with Yahweh. Eventually, Abraham leaves.

And then in chapter 19, in Genesis 19, it has this really interesting passage where it says that Yahweh on earth rains fire and brimstone from Yahweh in heaven. Now, you only have one Yahweh. So what's going on there? Well, we would say within like a Christian framework, this is the pre-incarnate Christ. He is not, you know, enfleshed in who Jesus is, but this is the complex unity.

And the Jews understand this. And even early on in rabbinical Judaism, there's a concept of the Shekinah glory, which is the presence above the ark. That God is ruling and reigning in heaven. And yet, there's also this idea that kind of gets fleshed out in Kabbalism of the Shevrot, which are like the presence and spirit of God all throughout the earth.

So in that sense, ancient Judaism, sometimes it's called the two powers in heaven. I don't love that kind of articulation, but in academia, that's what it's called. That God is ruling and reigning in heaven and still has a presence on earth. That God is complex within his unity.

Only one God, but there's something else going on there that maybe we don't fully understand, but then is teased out in its fullness in the New Testament with the Son, which is a title of familiarity. It's not like a birth son. But the Father and the Son, those are kinship terms. But they have existed, like I said before, in a set of living, loving relationships. It has always been three.

And she says, I'm with the head of John the Baptist. So she kind of gets coerced to— have him bring in the head of John the Baptist. While John is in prison for speaking out against them, he has doubts and he sends some of his followers to Jesus to ask Jesus, are you the one we're waiting for? Should we wait for another?

And they've existed eternally as three. The Spirit is teased out a little bit in the Old Testament. You have these kind of like these Easter eggs of Jesus throughout the burning bush, right? It says that the messenger of God spoke from the bush. And so you have these sort of things.

The early Christians are wrestling through these things and coming up with some good ideas, some bad ideas in order to formulate the language of this. Eventually, they come up with this idea, one being in three persons.

You're awesome, man.

So even John the Baptist starts to struggle with his own faith when things aren't going his way. And then it's really interesting because Jesus' reply is, go tell John what you've seen. The dead are raised, the blind see, the lame walk. And there's this interesting connection with that's—those are statements in the Old Testament of what Yahweh is going to do when he, like—

when he reunites his kingdom in the restoration. And there's a Dead Sea Scroll fragment called 4Q521, which is part of these like Essene community. And it talks about the fact that everybody will see God's Messiah and the dead will be raised and the lame will walk. And so it has these connections. So those are verses from the Old Testament.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, every copy of, like, the Gospel of John with the story of Lazarus and Mark is Jairus' daughter.

The raising the dead one is. Yeah. What's funny about the raising the dead one is that then the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders are like trying to figure out how to kill Jesus after that. They're like, did you see what just happened? We got to get this guy. We got to kill this guy. And then how are they going to kill Lazarus again? It's like, well, that didn't work the first time. Yeah.

Okay, go on, go on. But yeah, so I mean, all the copies that we have of John and Mark would include those stories. But the ancient world was largely illiterate. So that's something else to keep in mind is that our world is hyper literate. So we're constantly writing things down. And most people know how to write and read. It's not true in the ancient world.

So at the height of the Roman Empire, probably was only 10% literate. And there would be like pockets of communities that would be able to read and write. Right. But usually like the first Bibles were audio Bibles in the sense that you would have someone within your community. That had memorized the entirety of the Bible. Or they would just read out loud. Right.

So Paul writes letters to these churches. There'd probably be a few people in the church who could read it, but they would just hear it. Yeah. Most of the time.

I had that thought. Didn't happen.

So the, the disciples run scared. They hide. Because they basically figure, okay, the movement's dead. So Jesus isn't the only messianic movement that happens within this time period. There are guys before him and after him who try to create like revolutions. So after just a short period after Jesus, there's a guy named Simon Bar-Jiora. And he's famous. And then there's Simon Bar-Kokva.

So the Bar-Kokva revolt is the one that kind of launches things that eventually gets Jerusalem destroyed under Titus. who then marches into Jerusalem. He sacked Jerusalem and they destroy the temple. That happens in 70 AD. Was Simon claiming to be the son of God also? No. So that's unusual. Most of these guys are just like military leaders.

So Jesus' messianic claims are kind of unique in that he's doing things that people didn't really expect the Messiah to do or be, in that they're still expecting a military leader. Because... Have you heard of Maccabees? Yeah. First, second, third Maccabees. The Maccabees is the story of Hanukkah. So the Greek... uh, emperor guy, he marches in and he takes over Israel.

Like, fill us in, dude. No, the lawsuit didn't amount to much because there was no credibility to the lawsuit. You can't sue for not liking what...

And then he does something real bad for the Jews in that he sacrifices a pig on the altar in the temple to Zeus. So all, all bunch of layers of not being kosher. Right. And then, uh, the Simon or not Simon Judas, uh, Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer, he goes in and he kicks them out and he rededicates the temple. That's the story of Hanukkah. Got it. So he's like a military leader in that sense.

So he's seen as not the messianic figure that they're waiting for, but a messianic figure in the sense that he's established, like he's kicked out the bad guys and he's established the kind of unification of the Jewish nation at that point. So they're kind of looking for that again. And Judas Maccabeus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is also what Jesus does.

So when Jesus does that, it's kind of a callback. Like, okay. And the people are like, I think we know what's going to happen.

you you yourself said yes right yeah yeah it's okay but yeah i mean i haven't heard anything from him nor do i necessarily need to i don't be the guy that took down billy carson i don't want that to be my legacy yeah i don't think that's my origin story yeah he's still doing he's still doing all right yeah people still want to believe in aliens they want to believe in all this stuff you believe in the tablets of toad you got a necklace about it

Yeah, when he rides in the Triumphal Entry, like when he goes into Jerusalem, yeah, they're waving palm branches. That's why, like, Palm Sunday, we wave palm branches, because they're waving palm branches. They're putting their coats down, and they're saying, Hosanna. Yeah, I listened to that song this morning. Yeah, yeah, nice. Shadow Hill song, yeah.

Yeah, but it's the same crowd that then, when he's on trial with Pilate, is then saying, crucify him. So they turned fast.

Somewhere small in that, like he's a heck. And who says it? I forget exactly who makes that comment. I think it's when Jesus is ministering in Galilee, and they're like, what good can come from Nazareth? It's just such an unusual place. Once again, subverting cultural expectations. He's born in Bethlehem, which is where he should be, which is from the house of David.

But then he lives and grows up in Nazareth, which is like nowhereville. And then even when he goes back...

they're like because he ministers in nazareth at one point and everybody he's doing like now i'm seeing the star wars parallels i never got it before but they just ripped off the jesus story completely everybody rips off the jesus story unbelievable they gotta pay their little 10 star wars wait how's the matrix the matrix yeah is the chosen one

No, no, no. So Mary Magdalene is not the prostitute. Ah, okay. That was the Pope's fault. He connected those dots and they were wrong and then the Roman Catholic Church had to backtrack on that.

Okay, good. I always thought she was a prostitute. No.

No, well, because there's a there's a differentiation between like Eastern mysticism has this idea of like that, that this world is an illusion, right? So you have things like samsara, the cycle, that's Buddhism, right? Not Hinduism, but the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. And you're trying to escape this. Yeah, that's Hinduism too.

And so that would be ancient Platonic philosophy that gets mixed in with like the Gnosticism that develops in the second century, where the physical is bad and the spiritual is good. And so when you have the early Christians arguing against the Gnostics, they're doubling down, not that Jesus is God. They don't have a problem with that. It's that Jesus is a human.

Because they believe if you're human, you can't be God. You can't mix it. You're in a meat prison, and your spirit's trying to get out of there. But Jews and Christians have the inherent belief of the resurrection. So we are embodied. You're not a spirit that has a body. You're a spirit embodied. Those two things are mixed. And heaven is a layover. It's not the final goal.

Heaven is the place you go to wait for the final resurrection, when we will all be given new resurrected bodies. And that's why Jesus is called the firstfruits, is because everybody believed in the resurrection. So when Jesus keeps saying, you know, I'm going to die and I'm going to rise again, they're like, yeah, all of us, Jesus.

They don't understand that he's talking about something that's unique and that he's going to do it now as like a preview of what everyone's going to get in the afterlife. Like you have heaven and then the resurrection where heaven and earth meet and all things are restored.

I didn't know that this current one is.

I don't want to be disrespectful. You got to the part with the sore, with the white hair.

What do you think about flat earth? I don't know. I mean, I've been in an airplane in the sky, and I think I've seen the curve, but I don't know. You don't know. It's the windows. I'm not a scientist. Exactly. Don't make me say science-y things.

It went up. It's 15 now. That's Old Testament. You don't got to give 10%. You can at least give as much as you want.

No, I don't think so. A lot of people think that. There was a guy named... I'm going to forget his name. He was a Russian... researcher in the 1800s, and he made this claim that he went out to Tibet and he found a document in a Tibetan monastery that talked about Jesus studying there in India. His name's eluding me. It'll pop in my brain. Yeah, Nicholas Notovitch.

The problem is that he basically, with all these things, right, Emerald Talbis of Thoth, all the evidence disappears, right? And then you have, like, trust me, bro. And actually, a statement came out from the monks at this particular monastery, and they're like, we have no idea what this guy's talking about. No Russian has ever showed up here.

But he made this claim that Jesus went to India when he was in his childhood missing years. Got it. So you have his birth story, right? And then you have a story in the Gospel of Luke where he's 12 years old. And Mary, Joseph, and Jesus go to Jerusalem. And then Mary and Joseph conveniently lose the Son of God. And they get out of there and realize he's not with them.

They go back to the temple and he's teaching. Home Alone is a fucking Jesus story, too. I know. It's all a Jesus story.

That's my point.

Good question. So... The Gospels are a form of ancient biography, and when you read, there are stipulations for ancient biography. So there are guys like Lucian, who writes a document called How to Write Good History in the Ancient World, right? So he's a little bit before Jesus, and he actually talks about—and some other ancient biographies.

biographers, historians, talk about how do you write good history. And the editing process, they say, is just as important as what you include. So in the 18th, 19th century, a lot of these German scholars looked at the Gospels and they said, these can't be biographies because we know that biographies include stories of your childhood and particularly psychologize. So

We have to remove these as thinking about them as biographies. What they failed to understand is that there was already a category in the ancient world for what biographies looked like.

And whether the gospel authors were reading like Lucian and Celsus and Aristophanes or not, which I don't think they necessarily were, it was in the zeitgeist that you include what's important and you make sure that you don't add fluff. Particularly because these are... very arduous and expensive to write.

Uh, and so you include what's, if there's something noteworthy about, so the birth is noteworthy. The story where Jesus goes to the temple and all of these teachers in the temple are amazed by this 12 year old boy who's teaching them stuff that's in there. And then you like fast forward to when he's 30, because so from 12 to 30 is just fluff is, well, he's just kind of living. Yeah.

So Luke says he's... That's what I'm thinking.

Okay.

So I study ancient scribes and how they produce and copy and disseminate manuscripts. So you're testing for efficacy of these ancient scribes. Yeah, different things. So, like, there's a field called textual criticism, which looks at the text of particular documents. Yeah. Because in the ancient world, we don't have any originals. Everything is a copy, no matter what it is.

with all due respect with all due respect so i don't you get a pass um so it's a good question yeah so well i mentioned before when jesus goes get a pass oh because he gets hell anyway i didn't say that no no no you can say a lot without trying to eliminate his existence anyways right yeah he'll be back he'll be coming back in the next life as a christian no

So there's this story where Jesus goes back to Nazareth. Yes. And they're like, who is this guy? Isn't he, don't we know his mom? Don't we know his dad? Isn't he the carpenter's son? Yeah. So there is the equivalent of saying like, we went to prom with this guy. What's he doing? Like how, how'd he end up like this? Like they're surprised.

But don't they also know that he was immaculately conceived?

There must have been a little bit of conversation. Maybe some people knew, but they're surprised. And so there's an indication from the historical records of the Gospels that people like Jesus during his childhood couldn't have been all that crazy because they're surprised when he's showing up and he's doing miracles. But there is a category of literature in like 100 years plus after Jesus. Yeah.

It's called infancy narratives, where people are coming up with stories where what would, you know, magical Messiah Jesus have done. And so there's stories that he's like playing on the playground. He knocks it. But these aren't first-hand accounts. Oh, no, no, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. At minimum, there are only source material from the time frame that Jesus lived.

I went to the church that they were hiding out in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the claim that they make. That's fake? Well, I'm not saying it's fake. These fucking Egyptians. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying it's fake.

Yes, I got a good deal.

That was Aliens. I watched that documentary. Yes, it was a great documentary. So it's not that that church is fake. It's just that the stories that come up around these particular things are much later and their reliability is iffy. Okay, I went to the anointing stone when I was in Jerusalem. Is that real? That has a lot more early provenance.

The stuff in Jerusalem has a lot more credibility because we have records going back to the second century of people going there in pilgrimages. So a lot of the locations for the Holy Sepulchre or that kind of stuff, they go back to Constantine's mom. who went to Jerusalem and established some of these things. Got it.

And even if we found, quote-unquote, an original, I don't know how we'd verify it. Yeah, what makes something an original? The author writes it.

But she did so based on, like, a world chain of custody where she went to the places where the locals were saying, we've been going here for hundreds of years, and these are the connection points. Got it. So that's some word of mouth right there. It is, but it's like the chain of custody going back, arguably, to, like, there's a reliable sense. So are there questions about all these things? Sure.

Okay.

Well, so there are differentiations in detail because we have four Gospels. Yeah, explain what the Gospels are to people out there like me. Yeah. Good Catholics like you. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are these biographies of Jesus' life. So two of them claim to be written by eyewitnesses. Matthew is Levi, the tax collector, and John is the disciple, John. Luke and Mark are not.

So Luke is a traveling companion of Paul who writes this twofold document, Luke and Acts. And then Mark is, in the earliest church tradition, he's a traveling companion of Peter. So he gets his source information from Peter, which is really interesting in the fact that Peter does not look good in Mark. Like, that's where, you know, get behind me, Satan. He's the disciple.

Well, like whatever, like say we find Plato's Republic and it was one that was written by him. Or like how would we verify that it was actually his? But everything we have are copies and most of them are like hundreds of years after because old things wear out. Yeah. And so textual criticism looks at the text and the copies and looks at internal and external factors and traces the original back.

Like, he's continually not getting what Jesus is saying. And he, like, runs away, denies Jesus. So if... If the earliest source material is true, which I think we have no reason not to think it is, especially because they don't then call it the Gospel of Peter. which they could if they're like, well, this is Peter's source information.

They call it the Gospel of Mark, who Mark's generally a nobody. That only gives credibility to the fact that Mark probably wrote it. And then it has this connection directly with Peter himself. So four Gospels, two are claimed to be eyewitnesses who wrote them, and then two claim to be like associates of— Secondhand, yeah. Yeah.

So when the church is looking at all this literature and they're saying, okay, we have an Old Testament, like testamentum just means covenant. Deotheikin in the Greek, you just translate it into Latin and it's testament. The Old Testament, God's covenants are always followed up by written texts. So that's why they collected. You have guys like Philo and Josephus, they talk about this stuff.

What are the books? And then the Christians see Jesus. He establishes a new covenant. He's fulfilling what the prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 31, 31, where he says, I'm going to make a new covenant with my people. I'm going to write my law in their hearts. Jesus claims to fulfill those things.

And then the early Christians who are Jews who believe in Jesus as the Messiah are saying, okay, here's the covenant. Here's the promise. Where are the written texts? And so they have these conversations of canonicity, which just means like canonicity.

canon in greek means a rule so it's the standard you know you have like a harry potter canon and stuff that's not a star wars canon or lord of the rings canon whatever so the canon of scripture and they're saying okay what's in what's out what's in what's out and these are all the stories about jesus and his teachings at the time first-hand account second-hand account third-hand account some are some rumors and they have to go through parcel through to find what has the most uh

efficacy? Yeah. So what the conversations are having is what are the documents that are either from someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus? That's the standard.

And for the gospels in particular, like these four biographies of Jesus's life, they're the ones that the early Jesus community agrees upon the most because the disciples of Jesus had disciples. They're called the apostolic fathers. Right. Right. So there were people who like Peter and John and Paul discipled themselves. And then those people talk about, okay, I heard John say this.

I heard, you know, so, so they give credibility. So there's this like direct chain of succession in line of custody to the apostolic community.

So yes and no. So this goes to your question in terms of the differentiation in detail. So the fact is we have four biographies, and sometimes they tell the same stories, but they give different angles on the stories. So we have a similar thing with the emperor at the time, Tiberius. So the only other person who's sort of comparative to Jesus in terms of source information is the emperor.

So you have Jesus, and then you have the most powerful, the most well-known, the richest person at the time. And he also has four biographies of himself, or at least four. Don't kick that, please. Thank you. Sorry. Not while I'm talking. Andrew. So, Tiberius has Vilius, Proterculus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, and Tacitus, who are all writing source information for him.

So, if we can do like a comparative analysis for someone with Jesus, the emperor is a good guy to do it because he likewise has four individuals who are writing about his life. You're saying as an example of their importance and impact? Or like, how can we look at source information? Now, the Gospels are a little bit different because they're pretty comprehensive and they're only about Jesus.

Okay. Question. That's not what I do, but it's related.

Whereas these other guys are writing, say, about emperors more broadly. And so it's like snippets here and there. But what I was getting at is we have differences in those stories too. Or like Socrates... I get what you're saying. Socrates has three biographers.

Yeah. So I would say a differentiation in detail doesn't necessarily amount to a contradiction. So I haven't found something that I think is an outright contradiction. That's not to say there aren't hard ones. So the death of Judas is a hard one. Because one gospel says that he went and hung himself in the potter's field. The other says that he falls headlong and his entrails fall out.

He falls headlong and his insides fall out. What does that mean, falls headlong? Like it falls on his head. And his insides fall out. Yeah. What? So that's what it says happens. So there are a few things going on here.

I think it's entirely possible to harmonize that and say he hung himself and, you know, the rope snapped and it fell and he, like, it's not, you can see how you could get these kind of things, even if some people think you're playing use and fast with that kind of thing. Okay. You also have the fact that in Hebraic, Semitic,

idea your entrails like your your intestines are where your credibility comes from ah i got it so there's there could be a play on words in that he could have physically like his cut open and his his intestines fell out but there also could have been this idea for the jewish mindset of like this is the guy that betrayed jesus

Of course, it's an entrails fallout because that's where your credibility is.

Well, if they all said the same thing, you could accuse them of collaborating and collusion. That,

That's why you brought me on.

He's a flip-flopper, dude. He's a flip-flopper. No, no, no. So the Gospels are writing to the different authors with different intentions writing to different audiences. So some of them are clearly writing to Jewish audiences, so they're capitalizing on certain things. For example? So Matthew is making this connection between Jesus being the new David and the new Moses.

And so how would you identify that? Because there are so many copies. The thing with the Bible is that you have so many copies, far more copies than you have of any other ancient document. Okay. Why is that? The Christians really wanted to copy it.

So he's doing certain things in his gospel where he's capitalizing on aspects of Jesus' life. So he gives a different genealogy than Luke does for Jesus' ancestry. So some people look at that and they're like, well, this is a problem. You've got two genealogies of Jesus. Yeah.

But what we know about genealogies, particularly Jewish genealogies, is that sometimes they're not meant to be either exhaustive or gapless. What does that mean? So we today, if I'm doing a family tree, I'm going to make sure that everybody's listed, right? Grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather.

The ancient Hebrews are more concerned with the right people being named for the right reasons. And they also have this idea that's called gematria, where every letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a number associated with it, and your name ends up having a number. So David ends with the number 14, if you count up the things. Matthew's gospel starts with a genealogy that has three lists of 14.

Ending with Jesus. And the point of that, and we know that it's not like he leaves people out, because we can go back to like 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, where we have longer lists of these people. And Matthew is leaving people out, or he's like squishing whole generations into just one person.

So you could look at that and say in our modern mindset, well, that's playing loose and fast with the data. But an ancient Jew would say, okay, well, why is this happening? Ah, you have lists of 14. That's David. And so he's, to his audience, he's communicating, this is the new David, okay? And he's doing things that are fulfilling the expectation of who David is.

should be like as the king, as the anointed one. And you have things like Moses goes up on a mountain and receives the law. Jesus goes up on a mountain and gives the law, a new law, right? And so throughout the gospel of Matthew, you have these constant insertions that are capitalizing on details for his audience to make sure that they know that

This guy, Jesus, is this person who is the person you're waiting for. He's fulfilling the Davidic reign. He's the prophet like Moses that's predicted back in the Torah. And he's accomplishing these things.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because it has a different audience. Right. And so understanding the context helps you. That's why the like German rationalists in the 18th and 19th centuries didn't like they did the wrong thing. They said, this is how we would write, therefore. And they didn't look back because. There's like linguistic and cultural levels to it. Yeah. Right?

So you could just translate the text directly, but it's context that's going to tell you the difference between a butt dial and a booty call. even though they might be the same words in Greek or Hebrew, right? Yes. But you could read that and you could be completely misled.

It's like, Oprah, you get a copy, you get a copy. Well, part of it was like the Christians were the, I mean, Muslims call us the people of the book, right? Christians and Jews, because we have a scripture and that's like central to what we believe. The belief system. Whereas that's not necessarily true for like other ancient religious practices. In fact, that's the argument.

Oh, yeah, totally. And this is with everything.

Interpretation. Yeah. Well, you study the ancient culture. So fortunately we have like the ability to look at things and understand idioms. Yeah. And people talk about stuff. And that gives you a frame of reference. Like I'm sure they're using slang. Oh, yeah. Yeah, all the time.

So this is the difference between what's called a formal equivalence translation and a dynamic equivalent translation. Yeah, this is a dynamic equivalent translation. Yeah, so dynamic is like the thought for thought idea, right? So in the Gospel of Luke, in the Greek, there's this line where Jesus says, let these words sink into your ears. That's exactly what Jesus says.

Let these words sink into your ears. So if you have a dynamic equivalence like the New International Version of the Bible in English, they're going to say, listen carefully to what I'm about to say. Because that's what that means. But that's not what Jesus said. Whereas the New American Standard Bible, the NASB, is more of a formal equivalent.

They're literally going to say, let these words sink into your ears. Because that's the words that Jesus spoke. So it's the question of, because people always ask me, what's the best translation? Yeah. And I don't know the answer to that. Like the best Bible is the one you're going to read. So just figure out the one that you're going to read and then read it. New international version, baby.

There you go. So like, let these words sink into your ears or, and this gets tricky because you have turns of phrase. So one of the most quoted verses in the Bible of the Bible is a version of Exodus 34, six, where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai and God says that he is a gracious God, compassionate, steadfast and abounding love. And, and the Hebrew says long of nose. And you're like, what?

Long of no's. Well, it's a Hebrew idiom meaning slow to anger.

That's what that means. How do we know that that's what it is? What else does it mean? Hebrew is a Semitic language. We have other Semitic languages. Get out of here. This guy. This guy. Okay.

There's a end of first century, beginning of second century Jewish guy named Josephus. And so he writes a document called the Antiquities of the Jews.

Well. How do you know it wasn't just a descriptor? A descriptor? Yeah. Because why would you describe God as long of nose? So we have other examples within other Semitic languages and portrayals.

But this is why.

Well, this is just God. Oh, you mean Jesus is God. In my religion, Jesus is God. I don't know about you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're on the same page. Oh, we are? Okay, yeah, yeah. But I use that example to say, like, even the most formal equivalent isn't going to translate like that because it doesn't make any sense.

But your Hebrew is a semantic line.

And in it, he talks about the differentiation between, like, the Greek religious practices, the Greco-Roman religious practices, and the Jewish religious practices by saying, we don't have just an unlimited amount of religious texts like you guys have. We only have this.

Who are you saying has a big nose?

Yes. So wouldn't the Jewish God also have that? This is an idiom that we find in other Semitic languages. So like Akkadian and Aramaic. So this is a language found. Languages that are in the region. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, maybe. Contextually, no. Listen, leave it up to the historians. Comedically, yes. Comedically, yes. Just because Ari Shaffir looks like that today...

We're getting on the line right now. Yeah, yeah, we're getting close. Okay, all right. So you were saying. Dynamic formal equivalence translation stuff. That's, that's, how do we start this? You brought it up. You were talking about... You just said there are a bunch of long noses running out.

Yes, exactly.

Huh? What was, did you speak, what language was that? Abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness. Bro, I had no clue. You said it quickly and we were very like, what? Was that another window moment?

Okay, okay, okay.

So he was talking about like translation issues and that happens all the time. Yeah. And like you're translating the Bible into Peruvian in a culture that like doesn't know what a donkey is. Do you then say it's a llama? Or is that like taking too much liberty with the text? But this is stuff we run into all the time.

And part of the reason we know what the books of the Old Testament were in Jesus' day, part of the conversation is that Josephus outlines them. He gives a number and an argument for the list of books and what the books are. Yeah.

So this is why the best commentary on the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament is going to be the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament. And the Greek New Testament. Yeah. But there are things that we learn about these languages. Like the King James Bible is translated between 1603 and 1611. There were terms that they just didn't know what they meant and they transliterated them.

We now know what they are because we've like through... And then have they adjusted the King James Bible since? Well, no, you don't. Well, new translations do. There's a new King James and KJV. Yeah. And they would. So first Chronicles 26, 18. Yeah. In the King James Bible says at par, at par bar westward for the causeway into it. Par bar. You're like, what does that mean? Right?

But if you read the NIV, this guy's favorite translation. That shit is lit. The new Indian version.

That's right. Yeah, yeah. It says, as for the court to the west, there were two at the court and four at the road itself. I didn't even know what that meant. So parbar is not an Elizabethan English term. It's just a transliteration of a Hebrew word that they were like, we don't know what this is, so we're just going to call it a parbar. Like croissant.

Okay, we'll go with it.

You're low-balling.

What did you put up there? 285 for five, easy.

315? I've done 404 for one. What? What? Yeah. Body of Christ. Jesus. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, he has no reason to, like, make it up one way or the other. And then you have—so the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament. Yeah. Like, a lot. Yeah. And so we have— evidence from, okay, well, Jesus, Paul, Peter, they're quoting this stuff and they're saying like, this is scripture. They're advocating for it and arguing like theological stuff on the basis of these texts.

Yeah, so the accusation is usually that the word homosexuality gets incorporated into the Bible in the modern era. So the words in Hebrew in the Old Testament Leviticus, Paul, particularly in 1 Corinthians 7, plays off of what the Greek translation of the Old Testament has and uses this word arsenikoites, which literally means... to like to lie down a man with a man.

And so I think it's not a mistranslation because the concept is there. Like what it's talking about is not obscure. It might be controversial, but it's not obscure in the Hebrew and Greek. The accusation is usually that it's not talking about like same-sex sex. It's talking about something like men sleeping with boys or temple prostitution. I don't think you can really rationalize that.

There's a guy named Robert Gagnon. That's your last name. Yeah. Robert Gagnon. Do you say Gagnon? Yeah, these people don't understand. Wait, hold on.

No, no, no. So Robert Gagnon is a scholar. He did his dissertation. He taught at Princeton for a while on this, like the linguistic and cultural context of homosexuality in the Bible. So his is kind of like the volume. So he goes through all this stuff.

mark comes from a long line of people long line of croissants we just call them croissants yeah exactly okay so he's a croissant historian and then and then what did he find out well these concepts are like like if you went back to moses and you had two dudes and said we want to get married moses is like for what what he would say for what Yeah.

Well, that wouldn't be, he wouldn't, he'd be like, that's not what marriage is. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's not like, it's just because the word homosexuality exists now in English doesn't mean that the concept isn't there within the Bible. Yeah.

Well, they hide because they think their movement's done. They think their leader's dead. That's kaputs. But then he comes back. Yeah. So that's what changes their mind. So that's when they go from 11 scared disciples because Judas killed himself in the upper room to then going out and being willing to actually lose their life for this proclamation.

So we can also look at how they're treating scripture. Yeah. And then there are other stuff, Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that.

It's because Jesus shows up and then teaches them for 40 days, right? Oh, so they do another 40 days. They do another 40 days with Jesus. Right. That's, yeah. So that's the, that's what Luke talks about. This is 40 day period. And then you have the mountain of Ascension. He goes back and then they spread out.

Well, first they go back to Jerusalem and start preaching that at ground zero where it happened, which if you were trying to make it up, you wouldn't go back to the place where everybody saw the guy killed and say like, he's resurrected. The tomb's empty. Like that's, you go somewhere else. And people check the tomb and it's empty. Yeah.

Yeah. And then they start getting killed. It's good. It's good. I've just heard it before, so it's all good.

He's still dead in the tomb. Yeah, yeah. Jesus ain't there.

Yeah. And then Stephen is the first martyr and he gets killed. And so the disciples know that this is risky. But they're still willing to go do it. Yeah. So like when I was, last week I was in Turkey. Yeah. And I went to Ephesus, which is where the body of St. John is. And I went to Heropolis, which is where the body of Philip the disciple is.

This question sounds familiar.

So like they went out and they started preaching these things. And there's various stories of like some were martyred. Those reports are sketchier than others. But we know at minimum that Peter and Paul were martyred. martyred in Rome in and around the time between 64 and 68. So every single one of them gets killed? Not that we can reliably. At minimum, they are persecuted.

Some were probably killed for their faith. A lot of them suffered physical harm because of it.

What is the true one? Well, I mean, so I'm biased because I'm a Protestant, right? So nobody wakes up one day and is like, purgatory. We all believe that now, right? Like there's a slow fade for these traditions that develop over time. And so it's not like it... So if you talk to Roman Catholics, it's the 2,000-year-old church. Pope Leo XIV is the successor of Peter, and that goes right back.

i like the italian guy named pizza bola that was the just because his name is pizza bola that was that was a front runner pizza bola is the funniest most italian it's like a made-up italian yeah yeah if you were to like invent an italian virus nice um Don't you want Trump saying pizza bola, though? Yes, I do. Pizza bola. Okay, so tell me.

So all of these books are like independent scrolls. So there's no such thing. We think of a Bible and we think of like the single volume. When do we get that? Fourth century. So we don't get that until the year 300. Yeah, anywhere between. So Constantine decriminalizes Christianity in 313. Got it. The Edict of Milan, the Peace of the Church.

So the East and the West split over, I mean, there's language divisions, Latin and Greek, and all sorts of things. And then they ultimately disagree on the formulation of There's a bunch of things that happen, but on the formulation of the Nicene Creed, where does the spirit proceed from the father? So there's a bunch of things that go on, but they eventually excommunicate each other.

Interestingly enough, under a Pope Leo.

So by the Great Schism, by the time you get to 1517 and Martin Luther... Posts his 95 theses on the castle door in Wittenberg, Germany, and launches the Protestant Reformation. And he didn't want to start a different denomination. That wasn't his purpose. He wanted to reform the church, but the church wasn't willing to get along with that. And so then that created the division.

You got to talk to the cops. I'm just saying. They got Jesus's house in Cairo. So yeah, I was there. Yeah. So that's the Coptic. So they're, they're another group.

Yeah. Yeah. So you got, you got a bunch of different factions, right? But yeah, but I think you have a central core, which we would all adhere to approximately, but then you have differentiations in like theological disagreements. The Protestant reformation was to reform all of that and go back to the primitive church and, The print of church is? Well, like what scripture teaches.

Which would be closest to? I don't think it's necessarily closest to any of them. Like, I don't claim that. It feels kind of orthodox to me. It feels like you don't want to admit it. No, no, I'm not orthodox.

Yeah, Hagia Sophia. Yeah, Hagia Sophia. Yeah. Have you visited? Yeah, I was just there. And thoughts? I mean, it's a beautiful church. It's a mosque now, so.

Muslims.

So he makes it so that it's no longer illegal to be a Christian. Yeah. Because before him... there was a guy named Diocletian, who was the emperor. And Diocletian in 308 says, you know, I'm going to wipe these people out. So he makes it illegal for Christians to gather. And he beheads all the church leaders. And he like, it's this systematized persecution. So there's persecution before that.

They got a lot. Yeah. They got a lot. All those regions were Christian. Yeah. Christian and Jewish.

Seventh century.

Yeah, Charles the Hammer. That's why we get croissants from. You know that? Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. They ate the Turks for breakfast. That was the line.

That's largely why we have coffee, is because the Muslims were taking over Spain, and they went up and they grabbed all these beans from Kenya, because they weren't making coffee for a long time. And then when they retreated, the stories that they left these beans in Spain and Portugal. And then when Charles the Hammer of France, he pushes them back.

They leave all these beans and they get some of the Muslim captives. And they're like, what is this stuff? And they're like, oh, this is this drink we make. And there was a lot of pressure on the Pope to ban coffee as the drink of the devil. And so the story is that the Pope at the time drank it. And he said, this is the drink of the devil. We need to baptize it for Jesus. But that was just like...

This feud because it was, it was pitted as the anti-wine. So wine was like the drink of the Eucharist and coffee is the drink of the infidels. And so, but that's largely, and then the Capuchin monks in Italy, they took it and they didn't like the taste. So they mix it with honey and they mix it with milk and cappuccinos. Yeah.

Well, it would be—well, so— The Eucharist is— The Catholic Church has a papal primacy.

Why do they decide that there is a pope and why does the Orthodox Church decide that there isn't one? I mean, this is one of the disagreements between the East and the West because the seat of Peter becomes very important in the West. And the East Church says, well, we have all basically every other apostle. So we're not too concerned with the bishop in Rome.

But there is a point in time where like papal infallibility starts to develop. And then when the Pope chooses the emperor, so Charlemagne is crowned the Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope. I think it's the year 800. Give it a goog. And that's when I would argue. I love you, dude. That's when it starts. I love you.

Yeah. that's canadian was it 800 you got it um so yeah pope leo another pope leo yes the third he crowns charlemagne the emperor before that the emperor kind of had influence who the pope was and this is where you get this like subversion and that's where i personally would say the roman catholic big r big c church starts that's controversial roman catholics don't like that i say that

But that's when you start to get this idea of a papal primacy and the magisterium as this concrete body. The East is not on board with that. At all? No. Well, they just don't care. They don't think that the Bishop of Rome has any more or less authority than any of the other bishops. So they have the patriarchs, and they have that kind of setup.

The emperors were kind of loopy. So like Nero is famous for burning Christians in his garden as like the lights. He's nuts. Yeah. He got the lead poisoning, right? Probably. Yeah. I think he was the one who made his horse his general and like made a marble. Not like a few screws loose. So there was persecution, but it wasn't like empire wide until Diocletian. Diocletian comes in.

So Paul outlines this like hierarchy of— He won't give it to us. He won't give it to us. He doesn't get it yet. Of course not.

No, because you know what the truth is. I crossed the Tiber and I took apart my boat and I made a pulpit and I started preaching to the other side. That's what I'm talking about. Well, so at the Council of Nicaea, 325 AD.

Save humanity? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I would look at the Bible. It's a sola scriptura. Ooh. Ooh. Oh. Scripture is the sole infallible rule and faith of practice for the church. That was English. That was English. Did you catch that one? I got that one. Barely, but I got it. Barely. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's the biggest differentiation when the Protestants come around, is they say, Martin Luther's reading the Bible. He's reading the New Testament in Greek, and he's saying, I'm reading this stuff, and I'm looking at the church. I'm seeing a big difference. Yeah. So the church isn't acting in the way that the book is written.

There have been a lot of traditions that have developed that are at minimum non-biblical and at most anti-biblical. Like what's an example of that? Well, Pope Leo, another Pope Leo, starts this process of indulgences. So there's this theological idea called the treasury of merit that you can draw from that's like the holiness of the saints and Mary.

and the copious outgiving of the blood of Christ that you can draw on. And so the Pope Leo in the 16th century says, hey, we need to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica. And so he commissions guys to go out and collect money by selling indulgences.

So you either can get out of purgatory faster, or if you have family members who are stuck in purgatory, you give the church money, they'll get so many years off purgatory. Yeah. This is still a thing, by the way.

They never did anything like that. Wow, it's fascinating.

Yeah. Orthodox friends. So...

Yes. And even some of the people that like fought Luther on it, um, were sympathetic to some, to what the first debate of the reformation was between a guy named Desiderius Erasmus. He was Dutch. And the first debate was a written debate between him and Luther on the freedom of the will versus the bondage of the will. And, um, Erasmus could have been like a closet reformer in some things.

But there were lots of people. I mean, there was a whole period of time with popes and anti-popes.

He's like, yo, we're getting rid of this shit. Yeah. So easy. And he's going to destroy the Christians. That's his kind of motivation. Constantine eventually takes control of the empire and

Yeah. Well, so you have another Reformer guy a little bit later on after Luther named John Calvin. He's in France or he's in, well, he's French, but he's in Switzerland. And so he's in Geneva and the bishop of Geneva at the time actually writes to Salido, Cardinal Salido, writes to Salido. the people in Switzerland and Geneva and says, like, you got to come back to the true church.

Like, you're in danger of damnation. Come back. And the elderly Calvin comes out of retirement. He actually writes this letter to Cardinal Salido and he says, you got it wrong. We are. the original church. We don't need to go home.

You need to come home because you have, we've scraped all the moss off of the facade of Christianity and all that tradition that's dividing you from what scripture actually is telling you, what the core of the faith adheres to. And so you've lost the script. Yeah.

Yeah, great question. So he didn't. What does that mean, the Apocrypha? So Roman Catholics and Protestants have different number of books in their Bibles. So this is part of why I was in Italy, because we went to Trento in Italy, where the Council of Trent happened, where the Council of Trent was the Counter-Reformation. So 1546 to 1563, I think it was.

They respond to the Reformation because they're like, okay, Protestantism has become this big thing. We need to deal with this. So let's try to bring the Protestants and the Catholics together and figure this out. So that we can reunite the believers? Sort of, although they invite the Protestants and they say, you can show up, but you can't vote. So they don't really.

So the Protestants hear this and they're like, well, we're not showing up then. And a few show up later on. But part of the conversation is that there was no one Roman Catholic Bible. So you go back to, say, St. Jerome in the fourth century. He translates the Greek Old Testament and Greek New Testament into Latin. That's the Vulgate. It's the Vulgata, right? It just means like common.

So people weren't speaking Greek anymore. They're speaking Latin. And so Constantine says, we need a Bible that people can actually read. So he commissions Jerome to translate the Bible into the language that everybody can read. At the time, though, Jerome doesn't believe that the Apocrypha, so this other group of books in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, are Scripture.

So Jerome argues against Augustine, who does believe they were Scripture. But there's always this open conversation. The only council that makes any delineation on what Scripture is, is the Council of Trent. So at Trent, that is when the—so the Catholics would call it the Deuterocanonical books— And I'm a little disappointed that you didn't. You used my term, though, which I'm okay with. Sure.

Which one? Diocletian. Diocletian bolster, like, you mean for Christians? Like, banning a book makes it sell more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because apocrypha typically means I get to term for things that are out. Right. I went to Presbyterian school.

So the Catholics have 73 books in their Bible. I have 66 in my Bible. The 39 books of the Old Testament that I have in my Old Testament are the same books that the guy that I mentioned before, Josephus, mentions as the books that the Jews consider scripture. Now, he gives a different number, but it's the same number of books. They're just in a different order. So the Jews order them differently.

It's the same today. If you buy a Tanakh, the Torah, Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim, what are the books of the Jewish publication, they will have the same books as a Protestant Old Testament. They'll just have them in a different order. Got it. So they group the prophets together differently. They don't have 1 and 2 Kings. They have Kings. They don't have 1 and 2 Chronicles.

It's just a different... It's the same books, just different... That's fine. ...order. So... So Luther says, okay, there's all this debate. I'm just going to stick with the core. I'm going to cut out the chaff, and I'm just going to—this is the Bible. However, Luther still includes them in a separate section, which he labels Apocrypha.

And actually, the first King James Bible in 1611 also did that. So did the Geneva Bible. So did the Bishop's Bible. There's a longstanding history of Bibles that include them because they're written in the intertestamental period between the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the first book of the New Testament.

But to say that like Roman Catholics put them in or that Protestants took them out, I think is a little bit messy because there is historical precedence for both lists. But I would say that the strongest evidence, the earliest evidence is for the 66 that us Protestants stuck with. Because we said, what is scripture to the Jews? Yeah. And so Paul says the oracles of God are entrusted to the Jews.

And so guys like Jerome went back to the Jews and he said, okay, how many books do you have? And they said, these. And he said, have you ever considered these other ones scripture? They said, no. And he's like, okay, well, that does it for me.

It's not a bad way of putting it. Sort of. So Christians thrive under persecution, which is an interesting factor, but largely in spite of all of the stuff that's being spread about them. So Christians do things like the Romans practice this ancient form of abortion where, particularly if you have a girl, it's called exposure.

Yeah, I'm not going to do that ever again.

Yeah, I mean, you do have power corrupts, right? People are always going to use advantage. I mean, that's the biblical narrative.

original sin like the israelites want a king they're like hey god we want a king and god's like no that's gonna kings always end badly yeah you don't want that and they demand it and he gives him a king and saul is not a great guy and then david sleeps with everybody and kills people's husbands so you know it's the the narrative of this story i think that definitely happens i think

So the common accusation is that Constantine converts and then he pollutes things, right? Yeah. I think the problem with that is that Constantine, if he wants to exert power by converting to Christianity, it's kind of a dumb thing to do because he's converting to a minority religion that worships a crucified Jew. Why did he convert the empire to Christianity?

So he converted himself to Christianity. It's only after him under Emperor Theodosius that Christianity becomes the religion of Rome. I thought he converted on his deathbed. No. But I know what you're talking about. So he got baptized on his deathbed. That's it. Yes, yes. He converts after the events of 312 with the Battle of Milvian Bridge.

So there's this battle between Maxentius, who's the leader of the West, and Constantine, who's the leader of the East, and they fight for the unification of... The empire. The story is, whether you want to consider it reliable or not, is that... Constantine and his army have a vision of the Cairo, what looks like a P and an X. It's the first two letters in Greek for the word Christ.

And here a voice that says, in this sign, conquer. And so he puts that on all his shields. And even though they're going against the Praetorian Guard, which is like the elite fighting force of Maxentius, they win. And so after that point, he starts to like, okay, what's going on here with this? I used the sign of the Christian God. And it worked. And I won.

And then we do have testimony of other early Christians who seem to give credibility to the fact that he does, in fact— And part of that is that if he wanted to exert power, he could just do what Diocletian did and say, I'm God. I'm going to kill everybody. What I say goes. And he doesn't do that.

Yeah, it's not... Why even teach that? I mean, why does anybody teach anything?

So there are, like, there are kernels of that that's true in the sense that, like, Christians would do things like build churches over the sites of old temples, right? In that they said, like, you're coming here anyways to worship. Now worship the true God in the same location that you're regularly aware of going to anyways. But the assimilation of pagan practices, that's a myth.

How did we get the eggs in Easter? That's a Middle Age thing because eggs were associated with both New Life and spring in Europe. It's a European thing. Christmas.

You have to put the test back in New Testament.

Santa is like a combination of St. Nicholas, who is a fourth century bishop, and Sinterklaas in Germany. I think it's a New York thing. I think eventually the Dutch in New York. That's fire. They. You're going to take credit for that one? Yeah. I mean, yeah. He should. He should. Yeah. Him and him. And so he like all comes together. So this doesn't exist prior. What? The celebration of Christmas.

Oh, no. Christmas goes really old. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a guy named Julius Africanus in the second century who's preoccupied with figuring out how old everything is and, you know, how he gives us the date for the creation of the world. And then he like adds up. So part of what he's doing is he's a Christian and he's like, when was Jesus born? So.

he looked at a bunch of different things and he, he, he reckons that he's figured out when Jesus was, uh, like when the, the, when Mary got pregnant and they counts nine months and gets to December 25th. And so that's, it's 24th or 25th. Why did I blank? I was right. Oh, you know why? I just ran with it. Why?

So the Orthodox do it on January 6th. But it's the same date. We just use different calendars. That's why. You guys stuck with the old calendar. We went to the new calendar. It's the exact same date. Our calendars change. Oh. I didn't know that. Yeah. What about Halloween? Halloween is all Hallow's Eve and the like pagan stuff appears to have been entirely invented by commercialization.

No. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying the accusations of Christmas is pagan, Easter is pagan, that's nonsense.

Talk that shit. It's Jesus mythicism. And no historian, like even the people who doubt that Jesus exists, don't use that argument because usually historians are aware of the primary sources. And if you look at the stories of like Horus, Ra, Mithras, Attis, if you look at the details and then try to find the parallels, they're just not there.

I'm a girl. The girl's there. And then they have the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, right? Yeah. Jesus talks about, this is my body, this is my blood. And so the Romans catch wind of, they do this ceremony where they're talking about drinking blood and eating flesh. Sounds wild. And they're grabbing all these babies. Sounds wild.

It was made up by, largely, and popularized by the... Dan Brown? Oh. You know the movies, I guess.

It's like a YouTube thing. Yeah. It's made up from Tanera. So if you look at the actual stories of like Horace, Ra, the accusations of virgin births and 12 disciples, and you won't find them in those things.

So it's not that there aren't parallels that you can make. It's that if you look at the actual core of the details. So there's a fallacy called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. where it's this idea that Texan is shooting in the side of a barn, and he then finds the closest cluster of shots, and he paints a target around it, making himself look like a great shot, right?

So if you want to find parallels, you can find them. And then you make the accusation afterwards. Yeah, that makes sense. Let me see if I can give you an example. So John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were both... The presidencies were exactly 100 years apart, and Abraham Lincoln had a... He had an assistant by the name of Kennedy and Kennedy had an assistant by the name of Lincoln.

Both were assassinated by a man who went by three names, right? John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy was assassinated in a Lincoln. Yeah. And Lincoln was assassinated in the Ford Theater. Yeah. So, like, if you want to go down the rabbit trail of trying to find all these things, you could argue that John F. Kennedy never existed. He was just a copy of Lincoln. That's interesting.

So there's also like issues of correlation and causation. So if you do find parallels and you want to assert that Christians invented it, you have to find the causative links rather than just the correlations. Because the correlations could actually exist, but things correlate all the time. And the idea of an incarnation...

within Christianity is very different than the idea that you would find in something like Hinduism or even like miraculous births in the ancient world. Okay, question.

I mean, I don't know. That's not something that the Bible necessarily... There is an interesting theory that Judas was fed up with Jesus not being the Messiah he wanted him to be. And by betraying him, he was going to kickstart the revolution. Oh, impatient. Yeah. But...

It's Hollywood, yeah. Right. So in the midst of stuff like that, where they're like, they're eating the babies. Yeah. They still grow in a large part because they like they're they they're philanthropic. They help people. Right. So we have some like Roman leaders who write and they they decry the fact that Christians are not just taking care of their own.

it's it's hypothetical right you can't say one way or the other um something you would do to be honest yeah let's go these new york orthodox yeah dude new york orthodox that's like fire type of christianity i like that i don't want to see yes yes go i got something for you guys because when i was on rogan i made him a facsimile papyri yes okay yes and he's a very important facsimile papyri i remember watching p52 and it's like the pilot what is truth yes i made you one

but okay order of importance also made mark one so yes um because mark likes the apocryphal gospels this is uh that's the gospel of thomas oh wow that's the first page of the gospel thomas mark that's your guy aren't you mark thomas yeah yeah and that's made of genuine egyptian papyri oh that's sick yours thank you so much yeah so order of lesser importance to great importance because yours is far more important oh wow so this is a dead sea scroll fragment

What? Okay, okay, okay. I made it. Yes. And it's very important. 4Q51 is from Samuel. And I got the text there for you. Make sure you read it. What does it say in Hebrew? It says, As-salamu alaykum. Alaykum salam.

Who's McCall? That's his wife. David's wife.

But I needed to find you a passage that said foreskins.

Yeah.

God. Yeah, the Canaanites. The Canaanites. Wow.

They're taking care of like they're like they're taking care of everybody else is embarrassing us. So but there are lots of factors that go into that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Round zero. Round zero. What's happening after?

So this is awesome. Thank you. I went to the Coptic Museum in Cairo two years ago, and I saw the Naikamadi Library. So this is Naikamadi Codex II, which was discovered in 1945 and includes a bunch of Gnostic writings, including the Gospel of Philip, but the famous one is the Gospel of Thomas.

And the Gospel of Thomas, which we knew about prior to this because it had been condemned in the ancient church, but we didn't have evidence for it in terms of physical documentation until in the 1800s in a place called Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, they found some fragments of this unknown gospel.

Right. So Christianity is this like small fringe movement of a bunch of—and early on they're still associated in the pagan world with the Jews. They're like a group of Jews. They just follow this. So they're thought of as Jews at the time, but like an offset of Judaism.

Yes. 114 sayings. This is an important one because the last saying of the Gospel of Thomas has Peter saying, let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life. Good start. And then Jesus says, don't worry. I will make her resemble a male like you males. And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. Look at that.

I don't know enough about that. Oh, okay.

So you have these other... So you're just saying some wild stuff in the name of God. Yeah. So it's 114 sayings of Jesus talking to his disciples. And it's pretty early. It's our earliest... But written by a guy who's never met Jesus or any of his disciples? Yeah, pretty conclusively. The Gospel of Thomas was not written by Thomas the disciple.

But these other groups appropriate the names of the disciples to give credibility to their theology. So that's where you get Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas. It's these other groups in the subsequent centuries, and they read back their theology onto the lips of Jesus in order to validate.

Yeah, it's Old Testament.

Would have been. Yeah. It's, it's pseudographical. So it's like, it's pseudo strange graph a writing. So it's like, like a pseudonym is you want to write a book. You don't want people to know it's Andrew Schultz.

That's your pseudonym? No. You're Mark Twain? I'm Mark Twain. Nice. Noah was a New York Orthodox who did that. And so the pseudepigrapha are a group of writings that are associated with names that we know wasn't written. So Enoch is Noah's great-great-grandfather. Right. So the book of Enoch we know isn't necessarily... It doesn't come from that time frame because that would be like... pre-flood.

It was written way after. It was written in and around the 300 years after the Old Testament, beginning of New Testament. So like in that period of time, they wrote a bunch of stuff. And part of it was Enoch. What do you make of Enoch?

Yeah. Enoch's very interesting. There's actually three Enochs, first, second, and third Enoch. And the only one that really has any kind of credibility is First Enoch. But even then, what we call First Enoch is a collection of different, so we have fragments in Aramaic and Greek in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but then we have later ones in Coptic.

But stranger. Because so your religion in the ancient world is largely tied to your ethnicity. Right. And so conversion wasn't unusual. This is interesting. Conversion wasn't unusual in the ancient world. In fact, if you got married and you were like a pagan Roman, it was expected that you would convert to your husband's religion. That's interesting.

And so what ends up being like published as if you buy a copy of First Enoch, it's like all of this stuff put together. Some of it is like 200 years before Jesus, but some of it, Could very well have been written in the timeframe of Jesus in the first century, 80. But it's very clearly like a collection of Jewish musings about what happened during the flood.

It's like very theologically in-depth fan fiction.

I think it's them trying to figure out, and this is common with like the pseudographical work, is that there's another one called the Excoge of Moses. So they're looking at these Old Testament stories and they're trying to figure out, okay, like, how do we explain some of these things?

You have this weird story in Genesis chapter six, where the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful. And that's where you get the Nephilim and that kind of stuff. And so the Jews are like, how do we figure this stuff out? What are demons? What are angels? How do they interact with this world? There's not actually that much in the Old Testament about that stuff.

So let's write something like the gospel or not the gospel or the book of Enoch to try to expand upon and extrapolate this stuff. Enoch is... So you don't believe in the Nephilim? Well, yeah, they're in the Bible. The Nephilim are in the Bible. It just depends what you mean by Nephilim. Well, what do you mean by it?

Yeah. Nephilim is a giant. tricky term because we don't really know where it originates so nafal means to fall right in hebrew and so that's where you get the idea these are fallen angels yeah um but the greek translation of the old testament translated as gigas which is giant giants yeah so and then they pop up later in canaan when uh when uh what's his face goliath goliath

Well, so not just Goliath, but, um, when, when they go into the promised land and they like, you have the story of, there's these 10 spies that go to scope out the land that God has promised them. And then they come back and, uh, no, it's 12 men. And 10 of them are like, we can't go in there. There are giants there. And the term there is Nephilim. Like they, they're giants.

Particularly if they had house gods, which was common. Okay. But the Christians and the Jews were unusual in that they just denied everybody else's gods existed.

I don't know if it's like, They could just be spooked. They don't want to go in there, so they come up with this excuse that there are giants in there. Because the idea of the flood is that they were destroyed. So everybody dies, including the Nephilim. But then you have guys like C.S. Lewis. Lewis and Tolkien...

had these ideas that these stories of Zeus and the Greek gods, those were echoes of cultural remembrances of these heroes of old, men of renown, which is what they're called in Genesis chapter 6. It's kind of a cool idea. I don't know who they are. Do you believe in giants? I believe that there were giants, yeah. When you say giant, what do you mean? I don't know. Like, Andrew's a giant.

Game of Thrones? You're a giant to me. Everybody's a giant to me.

Yeah, yeah. The Hebrew Old Testament says that Goliath was nine feet tall, but the Greek translation of the Old Testament says that he was like, I think it was six foot five. So it's like, it could just be a word for really tall people. He was really tall people.

being reductive to the religious texts i don't know no not necessarily it's tricky because it's not like like these stories tell you what you need to know not what you want to know and so often we have to like speculate which is where you get the book of enoch and that's like let's expand upon this stuff

fire so so actually one of the earliest accusations for christians is that they're atheists they deny the gods so they're accused of being atheists and they're accused of being anti-social yeah yeah yeah yeah okay okay like atheos yeah no god yeah yeah like you guys believe in a thousand gods why would you believe in one yeah and the ancient world is not just polytheistic it's what's called henotheistic okay so you don't just believe there are many gods you believe that there's like hierarchies of gods and actually your gods could be my gods by another name

I think it depends on what you're looking at and whether it's meant to be taken literally or not.

Yeah. So there's different genre within scripture. Because remember, 66 books written over a period of 1600 years on three different continents, but close to 40 different authors in three different languages, right? That was English too. And so it's a wide variety. So don't read historical literature like you read apocalyptic literature. Don't read poetic literature like you read

Like you got to figure out what you're looking at. And some things are descriptive. They're telling you things that happened. Some things are prescriptive. They're telling you what to do. And some things are emotive. So you read like the Psalms and it says, blessed are those who smashed the children of our enemies on the rocks. And you're like, that's pretty intense.

Like, it's not telling you to do that. It's just this like heartache in wartime where you're seeking justice. And so those types of things like are expressed and, And depending on what the genre is, we have to be careful in trying to figure out what it's trying to say to us. And some things are history and poetic. So in Canada, we have Remembrance Day, November 11th. Yeah.

You have the equivalent, right? Like, remember World War... Two months earlier. Like Veterans Day? Yeah, like Veterans Day. And so we read this poem by this Canadian soldier who was... It's called... I'm going to forget it and all the Canadian people watching are going to get mad at me. In Flanders Fields, right? So in Flanders Fields, the poppies grow between the crosses row by row.

And it's this like very passionate story about the graves. They're burying their compatriots between the crosses in Flanders Fields. There are these poppies that are growing. So everybody, where's the poppy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is that history or is that poetry? Well, the answer is yes. Like it's both, right? Like it's not, it's not just because it's poetic.

It's talking about like these dead people saw sunsets glow days ago kind of thing.

They tell you what to do. So Leviticus, like telling the Jews what to do. Yes. But then you read something like Joshua. And they're like going in Canaan and they're killing people. And you're like, that's descriptive. That's telling you what happened. It doesn't mean you should do likewise, right? Judas hung himself. That's not telling you to go hang yourself.

It's telling you that Judas hung himself. So yeah, it's, it's, you have, that's what, like, I knew a guy who he put little, uh, like sticky notes in his Bible every time someone was like or killed or murdered. He's like, the Bible is so violent. He's like, no, it's just telling you things that happened. So it's not telling you to do that. Life is violent. So it just depends.

And then there are some passages that are trickier than others. Like Genesis chapter one is a tricky one because it's not entirely clear. Is it telling you like the mechanisms of how God created everything in the way that God created them, is there more of an expansive explanation to that?

When you look at the culture, could there be almost like a defense of the fact that you have other creation stories, like the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which has this big battle between the gods and its chaos, and the gods who die become the world, and you and me, and the end theme is kind of like everything's a mistake. you don't really have any purpose.

You know, you're just the product of this big battle. And now you're worshiping things like the stars and the sun and the earth. And Genesis chapter one says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So the things you guys worship, that's pretty stupid because... Our God created them. And it's good, right?

He keeps saying it's good after each refrain and created the land and it was good and created the fish and it was good. That's counter-cultural to something like the Enuma Elish. And then he creates humanity in his image and they're very good. And so is that the way God created everything? Sure, yeah, potentially.

But is it also kind of taking a jab at something like these other origin stories and it's subverting them and saying the stuff you believe is nonsense because this is actually how everything started? Yeah, I think so too. So there's like multiple things going on in... And once again, difference between a booty call and a butt dial, like contextual... Reading is helpful.

So like Zeus and Jupiter. Yes. Like that's why the Greeks and the Romans have the similar, if not the same gods by different names. Right. They have like different stories to them. So that's assumed by one another.

What do you make of that text? So I don't think it's genocide in the way that we would understand genocide, specifically because the Canaanites continue to pop up. So if they did actually wipe everybody out, they did a poor job at it. There's a few things going on in the text. God promises Abraham Canaan.

And says, I'm going to give it to your descendants, but I'm going to wait 400 years because the sins of the Amorites have not come to their full fruition. So God gives them 400 years to repent. And by the time you get to Joshua, they're not repenting if anything, they've gotten worse. They're doing things like child sacrifice to these agricultural gods.

And so then you have something unique in the Old Testament where before the monarchy, before Saul and David, the kings, it's a theocracy. God is the ruler of the people, and he uses Israel to enact his judgment. So he enacts judgment on these terrible people in order to—so in the same vein, a lot of people—

who accuse, who say to me, like, look, there's genocide in the Old Testament, also say things to me like, well, why doesn't God do anything about the evil in the world? I would actually argue this is an example of God doing something about the evil in the world, and that he's using his nation, Israel, to accomplish something.

Okay. Because I made response videos. Yes. To you guys. Yes. Because people kept sending it to me. Yes. Yeah.

the wiping out of these people so he sees that as justice for what they've done wrong these are bad people right um and and so i think there is there's an aspect of god is saying go and wipe them out i'm done with their evil at the same time uh There's a friend of the organization I work with, a guy named Paul Copan. He's in Florida. I think he teaches at Florida State University.

He wrote a book called Is God a Moral Monster? And then he wrote another book called Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament? And he goes through some interesting parallels in other ancient Near Eastern. So, like, Canaanite, Hittite, Egyptian...

war texts where it uses similar language in terms of like wipe them out leave none left kill the women the children the goats that kind of stuff and Copen argues that there's an aspect of cultural wartime hyperbole that exists in the same way that I would say like the Toronto Maple Leafs

Everyone's a god.

And where Jews and Christians are coming around, they're like, that ain't the case. Yeah. Not only are your gods not like powerful, your gods just don't, they straight up don't exist. You're making them up.

murdered the montreal canadians right um there there's an aspect of if you didn't understand what i was talking about that that was i'm talking about hockey i'm talking about a team when i say murdered i don't mean like that they were like that we use these kind of phenomenological hyperbole in our language today um like you killed at your last set right like this kind of stuff makes sense

And so in these kind of ancient Near Eastern texts, you have these levels of hyperbole, which could mean kill everybody, but doesn't always mean that. And we can compare them with like Egyptian steles or like wartime inscriptions.

Right. No, we do get that in the sense of like when you read the book of Jonah in –

hebrew you get these like there's almost like a comedic play to it where when he does eventually get to nineveh which he doesn't want to go to because god says go to nineveh preach repentance he doesn't want to go so he tries to hike it in the other direction and when he eventually gets there it says that everybody repents even the cows

And so persecution for Christians becomes this, they become this easy scapegoat because if you're like in Athens and the city God is Athena and there's some sort of like famine and you go, why do we have a famine? Well, Athena's mad. Why is Athena's mad? Well, because there are these guys running around saying she doesn't even exist.

And it's like, it's hyperbolic where it's saying like, even the cows are sorry. Like that's how much they're repentant of what they've done. So you got stuff like that.

That's a really great question. I don't know if I have a good answer to that in a room full of comedians. I wish I had examples.

Elijah, go up bald head. And he sends the she bears after them to kill them. That's... i mean funny the foreskin thing is pretty good foreskin thing is pretty good yeah you have like record of that um when jesus is talking to the woman at the well and she's a samaritan so samaritans are like mongrel jews they've married with other tribes and so they um they uh

The Jews in Israel don't like them very much. They also, there was a time where one of the Greek leaders was coming to... was coming to wipe out the Jews and the Samaritans who like live up north caught wind of this. And so they send him a letter and they say, hey, I know we look like Jews. I know we sound like Jews. I know we worship like Jews, but just FYI, we're not Jews.

So don't kill us when you go kill them. And also we have a temple that's like their temple, but we're actually going to dedicate it to you. We're going to start worshiping you. And so this is like a point of contention in Jesus's day where the Samaritans, this is where the good Samaritan is kind of like a play on things, right? Who is my neighbor?

And Jesus says, like, it's those people you don't like. That's who you need to love and be nice to. But when Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, and she's like, well, you guys worship in Jerusalem, but we worship at Mount Gerizim. Jesus is kind of like, hey, what's the name of your temple again? Who do you guys worship? It's kind of like poking her, right?

Because it's callback to this story, which is not a biblical one. And we know it because of individuals like Josephus, where they actually dedicated their temple to the Greek leader and to Jupiter. And so he's like, when she says, we worship here, you worship there. He's like, but who do you worship? So he's kind of like poking her.

And there's some sarcasm that if you didn't know what was going on in the background, the situational context, you wouldn't actually pick it up. And it's actually a weird kind of comment that he makes to her otherwise. Oh, that's funny. What about him cursing the fig tree? That's allegorical to the leaders of Jerusalem, that they look like they should. It has leaves.

So there's this early church historian named Tertullian, and he has this famous line where he says that if the Tiber River in Rome is too high or the Nile River in Egypt is too low, the cry will ring out the Christians, the lions, because they become like this easy. Why would our gods punish us? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have no reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that happens pretty quickly.

And so even though it's not the time for figs, it's like a... It's like masquerading that it should grow figs. And he's like, I'm going to curse the fig tree and it's not going to grow any figs. He does that while he's going to Jerusalem. And he sort of, the play is that the leaders in Jerusalem have all of this appearance of religiosity, but in the end they have no fruit.

So they're like dead and it doesn't matter how good they look on the outside. Right. You don't judge by what you water with. Right. The judging is by the fruit, but everybody's looking at what you water with.

all the good good things you do but that's that's not the going to church and the reading your bible that's not the fruit that's that's the that's the um that's a nutrients that's a fertilizer it's the water input and jesus is saying no no that's those are it's not that that's wrong but you got to grow the fruit and so if you're doing all the right things but you're not growing the fruit something's you're you might as well be a dead tree

And Tertullian also said the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. So we get like martyrdom stories very early. Right. And a lot of them are because that Christians become this easy scapegoat.

Oh, important question.

I'm agnostic. So I would say God is not going to force anyone into heaven. In that, heaven—once again, remember, heaven is not the final destination. It's the new earth. Yeah, it was a soft note, right? Yeah, so essentially, no one comes to the Father but through me, Jesus says, right? But C.S. Lewis, once again, he says that hell is locked from the inside.

So I would say that if you have spent your life— not living out a life that is what Jesus has called you to do, to be, then Jesus is not going to force you into his presence. You're going to go. So Lewis also says, heaven is God's, or hell is God saying, thy will be done. So what you want in your life by rejecting Christ is what you're going to get in the afterlife.

So that would be the Hindu way of working it out. Right. But then we accept Jesus. But even Hinduism is exclusivistic in certain regards. So, like, no one is entirely inclusivistic. Right. The exclusivists have to exclude the inclusivists and the inclusivists have to exclude the exclusivists.

Right. So. Depending on what version of Hinduism you're talking about, because there's polytheistic Hinduism, there's monotheistic Hinduism, and there's atheistic or non-theistic Hinduism. Yeah, you could be atheistic. Yeah. So they can't all be true. So truth by its very nature is exclusive, right? If I say two plus two is four... Well, I'll give Andrew the benefit of the doubt.

Andrew says 2 plus 2 is 4. I say 2 plus 2 is 6. One of us is wrong. Now, we could both be wrong, but the truth is that 2 plus 2 is 4. He's right. And so in that sense, that's an exclusive truth statement. So if you look at all the world religions, I would ultimately say they're all exclusivistic at some regard. I say Jesus is exclusivistic in the most important regard.

Well, yeah, so I would say Christianity is inclusivistic in that all are called to come. But it is exclusivistic in that Jesus loves you and calls you to come as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you where you are. And so it's unconditional, but it's not unconditioned. Because all you have to do is... Give up your life and follow Jesus.

Well, it does in the sense that when I say it's unconditional, it's that Jesus says all are welcome to come. But there is a condition. Yeah. There is, right? It's not nothing. Yeah. And in that sense, God is either, right, the universe— In like an Eastern mystic kind of idea, or God is a personal being. They can't both be true.

So we, I think all world religions have these like superficial agreements, but they disagree on the fundamentals, right? Who God is, who we are, why we're here, what sin is, what the afterlife is like, how we solve the problem of human flourishing. Like all these things are important topics, but Advil and arsenic both come in pill form.

But it's not the similarities that make you choose one over the other when you have a headache. It's the differences. So as someone who has studied world religions, I would say that there is no such thing as a religion that accepts everything.

Because even if I say Jesus is God incarnate and there's only one God, he's not just a guru and his teachings actually don't give you reason to just chop him up to a guru. then that's excluding the worldview system of something like Hinduism or Buddhism, which would also include that.

So to that, I would say there's no such thing as a good person. Because we're all sinners. So all good people. There's no such thing as a bad person. All good people go to heaven. That's clear biblically. Right. But Jesus says no one is good but God.

so we have a dilemma right all good people go to heaven no one is good but god what does that mean no one's going to heaven so the the issue is is like so this is similar to the question of what do you do with the person who lives on like a random island in the middle of you know papua new guinea and has never heard the god the innocent you know tribes person and the biblical answer is that there's no such thing as an innocent person in that i deserve hell

Yeah, so he is starting this movement of group repentance, right?

Me, Wes Huff, I deserve hell 100% of the time. That's like the wages of sin is death. And that's the language that Paul uses in that I'm like actively working at a job to earn a wage and that's sin and death, right? But the second part of that line is the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus. So the answer to the question is that I think we are both

worse than we realize and have the potential to do much more good than we realize. However, I am not going to heaven because of anything I've done. I can't do that. That's very clear scripturally. You cannot earn your way to heaven. It's not about doing things. It's not about what I'm doing. It's about what Jesus did.

And that's why missions existed. That was the motivation. So we were talking about, like, the New Testament is copied like crazy in the early period, these independent writings. Beautiful sacrifice. One of the reasons for that is because they were like, we need to get this out everywhere. Or else these people aren't going to get to heaven.

Where he is saying—so baptism isn't necessarily an unusual thing to do in ancient Judaism. Like, ablution cleaning is part of just ritualistic purity. The Jews—the ancient Jews were obsessed with ritualistic purity. And then you have groups like the Essenes out in the desert who were—they're like— We were just going to do this all day long.

But we both deny each other's central truth claims. Like, you would deny the central truth claim that I just articulated, and I would deny yours.

Ultimately, I would say God doesn't owe anybody anything. So the assumption is that God owes us our salvation. And I would say that it is more—if God chose just to save Abraham, he would have been more gracious— then we possibly deserve to do that. But he didn't just save Abraham.

He saves a countless number in the sense that when John has his vision in the book of Revelation, it's an innumerable number. He can't even count it. That's how big it is. And so I think the message of Christianity, the good news, what we call the gospel, is that You are headed towards destruction and you're actually attempting to cause the destruction, right?

It's not that, you know, Jesus has thrown a life preserver and you need to catch it. No, you're trying to fight Jesus. You don't want the life preserver, but apart from the saving work of the spirit reaching into the prophets, use the language of you have a heart of stone. God is going to give you a heart of flesh, but it's God's work that does that. And so we don't deserve that. That freedom.

That graciousness. It's a heavy weight, man. It is, but I mean, the good news is that... So... When I study world religions, I come up with this conclusion that all worldview perspectives are some form of survival of the fittest in that it's a do this, feel this, or think this. It's do this, pragmatism. It's feel this, emotionalism. Or it's think this, intellectualism.

You need to be the best at the knowledge. You need to be the most spiritual. You need to do the most things. And It's one or a combination of those things, right? Christianity is the opposite of that in that it says you can't feel, think, or do good enough, right? So it's not about that. It's not do and you'll be accepted, feel and you'll be accepted, think and you'll be accepted. It's

God has stepped out of eternity and into humanity in the second person of the Trinity in Jesus. And now you're accepted. Now you can think. Now you can feel. Now you can do. But it's not on your shoulders.

Like we're basically, we're going to, there's bads everywhere in Qumran, which is their community. Yeah. And they're just constantly washing themselves for ritual purity. Got it. So it's not that. John the Baptist is doing something unusual. It's that he is then saying that Israel communally needs to repent and that you need to be doing this there for this reason and that

I think if it was that, then I think we would have a problem. I think what the Bible says, particularly in that creation story, right, is that you are created with purpose and meaning and intention, and it is good. You actually bear the image of God, and there's something about that that is special.

So in one sense, you're more of a piece of shit than you can imagine, but also you're more loved and more— That's awesome. of amazing things that you can imagine. And that's the dichotomy of Christianity is that God does not need to create, right? So God lives in a set of living, loving relationships in the Trinity. He has existed eternally in relationship and in love.

That's what John says in 1 John. God is love.

And so God does not need to create in order to experience anything. Creation is an outpouring of his love. Now, this is different than, say, a unitarian monotheistic faith like Islam. In Islam, in one sense, philosophically, God does need to create to experience love because love requires an object and a subject.

And so in order to feel love, the unitarian God of something like Islam needs the subject. right? And the object in order to feel that. That's not true for Christianity because the Spirit and the Father, the Father has been loving the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit forever.

Yet, he chooses to create as an outpouring of his love, knowing full well that the creation will rebel against him because God loves us so much. So if it's only you're a piece of shit, that's a problem. That's a problem theology for, I think, what the Bible actually says. And the piece of shitness... This is a theological term. Of course. I went to seminary.

Is that we brought that into the world, right? So when the garden and the fruit, if we want to take that literally, or like we want to do the Jordan Peterson thing, whatever, what we get though is that God knows what's best for our flourishing.

And when it says that you will know the difference between good and evil, it's less of like an intellectual understanding of what good and evil are and more of a choosing the shots on our own terms. I, even though God created me and knows all things, I actually think I know better because And I'm going to eat the fruit because I think that that's better for me. And that's what sin is.

Yeah.

You're just going to put it on me.

Then this Jesus guy shows up and he says he's the one that is the reason why I'm doing this.

Yeah. So I think ultimately that's a question I don't know the answer to because it's not something that's directly outlined in Scripture. However, I think you can like extrapolate certain things in one way. Part of that is still saying you can earn it in that he's doing the right things. And he doesn't even know he's doing it. He's doing it because.

So I think God is not going to judge us based on what we don't know. We would hope. So I am optimistic that I personally would not damn that individual because I don't know what's going on there. And God is more than capable to reveal himself. I mean, Paul says in Romans that God's divine attributes and invisible qualities have been shown throughout creation so that no man is without excuse.

So there's an aspect of nobody can stand before God and say, I just didn't have enough and I didn't know enough. Because God is saying creation is screaming at you that there's something.

And I think that like... But the only way to heaven is through Jesus Christ. So that's where it does get tricky. And there is a sense of... Jesus saying, I'm the way, the truth, and life. No one comes to the Father but through me. I would say we have an imperative to tell that person about the God that they believe in and who that is.

Yeah.

And that's what Paul does in Acts chapter 17 when he goes to Athens and he goes to the Areopagus and he says, you have a shrine to an unknown God. In one sense, that's silly, but let me tell you about the unknown God. So that you go to the right place. That you're worshiping, put a name to it, and actually tell you the person that your heart is actually crying out to, because you bear his image.

Yeah.

And in that sense, we have to be careful, because if we make it about what we do and what we believe, in that way, it's meritorious. I understand what you're saying. And the commandments, something like the Ten Commandments... are less of a thou shalt not and more of a promise in that God is not a murderer. You're creating his image. Don't murder. God is not an adulterer.

You're creating his image. Don't commit adultery. God is not a thief. You're creating his image. Don't steal things. It's actually calling you to live up to the standard of the image that you bear of God. Even though you might feel inclined to do this. And flourish, ultimately. But I would say that there's an aspect of...

The person who doesn't understand that sees those things as a burden and sees them as a rule. And I would actually say that it's a calling by our creator to live up to the standard that he actually created us to be for the sake of human flourishing. And why do you think that we would like it to be merit-based? Because I think that we want to contribute.

I mean, that's not explicitly said one way or the other. But Jesus shows up and asks John to baptize him. And John says, I'm not worthy to baptize you. So he knows. You should be baptizing me, not the other way around. Got it. Yeah. But he would have at least heard something. Because we have this story where Mary finds out she's pregnant.

Well, I think part of this is that we have these understandings of hell, which might be skewed by Middle Age painting. Okay, I would love to hear that. People burning. Yes. I would say hell is the concept of God's wrath against evil in eternal justice. But it's also a separation from his goodness. And so...

you see these depictions particularly from the middle ages of like demons, uh, burning people alive. And that's more both heaven and hell in the middle ages is drawn more from like Greek, uh, imagery of where the gods live and what the underworld is than it is from what Scripture actually says about these things.

And that's like quintessential, you know, middle-age... Yeah. Yeah. What does the Scripture say hell is? Well, it's separation. It's separation from God. Like, God is not going to force you into His presence into that. And if you... are not choosing that. Like if you are not in Adam, you're in, sorry, if you're not in Christ, you're in Adam. So Jesus is called the second Adam, right?

Adam brings sin into the world and taints everything. Christ comes into the world and renews everything. And so the gospel message is that you're either going to be found in Adam or in Christ. Yeah. That's it. And God is not going to force you into being under Christ's righteousness. And again, At the same time, I still don't deserve that.

So this is where, like, when I was talking about before, all these religious concepts, it's about the do, the feel, the think. It's also about mercy or justice, right? So I would argue that something like... The Eastern philosophies, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, anything that has a reincarnation, that's just, right? You get what you deserve. The good you do in this life, you get in the next life.

And then she goes to her cousin Elizabeth, who's John the Baptist's mother. Yeah.

The bad you do in this life, sort of. There's a difference between reincarnation, Hinduism, and Buddhism. But that aside, it's like just, right? But we wouldn't necessarily say that it's merciful, right? You do get what you deserve. Oh, yeah, it's not. Then there are other religious systems.

And to a certain degree, I would pin Islam in that group because every chapter of the Quran, bar one chapter, starts with the bismillah, God the most merciful, the most benevolent. So in that sense, the God of Islam forgives, but somewhat arbitrarily. And it's at the expense of his justice. So if you, if God will forgive you, but the wrong you've done hasn't actually been paid for.

His law is kind of just winked at. Where Christianity is different is that the punishment that we deserve is taken on God himself in the person of Jesus. And so in that sense, justice is fulfilled. And because justice is fulfilled, his law is accomplished. And now mercy, so justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. And grace is getting what you don't deserve.

So because you don't get what you do deserve, which is the punishment, mercy happens. God forgives you, but he doesn't actually, and you don't deserve that either, but then he adopts you as his child. Yeah. That's grace. That's getting what you don't deserve. Yeah. Right?

And so when I look at something like comparative religious studies, what I see is all of these systems of the survival of the fittest that I talked about before, Christianity is the fittest stepping down and sacrificing himself for the survival of the weakest, right? And that changes things in that mercy and justice are not pitted against each other. It's not justice at the expense of mercy.

Yeah, right. And so there's like a knowledge there that something special might happen. Yeah, something special going on in Jesus.

It's not mercy at the expense of justice. They're actually accomplished together in the act of the cross where the self-volunteering of Jesus going to the cross, right? He says, no one takes my life from me. I give it of my own accord.

And it's not a points-based system either, which also gets hairy with like, so Islam is this concept within the Quran of the scales. Okay. Right? So you do bad things, you just try to outweigh them with your good things. There's a weird subjectivity to that. Right, because who decides, yeah. And actually Isaiah says that our righteous acts are like filthy rags.

And the term there, it's debated, but could actually mean something like menstrual rags. They're not just dirty and gross, and it's like ritually impure with stuff you don't want to get near. And so it's like, look, God, look at all the good things I'm doing. And he's like, you don't understand compared to my holiness how far that measures up. And so once again, God doesn't need to do any of this.

God doesn't need to create. God doesn't need to forgive. God doesn't need to give mercy or justice. But the fact that he does and then calls us all into that to turn away. So the word repentance in Greek, metanoite, actually means to change one's mind and actions and attitudes. Right? Like it's less of a, just don't do it anymore.

It's more of like metanoia, change your brain, like change it entirely. Your thought patterns start. It's what I talked about before with the 10 commandments. Like you're seeing it as a command and God is saying, no, it's a promise. You don't need to steal. You don't need to murder. You don't need to lie. You don't need to. Those are promises that God makes to you because of who you are.

Through what he can do. And then if you don't change, you said you either become Adam or you become Christ, right? Well, yeah. So it's like when you stand before the judgment throne, you're either going to take the penalty you deserve or... Or you're going to be covered in the righteousness of Christ, and that penalty is on him.

No, no. It's like a metaphorical language. The first Adam and the second Adam.

Until you are enlightened. I don't think that's the way, because it's not a spiritual or intellectual awareness in that sense. It's like God... Yeah, so it's tricky because the Eastern language, it doesn't compute with what's going on within the Semitic understanding of Scripture. So it's not like a nirvana. It's not like an awakening or an enlightenment.

Well, he's like a wild man. He's wearing camel skins and he's eating... locusts and honey and he's like living out in the desert. So he's not offering forgiveness. Well, he's saying repent. He's saying, so he's not offering forgiveness, but he's saying you need to seek forgiveness from God. And you start by doing this like act of forgiveness.

It's Christ revealing to you who you really are and who he really is.

Yeah, I would say everybody is born with original sin, and we all deserve punishment. But from who I know God's character to be in Scripture— God is free to save whom he wants to save. And based on who God is, I see no reason why he would not save children who die in infancy. He would not save people with cognitive disabilities. I don't know the answer to that ultimately, but...

Once again, like, Scripture tells us what we need to know, not what we want to know. But I think based on the character of God and the fact that when the Israelites are told not to sacrifice their children, it's the only time that, like, a group is overtly described as innocent. Like, the death of the innocents is what it's described to when these people are sacrificing their children to the...

the pagan agricultural gods. So I think it's like extrapolating in its conjecture, but I think based on what I see in scripture of who God is, that he's loving, that he's compassionate, that he's merciful, that he's abounding in steadfast love and kindness, right? That Exodus 34, 6.

That I see no reason to not say that if my wife has a miscarriage, that child I will be reunited with in heaven because of who God is and what his love and kindness is to humanity.

That's what I would— It could be. It could be. However, there is kind of a cognitive reckoning. This is where I would be careful to say that this is my opinion. Yeah, we're not— But I'm not denying that everybody is stained with sin.

Yeah. Go on, go on. So, but these, once again, these are like topics that are, I've been discussed for 2000 plus years, right? The Jews and the pre-Jesus times were also coming up with these questions. So there's a lot of delineation literature and, and like debate about these things.

Okay. Well, God—I would go to the length of saying God knows things we don't, because he's God. And so Paul talks about this in Romans chapter 8 and 9, where he comments on this and talks about the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. But it says both that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and God hardened Pharaoh's heart. So there's a mutuality going on in there in God's sovereignty and our free will.

going through like a public declaration of your repentance. And the Jewish leaders kind of get mad at him because he's implying that they, like their ethnicity isn't enough. So they come and they're like, well, we're children of Abraham. And his line is, you know, God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones, is what he says.

Both those things exist. And God uses Pharaoh as a tool to enact his justice. And yet also God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick. And so he does these things, even in instances where we might not totally understand what's going on, but it's ultimately for his glorification and the purpose of God is the main character of the story.

And the redemption of his people is accomplished through Pharaoh hardening his own heart and being bitter. And yet God also uses that in hardening Pharaoh's hearts to accomplish that narrative. So the book of Genesis literally ends with the story of Joseph, where Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, into Egypt. They want to kill him. God restrains their evil.

They sell him into slavery and he ends up climbing the ranks of being second to Pharaoh. And then there's a famine throughout the land. And the only place that has food because of the wisdom of Joseph via the, you know, God revealing this to him is Egypt. And so Joseph's brothers go back to Egypt and, And they meet with him, not knowing it's their brother.

And eventually he reveals who he is to them. And he says, you know, what you intended for evil, God intended for good in the saving of nations. And so God uses, he, God allows evil for good that often we don't understand.

Can I drink this?

Oh, of course.

I'm not trying to pin you to anything. I swear to God, I'm not. No, no, no. I get what you're saying. And I do think there's truth to that in that, like, I want Canada, the U.S., wherever, I want laws to be based on Christian things because I think that's actually good for society. And just for people in general. But... I don't want then those to become a means to an end.

Like, don't make the laws based on the Bible because people should be doing good. Actually, a friend of mine, Andy Bannister, who runs an organization out in Scotland called Solas, he did this debate. It was him. It was the head of the secular society, and it was a Muslim imam. And... The topic of the discussion was what makes the flourishing society or what makes a good society.

And the secular materialist guy and the Muslim basically argued for the same thing. We need to enact more rules. We need to make sure people are following them. And my friend Andy, his point was that's not going to work because everybody's going to try to find the loopholes in the rules or they're going to just do it so that they don't get in trouble.

And so the more rules you put in, the more people are going to try to get around them for one reason or the other. Like taxes. The only way... Like taxes. Oh, taxes. Make any tax law you want, we're going to find a loophole. Sure. Yeah. And so it's not about rules. It's about changing people's hearts. They should...

So he...

I think, you know, it's not an either or. It's not just about the afterlife or just about this life. It's a both and. You know, your will be done on earth as is in heaven.

Yeah.

Don't put words in my mouth.

Don't put anything.