Dr. Michael Peppard is a scholar and teacher whose primary work brings to light the meanings of the New Testament and other Christian materials in their social, political, artistic, and ritual contexts at Fordham University. Today, Dr. Michael Peppard joins us to cover and debunk every Christian myth and rumor. WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsors: Morgan & Morgan and Bluechew👕🧢 GET YOUR CAMP DRIP HERE: https://campgoods.co/🏕️ Get Today In History Email Here (Free): https://camp.beehiiv.com/🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.comTIMESTAMP: 0:00 Introduction0:55 Who is Dr. Michael Peppard + Pop Gnosticism & Controversial Myths5:04 Did Jesus Have A Twin? Apocryphal Text15:03 Women In Ancient Times18:56 Jesus’s Twin Brother 31:24 Pontifical Biblical Commission, Bible Nerds Interpret the Bible36:32 Multiple Endings in Gospels 39:05 Pontius Pilate + Why Pontius Killed Jesus45:20 Was Judas The Good Guy?50:00 Analyzing Controversial Rank + Did Jesus & Mary Magdalene Have Kids?56:31 Jesus In The Garden With a Naked Boy 1:05:32 Was Jesus a Political Revolutionary?1:13:42 Was Mary Really a Virgin + Puberty In The Ancient World1:23:40 Jesus Taught Reincarnation + Ancient Cultures Afterlife’s1:33:17 The Gospel of John1:41:02 Transubstantiation + Ancient Eucharists2:04:00 History of Catholic Traditions2:15:47 Check Out Dr. Peppard’s Book
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Michael Peppard?
Jesus having a twin, it's medium.
It's not too spicy. Is it possible that Judas, who sells Jesus out, and that by betraying Jesus, that he was actually carrying out the will of God? Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? And did he have children with her? Jesus taught reincarnation. The virgin birth was a mistranslation, suggesting that Jesus' birth was natural, not miraculous.
This is a tough one, though. Let me just say, not only is it possible, it's necessary. Of course, there are many things that he said and did that are not included in this book. If you go to the end of Mark, you find out that there are multiple endings.
What do we know about that moment that Christ shared with his disciples? Jesus was found with a young boy naked. Michael Pepperd. How are you, sir? Great. Happy to be here. Thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it. Before we begin, just to contextualize the conversation, could you explain to the audience who you are, what is your field of study, and what kind of work do you do?
Chapter 2: Did Jesus Have a Twin Brother?
Sure. So I work at Fordham University here in New York on the Bronx campus, and I've been a professor there in the theology department for 16 years. And my main areas are, there's kind of three main areas. One would be the New Testament and in all of its forms and in its context, but kind of especially its Greco-Roman context and the way it lives in the Roman Empire.
Secondly, I have a research track and a teaching track in early Christian material culture. So early Christian art, early Christian rituals, the kind of stuff of early Christianity as it developed in that same period, the first few hundred years.
And then third, I have a kind of parallel different track about Catholicism, which developed a bit because I'm part of a center for Catholic studies at Fordham. And so I started doing some teaching in that area, too. Uh, and write more, uh, less peer reviewed stuff, more like kind of magazine and op-ed type pieces about Catholicism.
Uh, prior to that, I was at Yale university for my graduate work, did a PhD there and, uh, and happy New Yorker now.
Nice. It's amazing. And I'm very grateful to have another Catholic in the tent. Okay. So often I get these academics that roll in here and they're either secular or even worse, they're Protestant. Oh my goodness.
My mom was Protestant. So I have to say, you know, I come from a mix.
I'm a good American mutt. I joke with my Protestant friends because I went to a Protestant high school and a middle school. And throughout my tenure there, I was lambasted as a Mary worshiper and any other name under the sun.
Well, were you? I mean, did they have any truth to that?
I was a Mary worshiper. Reverer. Venerator. Venerator. That's the word I was looking for. Venerator of the Blessed Mother. But no, I'm not going to worship. I'm not going to worship a woman. No, I'm joking. We don't need a misogyny immediately. Come on, guys.
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Chapter 3: What was the Role of Women in Ancient Times?
Yeah, we'll throw it up in the B-roll. So I wanted to speak with you today because, as I mentioned before, there is a... It seems like there's a current happening within pop culture, specifically on YouTube, I found, where there is a large interest in sort of like pop Gnosticism is the way that I'll put it. I think it was kind of popularized through, I would say... I think Zeitgeist.
Do you remember this documentary that came out? It was like 2002, 2003. Okay. Nope. And throughout it, it sort of like created these parallels with like Jesus and the story of the Christ figure and paralleled it and basically said it was a rip of the Egyptian story. Sun God, I believe. I forget the exact person. And then Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.
And then, you know, since then you have folks like Billy Carson is a very prominent YouTuber that talks about Gnosticism. And yeah, it's just kind of like exploded. And I, you know, as a Catholic...
am disgusted by this but as an as an open-minded curious person that loves uh controversial hot takes i am i find it very titillating okay and so i watch a lot of these videos kind of you know exploring and breaking down these these controversial myths so i think it would be fun uh just kind of start our conversation by going through some of the most controversial hot takes specifically around the new testament and our understanding of christ okay and uh maybe just ranking them
And a good ranking system I've seen, my friend Alex O'Connor does this, the YouTuber, he's brilliant. Spiciest to mintiest.
Okay.
Spiciest being, you know, this is a wild belief. If someone believes this, this is an insane hot take.
So is it a plausibility index? Is it a believability index? Or is it a shock value? Is it all those things?
I think it's shock primarily, but then we can kind of go down the list. And I think maybe the more veracity it has, it might actually be almost less spicy, but we'll see. I guess we can kind of discover that as we go through. The first thing that I wanted to ask you, I've heard the claim that Jesus Christ had a twin brother. Have you heard this before? And where does this come from?
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Chapter 4: Was Judas the Good Guy?
And we even see this in the canonical New Testament when you take something like the parable of the lost sheep. Now, in your mind, I know you went to some church growing up, and so you've heard this parable and you think you kind of know what it is. But when you put Matthew's version and Luke's version actually right next to each other, and you look at the Greek versions, Matthew and Luke don't
necessarily think the parable means the same thing they have slight differences in how they think this parable uh was meant and they have different audiences in which they said it so in in one gospel and gospel of luke that parable is taught to a group of outsiders uh a group of says quote tax collectors and sinners and it seems like a parable that's trying to bring people in who are not a part of the movement who are lost and then they get brought in
In Matthews, it's situated as a teaching to the disciples about seemingly about not letting people go astray in the first place. It's really a teaching about leadership. That's how I interpret it. Being a good shepherd. Yeah. Okay, so that's more the Matthew emphasis. It's very subtle, but my point is, I guess my point I try to make is that
Already within the canonical written tradition, we have evidence of slight differences in transmission at the oral level before these things get written down. I see. And so the notion that there might be also one of those in the Gospel of Thomas that was transmitted orally in Egypt or in Syria and then eventually written down... I'm totally open to that.
So like there's a parable called the parable of the tenants, um, which is in the gospel of Thomas and is in Mark and is in, uh, Matthew and three different, three different versions. And there are some scholars who feel like the Thomas version, um, might represent an older version of that oral tradition.
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Chapter 5: Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene Have Children?
Wow, because Mark was written, what, 70 AD, roughly?
Yeah, usually we date it around there, somewhere around the fall of the temple, around the destruction of the temple.
Second temple.
Yeah, second temple, exactly, in Jerusalem.
Now, so to suggest that it is more archaic would suggest that it is...
more like closely around the time of christ and what would indicate that it is older so so what i'm arguing though is not that the written form of god not that the written form of the gospel of thomas as it was discovered in nakamari i'm not saying that that is older i'm saying that it might preserve oral traditions and how can we indicate that is that based off of the syntax of the sentences like the actual words that are used
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Chapter 6: What is the Significance of Jesus in the Garden with a Naked Boy?
So there are actually – well, it's difficult, and you might imagine not everyone agrees in scholarship about this. There are some basic principle ideas. Some people have an intuition that shorter stories are older, and then they get embellished over time. There are some people who have an instinct that – Um, more specific stories are older and then they get universalized over time.
There are some people have an instinct that Jesus didn't tell allegories and that Jesus told parables, uh, that were more, uh, curt, quick to the point and that, and that were not allegorized into a whole world of doctrine. And so maybe the parables that look like shorter, snappier, have more of an air of like authenticity of what a wandering itinerant, uh, wisdom teacher might've talked like.
And the gospel of Thomas is very short and snappy. It doesn't allegorize. Yeah, exactly. It says a lot. It has a lot of phrases that, that, um, we, we truly don't know for sure what they mean, honestly.
And so if you, if you have a category or a, if you have a framing in your mind of like, that's the kind of person I imagine Jesus to be, that he's telling, uh, riddles, telling almost like Zen koan type, uh, And he's leaving it up to let the one who has ears to hear hear, right? If you have ears to hear my message and you'll understand it, I'm not going to explain it all to you.
If you have that image of Jesus in your mind, then some of these Thomas versions might look more authentic to you.
But some of them are just wild. I mean, this is one I remember. Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.
Right, right, right. So it sounds wild, right?
It's just bizarre.
This isn't... Yeah, so I... We can get into this a little bit. So one of the ideas here that help maybe helps understand what's going on. This is a tough one though. Let me just say, I don't, I don't come in here with like definitive interpretations of all, of all, you know, a hundred and 140 of these sayings, but.
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Chapter 7: Was Jesus a Political Revolutionary?
Um, there is a sense in Greco Roman, Greco Roman understanding of gender, let's say that the proper, the full form of a human person is a male form. So that's obviously misogynistic. Um, but that is a, uh, idea that's, that's going around in the air. You can, you can read it. It has to do with, it has to do with, you can read it in, um, Greek and Roman medical treatises and things like this.
The woman is derivative from the man, as it's told in the Genesis story.
Yes, and it's not quite fully developed, even biologically, not quite fully developed. So there is a way to interpret this that's saying Jesus' female disciples, they are going to become fully developed. They're going to become fully, to be fully his disciple, they need to act, more or less act like male disciples. We also see this later.
It doesn't have to be quite so misogynistic in its sound when we look later at like early Christian martyr stories, many of which are women, right? Who are women who are going to the death for their faith, such as Perpetua and Felicity in North Africa. And when we read these martyr stories of early Christian women, a lot of them are presented as male.
They're not men biologically, but their virtues, their characteristics are presented as male in the course of telling their story as a way of showing that they are fully embodying Christ. They are fully taking on his form. And it's almost a criticism of men who aren't doing that.
oh right because if a woman is doing it why what excuse do you have and the word the ancient greek word for courage is manliness the actual word andrea is like like andrew is so to to say like perpetua is shows courage before her captor it actually says she's shows her manhood like she's manly interesting
And to the people in that time, obviously, contextually, they would understand that this compliment that nowadays we see as sort of being gender neutral, something like courage can go, you know, human to non-human to anything. And the time they would have understood to say like, oh, they're putting masculine traits on these women.
And that is an honorable thing to do because, you know, perhaps it is the it is God's will. Maybe God is a man himself. So therefore, that is like the divine essence of creation.
That's interesting. And they have a lot of kind of militaristic imagery too in these martyr stories where, you know, just to take Perpetua for the example. I mean, at the end, she guides the executor's knife to her own throat. He's afraid to do it. And she's like, she brings, I mean, it's pretty goth. Whoa. I've never heard that before. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What is Transubstantiation and Its Historical Context?
Right. That there was all the leaders get together and they have a spreadsheet and they're talking about, you know, well, the Gospel of Thomas doesn't have a passion narrative. It doesn't talk about the crucifixion. So that one's out. But the Acts of Thomas is pretty good. Why can't why don't we put that in? Well, it's a little bit different here and they only use it in Syria.
And those in Italy have never heard of it. OK, we'll put it out for these meetings that wrap. They never have. We want to believe they happened. Sometimes we fabricate them that they happened. Sometimes we say, well, at the Council of Nicaea, they must have done this. I don't think that was their main concern.
They had concerns at the Council of Nicaea about church unity and concerns about doctrine and concerns about organizational structure in the fourth century. But when we look at our fourth century codices, meaning books, kind of the great codices of the fourth and fifth century, which are earliest collected, what comes to eventually be the Bible,
What you see very clearly is that there is a core, which is strong. Your core of four gospels, Paul's letters, 1 Peter, sometimes 2 Peter, you know, Acts and Hebrews get in there. You have your core, but then you have a lot of fuzziness on the edges, right? And you look at, you know, Codex in the Vatican, Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus in the British Library, 4th century codices.
And at the end, they have some other texts, right, that are not ultimately in the modern post-Reformation, post-printing press canon. So what do we do with that? Do we think that they thought that those were of the same weight as the ones that came before? I'm more likely just to say that they had different questions than we have, right? Their questions were primarily about, is this useful?
Is this text good for teaching? Is it good for learning?
I feel like this poses an issue for believers because they say, you know, these books were assembled. through the divinity of God. Like God himself was guiding these early church leaders to putting these books together. So if there is, you know, there can be no error. There can be no, you know, human fray that actually affects the text of the books.
Yeah, I mean, my historian's perspective on that would be to say that inerrancy is a modern concept. We don't see much concern about inerrancy in medieval Christianity or in early Christianity in the way that we see it in modern post-printing press, post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation Christianity. The vast majority of Christians in Christian history believe did not think that way.
And we have evidence of that. They knew there were discrepancies. Third and fourth century Christians, they're not dumb. If they have the stories, they can see, well, in this one, it looks like Jesus is crucified on Passover, and in this one, it looks like it's not.
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